 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to be coloring this gorgeous huge big bold pumpkin with Copic markers. As soon as I saw this stamp I knew I was going to have to color it. I could see it immediately with a glow coming out from the inside of the pumpkin and dark all around him and yeah that's what I had to do. So here's the Copic markers I'll be using. I always post these now on my blog so you can go grab the color list per se rather than trying to write them down from on the screen here. And while I do this simple portion of the coloring before I get to the more complex shading parts, I thought I'd tell you a crazy story because you guys like stories right? I was over at Ellen Hudson's office recently and just visiting with her because we have lunch once in a while because we're buds and I was kind of walking around talking to some other folks that worked there and this picture came up on the screen of somebody's email and I squealed because you know you get excited when you see a stamp you like and I'm no different than anybody else so uh lo and behold last week there was a stamp that arrived in an envelope just all by itself Lonesome that came from Amy over at Colorado Craft Company. How cool is that? It was very sweet of her to send that to me so that I could have it and be one of the first people to share it with you. I'm kind of excited usually it takes forever because I wait until things get into the store so I can go buy them and then by then everybody already has moved on past things so I don't often get to share all that many things except for from a couple of companies that I do work with closely enough that um they will send me some free stamps like Ellen Hudson of course because we're buds and MFT because I do videos on their channel so they need me to have the stuff and then art impressions because we are just old friends from forever ago but most of the time I really prefer to just buy my own stuff because that's important to me to be able to say to you I love this enough that I bought it and I would have bought this one if if I hadn't had it in my my mailbox so there you go there's my silly story but what I'm doing with the pumpkin is coloring I the color on the inside of the eyes and the mouth is what I normally would use on a pumpkin which is like a YR16 or a YR04 is about the same color so if you have that that's a good pumpkin color but I wanted this to be a nighttime one so I put that color on the inside of those normally that would be more like a Y17 with a YR16 on the outside so this outside color is a YR18 that's a little bit darker a little bit desaturated as well it's just kind of a more of a brownish orange than a pure orange because it's going to be nighttime and at night time you're not going to see a lot of color if you've ever gone outside and looked at anything you really don't see much color anywhere except for where there's light and then I wanted the light to be really strong so this is one of those places where you know I'm using a big and bold stamp so I'm going to go big and bold with my color if you go big and bold sometimes just dive in there with a darker color because it'll force you to make some different decisions so here I went in with a really dark color I was thinking is this dark enough is it too dark am I gonna regret this I'm gonna have to throw the paper away and start all over but you know I just keep going when I start coloring something because I never know what I'm gonna learn from it so if you pick a color and you're like oh boy that's that's a hot mess just keep going because you never know what you can come up with and when I do a lot of my night scenes which I do a lot at Christmas time there will be more coming I end up doing a lot more heavy color than you might originally think so be big and bold with your colors and and step out and do something crazy so here is the the part where we get toward where the light is shining there's a little bit of light coming from that right hand side so I'm going to leave more open spaces and then just start using some other colors to blend those and leave a little bit of that light color showing but I'm creating the roundness in each one of those little portions those sections of the pumpkin so he ends up feeling like he's kind of lumpy and that's that's sort of the look that I was going for with he old pumpkin and as I just kind of smooth the colors out a little bit I was debating whether to go darker and I decided you know what the heck I'm doing it I'm committed so let's see if I can really pop the contrast so I grabbed a dark brown like just because it's an orange pumpkin doesn't mean there can't be dark brown on it so when you start coloring this stamp go big and just just do it it's only paper nothing is going to happen if you totally mess it up nothing but recycling it so do recycle and then you don't have to feel guilty about it but if it doesn't come out then so you tried you made an effort at it and that's what I love to see when when I see people try something new and exciting and different and bold that is that just makes my heart happy so speaking of witch if you are not a blog follower and you don't subscribe to my email lists or anything like that over at art-classes.com uh you might not know that there is a sale going on on classes right now so I wanted to let you know and since I'm doing this video that I know is going up during the sale the sale is from September 1st through September 7th and I might even extend it to the 8th because why not it's a weekend so let's just make it the 8th I will go fix the coupon so it lasts longer so coupon code will be school and you can get a discount on all the adult classes except for the two autumn leaves classes which are on sale already because they just launched this weekend so if you did not watch those videos when they posted this weekend I always post a little teaser video here on youtube for each of my classes so you can sort of see what's going to be taught in the class and if you ever want to know what's in one of the classes make sure you scroll down to the video that's on the class page before you purchase it and you can get a sneak peek at what you will be learning etc and there's always a free pre-class lesson for each one so you can get to see the supplies that you're going to need and know if you already have everything because with some of the classes you might already have everything entirely so go use the coupon code school to get a discount and then if you want the autumn leaves classes they're both advanced classes so I warn you of that one is Copic marker and the other one is colored pencil but you may already have all the stuff for it so might just be the class itself but I put it on a nice steep discount to encourage people to go and check it out so the background is mostly black except on one side where there's going to be the light coming from that side I'm just using a dark gray and that's only so that I get a little difference in color you could get away with doing this with just black all the way around it easily enough and then I put some dark brown down here at the bottom just so I have a little different color as an anchor underneath of this I was debating with this one whether I was going to make two cards out of it recently I did the big cupcake from Colorado Craft Company and I cut that one in two down the middle and there was no screaming I will link to that video at the end of this one if you missed that one I got two cards out of that one and you could do the same thing with this one and just cut it down the middle and have half a pumpkin on each card you might want to leave yourself more paper on either side than I did because yeah you want to have enough room to to make the rest of the card however I'm just going to do one giant card with this one because I don't send that many Halloween cards out I do send fall cards but I do send Halloween cards to my nieces each year they are grown up but you know what what person doesn't like to get a weird card from your auntie once in a while so anyway just colored some green on those leaves added a little bit of green to the bottom and then all of those lines from all of the vines had disappeared so I could see them sort of at an angle the way I was looking at it so I could trace over them with this permapake pen that I had and then I stamped the sentiment and used some gold embossing powder on it just did a couple layers of paper and there is my fun little crazy pumpkin card so hope you enjoyed storytelling today go buy yourself a new stamp just because you deserve it and go buy yourself a class because learning is fun right and who doesn't like sales so coupon code school and September 1st through the 7th or through the 8th yes I just said the 8th 1st through the 8th we have a sale going on so I will see you guys later bye bye