 Well, hi there. Today I am going to be working on this card with multiple layers of Copic colors and talking about how and why I do a lot of color layering and how I make those decisions. And I'm going to start off with this stamp set from Hero Arts. It's one that has money donated to charity. It's got these hands with layering stamps in it. I don't have browns to layer with, so I'm stuck trying to color the hands myself, but if you have brown inks, you can do that. I'm also going to use a background stamp. I've got the heart and the hand stamp together, and I'm going to make a mask for the heart. And that's because I want to stamp that background, that swirl background. And I'm using eclipse tape, which is basically sticky note quality stickiness, so it's not super, super sticky, but it's enough that it's going to work. And I'm going to stamp onto it, take that extra piece and attach it back onto the roll for use later, and then trim out the little heart. The stamp that I'm going to use for the background is from Ellen Hudson, and I can't use my magnets with it because it's a full stamp, so I'm going to tape it down with some washi and then place my mask that I've cut out onto the heart and ink up the stamp. And I decided I was going to try to do something distress looking. I recently posted a Copic art journaling class, and that's sort of where I wanted to go with this with just lots of juicy layers of color and great intensity. And I smashed it on there with not really perfect inking. And I did that deliberately. I'm going to tell you I did that deliberately. But I'm a terrible stamper, so this is like exaggerating my normal terrible stamping. So there you go. And I'm starting by coloring the two hands. And I decided to make the Caucasian hand, which would be my hand in the front, because I wanted to show you something on the other hand when we get there specifically. But you can make either hand, of course, whatever color hand you like, whatever your favorite colors are. On my teaching site in the color charts section, there is a human rainbow coloring download for free that you can get. And it has lots of color ideas for different color combinations that you can try. So for the other hand, I wanted to make a African American hand, because I was going to send this to someone who is African American. But I wanted to note something. When you're looking at the palm of any hand, you know, white person, black person, whatever, the palm is generally lighter. So I'm going to stop the color before I get all the way to the palm. There's just a little bit of the palm sticking out in this particular rendering. And I'm using purples for my shading, by the way. That's just what I like to do because it gives me a little more realism to have that purple underlying things. But I'm stopping so I leave a little bit of that lighter color for the palm showing and then going over my purple with a mid tone. And then I'm going to go in with my light color again and blend out those edges. And that's going to at least give me the kind of blending that I want to get for this. I may by the end end up going over these again, because my plan is to add so much dark and intense color to these, this background that it might require putting more color into the hands by the time I get to it. Originally, I was thinking of making this kind of a rainbow thing with a whole bunch of different colors. And then I thought, no, I couldn't count out how to get the right rainbow colors around there. And I thought, well, what if I did just yellows for the lighter stripes? And then it was like, no, maybe I need to do oranges. I need to do something a little darker because in my mind, then that heart was going to be really great if I could make it yellow. Yellow is my favorite color. And I thought that would be a more striking part for the yellow. So I started going in with darker oranges. And I didn't put the colors on the screen because there's just so many. But I will have a picture of all of the colors on my blog if you want to see what colors they were, because I did grab the handful of markers and took a picture of it before I finished this. And then I went in with purples. I was debating whether to go with blues because blue is complementary to orange. And then I decided to go for more of a red violet than just purple. So I started adding this red violet color to it, nice dark color that would make the purple go a little bit more toward the pinkish purple side rather than the bluish purple side. And then I realized there was too much difference now between the oranges and the purples because I wanted that to have that burst, but I didn't want it to be such a bright burst that it was going to take away from the center. So I got darker with my colors in that. I mean, it was just like this layering that I just kept doing over and over and over again. Same thing started happening with the heart because I started with that light color and then I got darker and darker and darker and I had to keep going darker around the outside edges because I wanted that center to just glow. And that meant that I kept making the outside edges darker. But notice when you're trying to make shading come in from the outside and make a center highlight, you may find you always have that center highlight get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. It's one reason why doing your shading with one side or the other being highlights and shadows is easier because you don't have all the sides meeting in the middle for highlights. So you have less tendency to overwork the centers. So the center got to the part where I was kind of happy with it. I had that yellow glow. I'm still going to add a little tweak to it. But then I needed to darken the outside and just keep pushing that further with darker blue colors. I even went with a BV17 to throw more bluish in it so that I would have a little bit more of the visual difference. And then that started making these oranges really pop out. So I was going to have to darken those. And it just is an ongoing process when I start doing this because I just keep layering colors, which is one of the great things, even though it's challenging doing this with Copics, it's one of the great things about them as you can just keep going. Eventually, if you're using a really thick paper, it's going to pull up and be sticky and weird because sometimes that happens when you get too much color, especially when you get into the really dark ones. But for the most part, if you just let things dry, you can keep adding more and more layers and keep going. And that's what I started doing here is adding more of these really darker, richer colors on the reds to try to pull them into something that's going to start. If you squint at it, you can kind of tell the difference when these start disappearing and they start melting into the same kinds of overall tones as the purples. They're not going to get as dark, but they're less striking on their own. And they'll they'll just be less important. Because I really wanted the heart to be the thing that pops out on this, almost like it's just glowing and just, you know, the power of the handshake between two people is what I really wanted to convey here. So darker colors, another layer of dark colors. And now it's like kind of practically purple and red. It's not orange and yellow anymore, right? Okay, so it changed along the way. That's perfectly fine. Now my stamping on the heart wasn't super black. So I started going around that with my black marker. And then I decided to pull the outside background together with that heart by giving it the same thickness of sketchy kind of lines to it, which worked really well. So it started feeling like that was all one element. It was all designed in the same way. And then my inner doodler came out because she comes out time from time to time. That's just what she does. And I started doodling in each one of these sections. And just coming up with a sort of regular pattern, a little bit of a squiggle around the outside, smaller circles, and then bigger circles in the middle, and just kind of playing around. And it was a way to start to unify all that background, especially if you have areas that aren't blended, or if they're not blended the same, and you want it to feel all the same. Once you start adding the texture of all the doodling on top, it just kind of hides anything else that's underneath of there. So here's a closer view of all that little scribbly doodling. And I decided to do the same doodling all over all of the orangey red parts, and try to see if I could unify that with everything as well. And with the same pattern, it started really feeling more like what I wanted it to feel like. Just a very hand drawn hand created piece, because it's going to go to a mixed media artist. And I know how much she loves that kind of thing. And that's where I wanted to go with this. I wanted to customize it specifically for her, because I thought she would really enjoy that and appreciate it. She's not a Copic artist. So she may not know much about these markers or anything. She's probably not even watching this video, because I don't think she even subscribes, but I wanted to send it to her anyway. Because I thought she could use some encouragement. And that is always a good reason to send anyone a card, isn't it? To send them a little bit of love. So I rounded the corners with my corner chomper. And then I'll decide which of the many sentiments, there's a ton of sentiments in that Hero Arts set, that I will add to the inside of it and then pop that in the mail to her. I hope you guys have a great day. I hope you learned a little something about crazy ink layering in this with your Copic markers. And I'll see you again in another video very soon. Bye bye.