 Hello there, it's Sandy Allknock, and today I'll be using my polychromos pencils to create some clouds over a farm on a snowy day. This photo from Paint My Photo, which is one of my favorite places to get pictures, is one that has been in my folder for a long time, wanted to do this for quite some time, and I also wanted to adapt it because those big trees in the front were a little much for me for using with watercolor and trying to do all of those branches and things, but I thought color pencil would be good, and I also wanted to expand it so there was more sky and there was just a rearrangement of some of the elements in the picture. And I started out by adding the sky in the background throughout the whole thing so I could draw the trees on top of it. And with these clouds, I used a bunch of different techniques to add the color to them. Sometimes it was powdered pigment, sometimes it was direct pencil to paper, I used both cotton ball and a q-tip for blending, and I did use some Gamsol to do some of the blending in certain areas. What I've kind of figured out as I was doing this in a lot of these kinds of drawings or experiments, I try things, I see what works and what doesn't work. I found that once I had applied the Gamsol or if I had really gone overboard in applying the color in any way, that the erasers did not work as well. So my recommendation if you do color pencil work and you want to use eraser effects to do things like create clouds in skies, experiment with it ahead of time and see how much pressure you can get away with, how much blending you can get away with because you could end up causing yourself some trouble. Here the pigment was light at the top edge of this cloud bank here at the bottom and I was able to get a softer edge on top using a stick eraser and that sort of thing. So you know, goof around with it and see what's going to work with the kinds of marks that you expect to use and the kinds of colors that you'll be using them in. So if you're only going to use that eraser stuff in the sky, then throw some colors of the sky down on a piece of scrap paper and try it out with different pressures of applying of the color and then start using your different erasers. I've got an electric eraser as well. I did recently purchase this one which was 30 something bucks and the other one that I had was eight or nine dollars and I wanted to see if there was any difference and literally I have not been able to determine the difference. There may be a difference in the type of eraser head or the eraser stuff. There's different brands and I haven't experimented with all those but the functioning of the actual electric eraser seems to be the same across the board whether you get the cheaper one or the more expensive one. So I'll be letting you know if I discover some differences between them but I would say either one would be just fine so get the cheaper one. It's kind of fun to play with erasers and I haven't gotten all the social media stuff done for this week at the time that I'm recording this but hopefully I have discovered all kinds of fun things that I've posted to use erasers in different ways because this electric eraser which I think I started with these last fall I haven't had a lot of time to play with them. I just kept thinking about all the techniques that could be done with them. That's why I wanted to start playing around with them more so hopefully I will have had plenty of time to do that with this new way that I'm doing my YouTube with one big video on Fridays smaller but more actionable on Monday. So Monday's video is all about making heart-shaped clouds so if you missed that one you might want to do that if you have some paper and some colored pencils and a couple of erasers on hand you can make your Valentine's without getting any other supplies because making heart-shaped clouds is a pretty cool idea for a card. The colors that I'm using on the ground here I was experimenting with mixing purples, browns and greens not very much green but in the photograph there was a good bit of green so I did include a lot of that. These are trees that I altered the size of a bit I altered their scale so they'd be a little further away adding in lighter colors that I wanted to appear behind like in the back of the backside of the tree and then going over it with the darker colors in the foreground and then sometimes even just blending some areas and you'll see a little more of that here blending some areas that become the background because a tree is dimensional tree has branches in the foreground and it has branches that are further away and what I tried to do with some of this was to create more fuzzy branches that are in the background and then put the more foreground types of branches in the foreground so you can see the picture there that I just kept in front of me up on the iPad. By the way I set up something on PayPal where I send money every month to paint my photo since I use them all the time if there's ever a site that you use that has something you use all the time like they they have something you reference all the time I would highly recommend just making sure that you're one of those people that helps to keep the site up because you wouldn't want any of those sites that you love and that you use a lot of reference from you wouldn't want those to go belly up because they couldn't afford their internet fees and all that kind of thing upkeep for their website so I make sure I do that. So here I've added in a bunch of the branches and these are the lighter ones that are going to be in the background and going to kind of knock those back a little bit and add in darker branches in front of them so the tree just builds up slowly over time adding in more color and deeper. In the photo I was looking for the colors of the branches that are on the far side and trying to use some of those first because once I got at least the bases of those branches in I used a cotton ball to soften some of that and then I could put branches in the foreground on top of it with a darker pencil that would start to pull those to the front and the tree gains a lot more dimension that way just by having some fuzzy strokes in the back and some more defined ones up in the front and then came the snow which was the part that I was excited to do I've had just a desire for more snow and I'm filming this ahead so I don't know if we got more snow but a few weeks back we had massive amounts of snow where I live and it was so great it was so quiet outside I love the dampening of the sound in the area when you're out in snow there's just a knowledge all of a sudden there was a lot of ambient noise that has disappeared when there's snow just everything gets quieter well until the guys with the four wheel drives start running around the neighborhood and trying to do pop a wheelie in front of my house yeah that happened quite a bit but just creating all these purples and blues in the shadows these long shadows that are just coming from the the low sun in the distance it was just really fun letting them blend using the cotton ball and the only area that I really used gamsol on this was in some of that really heavy blue in the sky because I wanted some of that to stay bright the rest of this especially once I realized I wasn't going to be able to lift off color very well if the color was applied heavily I kept it much lighter here on the bottom so that I could use my electric eraser and just put some highlights on the top where the sun just skips over the the top of the edges of some of the snow banks and then I even used it to add some snow onto the branches on the very big tree in the foreground since you would see that you don't see much in the distance on the smaller tree with a very sharp pencil I started adding some grasses that are sticking up randomly out of the snow and then sharpened up the electric eraser so I could add in some just little highlights where that crunchy snow captures the light just a little bit of dappled light it almost looks like glitter in certain kinds of snow and just tapping the edge of that electric eraser on the surface of the paper just know that the electric eraser can damage the surface so don't get too crazy with it but you can even do things like this do some drawing of grasses that are covered in snow and that are that have highlights hitting them etc so that's my finished rendition of this photograph and the original is for sale over in my fine art store there's prints on society six links to all that down below and on the blog there's links to everything else that happened this week all the other eraser ideas that I came up with and this is the video from monday on making clouds so if you're interested in more information on making clouds check that one out link up here on the screen and I will see you on monday I hope you have a great weekend go make something beautiful I'll see you soon bye