 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnock, and today I'm going to be drawing an imaginary creature in honor of my Imaginary Creatures class that just launched. It's a Level 2 colored pencil class, and there's a link in the doobly-doo to that. I'll be talking about it a little more throughout this video, but I wanted to share a little bit about my patrons because they're awesome people, and this weekend a bunch of them joined me for a live stream of the drawing that you're going to see today. So thank you to them for hanging out with me and helping select colors and things, and for all the help they gave me in giving me feedback to create the Imaginary Creatures class in the first place. So I started out by thinking in my head about these drawings that I used to do as a little girl. They always looked like this. They had a little body, they were feet, and hands that were just little circles. They had eyeballs, and I just put different things in their hands like tennis rackets and tennis balls. I would make them go to the store, or they would run. I had scenes with them. I just, crazy numbers of times I drew that little thing. And this drawing is kind of the grown-up version of that. So you'll be able to see this develop as a puffball, that's a very furry puffball, with big eyes instead of the little eyes that I used to draw, and a tutu because I can draw a tutu. And why not? You know, when you're an artist and you're drawing Imaginary Creatures, you can do anything you would like. And then started doing the drawing. This one is much larger than the ones that you'll be doing in the class, because in the class all 10 fit on one 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. This one is in a 6 by 6 sketchbook. So I made it much larger so I could get into more of the details, that kind of thing. If when you get done with the class, you want to draw your own boxes and start to make your own Imaginary Creatures in whatever kind of format you want to draw them in, have at it by all means. And if you're somebody who already loves to draw and you could do something like this on your own without a class, then go for it. It's a lot of fun. There's a couple things that I teach in this class. And it's kind of a hodgepodge of a lot of things. I wanted something that would take people from Color Pencil Jumpstart, where you're just getting to know the medium and starting to learn some techniques. Before you get to level three, where you have to start to draw your own scenes, that's intimidating to a lot of people. So I wanted something in the middle. And that was one of the goals of this class, to give people a place to go after they finish the Jumpstart class. And this one is going to focus quite a bit on the no line technique, as it's called in card making or in fine art, it would be called implied line. And I almost want to see if I can change the way crafters refer to it as no line because no line would mean it's a big blobby area. There's no line between any shapes. And I know what we mean in stamping is there's no black stamped line. But in fine art, what they mean by implied line is that there's two shapes next to each other, but they're defined by not a black line, but an implied line by having darker color on one side of it and lighter color on the other so that you can see the difference between them. But there's not an actual outline to it. And so we'll talk about that quite a bit in the class. We'll do a bunch on textures and, as I said, shading. And just a lot about having fun with your art. One of the things I've discovered as a teacher is that some of my most popular classes that people actually finish are classes where there's one big project that you're finishing, you know, a whole page of something. Instead of having little individual lessons that are all separate from each other because we all lose track of stuff. I don't know how many classes I have half finished on different sites all over the internet because I just never completely finished them. I never went back and I wanted to do something on one page so you can finish that whole page and then the class is done that hopefully will pull people through because it is so much fun and that it would be so much fun they wouldn't even notice that they were in a class. They wouldn't even notice that they're learning about shading and line and texture and all those sorts of things. In the class, I'll be using no blending solutions. In the same way that I'm doing with this drawing, I am going over and over and over with the same colored pencils with a really sharp, sharp, sharp point and when you've got that point really sharp, the pencil can get down into all those nooks and crannies. In that purple background, you can see all of the white paper coming through in part of it because that is unfinished and that unfinished look is something I think a lot of people say I don't like color pencil because it just doesn't blend like Copic markers do and I think this is the reason why I think people don't complete it. They don't get to that finished stage. But once you complete all of the layers to start to really fill that in, the texture of colored pencil on paper can just be delicious. I'm not going to stop anybody from trying to use blending solutions and blending stumps in the class, of course, but be aware that you're not going to get really sharp edges for that implied line look. If you're implying that there's a line there, you need a sharp enough edge between a dark color and a light color that you end up with some definition to it and that's going to be important in order to make your images not look all soft and squishy. For this drawing, as well as all of the demonstrations in class, I've used Polychromos pencils and the practice ones that I did before class were all done in Prismacolor and literally you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in looking at a sheet of either one of them, so either brand of pencil is fine. I do give you the colors that I use from the Polychromos set in each of the lessons, but I also give you conversions that you can use if you're going to use Prismacolor pencils instead. You can also change the colors to whatever you want. There is no rule when you're talking about imaginary creatures so you can color them any old way that you wish. So as long as you've got some Stonehenge drawing paper for the Color Pencil Jumpstart class and you've got a set of pencils, you have all the supplies you need for this class. You'll just need to tear out a sheet of your drawing paper, put it through your printer so that you can print out the template that I give you in the first lesson in class and then get busy coloring. I also give you a blank template so you can draw your own creatures if you would like and make more pages of these because I certainly am becoming addicted to coloring these because they're so much fun. There's so much freedom in drawing something out of your imagination instead of trying to make things that are always realistic and then not being able to achieve it. So thank you so much for joining me for this video. Links to everything are in the doobly-do as always and I will see you again very soon. Thanks again to my patrons for all your help with this class. See you guys later.