 Well, hi there, my name is Sandi Alnok, artist and paper crafter here bringing you Mermaid Week on YouTube I'm making up my own mermaid week holiday and today I'm going to do an underwater wreath using my Copic markers and Mermaid week is just something I'm doing for fun because there's so many great mermaid stamps out there So each day this week I am putting out another mermaid card video So here is the little mermaid from Reverse Confetti I was in the middle of preparing for mermaid week and I saw this one come out and I went I got to go buy that one and add it to mermaid week because she's so cute and With her I was debating what color skin that I wanted to give her I do have this thing that I do called the Human rainbow and I thought what would happen if I made a little dark skinned Mermaid because I think she would be really cute that way and I just decided to go with some of my richer markers When I go for darker skin, I often will start with lighter colors and just start to slowly build them up so I'm using a Kind of medium ish shape So I don't want her to be too too dark because there's going to be lots of other light things on the card But I wanted to have enough punch to her skin that with the background that I'm planning for that wreath that she won't Disappear I wanted to have some really good rich color So my final layer is going to be this e1 3 Which will give me just an overall dark color and blend everything out, but it's not super dark And it's a little bit warmer because of that lighter flesh tone that was put down first underneath of it and finish out her little arms and She's cute already. I mean I just really love her because she's adorable her hair I thought let me do some fun colored hair because she's a mermaid So I'm using a purple and I'll use some teal to mix with it purple and teal or not colors You would normally mix together in any normal sense of Copic marker color blending But I'll show you how I do this because it's certainly possible to mix basically any color You don't have to stick with just what would be normal So I'm going to put my blue green color on the bottom and the purple on the top and Then start to let the two of them blend So I'm going to do a little bit of light kind of flicking toward her her little part and Let some of that blue green go over top of the purple And mix some of it together and you get a sort of interesting combination of the two colors there and I'm not stressed too much about the blending because I'm going to do another step afterward But I'm just going to color in the rest of the blue green You hear my little kitty in the background everybody say hello to punch He loves it when you say hello to him in the comments, too And then I'm going back in with my purple and I'm going to pull that purple down But I'm doing it with the lightest flicks I can possibly do just with the tip of the marker Because that's going to also give some detail to her hair and it'll also make it look like that color is blending Even though it's not completely blending. It's just a faux blending and I can you know Just add a couple little streaks here and there wherever it seems like like I want to add some detail And you can do the same thing of course with your regular hair colors doesn't have to be your crazy purple and blue green colors But the same kinds of really light flicks make for some really pretty little hair For her body I decided I wanted to have a bit of a rainbow going on and I'm keeping too rough rainbow order But not exactly I'm not worrying about it and stressing out about it too much and The inside of that flower. I just wanted to have some general green So I didn't even stick into those stick to those little tiny lines there And that allows me to just color right over top of it with the yellow and have it be just a really soft blend of these two colors Now when you're adding a dark color like this pink color You'll need to blend over it with the lighter color and then sometimes you'll blend something more with a dark color If you don't get a good blend with one combination then try another one try going back to the color that you're blending into it with I Cut her out and set her aside and Started working on the wreath and the way that I stamped this wreath was to put a pencil Circle for the outside kind of roughly where I wanted it and then a smaller pencil circle Inside and just started filling in stamps. I started with the largest ones and then move to the smallest ones And that helps you to be able to fill them in in the tinier spaces as they get smaller and smaller There are a bunch that I masked, but I didn't mask them by cutting out a thousand little fish or little starfish or anything I just laid a sticky note over top of something and made really quick and easy masking Because it wasn't worth a lot of that detail. You're not gonna look into it much on the card But if it does bother you that some of the lines don't meet up then just take a pen and fill them in If you're going to fill it in before you do your Copic coloring, just make sure you use a Copic friendly pen Generally, I use the Copic multi-liners You see me there erasing my pencil lines because I realized I hadn't erased that really well and that way you can color right over top of them and The ink won't won't move But if you don't have a multi-liner, you can always do that after you finish your coloring with any black pen And that way you'll still get the joy of that outline without having to have a separate pen in your possession I'm using all the same colors that I used on the Mermaid because that's going to tie the whole image together in the long run and When you're coloring things with multiple images like this I was trying to like first color all the fish and then do all the seashells because your eye Can start to kind of recognize certain shapes and it'll help to make sure you catch them all while you have that marker out You're not constantly changing markers by going along the the entire wreath all at once So my eye is currently looking for all the small starfish to fill all of those in you'll occasionally miss some But at least it helps to control the coloring a little bit. Otherwise, you'll be constantly changing markers every two seconds And that sort of thing so that can be a little bit of a pain in the drain when you're coloring something really complex like this now for the inside I Didn't necessarily need to but I wanted to add some richer color because I realized this was going to start looking really fussy and Wasn't going to feel much like a coherent wreath. It was just a little too disjointed for me So in the center area of the whole wreath, I'm coloring with a dark blue-green color and additional to the colors I had used earlier and Just filling in that center section just kind of moving around trying to decide how far out I wanted to go you could have just a very small amount of it and then switch to another color And I was trying to decide how wide that should be how far should it stretch and You could lay the image over it that you're going to use and you'll see me do that later on and compare how strong it is compared to the the other image like the the mermaid that I'll be using and When I look at this kind of a thing It starts to become one shape when I have a big solid color behind it like this So that really helped me in trying to figure out what this is going to look like So then I went in with a lighter blue-green color And I just started adding a little bit of frilliness around the edges And I'm really just doing scribbles and dots Not getting carried away with it because nobody's going to really be looking at it. There's a lot of other things to Interest somebody's eye as they're looking at this card So it's just going to add a little softness so it doesn't look quite so harsh and I'm looking overall to make sure I kind of control The width of the wreath all the way around to make it approximately the same width And when I got all done with it I decided not to go back and fix something but it is a little wider on the left side than it is on the right side But I handled that by how I put it on the card, which you will see in just a moment but then I went in with the Dark blue-green and I added a little frilliness on top of the light Color just so I could soften that out because I had left a pretty harsh edge behind Since I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do a lot of the things I do I make up as I go along So that's one of the details that I added as I Started working with this So now I've popped this panel onto a card base and here's my little mermaid. She's going to go on to the panel Using some power tabs. These are really super sticky and they're dimensional But just barely dimensional and I'm hanging her off the right-hand side partially for two reasons Hello crows in the neighborhood. You can hear the birds growing madly behind me But I wanted to leave room for the sentiment and I also wanted to cover the fact that that right-hand side wasn't as wide as the left-hand side and I love this little card. It's bright and cheery and Simple yet complex if that makes sense. So it's a really simple design But it's got a lot of interesting both dimension and color and imagery and stuff and it's just a whole lot of fun So I hope you've enjoyed this one and that you'll stay tuned for the rest of the videos this week Yesterday's is in the upper left-hand corner. You can go watch that one And all the others will be coming up as the week moves on and if you want to subscribe You will get all the videos delivered to your inbox You can also subscribe over to them on the blog and I will talk to you later. Bye. Bye