 Well, hello there. It's Sandy All Knock. Welcome to my sabbatical. In December of every year, I take a sabbatical from card making here on YouTube because y'all should be out making your cards, not learning new things because you need to just get on it and get them in the mail, so I'm doing fine art stuff this month instead. Typically, I don't even do any videos during the month of December, so even doing these fine art ones will be an interesting challenge for me to keep up making videos. Some of them will have voiceovers, some of them will not. I don't really know what I'm going to do, but I'm not going to hold myself to anything. In this particular video, I'm going to try something completely different, which is not watching the video go by, watching myself do the drawing while I'm talking. I'm just recording the voiceover with the drawing in front of me so I can talk about some of the things that I was thinking about while I was doing the drawing because I had a lot of things running through my head because it took a long time to do this. For those who saw the word giveaway in the title of this video, stay tuned to the end. I'll talk about it when I get there, but I want to talk about the stuff that was in my head first because that stuff will flip away quickly. I know myself well enough to know that I am a bear of very little brain, and I don't want those things to go away. OK, first off, using a Twizby Eco pen, and this is my extra fine nib, and I'm using it on Hanamula hand lettering paper. I love this paper for drawing on, but I don't know that I love this giant pad. It's 11 and 3 quarters by 16 and a half inches, which is ginormous for a pen and ink drawing. I don't know that I've ever drawn one quite this size, at least not a full thing. I've drawn a small thing in the center, but not a full, very much inked drawing like this. So it was more than a little challenge, and it took me many hours to do this. And at this point, I don't even know how many hours of footage I have, but there was a giant chunk that I forgot to turn the camera back on. So I don't even know if I'll ever have an exact idea how long it took me to do. This is not a fine, quote unquote, fine type of rendering. This is a sketch, and I didn't worry about trying to stay in the lines or trying to not have my pen goof up and go into an area it wasn't supposed to. I wasn't worried about trying to be consistent with angles of my hash marks, none of that. I was just trying to see what it would take to render this scene in pen and ink. I have painted snow before and painted trees a lot, and I know how to do that. But I really had no idea how to approach doing all of these different textures and hues in black and white in just a pen that I had one width for. I mean, I did cheat a little bit in some of the very black areas. I switched to a medium nib so I could cover real estate a little bit faster. But just trying to think of how to get this many different grays from one pen, that's something I had never challenged myself to do. So that was my aim. The place where this scene came from is actually a video, not a photograph. It's a video, and there are these people all over YouTube, God bless them, who take a camera out to some beautiful wild area and just set it up and turn it on and film for an hour or two hours or whatever. And they have ambient sound in there from outside. I love to go to sleep listening to some of these because it's very peaceful. And it gives me that feeling of being out sketching plein air. And in a situation like in this particular video, it's snowing in the video. If I was trying to draw on paper with pen and ink, with all this snow coming down, I would be a hot mess in terms of my paper. It would be all sorts of wrinkled. So this gave me that feeling of being out there sketching live without having to deal with any of the weather issues. And that was nice. But I chose it because of all of the different trees that were in it. There's just this cacophony of pine trees. And there's some that are skinny, some that are fat, some that are tall, some that are very mature. So they have big thick branches that have big bulbous clumps of snow. And then there's others that just have these little wispy branches. They're little saplings. And they have just a smidgen of snow on them. And how do you render all of that? How do you render the different grays in the scene and give it life with only having a pen? So a lot of this was playing with those kind of ideas and using cross-hatching and hatching in order to create the grays, especially in that background that you'll see at the end of the drawing. I created negative space areas. I did negative drawing black in between big tree trunks and then went over them basically with gray, with lines, so that it pushed those to the background. And then there were areas in some of the smaller trees where I used more of a dot texture to indicate the smattering of snow that was on them. There was a lot more pine needles coming through and that sort of thing. So you had less of the big white clumps of snow. And then in tree branches that were closer, I had more detail. I had more openings in the snow where maybe the snow kind of merged off onto a different branch and there were dark areas in between. And then there's even some parts that used a white pen, especially that big tree on the right-hand side where I'll be adding wind-blown snow across one side of the tree. So all of this together, the one thing that I would tell you if you're trying to draw things like this, and even if you're just trying to draw one pine tree with snow on it, is to look at real pine trees and find one that's simpler than this, of course, if you're just learning how to draw a pine tree. And look at the actual shapes of the clumps of snow. If you try to think of it as a tree, you're going to end up drawing something that looks like your idea of clumps of snow on a tree. You're not going to end up drawing clumps of snow on a tree. It's just what you think clumps of snow on a tree look like. And when I started looking at each shape individually and then how that shape relates to the shape next to it, how much spaces are in between it, is there gray in between it or is it black in between it? And looking at those relationships between shapes and tones was where I started making differentiation between the trees. And that is really the way all drawing needs to be done if you're trying to look at something and draw it. There's a lot of people that draw their idea of things. And when I was in college, our drawing professor, the first class that we went in and sat down, she said, I want everybody to draw an apple. And we all looked at her like she was crazy. We knew how to draw. There's a reason we were in art school. So we all drew an apple. And then she came around with a bag of apples and put an apple on our table and said, now right next to it, I want you to draw a real apple. And all of a sudden, our apples looked like real apples instead of our idea of an apple. But it's not until you really make yourself look at things that you can start to translate them in a way that comes across as more real. Because if you're drawing what you think something looks like because, well, I've looked at trees my whole life. Of course, I know what a tree looks like. You're not drawing that tree. You're drawing your idea of what that tree might be. So that is my overarching advice for you on drawing a scene like this. And there's a link in the doobly-doo if you're interested in seeing the video that I was looking at when I did this drawing. And I would challenge you to try it if you think you're up to it. But I also would recommend trying something simpler if you've not drawn something like this before. Because this was epically difficult. It was just something that I thought would be an interesting challenge for me. And that's what my sabbatical is all about. It's looking for things that are beyond what I think I can do, beyond what I've thought of doing before. I've already started doing some sketches of things that I want to try this month. And I've got a little sketchbook with just ideas. And I'm just jotting them down so that maybe this month I'll finally get to them. One of the best places that I find great things to draw from is Paint My Photo. It's a site. I'll put the link in the doobly-doo. It's free. I give them a donation every month because I use so many of their photos. But people can upload photos there and they just give you the rights if you're a member of the site. You have the rights to just use it. You don't have to worry about copyright stuff and all that sort of thing. Like you would if you were going from Google or like this drawing. I could never sell this because I didn't get permission from this person who filmed the video. I just happened to use her stuff. And that's about that. So pmp-art.com is the website. You might want to check that out and see if there are trees there that you would like to start to practice drawing. Now for the giveaway that I wanted to talk about, I was doing my decorating, all my Christmas decorating and stuff, got my tree out and everything, all the decorations. And of course started cleaning things while I was doing that because fall cleaning is a thing that just passed right by and as soon as I hit Christmas decorations it was time to clean things up. And I found a whole bunch of stamps and dies and things that I had set aside for prizes at various times of the year plus all the Christmas and fall things that I had from this year. And I have a ton of stuff to give away. So I have 12 flat rate envelopes full of goodies. What I'm going to do is give them away to 12 people who participate in Ellen Hudson's 12 Tags of Christmas series. So over on her blog, today I have the very first video for day one of the 12 Tags of Christmas. And you can use mine for inspiration. There are songs that inspire you to make a tag. So you can follow along each day and make a tag for it and then link up using the linky thing that she's got there. When the 12 days is over I'm going to go back and I'm going to pick one from each of the days, each of the songs and give them away and just randomly to whoever random org says to choose from that day. All right, now I will talk about the giveaway that I mentioned. I have 12 flat rate envelopes full of stamps, dies and fun things to give away. Some of them are leftover prizes that no one claimed because silly some of you. So now let's talk about the prizes. Lots of you wanted to know how to enter the giveaway, I'm sure that might be the only reason that you stuck around till now. But I want to tell you about the prizes. I have 12 flat rate envelopes stuffed to the gills with stamps and dies. I want them gone. I want them to go to good homes where someone will use them because I do not have enough hours in my day and I have a special plan for how to give them away. And what I want to do is send you over to Ellen Hudson's blog because later today, about three hours after I post my videos, when she posts hers, I have the first in her 12 tags of Christmas series. So I want you to go watch that video and I want you to go see her linky thing because she explains how to use the linky thing, et cetera. And you can enter every single day by making a tag along the theme of the song that the artist made their tag for that day. So just follow along, make a little tag each day and enter them in the linky thing. At the end of that, so it ends on the 12th, I'll give it till the 14th. And on the 14th, I'll go through her linky thing and pull winners from that. I'll just have random.org select people, but I need to know that those people were actually subscribers of mine. So what I want you to do is comment on this video with the name that you use when you enter linky things then put it in there so that I can double check to see if you are the same person that is on my winners list. Because I'll cross reference them to make sure that I'm picking people who are actually entering for my giveaway. Because otherwise, I could give it away to somebody who has no idea who I am or what I'm giving away and maybe they don't want it. I don't know, you never know. So you have to do those things. You have to go enter her linky thing and then tell me here like what your special name is because people put special funky names in their linky thing and I wanna make sure that I connect the dots between them. I also wanted you to know that on Thursday at noon, I am going to attempt a live YouTube watercolor video. Now I can't make any promises that this is going to work. I have not tried going live on YouTube for ages but I now have a way to hook my big camera up so I can get good video quality which is why I haven't done it because I don't like cell phone videos. They just come out fuzzy and I want this to be good video. So I'm gonna try this on Thursday at noon. So please do attempt to come if you can. I would love to see you and chit chat with you while I try to paint. Well, we'll see if I can chit chat and paint at the same time. I don't really know if I can but it will at least be real time video. So there's that. I will see you guys on Thursday and don't forget to go over to Ellen Hudson's to enter my crazy wild giveaway and I'll see you soon. Bye bye.