 Well, hey there everybody, it's Sandy Alnock and I am going to make a candy store scene that's going to be a little bit on the wintry flavored side with a window full of snow in the background. So let's get started. I'm going to be using watercolor pencils with this stamp set called Sweet Treats from Doodle Bug. Lots of yummy candy in it and I'm always up for anything with candy in it and I'm going to use my super color pencils. I don't know that I've actually used them very often here on YouTube. They are quite nice. They're by Karen Dash, so they're high quality artist watercolor pencils. They have three trays in the full set and I think they're pretty spectacular. I love the color selection in these, maybe actually the most out of all of my watercolor pencils. So if you don't have any and you're looking for something to ask for for a Christmas gift, these might be a really nice thing to have someone treat you to. So be sure to put that on the list for Santee Claws. I have stamped these three images from the stamp set onto a piece of Arches watercolor paper and this is the cold press and I have stamped it in VersaFine Onyx Black Ink which you'd have to do if you're doing watercolor or watercolor pencil. All requires the same thing because you're using water with it and you don't want the ink to bleed. The nice thing about watercolor pencils in general is, especially for those who want to try watercolor but it just seems a little too out of control, applying the color with just a brush can be really frightening. But watercolor pencil gives you the control of being able to put pencil and pigment into a really specific area, especially when you've got images like this that have tiny areas to color in. If you were trying to do this just with a paint brush, it would be quite the struggle to do this but when you're painting water over top of it, it doesn't matter if you're painting perfectly in a little area like this. If you've got the pencil where you want it and you just touch it with the water then it's just going to move around within that area. It's not really that big of an issue and the watercolor pencil can definitely help you to apply the color into a very tiny area. For the candies, I'm just coloring them any old which way. It doesn't really matter a lot because there's so many candies in there that I'm leaving some highlights, some white highlights in there. You could also go back in and do that with a white pen when you're finished but if you've got control then go ahead and leave those white highlights in there. The cake in the background that I did at first, I used a yellow and a purple and as you saw, I scribbled the color in there. I didn't really try to put it in a tidy way and that is another one of the good things about watercolor pencil. If you use a good brand of them, they melt out nicely and then when I mix them together, the yellow and the purple made this really interesting, very warm brown because yellow and purple are opposites on the color wheel which means they're complementary colors and generally complementary colors if used in particular mixes will actually make a neutral but they blend together in this case to make a brownish yellowish kind of color. The jars that I'm coloring, I'm just putting in a little bit of gray so that I can make these silver jars and as you can see, I'm not being real super careful about where I'm putting the color at other than on the lids, I'm trying to put it to the left side but then I can just add water to it and move it right into the area where the pigment is and it turns into a blended area and if you use the brush correctly, you can actually push color into the shadow area and pull it out of, you know, lift it out of the highlight area and push it to the left so you end up having something that looks kind of dimensional. Now one problem with this little stand back here is that there's nothing inside of it to give it any definition so I looked at it and tried to picture, you know, there's a rectangle across the top, a circle in the middle and a half a circle stand at the bottom so I could create some shapes and shadows within that but I also stamped it behind because why not hide it a little bit? There's no reason not to and then I added a little bit of color onto the icing. I will add later on the little candies and stuff on top of that cake because I kind of forgot to do that at this point so you will see at the end I did get those finished because I know somebody will be upset that I did not do them at this time. To fill in all the area inside the candy jars I wanted to really pale gray but I didn't really feel like scribbling gray color in there so I scribbled it on the tape. You can also scribble it on a scrap piece of paper somewhere else and then I could pick it up like I was using a palette and for a little area like that it worked really well. I next wanted to make a counter that these little candies were sitting on because I was picturing it being in a candy store, in a window, that kind of thing and I did a strip of the table color which would be the light gray and then a strip of a medium gray which is the side of the table and then the area underneath which is the counter and I did that with black and I started by doing painting the counter at the top and then the shadow part on the the front of the counter at the bottom and then I just did a very light covering of the middle knowing that those were going to blend into the top and the bottom because everything is still wet but I waited just long enough that it didn't go crazy but I did get a nice soft edge so if you want a soft edge on something then make sure you paint them while they're still a little bit on the damp side and they'll blend together and I used the pigment that was left on my brush to make reflections underneath each of the jars. Now one of the things I was picturing for this scene in my head was having a window behind and I've done this in other mediums before it's a really nice way to give a setting to a scene without having to get into a whole lot of detail and I made a very pale grid out of gray and just used a very tiny bit of the pencil and went over it with water just to give a general I you know you can see I did not measure anything I can use a ruler none of that just went over it real quickly so I would have that grid and then took some blue pencil and scribbled some into the top two-thirds of each one of these sections just leaving lots around the outside because when snow lands inside a square window pane it's going to collect on the sides and the bottom generally and I'm even gonna let some of it collect at the top because you know it it flies sideways when it's winter it's that's what snow does and once I grabbed my brush I could extend the color a little further than the area that I had colored it so when you put the color pencil in there the watercolor pencil you can do it less than the area that you think you're going to need and as you go you can adjust the size of the opening in the window to see exactly where you want it to be now these don't have to be even because the snow is going to land as the snow lands on each one of these window panes so don't worry about it if they're not even that's another thing I like about doing this kind of a thing in the background because it's very forgiving and you don't have to have perfection in order for it to look like what it looks like which I guess is a pair of phrases that don't make any sense but you know what I mean right you're in my head sometimes I feel like I speak in gibberish and there we go with the windows behind everything I did decide to go in with a pen and you could do this with a Sharpie or any kind of black pen when you're doing it at the end of your drawing but I wanted to add a little bit of detail into the bottom section because that's where the stamps are that have black lines so I thought it would be helpful to pull the counter toward the front with a little bit of black line so I just made two lines for the countertop one line for the side of the counter and then some vertical lines for the counter face that's at the bottom in the bottom section it added a tiny bit of detail and allowed all that really soft color in the background to just be far in the background and everything else pulls forward that way and then I added a sentiment from my favorite sentiment set from last year's Ellen Hudson retro Christmas greetings I love the way that these fonts are done and I I think it's the most wonderful time of the year when you get all the candy and the cakes and the treats and the yummies so that's just my opinion how much sugar holic and that's it for me today I guess I will see you guys later links in the doobly-doo to all of the supplies the super color pencils stamp set and everything and link to the blog as well and I'll see you later on bye bye