 Hello friends! Today we're going to be looking at how to color moonlight or backlighting on an image because sometimes you want to have light in just a strange place and that's one of the things that I love to tackle if you haven't noticed on my YouTube channel. So this is a Darling Kitty from Purple Onion Designs drawn by Stacy Yakula. Yakula, I'm not sure how to say her last name, but she is an incredible stamp artist. I just love her images and I'm starting off. I didn't have a real plan here and sometimes I show you things I haven't colored previously. So this is my first attempt at this one and I wanted to have a yellowish moon with some yellow glowing light around this little guy. So I threw yellow all over it. That turned out to be something I change as I go on, but when it's a light color like this, a light yellow, it's easy enough to go over it with other colors and to adapt. So I've started putting the gray around the center of the image because there's not really going to be any white on this. All of the front kitty, the part that's facing you is going to be in the dark and the only part that's going to be lit is where that yellow is. So the yellow kind of acts as though it's a placeholder for me just so I remember not to color my dark parts all the way out to the edge because I'm going to make this a calico kitty. I just had that in my head that I wanted to do it that way and I'm going to add some spots and things to it, but I wanted to get this base color in there first before adding all the spots so that I could have that overall rounded shape and have that start to develop before I started adding in on my spots. So with calico kitties, at least to try color, I was kind of googling to see what the spots sort of look like and they're pretty much all over the place. You can have a few spots, a lot of spots, little ones, big ones, all different kinds of things tends to seem like the tummies are a little on the lighter side and all the parts on this image that are gray or in some cases the yellow may end up being some of the whitish spots, but they're not going to be pure white. It's just going to look white when we get this whole thing done. It's going to look like those are the light spots on the kitty. So I'm just adding in my dark places right now with my Copic markers and just kind of randomly putting the spots in there. I'm going to add more texture to the fur as we go and especially, you know, when we get later on in the image just because I wanted to get my colors blocked in first and sort of see where I was headed with it. So our little pumpkin again is going to have some glowing around him more on that right hand side because the left hand side, the parts that's in front of the kitty, is blocked by the light or but the light is blocked from that side of the pumpkin. So it's not really going to show with that highlight on that left side. So adding a little bit darker color on the orange parts and now I'm going to start on the hat, doing the hat in a few layers because I wasn't really sure how dark to go from the beginning because I wanted to definitely look like a black hat. I wasn't at all sure. I tried googling for, you know, yellow hat or a black hat in the, in a golden moonlight or anything that would indicate to me how to do the lighting on this. So I started by just trying to spread the color out a little bit, started looking like a hot mess. I know that's what my stuff often looks like before it looks good and I promise this comes out really well in the end. So I started smoothing it out, adding more dark color because I figured at least I need more dark and then I went in with this YR02 around the edges. So I thought what if it was more of an orange light rather than a yellow light in some spots? And it was starting to work, but not completely until I did this move right here. See that? It's no longer yellow or orange, but it has that yellow-orange cast to it and I really liked how that came out. All right, so now I'm working in this arena right here for my YR02, my YR04, and I wanted to go in and do something darker, like a 1.8, and then I wanted to jump over here. I decided I landed on an E08 for the next one after the YR18. So, you know, you can kind of jump over a number of the hexagons or just, you know, a few next to it really depends on how the colors are laid out because each section is a little different in terms of how many spaces over that you'd really need to go. But I'm adding just a little bit of extra detail with the darker marker to add some fur in there. And I mean, you can really get crazy and go super dark and add some really dark ones. I'm not going to go two nuts on it because I have a lot of coloring to do on the rest of the image because we've got that whole moon and the background and everything to get done on this one. So I didn't want to put too much detail into the little kitty quite yet because there might be some time to do that at the end and there may be a need for it and there may not be. So sometimes I just block in things across an image just so I can get a start on it and get an overall feel and then add in my final details at the very end. So I knew that I needed to add some really good darks and you could go as dark as a black but I just kind of went for an N10 and there's not really a rhyme or reason why I'm doing N's and T's and C's and that sort of thing when I do most black things. There's sometimes a reason for doing W's because they're a warmer gray. The others I wouldn't buy all of them if I were you. I bought them all because I wanted to test and see the difference and it's really hard to tell an actual difference between them. All right I wanted to do a purple for the color the little bow and I picked a V06 because I wanted something a little darker not too screaming bright so V04 would have been maybe my choice but it was just going to be too bright and I didn't want that to fight for too much attention with my little kitty cat. So next up I need to pick some colors for the grass and I wanted to start with a YG03 maybe jump down a few to a YG17 and then something down in this region I settled on a YG67 not to go too dark but darker than the other two because what I want to create is some grasses that are backlit as well. My kitty's can be sitting on a hillside it's going to be a rounded hillside and I'm not sketching anything in I'm just kind of giving it a rounded shape and you'll see I just kind of work at the grasses as I build it up. So now I'm going to go to that medium tone and do just a little bit further out to the sides and I'm doing quick light flicks to just create some grass. I'm going to blend that in with the sky later when I get to that part so I'm just trying to lay it in for right now to get that color onto the piece of paper first. Next is YG67 and that's a darker color yet and so you can sort of see that the light is building up on the two sides around the edges and then it gets darker in the middle where all the shadow is going to be cast because the moon is shining from behind all of that. So let's finish this section up I'm trying to just get it roughly even I'm going to go over it some more so don't have to fuss with it too much but next I want to pick my colors for the sky I normally go with a B99 I thought this time I'm going to do a B3937 and I'm going to jump down to a B34 as well that is a natural blending group and sometimes the chart leads me exactly to go with a natural blending group just because we have this chart doesn't mean that the numbers no longer apply because I love the number system I've told you guys that before but in this particular case it works very very well on this sky so I'm going around it if you want to make a perfect circle you can always I drew this in pencil by going around a die cut circle so that I could make a circle and lay it on there but you could lay the die cut on there and go around it with your Copic marker to make it even I was trusting that I could figure out how to do it without making my circle look all wobbly and weird but I also wanted this background to feel almost painterly so even as I'm blending the colors you're going to see that I left some of the strokes and I didn't want to make it look like it was all perfect perfect perfect because I liked the sketchy feel it made me feel more like this was a children's illustration even more than a card and if you look at kids books they leave a lot of that artistic flair in it so just because we think we all always want to have everything perfectly blended there are times when you want to deliberately leave some of the artistic strokes in it so I'm going to just gradually get to darker and darker as I get to the outside I am going to trim off the edges so I'm not going to color over the the edges all the way to the the background that's a black desk blotter that I use just because I want something consistent in my videos um it does help not to color on it so that I don't have to go get a new blotter all right so you can see I'm just kind of working back and forth with the colors to get some sort of graduate graduated blending between them I'm not being really super careful with it to try to make them all perfectly even I'm letting the lines go around the moon even I'm not I'm just letting those strokes show because it just gives it that really painterly look and now I can blend that grass in I'm just going to go right over top of it with the yg03 so I get that really light light bright grass on the outside edges and then I can go in with my next color and just continue some more of those grasses and build them up just a little bit more and then add more dark into the center and just very very quickly go through adding a little bit more to this so it evens out just a little bit and now I'm going to start working on the moon I want to I still want to have that yellow glow I had that in my head and so I didn't want to let go of that even though not a whole lot of the yellow remained on my little little key cat so I'm just putting a little tiny bit of it on the outside edges and then I went for my ease I went for an e43 and an e40 because I wanted something I wanted to make these little craters in the moon and I did just kind of a c shape at the bottom with the darker color and then filling it in lightly with the e40 if this is too heavy for you you could go with you know lighter colors or just go over this with your colorless blender after you get this step done so that you can lighten those colors if it really bugs you but I liked how it gave it a very natural color to it and it wasn't the traditional blue which you know it's just kind of expected I like to do something that's unexpected after I got my card all put together I put it on the the layers and everything and then I went in to put my stars in sometimes I do wait until I get the card assembled before putting in super tiny details like this or adding especially if I'm adding any glossy accents or anything like that but even here I decided I was going to wait until I got it all settled in so that my stars would end up at the right place because if I started trimming and cut a star in half sometimes that looks a little funny so anyway here is the card with better lighting on it on the actual camera that I took a picture of it with and I think it came out really really darling and here is a close-up of it sweet sweet sweet little kitty cat and I hope you enjoyed this video I certainly enjoyed bringing it to you here are some more videos if you would like to take a look at something there and I will see you guys next time I have a really fabulous day bye bye