 Hi there, my name is Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And this is another in my series of holiday backgrounds for cards using Copic Markers. I'm gonna be using Christmas Bug, which is a fun new image from Stamping Bella. And each Wednesday this month, I am launching this series that's hopefully gonna continue throughout the fall so that you can learn how to make some really interesting backgrounds for your cards for Christmas. Alrighty, let's get rolling. This really cute stamp has a tree in a car and it's a VW bug. That's why it's called Christmas Bug. And I'm using one of my favorite color combinations for trees, which is the YG9 series. It's got a high number for that first digit. And if you know anything about the Copic number system, you know that should mean that it's a dull color. So it's not a vibrant, crazy green color. It's a very realistic looking green. So I start off with a light one and I colored this one a few times. It took me a while to visually separate some of the different areas. There's snow on the car, there's lights, there's lights on the tree. And what I found that was a little bit easier to do was to start coloring in first the tree and get a base color in there, get a base color on the car itself so I could see where the snow was. It's the first couple of times I accidentally colored over some of the snow areas. So just focus your eye on each section that you're working on when you have an image like this. And sometimes it will help you to just follow that one along until it's logical conclusion and then move on to another section so they don't end up getting too much color on an area that you didn't plan on getting a lot of color in there. So the car is now done with a very light yellow color. And just for contrast, so I can get an idea of how dark the darkest part will be, I did the tires. Sometimes it's helpful to me to be able to see what the darkest area is so that I know how dark my other colors and my shading is gonna be on the other parts of the image. So that is what I'm doing here. I'm just gonna color in with a T marker. Now whenever I do grays, I rotate between whatever grays happen to have ink in them. It does not have to be the T's, the N's, the C's and W's. Sometimes the W's will make a little difference because you get a little warmer color, but most any time when I use any gray marker, you can often substitute whatever you have. I decided on a couple of bright colors for the different lights on here. You could do one color for the whole string of lights and it may help it to visually hang together a little bit more. So if you have a little challenge, that might be a good thing. I decided not to do any yellow lights since the car is yellow. So avoid a color where all your lights are gonna disappear into the car unless it's gonna be so dark that you can do the lighting technique that I'm gonna show you later. My car is yellow so I didn't end up doing the lighting on the car itself, but that was my choice because I wanted a yellow car. When I was a kid, I thought it would be cool to have a yellow bug and instead I drive a yellow Mustang, which I think a little bit better at this stage of my life. I love having a yellow car, a little bit of sunshine in my life. So here I'm gonna go with a dark-ish but not completely dark gray and I decided I wanted to add a little bit of interest to the inside of those wheel wells. And so I just put in some little shapes, little triangle shapes. You don't have to do that. That's just a little extra detail that I like to do because I'm crazy that way. Most people don't really get into that kind of thing as much as I do. Now here's where the color's gonna get a little crazy. I'm using a V04. For those who have taken my Copic Jumpstart class that's over on my blog, you can just click over to my blog and look in the shop. There is a beginning Copic class and it's not just for beginners because it has a lot of color theory in it but the color theory here is that a purple is opposite of a yellow on the color wheel. So I'm using that for my shading. You notice that it doesn't look purple. So that was why I gave it a little bit of the shadow areas in that purple color so I could get a good contrast. Then I'm using my Y17 to add my basic mid-tone to it and I'm leaving just a little bit of the bright yellow for highlights because this is a nighttime scene and technically I could really gray this whole car out and allow only a tiny bit of it to be lit by the moon but I decided I wanted some brighter color in total. So that's where I'm gonna leave just a few highlights on the side of the car that's facing us. The moon is behind so there technically would not be little lights on there but I wanted a little bit of brightness in that one area where there's nothing else going on on the stamped image. There's so much detail everywhere else. It seemed like a good thing to add. So I'm just gonna finish putting more of this darker yellow color allowing those light highlights to point up toward the moon up there. Get a little bit of color inside some of these lights and there's little shadows underneath each of those bits of snow so they end up actually being a little more popped. And what I noticed was that V04 and the Y17 hadn't actually blended particularly well so I took a pink color. Yes, a pink color and added a little bit of that to make the gradation between the purple and the yellow a little bit smoother. And that is just one of those things I tried. I was looking for a color to do that what I could have done it with a light purple but figured a pink would work just as well. Next up is going to be adding a lot to the tree and we're going back to that YG9 combination. YG99 is very, very dark. For some people it's too dark. Some folks aren't used to contrast and that can seem a little too much but I'm going to cover the entire thing inside the car with YG97. That's going to help the windows of the car pop out so that you actually see them. If I had done the same lighter colors, lighter progression of colors in that I would not have actually been able to differentiate between where the tree is and the car is. For the time being I'm leaving the lights white and I'm figuring I could also go back in with a white pen at the end and not have to worry so much about getting my marker around all those little teeny tiny lights. And that is one way to avoid having to deal with lights when you're coloring a Christmas tree but to some extent you could be able to actually put some color in there and push out a little bit of green that's in there. Not a whole lot of the light green or the dark green but you could push out some of the light green if you colored right over it. But I'm going to kind of soften out the shadows underneath of each of my really darks and now I'm going to go in with a less dark color. YG95 and color that in until I leave just a highlight of the YG93 facing out toward the moon because the moon is where you're going to get the most highlights on that little tree. It is backlit so technically there probably would just be a big shadow shape and you would have a glow behind it but for the sake of a card I am adapting what the natural light would actually be. Who knows in this series we might tackle something like that at some point so make sure you subscribe if you'd like to see something along those lines. So with my YG93 I'm blending out a little bit more of those areas to bring all that together and finish off my tree knowing that I can come back in and tidy up some areas if I need to but I want to get that background in and figure out what I'm going to do here so I wanted, if you look at the moon, I wanted to add a little bit of that glow around the moon because you get a little bit of cast light kind of radiating off of it and then it goes dark afterward. So you can do a moon where it just goes immediately to the darkest color right at the edge of the moon but I thought it would be kind of fun to have a little bit of a glow added out there. Got a little challenging as I was doing the blue around all the lights and things and I had to adapt, you know, how dark did I want those areas down at the bottom to be but I walked from the B12 to the B14 and often you probably know this. I like to do my light color first. I didn't have a whole lot of marker left in my B12 so I decided to not color the entire sky first. Sometimes you'll get a little better blending but also when you go around something like the moon and you have little lines, I'm even gonna go ahead and leave some of the lines around the moon, it almost works to have a sketchy looking sky around the moon, like you could almost see all of those lines radiating out as it gets darker around the outside edges. So I'm just gonna keep going around in a circle around the entire moon and I'm leaving a little bit of a lighter color around the tree too because the tree is gonna have a little glow on it but you can see my B12 is starting to run out. That's why I was trying to preserve it by not coloring the entire thing with it and I wanted to have some really good coverage of the B12 right by the tree itself because that's gonna be the lightest part. Now I went to a B16, so that's walking one marker further in the B1 family and color families have the same letter and the same first digit and they usually blend the best so when you're doing something like this it often helps to just stay with those kinds of colors. So I'm going round and round and then I can go back in with my B14, B12 to work into some of those areas to figure out where they're going to blend around the circle. But it really depends on how much of that look of all those little lines that you want around it. It's kind of fun, I find, to have a bunch of different, I don't know, little lines going around that make it look like that glow is just slowly walking out into the sky. And as I got out into the very far reaches I decided that I think this is far enough. I don't know that I needed to go into a B18 because there is one darker marker. But I thought, let me work on getting the blending going on the inner parts first and see what happens whether or not I do need to end up going to that B18 or not. A lot of my decisions in my coloring happen as I'm doing the coloring. I don't necessarily know where it's headed until I get there. So I'm just touching up a few areas and then I'll work on this little section down here which ended up being the most annoying section of the whole thing, trying to color in all those little tiny areas. I grabbed my B16 to add a little more dark color in there. I had been trying to blend it with a color that was too light. And so I went a little bit darker right around that, right around those lights in the back. So next up, I went for adding the stars in the sky. And what you may notice also is in addition to the moon having a glow around it, stars may have a glow around them. And that's where I'm adding with a B12. I'm not going straight for the zero marker which a lot of us might automatically think to add. The B12 does push some color away from those darker blues that are already on the image. And then I'm going in with a zero marker to push out a little bit more. You could push it all the way out to the very outside but it kind of looked fun to have these multiple layer dots that got lighter in the center. And a tip for you if you want them to get lighter, color them a little bit and then go move on to something else and then go back and recolor another one because you can get them to be brighter but not by continually coloring and coloring and coloring on them because eventually they are going to start getting bigger. So if you want to keep the size of them then you want to go back in later to do that. Now for the lights, I'm going around each one of the lights. That's going to add a little bit of the color splendor within the light itself. So I can go back in and add a little bit more of the light color itself, the bulb color and add that on top but the little glow makes them look like they are turned on. I'm not sure how they would be turned on while they're riding down the road and speaking of which, I'm not really sure how anyone drives this car because there's a tree filling the entire car. So this must be a magical car that went tree shopping on its own in this little one. So now in the very centers of all of those star glows that I've already created, I'm just using my white gel pen. I use the Signo gel pen to add some different sized stars in the middle. And for the lights, they each have a little highlight. I am going to do some stuff later in the fall on doing lights and some interesting things with lights that I have planned, but I'm just gonna add a little tiny white highlight to each one of them. Don't worry about where it is, just add a little line of light on each one and it makes them look a little bit on the shinier side. So next up, I'm going to take some red and finally finish all of those ornaments. I wasn't positive what I wanted to do with them but with all the white dots in the sky, I wanted to unify this tree. If I had put all different color ornaments on it, it would look really busy. I've got all the busyness of all those different colors on the string of lights. So the bulbs and things on the tree seemed better to do in just a single color. Finally, I wanted to add a little detail to the moon. So I've put some circles of blue and then erasing basically three quarters of that circle with my zero marker that ends up looking like craters and don't do your craters all over the entire moon generally unless you're really focusing on doing a lot of different sizes and stuff where you could end up looking like you're making a moon with measles or something. I'm not really sure what, but this ends up making the whole thing look like a moon with craters while having that vibrant light kind of radiating from the middle that almost makes the craters blow out a little bit. On the card itself, I trimmed it down so I have a strip of black adding a little bit more contrast so it pulls those tires in and makes all this kind of work together a little bit better. But I hope this is an easy background that you can do on one of your cards. Just draw a circle behind whatever the image is, coloring your sky and then make some really fun stars on it. There are going to be a couple more in this series and as those videos go live each Wednesday, these links will be available, but you can subscribe and make sure you click on the little button that allows all these videos to be sent to you after you hit the subscribe button. There's a little round button next to it because I don't want you to miss a thing and I'll see you guys next time. Have an awesome day. Bye bye.