 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'll be making a Slimline Elf card and there are glass ornaments in it. It's inspired by this card sent in by Elaine earlier this summer. She put hers on a swingy thing and I will write up some notes from her notes about what she did, what products she used, and link to them if I can find them. And I was inspired by this to go get another Mo Manning image because I love her images and I got another elf. So this one is carrying a couple of Christmas ornaments. I thought that would be fun to do some simple straight forward coloring on them but very realistic. So we're not going to do a ton of super crazy kinds of reflections on them but we'll make them look really beautiful. And hopefully that will help you in getting your own Christmas cards done. I'm going to start by coloring the elf though using my crazy purple combination. I always like to use a purple in the shadows because that's the color that you can dull down some of these browns with because Copic gives you colors that are really bright and intense and you don't really necessarily want bright intense colors on the skin tones if you're trying to go for realism. You want them a little dulled down and purples will help to do that. And sometimes the more reddish ones but mostly the more bluish ones, the blue violets. I've also used some darker skin tones on this because I'm going to be putting a lot of color and really saturating the color in the rest of the picture and I want the skin tone to be enough to hold up to it. I want it to be strong enough that it can withstand all that contrast that's going to be around it. The hat I'm using an R35 for the main color in all the stripes and with the reds I mean my favorite dark red is an R89 and the one that goes with it, just hand and glove is an R37 and then you can use an R35, an R24, an R14, 17, lots of different lighter reds but those two for the dark and the mid tone work with so much that they're just my go-to when it comes to doing reds. You can get darker with the reds by using a gray in there and the red but for something this small that's a little bit of overkill to put too much in there but I am going to go for heavy contrast in this because contrast is what makes your eye see something as realistic as dimensional and if you want your artwork to look that way you need to be willing to use some contrast. I know it's scary but it's worth doing. I'm going to use the same colors on the overalls and with the overalls I'm going to put shadows in areas where I think there would be shadows there's not much indicated here there's a few lines and I'm going to extend those lines with the R89 and just add more color in those areas and then when I switch to my R37 I'll extend those even further so I continue the wrinkles in the fabric and it will start to build that realism around the entire pair of overalls which is start stretching that color out and if you need to you can go back in again with the light red sometimes you get sometimes you don't really depends on how everything worked in this particular picture I'm seeing in my head the light is coming from the upper right hand side so all the shadows are on the left the shadows on the hat are on the left and when I start working on the stripes in the outfit the rest of the outfit I'm only going to really worry about doing a two color blend in these because there's not room very tiny areas and once you convince somebody that it's real by looking at other areas they're going to totally buy it even if you don't have a whole bunch of colors doing your shadow work in some of these small areas now this is where it's going to get scary for some of you use a C7 for my darkest on the whites yes a dark gray on the whites because the whites are going to look white when they're in comparison to the darks I'm not using a background in this so the whites are going to need something else to balance off of to start to look realistic so I'm using that really dark C7 most people won't go that far you know I'm a little braver than a lot of people so I did have a little bloop and went into the ear don't use the colorless blender when you're fixing that just use the color that's already there I use one of the flesh tones and that just pushed that out right away next up I'm using another gray to just blend a little bit softly some of the areas that needed a little softening on the edges so that I get some roundness but look how much better that hat looks when it's got that really dark color and it just makes a huge difference and then there's highlights along the top of the arm and the backside of the back so it matches the rest of the light coming from that upper right hand side so I was debating about which color to do the shoes so I left those for last and decided red shoes would be adorable so we've got red shoes on and any old random brown in the hair there's only a few strands so not much needed there as I said once you start adding a lot of realism to something else you don't really have to worry about it too much in some of the smaller areas and now I'm going to do one of the Christmas ornaments and then we're going to do the other two together but I'm going to do one in this order and basically what I tend to do is start off with some light colors and I try to draw in where my highlights going to be but I leave it bigger than I want the highlight to be in the end and I didn't want a pinpoint highlight but I wanted a soft blend from the outside to the inside and a soft blend is going to mean a lot of colors as we start working from the very darkest into the very lightest there's a huge range from that R89 which is going to be our darks to the R000 so there's going to be a lot of transition work and if you close up that highlight too soon you're going to end up with no highlight at all because you as you keep pouring more ink into this it's going to start bleeding need to be careful not to let it bleed outside of the image so do that outside edge with your whatever red is going to be your main red and then don't touch it any more than you absolutely have to because you don't want to keep pouring more moisture into that portion of the paper so here we go with the darkest red and I'm going to put a bounced highlight from the face that you can kind of see the reflection of the face in the bottom of that ornament and right now it's really bright if I go over with the R37 which is what I'm using right now it's not really dark enough because it looks more like a gap or a hole or a design element or something it's too sharp it's too contrasty so I am going to have to dull that down but I started working toward those highlights and just bringing that color up and then started trying to scrub at those edges but I'm noticing that I'm starting to get a little bit of bleeding in the paper I set it down for a second just walked away from it so it could dry a little bit before I went on to the next step and then I started with an R39 and once I added the R39 that gave me a better transition from the R89 up to the R37 and then I went cycled right back through all of the other colors again and I'm doing this one more slowly than I'm going to do the other two and you're going to see a little bit of a difference in how they come out because of it it's kind of up to you whether or not you want to do them more quickly or you want to spend more time laboring over them I never find that laboring does me a whole lot of good so working quickly we'll see how that goes so here on these two I'm going to put my main highlight should be in about the same place as it is on the other two now there are some science reasons why you would move it from one place to another because each of the ornaments is a different orientation to whatever the light source is but in this case we're just going to let them be about the same I sketched in just so you could see where they're going to be some other bounced highlights that are going to be in the bottoms but of course I have to go over them with this base color as they start building up the colors anyway so those are going to go away but I sketch them in for myself so they're in my brain I did go outside the lines and you can't really repair red very well may know that already so I've just extended the ornament a little bit larger and then once the R89 gets out there you're not going to see any of that now if you're coloring a very light pale color for your ornament then hopefully you can use something else like a colorless blender or a white pen that will light that but reds just don't really cooperate that way so into the R89 I'm leaving some of those bounce highlights bouncing off of the face and then the top one has just a little bounce from each of the two ornaments down below it now I haven't looked at ornaments to see what they look like in this particular orientation because they'd have to see them with a light on them and set everything up that's just too much work for my brain I've studied glass a lot I've drawn a lot of glass in my day and I just have a gut instinct for it so I'm trying to give you a few ideas on how you can simplify it a little bit keep one main highlight and if you've got an object that's really close like that face just let a little tiny bit of a bounced highlight show even though most people will notice it their eye tells them that's what it is and it's just something that's in your head so I'm adding extra colors as you probably noticed there were a couple extra colors that appeared in the list a little earlier because I needed more colors for transition please don't feel like you have to be able to get everything done in three colors because somebody on youtube said that you had to have three colors for a good blend sometimes it takes seven eight nine 12 colors to get a really good blend and I wanted these to look really really good and it took a lot to make that happen it took some breaks in between as the paper got saturated and I started feeling like I was it was starting to get out of control just let it go for a second make sure you also have something underneath of it have some white paper underneath of it not a surface that's plastic or glass or wood because if any ink is pooling underneath it's going to bounce back up into the paper and you're going to just be pouring more color back in and when it pours in from underneath you have zero control where it goes so you want to avoid that and just having a piece of cotton paper underneath of it is usually enough to help that out so I'm pretty satisfied with how this is going you know working my way back into those highlights and I can make them now as small as I want them to be because I'm satisfied with everything else and I can keep building into that if I had started with those tiny highlights they would be gone by now so I can keep them and then control with this final touch of the R 000 exactly how much light I want on each of them adding a little bit of shadow underneath it's thicker where the elf and the ornaments are than where just the hat is that tip of the hat and use some gray for the caps on each one of the ornaments and some white because there's scallops at the bottom of each one of those caps and they just have little decorative things on them so seem to need a little bit of highlight to make those sparkle just a bit now let's look at the back side of this and you can see the two that I did quickly and I did them with less TLC less breaks in between bled through more where the other one did not and I was just pouring the ink in on the second and third ornaments unlike the first one so you'll see differences like that depending on how much TLC you put in now the border that I have on the outside of this goes from light red at the top to dark red at the bottom in the colors that I colored in so I colored my own pattern paper quote unquote pattern paper by using some scrap that I was going to throw away or recycle I could turn it into something that I could just use the edge for the edge only will show added an ellen hudson sentiment to it if you're interested in doing more glass work I have a clearly copic class it's an advanced class it's got lots in it about coloring all different kinds of glass two of them are holiday related I can't remember if there's more of them in there that are holiday related but I know there's an ornament in there that is really cool and then we also have some Christmas lights so if you're interested in that kind of thing there's a link in the doobly-doo to that class you can go check that out and that's all I got for you today thank you very much for sticking with me through a 14 minute video I don't usually do them this long but I will see you guys later take care bye