 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnok and today I'll be erasing to create snow in a colored pencil card. The one on the left is the one I'll be making today, but I used the same techniques for the one on the right that you may have seen on Instagram recently. And first I'm going to start though by talking about this clear stamp, because I had some people ask me about that on the Instagram video. It's basically a clear stamp that you can stick the red rubber stamps to. So they will stick to this in your stamping platform. You can place it anywhere you need to, remove your pads and things so that it's not too thick because red rubber stamps are thick and then you've got the thickness of that, so I use it without any pads inside the Misti. And then place your stamp where you want it to go and it will, if you've got this thing nice and clean, then it will stick to it. If it's dirty and just needs washed off in order to regain its stickiness, then you can do that. So I put my ink on it and the first type of erasing I'm going to do here is with a baby wipe to dab off a little bit of the ink in the areas where I want a snow spray. And the snow spray is going to come up from the, where the tires are hitting the snow. There's a few areas that I thought I would leave whiteed out so that there would be some snow coming up over the top of the car, but then I realized that I needed to have the driver visible, so I put a little bit of ink in there so that, you know, you can, with a stamping platform, you can stamp it a couple times in order to fill in the areas that you really need. And I put a piece of masking paper in it because I wanted to put a building behind it. Purple Onion also has some other stamps that come out and they have great scenes in this Stacey Yakula collection. So I did a real simple cutting out of just the top end of the car. You don't need to cut out the bottom end, since we're only going to stamp the top part where the building is. I moved the clear stamp so that I could line up the building. If you're not sure where your building is lining up, you could always stamp it onto a piece of acetate, but I was pretty confident with the placement. And here I'm only putting ink on in certain places. That's another way to erase. You don't even have to wipe it off if you only tap on the corner of the ink pad in certain places, because I wanted to have some snow on the roof. And in order to do that, I needed to not have ink everywhere. And then I was able to peel off my mask and I've got a scene ready to roll. So I'm using some Polychromos pencils. The colors that I'm using will be over on the blog so you can see what they are if you're interested. And I'm starting with a very light coat for the animals, because when you're looking at something through glass, you're going to see a muted image of it. So sometimes it'll be more muted colors. Sometimes it's just softer colors. And you'll see how this plays out when we get a little further into the card. There are a few places where I realized I didn't keep the masking in the building the same way so that I have some spots that I'm going to just draw back in as I do my coloring that I had originally intended of maybe having some snow spray there. I wasn't thinking about the building in the back. So I'm going to worry mostly about the snow spray by the tires. And then comes the coloring of the car. I really wanted to color this car. Michelle, such a sweetheart that owns Purple Onion, offered me stamps. She sends me pictures of her releases. And I just pick out a couple of stamps because I just love the Stacey Yackle stuff. And this is one of the ones that I really wanted to color because just the whole shininess of the car. And I could immediately see doing some kind of a snow thing in the bottom was what I really wanted to do. So I'm using a couple different reds. I started with a light red to just put some color in there and leave some highlight spots. I'm not really worried too much about where the lights coming from on this because cars are shiny and they have all kinds of panels that go different directions. So don't kill yourself over exactly where all those highlights should be. Yes, there are going to be some places that are correct, but it all depends on where the lighting is coming from. Are there street lights out there? Is it daytime, nighttime, all that kind of stuff? I really just wanted to establish some lights and darks into the car itself first before I get everything else going. So I'm actually using some black to do some shading in here. The Polychromo set doesn't have a lot of really deep, deep, deep dark reds. And you know me in contrast, I'm a big fan of contrast. So sometimes black is just where it's at. You can use a complementary color, but in this case that would have been green. And I don't find that greens make me very happy when it comes to shading in reds. At least not in, well, I should say not on a big red object like this. There's some small areas where it can work, but for something like this, it's just a little much. So I'm going over it with a heavier coat now of the lighter red pencil, shaving out some of the areas that I had left white. I always leave more white than I think I need, excuse me. And then start to remove them if need be, if it turns out to be too much. Because I didn't want the focus to be on how shiny the car was. It's more about the whole thing in comparison to the train station in the back and the snow in the bottom and that sort of thing. So just a couple layers of pencil and I will add some other as well at the end. Because you know me, I always have to keep adding and fussing and fussing. So the roof of the car with a little bit of the dark shading under it as well. And then I put some gray in all the white areas in the car itself. A little bit darker in the open spaces above their heads, but then going right over their faces and look how they appear to be behind glass. Because I didn't leave white whites. Because you wouldn't see white whites inside of a car like that. If you ever look at another group of people in a vehicle, you're not going to see if someone's wearing a white shirt. You'll see a light gray, but you won't see a white white inside of a car through glass. So that'll help to give you that kind of an impression. It works for all different kinds of windows, so whatever kind of vehicle or building that you're drawing something that has a picture of something inside of it. Don't worry too much about keeping those white whites. Now the front end of the car, I could not figure out what some of these parts were. And that's what artists get to do. They get to enter a car to be whatever they want. And I couldn't figure out where there was a grill. Is there a place where there should be a grill? Should I put one in? Decided not to, just to keep to some horizontal lines. And I'm leaving some open spaces. Partially because I want that to be part of the snow spray. But then there's other places that I put some color that I intended to erase. Because when you want to use an eraser to create a particular kind of texture, you really actually do need some color for it to erase from. If you're erasing out of a really pale, pale, pale color, you won't see anything. And I wanted to show you the electric eraser that I used in a recent video. I was working on a squirrel drawing and showed you that. I wanted to show you it also works with colored pencil. And basically it's like a little drill, like a little mini drill. And you press down on the button and it spins around. And if you need to pull the eraser up, like if you need more eraser, you wear it down. Then you just pull the whole silver piece out. And then you can lift up the white eraser. And in order to sharpen it, you just press it down while it's moving on your desk surface or something. And it will shave off the top edge and then it'll flatten out and you'll get sharp edges on the outside of that circle of eraser. But you can see I can just tap on the surface and it makes little snow blobs. So you can make all different kinds of textures with this. So look for me to do that in the future, because I think it has lots of possibilities for fun stuff it could do. Now for the building itself, the train station. Remember, I had just tapped the ink onto the image itself. I wasn't really strategic in where I was not inking. I was just putting some color down so that I would have parts of the building that would show and I was more focused on making sure that Holly's Holly station sign back there was showing so that it was clearly a train station they're driving away from. But I didn't really know what else I was going to do with this. So I ended up leaving those white spaces open so I'd have some snow landing on the roof and staying there. And layered a couple of different colors over top of it. Sorry for the crazy focused thing that happened there. Does not like it when I move my hand in front of the place. It's trying to focus itself on. But the triangle portion there started looking a little bit weird because I didn't get any ink into that area, which means that I had to figure out what to do with it. And there was obviously not going to be a giant blob of snow on the side of that angled piece of the building. Like that was a vertical so there wouldn't be anything there. So I decided to add a window there. And what I did was just make a large black box and I could use that electric eraser again. So this is just one of those things that you can think of all the different times you wished you could have had an eraser that would work like this and just draw in the crisscross and then color it with your colored pencils. And now it looks like it's part of the stamp. Kind of cool, right? Think of areas that you could use that because this is a pretty good tool. Now remember that it could also eat your paper. So you want to practice with it and figure out how much you can actually touch the paper without starting to tear it up because it's abrasive. It feels like a little dentist drill or something in your hand. Not that I know what it dentist drill feels like, but it does have a lot of power to it so it can eat your paper. So be a little bit careful with it and tap gently as you start to get the feel for it. Adding just a little more shading, a little more dark areas in the building so I can push that back behind the car and that sort of thing. Working on putting a few details into some of that. And then I decided the car needed to feel more in the foreground. So I'm going to use the Gamsol, my little container there. I use a cotton ball in there so I don't spill my Gamsol liquid everywhere. And a blending stump that I'm just applying the Gamsol to the paper with the blending stump and moving it around so that I'm getting a richer red. So that's pulling it forward more so that the building in the back has all the texture in it and it's going to recede more to the rear of the image. And the car is the thing that's going to be out front, which of course it's red so that's going to help it but giving it that little extra bit of shine was helpful. So I wanted a subtle background, just something, a little bit of a hint of something in the distance. So I took a very pale gray, which you can't see super well here. The lighting, you know, in order to just see anything it tries to brighten things up. It's a very, very pale gray though. And you can see that it starts to make the white of the snow look white because it's coloring the paper itself. And this Stonehenge paper that I'm using is actually the warm white. It's not the white white. There's a green cover that's the white white and the yellow cover is the one that I used here. So it's kind of a cream color already, but putting the gray around it made the snow look whiter. Well, since I liked the lighter gray and how much it made the snow stand out, I decided to add a darker gray. So there we go, right? A little bit is good, a little more might be better and in this case it was. I went back and forth with the pencil for a bit with a very light touch and then used a cotton ball, no Gamsol on it, just a cotton ball to move the color around. So I got a smooth coat of that. And then I used an eraser that I have not used here much. I think I've used it once maybe. And this is a mono eraser. You probably have seen them around, lots of people have them, but I recently got both of the mono erasers. One of them has a flat kind of chisel point, which is the one I'm using here. The other one has a very fine point. And I'm erasing some trees into the background. So they look like snowy trees since they're nice and white. And it works really well. I really like these erasers quite a bit. And there's also a knockstick eraser. It's a little clunkier that I've had for many years and I've used it for a long time. I'll link you to all of that as well as the electric one and the stamps and everything in the doobly-doo as well as over on the blog. So you can see more of all of that if you need any of that stuff. Oh, and that clear stamp too. Because, yeah, that makes red rubber stamps a lot easier to stamp with. All right, there is my finished 5x7 card, nice and big. And this one is also a 5x7 with another purple onion designs image. I had just wiped off the areas where the snow went over the wheels on the train. And you can see that over on Instagram. I'll put a link in the doobly-doo to that. So you can check that out as well. That is it for me today. I will see you all again very soon with another video because that's how I roll. Have an awesome day. Go create something beautiful. Bye-bye.