 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnok and it's beginning to look a lot like winter in my studio. I know it's June as I'm posting this video, but I was just working on a mini class for those who are working on their holiday projects in the middle of summer because I know it keeps some of you cool. So information on the mini-class winter wonderland in color pencil is in the do we do, but I'm going to be working on snowmen because I needed something to test out some blending solutions. And so we're going to get going on that as I was preparing to work on the class, I saw that my Gamsol was running low. I was down to less than a quarter of a bottle and that panicked me. So I went shopping and I shopped other artists websites to see what kinds of things they use. There's US art supplies, oil medium, Windsor and Newton sands odor, which means without odor in French, which is a lie. They all have some odor. Drying poppy oil, which sounds interesting to me for a lot of reasons, boiled linseed oil, which I already had in the house from a previous project and on the right is a jar of isopropyl 99% because yes, you can blend with that. I put mine in little jars because I am messy and I knock things over all the time and it's easiest for me to use a pipette to put some of the blending solution on a cotton ball inside these little jars. And that means I don't have loose liquid floating around on my desk. And it also means I'm not dipping into complete liquid because usually you don't need quite that much liquid when you're doing color pencil blending. I ran out of jars. So the linseed oil ends up on a little plate and that doesn't have a lid. So I am going to just toss that afterward. No big deal. So let us get going on creating the snowman with just pencils. I'm going to loosely sketch the snow people shapes. And to do that, I'm doing two balls for my snowman instead of three. I was always more successful as a child doing two rather than trying to stack up three and then having the top one fall over. So there you go. I think they're also cuter. So I'm going to just make two. And I'm going to create one for each of my blending solutions that I'm going to test, except I miscounted. So the last one on the right will always just use a different blending solution because I put too many snowmen in my picture. See, I was even counting there and I still did it wrong. There you go. Next up is dry blending. We're going to start with dry blending. Even though this is about wet blending with your colored pencils, typically I use this. It's a tea strainer, the top of a tea strainer and scribble the pencil in there. And then all the pigment falls through and I have all this dust that I can move around. And that's usually for backgrounds. But what do you do when you've got a little image like a snowman or if you're a stamper and you're trying to fill in a small section? Create a pile of pigment that you can paint with. I'm doing this on a nail file. You can also do it on a piece of sandpaper or on a blending stump sander and then paint it. I'm using a very soft, soft, soft brush. And this is one out of my brush drawer that has all of my cheapy brushes. These are all the ones that I'm willing to throw away if I dip them in something that ruins them. And this one has hairs sticking out all over the place. So it ended up in that drawer, but it works great for creating a really soft look. And for the snowmen or all the little snowballs, I wanted to have kind of a scrunchy snowy texture. So I started by using this dry blending to put some color down because in the next step I'm going to add some wet blending to it. But I wanted to have something on the paper first. My light source is on the right so the shadows are all on the left. And it's just a real quick way to add some color in here that I'll be able to use as I start doing the rest of the blending. So all of the snow people are done. By the way, just let you know now I did miscount. I added an extra snowman, one more than my blending solutions that I have. So the last snowman gets to be blended with whatever I want to blend it with. Blending solutions are chemicals. So they're some kind of chemical that's going to make the pigment move on the paper. And what I'm using to apply them is a stiffer brush than I used last time because I'm also trying to press into the paper a little bit. So I push the pigment into the surface of the paper. It's going to hold it there better. And as I was working, I realized I wanted stronger color because I was going to have these really strong, bright hats and scarves and things on them. And I wanted to have a blue that would stand up to it. But I still wanted that scrunchy look to the whole thing. So this worked really well to get that sort of scrunchy look because the blending isn't perfect. The linseed oil performed worst out of all of these on this paper. But from everything I've read, all of them work better and worse on different papers. So I'm going to be testing over the next couple months since I now have these solutions in the house. And I'll be testing them with different mediums as well. So I'm going to use a electric eraser to remove the lines. And then a dusting brush to get rid of all that excess dust. And it's time to add the clothing. Since the lines were removed, the clothing is now going to do the work of those lines because I'm going to do implied line coloring. This implied line lets your eye fill in the details. So you can see the left and right side of that snowman's face, even though they're not drawn in there. Your mind fills it in. When I do the blending, I have color left on the brush itself. So I can use that to make puffballs on the top of the hat or a soft edge on the bottom of the scarf. So in between each one of these, before you clean off your brush, make sure you use the color that's in the brush for any of those kind of soft details you want to add. And when I say clean off the brush, what I have been doing is scribbling off the color on a paper towel and then dipping it in some alcohol, 99% alcohol, and then wiping it off on the paper towel again until I have no color left, just so I don't end up dragging some red or orange into the yellow, etc. When you're working from lighter colors to darker colors, that's not as much an issue, but when you're going toward lighter colors, it's much more difficult. Also, when you're doing this kind of wet blending, go from the light areas into the dark areas unless you want to pull that color from the dark area into the light area. So on the yellow, I had to be careful to make sure I didn't pull too much of the orange into the yellow hat so that my rainbow is going to look like a rainbow across all my snowmen. While I recommend that these are easy enough snowmen, that you could actually draw them yourself, I have given my patrons the sketch of this drawing. So I made a sketch after I finished this of the snow people and their hats and scarves. I left off the eyes and the noses and the other accessories that I add at the very end of this video, but I wanted to give them the ability to customize those on their own because I'm going to customize mine. But I decided to give that to them because sometimes you just need a little help and if you want to just print that out, then you can become a patron for, oh, a dollar a month. It's not expensive to become a patron and support my work and I really do appreciate that for those of you who decide you are able to do that. Okay, another thing that I love about implied line coloring is happening in this blue guy. I didn't like the shape of the hat and since I was using no line coloring, I could actually adjust the top of the hat before moving forward with it. If I had a line there on my paper that was a black line from a stamp or something, I could not adjust that and this way I could change it all I wanted. Here's another area where I had a little oops, the left side of that scarf. I don't know what's hanging down there. I made a line there that shouldn't have been there. That is going to get fixed when I get to adding my accessories at the end. So stay tuned for what that turns into. The last hat, of course, had to be one of those hats with the two pom-poms on top. And again, I didn't like the shape of the hat as it was starting to get blended. It just didn't look quite right. It looked like it was way too high on the forehead. So since I didn't have a line there, I could just move it and he looks cuter. It looks like the hats pulled down more on his face, which is kind of fun. Adding all of the eyes and the noses are one of the fun parts. So I decided to save that all for one fell swoop. So now they suddenly all get personalities, making them face different directions, look different directions, gives them personality. Buttons could be different colors, but I'm opted for all blacks since I have so much color in this drawing already. And then I added mittens. Most of them are coming around the back side of the snowman or sometimes underneath one of the scarves. The mittens allowed me to rescue that weird awkward place on the blue snowman where I had that point on the other side of the scarf. And then comes the real personalization, which is to add a theme to it. And mine is art themed, of course, because that's my jam. You could add coffee mugs to this. You could add all different kinds of things that they're holding. And if you're making this for someone else, customize it with what they're interested in. And they will know that you thought of them when you drew this picture for them. Make however many snowmen you want, a whole bunch or just a few. Tag me on social media if you do. I'd love to see what you're making. Next month is World Watercolor Month. The shop is open over at Doodle Wash to do some fundraising for kids and art so you can get my pouch over there and Winter Wonderland Class. All of these things are linked in the doobly-doo down below. It is a link fiesta along with the supplies and everything used in today's video. I'll see you on socials all week with more wintry stuff. And I'll be back here on Friday again with more color pencil. So I'll see you then. Bye.