 Well hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter and today I'm going to be trying out some of the new Stonehenge craft colored drawing paper. For my card I decided to use this Darcy's stamp set called All Right and I'm using the pencil in this particular card and since it's back to school time seemed like a good kind of a theme to do for a card. This is the paper, there's a front and a back side, the darker is the front side and this is how it compares to the Nina Desert Storm because I've used that quite a bit and this is significantly darker than of course the Nina and these are the colors that I'm using and it's all the Prismacolors that I'm using in this particular card and what I did was stamp them in some of my favorite things, grout gray ink so that I would get a kind of tone on tone look and by the time I finished on my coloring those lines would really disappear so I'm coloring right over top of them so it looks like I drew the pencils myself. One of the reasons I like using a colored paper like this is because it increases the contrast because now you have a mid-tone that's laid down and it forces you to use some really punchy colors in order to make them show up and it also forces you to use some white highlights somewhere and the white highlights are going to pop against a colored background like this and that's what I really wanted to try when I bought this pad of Stonehenge. I don't know if this is brand new, I say I'm trying out this new Stonehenge paper but it's new to me, I did not know that they had craft. They had some other ones that were supposed to be not white in a pad, they were supposed to be a mixed color pad and I was hoping to get something like this in that pad but it was just various shades of off-white that was not really particularly satisfying to get that one so I was happy when I saw that this came up in my hey you bought something similar to this you should buy this and I decided to pick up the pad of it and I was generally pleased with it. I like Stonehenge paper the surface of their white papers and even those off-white papers are fine the surface of it is it feels a little bit more like a hot press watercolor paper if you know what that feels like very soft and a very fine texture and that tends to hold the pencil really nicely it pulls enough pigment off of the pencil itself but it also doesn't create extra texture by being too textured if you picture a mountain range and you're coloring across the top of the mountain range you want the the pigment to go down into the valleys not just sit on the tops of the mountains because when you get that those little white spots or paper color spots in between you get that because of the pencil skipping over the peaks and valleys in an uneven way this paper has such a fine texture that it tends to work really nicely now the one on the left is the front of the pad of paper and so if you buy it in a pad then you'll always know which one's the front because that's one facing up the backside of it is on the right and I found that that had more uneven texture shall we say then the front side did the front I could get a really nice even strip of color regardless of having to I didn't have to work really hard I did have to work harder to get it a little bit more even on the right hand side and I didn't even succeed in that in a whole lot and I kind of didn't try too hardly hard because I wanted a little more of an apples to apples comparison when I got done and I will show you them both really close so you can see what that texture ends up looking like doing this no-line technique means you do have to draw the eyes back in you can color around the mouth but it's really hard to color around the eyes but you can also move them when you do that so if you decide you want your face in a different place and you could just move the eyes up or down or do whatever you want with them and the eyes here the way that they've drawn them is basically an oval with the eyelashes coming off and a little white dot for the highlights so I just thought that would be really cute to do them on top and you could play around with what pen you have that would go over top of colored pencil but by the time it gets on top of that pigment a pen might not stay meaning it might it might not adhere to the wax of the pencil particularly much so you may not be satisfied with that so a really super sharp black pencil will get you that kind of detail on the white portions here the white pencil down below I put down a little bit of the shading first and then went into the white and here I'm using the white first and then putting some shading this kind of bluish slate blue color on top you can go either direction and you can just layer those colors the harder you press the less you're going to be able to layer and that's one of the reasons that the Stonehenge paper makes a big difference to me because I don't have to press as hard which means I don't get that build up as early so I'm able to do a lot more layering and add more color to it and make things pop more I decided to add a little bit to the band that's around the end of the pencil just to create a little bit of interest there so it wasn't just all these really simple shapes and then went over with a kind of a tan pencil to color the wood and then decided to use that for part of the eraser as well but I wanted to highlight on the eraser so I put the highlight down first and then just went over it with that tan pencil and then I get a couple shades of that one pencil when I go over part of it with the under part of it with the white and then over it with the color itself and then I added a little bit of that 944 just to add a reddish brown shadow on one side and that is one of the pencils the other two I am going to color in superfast mode because you've now seen one of them and I thought I'd talk a little bit about my love for Prisma colors a lot of people don't like them I totally get that if you bought a box that was a bum box or that got dropped in shipping or you've dropped it in your studio or your children played with it and dropped it or something you may have gotten a lot of broke broken pencil lids and there are people that have had that issue I have been using these for 25 34 yeah I'm gonna not even tell you how many years since college and I have never had a massive problem just with one pencil or two here and there I've had a pencil lead that just kind of would never sharpen it would just keep breaking I have never had the problem with a whole box of them and I know a lot of people have so I you know I'm not denying that that's your experience but I literally have not had that happen to me so I don't I don't have a an inner hatred of Prisma colors like some people have a visceral reaction when I color with my Prisma colors I like these as much as I like polychromos and all the other pencils that I use totally fine the coloring I can do with any of them works about the same I don't find that one works better or worse than the others personally and I'm able to achieve great results with any of them so whatever you can afford I always say get the best you can afford the closest to artist grade because that's just you're gonna get better results from that in general this yellow there was a really big difference between the dark yellow and the mid yellow that I chose you can see the colors up top there so I just added a little layer of that mid yellow to the center of the pencil and then I added a little scribble coming off of each one of the pencils which I thought would be kind of a fun little thing getting it bigger toward the front so it almost has some dimension on the card going back into space the yellow I wished I hadn't picked the dark yellow to do that with because it looked kind of weak so I tried going over some of it with the medium yellow and it didn't work all that great but you know sometimes you got to fix what you messed up in the first place and there's that so I added those little things and then I decided I needed some sort of a baseline so my pencils would have a floor of some sort on my card I wasn't really sure what to do so I took a grayish pencil and actually took the black first and added just a line there for my horizon on my my cards and then added just a little haze of gray between the pencils going upwards so that there would be just a little bit of contrast right around that those white sides of each one of those the wood in the pencil tip would kind of pop more and then I took my cards and added them onto card bases with a little popped sentiment now here's the difference between those two on the right hand side is the the backside of the paper and the left hand side is the front definitely use the front of the paper I found that that worked better you can definitely get results from the back but I would recommend sticking with the front of the paper because you're just going to get a little denser color a little more quickly with a lot less work so if you're interested in seeing something else with this particular stamp set I do have a watercolor that's going to go up on Instagram TV later today and if you're watching later on then I will have a link in the doobly-doo directly to it otherwise go follow my Instagram and I will see you guys later on have a great day bye bye