 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Allnach, artist and paper crafter, and today I'm going to make some winter juniper berries on a card. I struggled with creating this one until I decided I was going to go winter with it because I kept trying to color these berries, this little branch, and it just wasn't working for me, but I pulled out some snowy colors and I decided I was going to let some of the berries fall off of the branch and drop onto the snow on the ground and that idea got me excited because otherwise I was just trying to color them on the page and I wasn't, I don't know, it wasn't generating any, any story in my mind and for me when I'm doing a piece of hard work if I can picture what the scene is like, is it cold, is it warm, is it sunny, where's the light coming from? Somehow tell a story with it. It seems to work better in my mind. If I'm just coloring something for the sake of coloring it, it seems a little boring to me and it doesn't get me excited. So I had tried this several times and it hadn't worked, but I really liked this. You could also do this if it's not winter when you're watching this video. You could just put some dirt down below and have the berries fall into the dirt, into leaves, or you could put lots of those little juniper berry needles. I don't know if they're leaves or needles on these, but you could put a lot of those on the ground. Lots of different ways you could have the berries fall off onto something on the ground. But I've stamped the berries on the ground. Some of them are round, but most of them are half berries and I just did that using a little post-it note and had them at different heights above the snow. So some of them fell all the way in the snow. Some of them were just sitting on top. Maybe that's a little bit of icy snow in some places. And I'm using a series of blues to make my berries. I looked up some pictures and they're not this happy of a blue, those juniper berries. They're really a dull kind of blue, but I wanted mine happy and bright anyway, so tough luck on what reality looks like. I tried to get close-ish to the color and then pushed it a little further so that my berries would have a little more of a happy feel. But I'm building them from the darkest color on the the right-hand side and then with a nice highlight on the front of the berry. These berries are also not shiny, so they wouldn't have as bright a highlight as I'm putting on them. So I'm knocking back some of that, but I did like the idea of these berries feeling a little bit shiny. So I'm gonna do it anyway, even though that's not reality. So there you go. I also don't know when junipers have berries on them. I don't know enough about them to know whether or not this is the time of year that they would have the berries, or they have the berries in the summertime, and they would only be the branches in the winter. And there you go. If I'm going with non-reality, then there we have it. I'm just gonna do what I feel like doing and what I was inspired to color today. The juniper branches or the needles on these these little branches, the picture that I chose that had really, it was from Wikipedia and it was a really gorgeous photo, and the greens were really unique. There's different greens on different plants. Some of them are more olive. Some of them are a brighter grass green color. And the little branch that I was looking at in the photograph, I don't know if it was just the way it was lit, but it had a lot of colors in it. So it had a base, like overall was a more olive green. It had a reddish brown kind of stem down the middle. And then the leaves also had a couple of different colors in them. So I started by putting some YG99 so I can have some shadows in there, some darker areas. And the darker areas are kind of toward the base of each one of the needles. And I just went around all of them and added some. But in the picture that I was looking at there, I could see other colors in there. Some of them were really bright colors. Some of them were less bright. Some of them were stronger and some less strong. So do yourself a favor and look at, excuse me, a variety of pictures when you're going to color something and see what it really looks like. So some of the tips of the ones that I was looking at had this really bright green and it was like a spring green kind of color. And then there were others that had more of a blue in them, almost the same blue as the berries. So I took one of my berry blues and just sketched in a little bit of blue here and there on some of the different branch pieces. And that started to give me that different feel for the types of greens that I was looking for. Now to create the snow, you could do a bunch of different ways. And I'll start by showing you just make a circular shadow in back of the snow, in back of each of the berries on the snow. And yeah, that could be the way it is. But I tend to add more color to my snow because most people, like they don't want to put any color in the snow because snow is white. But snow has shadows in it, it has dimensions in it. So I'm adding a little pocket where each one of them kind of dented the snow and adding it with extra color. And the more color you add, the more contrast you're going to get. And the more contrast you get, the more things appear to be real. So I'm just kind of softening out the color now. I started with a duller blue for some of the deeper shadows and then a brighter blue where I'm blending it out into the rest of the snow. So I get that really soft, bright, snowy look, but I get a little bit of the shadowness from shadowness. Is that a word? I get a little bit of the shadows and the reality from having a little bit of a duller color in the shadows themselves. And even between some of the berries, I'm creating little hillsides, little mini snowy hillsides in between them with highlights and shadows on them. So it's giving that snow down below a bit of dimension. And then for my finished card, I trimmed it down, popped it onto a card base with a little dimensional adhesive and just left a strip on the side. A nice white on white look gives it a clean and simple look and yet makes it a little more elegant than just having it flat on a card. That's about it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, click that like button. Make sure you visit the blog every once in a while because there are more cards on the blog than there are on YouTube and lots of things to learn from those as well. I will see you guys later. Have a wonderful day. Go make something beautiful.