 I have a little Thanksgiving card to share with you today with a whole bunch of really fun things on the table that I'll talk about how to color in addition to that fun turkey in the background. The stamp set is from Sunny Studios Stamps and it's got turkeys as well as cornucopia and pies and all kinds of yummy things to eat. And I've stamped them all, but in a way that wasn't as difficult as it looks. The cornucopia, I just had to mask out the bottom portion of it so I could stamp the fruits and vegetables kind of randomly in there. And I'm going to add enough color to it that it doesn't really matter that they're not masked out behind each other. They're just kind of fit into shapes like a puzzle. The cornucopia, I forgot to leave highlights on it. The brown that I chose just came out darker than expected. So I went back into it with a lighter color and just pushed out some highlights. And now that I'm adding a real dark shadow, you get the real contrast between the really darks and the really lights. My whole idea with this one was to make this really rich, dark kind of scene card. And I wanted to add enough dark colors inside the cornucopia and then really strong shadows on all these objects because they're stamped so loosely in there. They're not, you know, I didn't try hard to mask them out. So look how dark the pear shadow is. It's as dark as what's going on inside of the cornucopia. I'm going to do the same thing with each one of these. Just add super, super dark shadows behind them so that you don't end up feeling like these things are floating in the air, which is where they were stamped. Like they were floating in the air, but adding really dark colors there. And even though it feels like a really dark area right now, as soon as I add the rest of the background, this whole foreground is going to feel lighter by comparison. That's just how color works. It's all in relation to what's next to it. To add the dark shadows onto the pumpkin, I'm actually using a blue color. It looks kind of greenish there, but it's a blue. And that's the opposite color on the color wheel. So it gives you a really nice dark color that you might not be able to get from a dark orange or a dark brown color on the pumpkin. Turkey is going to be a nice, rich, dark color, too, because I like my turkey's well done when it's ready to eat. So I'm going to add plenty of color there. And, you know, a little bit of texture made with the dark shadow and then blend over top of it with a mid-tone color and then get rid of that highlight just barely with the lightest color again to blend it in. But leaving some of that texture from the darkest color underneath. And then the plate is going to indicate some real strong light because I'm picturing that light being over the turkey's head, the live turkey, shall we say? And that means there's going to be a shadow off to the left in front of it. And then that plate can just be sort of a silvery gray. The pie is really a fun thing to color so that each of those lattices is going to need to recede or the lattice part, the crisscross part, is going to be higher up and then underneath recedes down. So I'm going to put shadows in the top kind of V shape and then start throwing some darker colors underneath each one of those, the outside edge, the little crimping, and then just fill in each one of the squares in between and then all of a sudden the lattices look like they're sitting on top. I did decide to knock back a little bit so that there was just a little highlight on the lattices rather than a lot because again this was going to be a very dark scene. I knew I was going to put a lot of color in that background so I needed all this to be rich or else I was going to have to go back into it and re-layer once I got that dark background on the wall behind it. And now I'm going to put a table in here and I did forget something while I was putting the table in because I wanted a table runner. I needed to have some kind of decoration. Couldn't just be a flat old brown table but since I had gone with a light enough brown to start with, that left me able to push some orange into it. So as long as you're going with a dark color into it then you can just kind of go right over top of that. The outside area of the table itself is going to get darker so the orange is going to start to look lighter by comparison as I add the dark color. So first is going to be a line of shadow right underneath of where that table runner is and then create some texture on the table with that dark brown and you know after I get all that that line work done then I'll dark in all of that. It's just one of my techniques I use for wood all the time just to take a mid-tone after you get those dark lines put in and just go over it with a simple coat. Don't scrub over it too much so you don't lose all the lines but it gives a really nice wood texture that ends up having enough detail in it to look woody but not to be so detailed that it catches your eye. It still kind of disappears and look how bright that orange suddenly looks. It's just kind of interesting to see how colors in comparison to each other really change a lot. So now watch how the colors change the scene doesn't look so dark once I add this dark background. I'm starting with a really dark gray at the bottom here and I'm going to work my way up because I'm picturing I was almost going to draw a light bulb up there above the turkey's head or a candelabra or something and I decided that would be too complex so I just decided I would start working up my way up the card with dark colors at the bottom and then that arc would get lighter and lighter so I just kept jumping two colors lighter in the gray colors as I worked my way up and that just kind of made them get lighter and lighter. Using a warm gray gave it a warmer feel. You could use cooler grays but it felt like that would be too clinical of an atmosphere like he was in a I don't know turkey processing plant or something silvery so I wanted it to still feel like he was in a home like checking out his cousin who was now on the table and maybe being a little surprised by what he saw that his his cousin was on a plate now instead of I don't know what he might have thought was happening to his cousin when his cousin got taken into the house. Maybe he didn't know. I just wasn't sure. The color the gray color just gets lighter and lighter up there so it feels like there's some kind of light source. Now that meant that I was going to darken other things so I started adding dark on the left side on the table darkening that table runner and just I wanted to start pushing the light toward the turkey the live turkey so that everything else in this background would start to disappear and and just put all the attention right right where the light is shining on that turkey. So I started adding shadows underneath the plates and those sorts of things to make cast shadows. I needed to add something to the table runner so it felt like there was a reason for it there so I just did a little bit of doodling around the edge to give it a lacy border and did some crisscrossing with it with just doing some dots so that it would look like it's quilted and make it a little bit more handmade type of thing. You could do all kinds of different patterns on a table runner like this and I'm doing the same pattern over top of the dark areas as I am over the light but that started feeling like it was taking too much attention. I didn't want the table runner this skirt is not about the table runner so I pushed it another shade darker. I just made it you know more intense but a darker color and that came from time for the turkey and I was trying to figure out what it was going to do for him for the lighting. Originally I was thinking about it being really dark and just barely him coming out of the darkness like he just snuck into the house and was peeking in to see where his cousin was not knowing what he was about to see and I just kept adding color to it knowing that I can keep adding more I can keep darkening it and making him disappear more and more and more but trying to figure out where it makes the most sense for the lighting to be. I wanted enough on his tail feathers that you could tell he was definitely a turkey because as I lost detail on other things I was going to need some signals of what he was and I left some of the highlights on either side of his neck and a little bit on his shoulders so that he would end up looking turkey shaped a little bit. His hat was next and had to be cool grays because I had all this warm grays in the background and I wanted his hat to be very dark because it's supposed to be a black hat but I needed it to show up enough so very very gentle with the amount of darks that I added in and just started working my way slowly up there to do my blending without losing the highlights because I needed just a little bit of the pop of the highlight color. I used a multi-liner pen to make a mess of his face and his beak because I wanted his beak to be open like he was in shock and I did that with my white Signo pen and it just took a little bit of the orangey color and blocked out the beak. It gives me a little bit of the hint at the bottom shape of the beak without being too much. I kept trying to fix the eyes but that didn't quite work which is why I added googly's in the long run when I finished the card because googly's make everything better and then I added another layer of darks. Watch what happens here when I add these really dark colors. The shoulders and the neck totally pop out of this whereas before they were getting kind of mushy this really helped to define them. So there's my crazy card with its beautiful font. I just love these fonts they've used for the Thanksgiving word and stuff really really beautiful and I love cards that make me laugh and googly's will do it every single time so get yourself some googly eyes and have them around because you never know when they're gonna be the thing that rescues a card for you. Thanks so much for joining me today I will see you again very soon. All the links are in the doobly-doo if you need any of these stamp sets or anything and I'll see you later. Take care.