 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnok, and I promised you another unboxing this week. This is going to be OLO alcohol markers, and to swatch them, I made gumdrops, and I'm going to show you how to make the cutest, simplest gumdrops you've ever seen. Everybody can do this. The U.S. distributor for OLO alcohol markers offered me the chance to try some. And rather than pick out markers for me, she said, hey, go to the OLO site and pick out $75 worth of stuff. So I did, and it came with a color chart, a color wheel, a sticker, and they threw in a pack of paper as an extra. But these markers are what I got for $75. If you're wondering what you get when you purchase some, $75 got me this. And they come with these connectors because you're buying two halves of a marker. It's like a DIY thing. You can decide if you want to get two of the same color, so your whole marker is the same color, and you'd have a chisel nib on one side and a brush nib on the other. I mostly use the brush nib, and I didn't really care about the chisel nibs, and I wanted more colors to test and play with. So I have doubled the colors because they're all brush nibs. So that is just the way that I chose to approach it. Each one of these halves has two milliliters of ink in them, and that's apparently the same amount that a regular Copic marker or other alcohol markers, most of them are around two milliliters. So the way that they construct them, I guess they have more space in half a marker for the same amount of ink. And they are refillable, their nibs can be replaced. I don't know how the refilling works on this. I didn't look into that at all, but if you're interested you can go to their website, and I know they have tons of videos on all this stuff, but here's how they go together. So you have the connector, you just twist it in there, very easy to do. There's no ink that's going to leak out on you, so it's also not going to be mixing if you have one color on one side and one color on the other. They're just separate units, and the connector just holds them together so that they're an actual pen. I suppose you could draw with them with just half a marker if you wished, but I would recommend getting a whole pen because it's a little easier on your hand. So they gave me two copies of this swatch sheet. I guess this is the number of colors they have, and the font on it is way too tiny for my old eyeball, so you'll see my head peek in here as I was leaning down and trying to squint to see what the numbers were. They do have a numbering system. I didn't dig into it. If I get interested enough, if I get more markers, I'll probably look into that, but yeah, you can look into that on their website if you want to. I don't have, as I said, color recommendations. You'll see how poor some of mine work as I have some big gaps in what I chose, so I am going to use their blending card. This is Expresit. It's been around for a long time. It's not, I don't think it's an Olo product. I think it came from the distributor, but they know that I am one of those people that uses the Nina Solar White and wanted me to try this, so I haven't tried this paper in a long time, so I thought, what the heck? I will try it, but I decided I wanted to test the markers and make something out of them rather than just making little swatches. That doesn't tell me anything. I wanted to see how they blend, see what the nibs feel like when you're actually drawing with them rather than when you're coloring in a little circle. That doesn't tell me much, so I drew one gumdrop, which is basically a rounded top on it. The bottom part is a little flatter, and then I just made a layout of a bunch of gumdrops in the number of colors that I had a little bit more, so I could make a more interesting layout with some of them turned sideways and some of them vertically, and then I saved the mask after I got this done. You'll see why when we get later in this little drawing. I realized afterward, after I was all finished, that one of the coolest things for this particular technique, if you're making Christmas tags, it would be adorable to make a little Christmas tag with two gumdrops on it. A little red one, a little green one, or matching whatever color wrapping paper you're using. I think that would be adorable. I should have done that, but no, I decided to make one drawing with all of my little markers in it. So when the gumdrop is turned on the side, you would actually see the bottom of it if it's kind of facing away from you a little bit. So I did draw the side that on that left side, that's the bottom of the gumdrop. You can see the roundness, and I did start to try to make a texture out of them as I was putting my colors in using a darker color at the bottom and a little lighter at the top and leaving some bounce light on there, which you can look up bounce light on my channel. I've done that a bunch of times, but then I just started messing around with all the other colors. As I started doing this, I realized the marker wasn't really giving me the look of that sugar that I wanted. And I almost got out of white pen to start dotting all of those little white sugars, but I have a better idea, a faster idea. So if you're going to do this, if you're going to make cards or tags or anything with these gumdrops, you're just going to be so excited to see how this works. Okay, so my greens. This is one of the places I did some bad choosing. I had that really light green, and then I had a medium green, and then I had a yellow green, you know, second yellow green that was just kind of a medium tone. I didn't have anything in between. I was like, oops. So I did tip to tip, which is something you can do with any alcohol markers. And when you get done, you can just scribble off the color, and it should not ruin your your nib or anything. But it gave me a little bit of transition. When you're doing the technique for the sugar that I'm going to show you, you don't even have to worry about any of the blending and making it perfect because the sugar is going to cover all that. But for the yellows, again, I didn't have a dark orange yellow, the two yellows that I picked were too close. So I ended up using some red just doing tip to tip to add some red to it. Try to try to try to save my poor yellow gumdrop and then added another red one and just continued on. Now, when I started figuring out how many of these gumdrops I was going to do, I was debating whether to use my browns because I do have a dark and a medium brown color. Didn't get a light brown, so I can't do skin tones. But I was realizing, you know, I don't even know if there is such a thing in gumdrop land as chocolate gumdrops. Maybe somebody can tell me if there are chocolate gumdrops. But I decided I was just going to do a chocolate gumdrop because I wanted to try out all my colors that I got. So, yeah, we have a chocolate gumdrop in here. And if there is a chocolate gumdrop, I'm going to go find some this Christmas that would be delicious, I think. I used my light grays for shadows. Did not get a medium enough gray. So I have just two very, very light ones. So I was going to have to come up with some other solution for shadows using these markers. I would probably choose if I was not doing a video just about olo markers. I would grab some of my other brands and mix them. But I'm going to try to stick with the set that I got for this video. So I'm using some Paige Martin's bleed proof white. And I'm using that mask that I made. Super, super easy. Just use a toothbrush and stick it into the bleed proof white. You may need to moisten your bleed proof white a little bit to get it to flick. Because if it's really, really thick, like mine is kind of dry, it doesn't like to flick off very much. So if I spritz a little bit into the bottle, it makes it a little wetter and it moves a bit better. And this stuff works nicely, even on top of red. So if you're making red gumdrops, this doesn't kind of fade and turn pink the way some white products do. And just flick all of that sugar on there and voila. Since I didn't have a darker marker in this olo set, I decided I would just use a graphite pencil to darken my shadows a bit. But look how sweet those gumdrops look. Are they not the cutest little thing? And two of those on a tag would be amazing and super easy. Whatever alcohol markers you have, you could do them in watercolor. You can do them in anything and just put sugary on top of them. Now I did another drawing for patrons. I posted this video for them and made my own jar and filled it with gumdrops and used kind of the same technique but had to draw it within the context of the jar. So if you ever wanted to be a patron, there is a link in the doobly-doo down below. You get extra bonus content and goodies and cards in the mail and all kinds of fun stuff from me if you become a patron. So that is it for me today. I hope that you enjoyed this video and that you will try making some gumdrops of your own. If you do tag me, I want to see your gumdrops and what you choose to do with them. I will see you again very soon with another video. Take care and go create something every day.