 Hi everybody! It's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel. Today I'm going to talk about coloring giraffes plus the hex chart and Misty Magic. I have the Misty out ready to do this W plus 9 stamp set called Party Animal. It's pardon the fireworks out there and I have some labeling tape with a couple masks already cut out of it. Didn't even cut them all the way out. Just cut out the parts that I needed and my Misty is divided into quadrants to make a multiple image scene out of a bunch of the different stamps. I've been doing this for kits a lot and it's really worked great so I can go back and redo a page of my kits after I've already finished something. If I get my count wrong and I leave these in place I can go and add a couple to the count before I take all the stamps off and I thought it would work really great for this image as well because I wanted to stamp it and create this scene but also makes them for watercolor paper and I wanted to show you how I did this so here this is one of the joys of the Misty. My sentiment didn't ink up really well so I just re-stamp it in the same place and next this is the magic I started figuring out because if you turn upside down you get another quadrant to work with and I wanted that little half circle so I put tape on the other side of the plastic and that tells me to only ink up to that line and then I get the half circle and then I peel off my little masks and it's done and ready to go. This is by the way on some cream colored cardstock from Nina and that's gonna play into how this thing comes out later. This is watercolor cardstock because I'm going to also do a clean color version for my patrons. My patrons over on patreon.com slash sandy all knock get a special video each month and they're going to get to see this one colored with the clean color pens just for fun. So here is the watercolor one so again all I have to do is peel off my masks by the boom by the bing I've got another one so hopefully that is a helpful trick for you when you do your multiple stamping like that. So I've got my hex chart out if you don't know about the hex chart there's a link in the description and I'm trying to find colors that match this little giraffe that I found on my phone so I'm gonna kind of stay in the colors that are that I'm seeing in there a little bit yellowish a little bit reddish but not quite a supernatural brown but a little warmer than that and trying to pick out which colors I'm going to use. So I'm gonna start with the lightest of the colors that I chose which is the E97 and I'm gonna color in all of the spots on both of my little giraffes and by the way I absolutely love this little sentiment that goes with these you lift me up when I'm feeling down because all I could picture was one of these little giraffes picking the other one up or holding him up so our little guy is falling off a rock and leaning on his buddy and that's sometimes what my life feels like is leaning on friends like that and so I started looking at this picture and I realized he's got color all over his whole face so his snout even though in all kinds of cartoons that you see of giraffes the snout would sometimes be colored the the darker color I'm gonna leave it white and I'm gonna color his whole head the the brownish red orangeish colors and I'm gonna let the nose be white but I'm gonna add some dimension to it and now I'm gonna go in and start adding my dimension in the body area with a gray marker I know this is probably freaking some people out like after I colored all this beautiful little orange color what am I doing with the gray but I wanted to establish my shadows first because I've got all that white area in between I want to know where I'm gonna put the shadows on the spots so if I put my shadows across the whole thing first then I can go into it and you'll see me do this in a moment with my spot colors and I can make them more intense so now I've got my E08 which is the color I picked out for my shadows and I'm gonna go into all the ones that are in the darker gray shadow area and then a few other spots choose choice spots that I decided to make the darker color but I'm adding those shadows there since I've already got the gray in there then I know where those shadows are gonna go it's hard when you're looking at a pattern like this to figure out where that shadow is gonna travel down to across his body but it's much easier if you can establish them first so here's my mid-tone color that I had picked the E99 and I'm going to kind of just help that roundness move across the image by making the spots in the middle this E99 and the ones in the highlight area over on the right-hand side down down the right hand side of their bodies are going to be the E97 so the spots are helping to make the whole object look round even though the spots themselves are flat on the body I'm not sure if I'm explaining this right but I certainly hope so because I kind of work through these things in my head and I always hope that I can communicate them in my videos so I'm not coloring the super highlights on the faces because I realized I wanted an even lighter color on the faces and so I'm just finishing out the spots there and I went back to my chart to try to find a color that was going to take that E97 and make it even lighter and that would be like a YR01 would work for that so I decided to pull that marker out and on my chart you could tell that that E97 is much lighter it dries back much lighter than it goes on here but here it's also mixed with other colors so on the chart it's a little challenging sometimes to know exactly what's going to come out of your pen versus what's been on the chart and drying for a while because those colors do tend to soften after a while so I've got the little feetsies colored now and blending all that out and what I decided to do was use my color wheel to figure out what color the bird should be because this color wheel that I made it's I invented this little thing there's a class on my blog if you want to take it and learn how to make this color wheel but I want to use the complementary color so I spin this side around until my stars align I guess because the stars are the ones that represent the opposite colors so if I go to like an orangey color the opposite of that is blue so the complementary color is blue I don't usually use my my little tiny spinning color wheel during my videos because it's kind of very natural to me I know internally that orange and blue are opposites but I thought I would point that out if you can never remember what your color wheel looks like and what colors are opposite what there are lots of online ones that you can go to at any time but you can also make one of these to tuck in your bag it's just a little class that'll show you how to make that you get a PDF download that you can print out and it'll tell you how to assemble it so my little birds are blue and you can tell that they really pop against the orangey brown colors on the card so it's using compliments is a really great way to get that pop now I was looking for a dark color and I went to that E29 because I was looking for something that was not a dead brown I guess and the E29 is one of the most lively of the really dark browns and I after looking at this I'd realize I really wanted to add some real contrast because I wasn't getting enough you know me I like contrast so I'm adding some E29 in a few spots including just making the little antlers whatever they are on our little guy making them the dark color too and then I went to the grayish brown section in order to find colors for the rock and for the ground because I want those to look less alive I guess you might call it there are people that have a rule about trying to have the the warm grays be in live animals and then the cool grays being in dead things and you can apply the same kind of an idea here with browns and the more lively a color that the brighter and more intense the color is the more it might look good on an animal but colors like these will look I guess they'll look like dirt and that's kind of what the intent is here is to make these colors not take over not overpower but I wanted to also use some different markers because now that I have the hex chart I'm using a whole lot more different kinds of markers different kinds of colors than I normally would have because I have my go-to colors the ones that I always use for my animals always use for my rocks and this is really been a fun exercise in expanding what I use as far as my marker colors so I'm coloring my shadows that are coming down from the giraffe because if the light is in that upper right hand corner they're going to go kind of around that rock and here I'm adding the E57 which is a nice dark color and then blending it out with that E55 those are part of a natural blending group so they're going to work really well together on that rock and then I'm going to go down and do the dirt at the bottom and I had gone for the E43 originally for that that dirt at the bottom and I added E44 look at the color difference in just one number sometimes there's a huge color difference in one number and sometimes it's very small it really depends on the colors so you can't solely go by numbers in order to figure that out and here you can see a second coat of the E43 makes it suddenly extremely dark whereas before it was it was much lighter so there's a lot of different things that happen when you layer colors over top of each other so next I got out a Copic multiliner pen and instead of drawing the bottom of the rock in before I started coloring I did it afterward because that allows me to not have to worry about coloring inside the lines that I draw how cool is that I realized that I hadn't drawn any color in between where the two heads are so I kind of snug them together and then I started thinking about what I'm going to do in the background if anything and I wanted it to be pretty simple but it's on this cream colored cardstock and I wanted to find a way to make the giraffes look like their whites are white even though they're cream but look what happens when I start adding just a light light wash of this B00 they start looking white by comparison and you can almost watch it happen as the color appears next to them and a little trick for you as you're coloring something like this on it on a background I started with the coloring right in the lift me up area because if you have any areas where you overlap your colors and the you know you have multiple layers of where your marker started if you do it behind text or something if you have some sort of stamped image there then you can't really see it as well and then again I've used this mini mr. trick before if you get to the point where your blending is not right or you've got little lines in your sky just spritz it really good well not super good but spritz it good with some colorless blender in your mini mr. and you will see that it comes out just gorgeous when it's all finished after that colorless blender dries from the mini mr. it just takes away the harsh look of any of those brush strokes in the sky and I also added a few glossy accents dots to draw some attention to that sentiment so they're kind of bubbling up from the words lift me up put it on a dark brown card base and she's done this is a sneak peek at something the patrons get to see every month I'm going to be doing a patreon only version of one of the cards that's here on YouTube so if you want to see an extra bonus video you're welcome to join us in the patreon family you can click on the link in the description in the annotation in the bottom right or in the info box up in the upper right hand corner which will also take you to my blog where there's lots more information as well so click around any old place and find something else that interests you and I will see you guys again next time I hope you have a really super super day bye bye