 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist here on YouTube and today I'm going to use Copic Markers to add a lot of detail to make this whale realistic. For my first post of the new year, I went to an older stamp set by Ellen Hudson, actually it's designed by Julie Ebersole, and it's called Swale S. Apostrophe Whale as in swell because Julie's full of puns, and I decided to color it like a realistic humpback and I wanted to get all those textures that humpback whales have. So that's what I thought I'd talk about today is adding those details. And with Copic Markers, you want your detailed layers to be on top if you want them to be crisp and clear. So I put the overall color, I wanted a blue sheen underneath of all the gray, so I put that down first. If I put it down later, everything else would soften and melt out. So putting that color down first really helped. However, you have to make sure you let it dry or else all of the texture you put on top is going to mush out. If you've ever colored over an area repeatedly, you end up with a lot of ink on the page. So give it a couple seconds or a minute or so in order for that alcohol that's in the paper now that's saturated it. Just give it a second to just kind of air out and evaporate a little bit. And what I wanted to focus on on this one was the wrinkles that he's got around his eye and around his fin and then those ridges that go from his mouth down to his belly. And the way that I achieved the dimension in those ridges is by starting with a darker color up by the mouth and then did another extension of that with a lighter marker and then when I get down to the very bottom, I'll go with a lighter marker still. So that's going to still give me the dimension and the roundness on the whale while still allowing that texture to show up. The back of him, I was debating whether to leave a highlight white up there or not. I eventually did decide to get rid of that. But down here as you can see where I'm doing my really light color of marker and that's allowing that dimension to continue all the way down and just softening out some of those edges so I don't have places where it's choppy and ends when it shouldn't end. I put some really dark color under the fin because I wanted to make sure that looks like it's shaded from the light with just the tip of it having a little highlight on it. And then wanted to darken the whole whale so I started adding a darker color to that whole mid area and then I'm going to add a medium tone on the top. And that will also give me the roundness going the other direction. The lines go like kind of the length of his body and then the dark to light from the middle going out both directions gives me the roundness top to bottom. And as I was working on this I was thinking you know I probably have gone a little too far with this and I needed a little texture down there. I tried doing some dots and that didn't help all that much on his belly so I will soften those out and come up with a different idea. But for his back the humpback whales have sort of those bumps and ridges and I think they might be barnacles on the backs of them and little fish hanging off and so I added those with a colorless blender. And then I also took out the highlight that I had put back in, the highlight that I had covered over when I did some coloring earlier. I used the colorless blender to soften the highlights on the fin and on the tail and then kind of got rid of some of those on the belly. I had put them back in and then I went you know I just need my white pen. Because my white pen can make me happy and it fixes everything in some fashion. So instead of using straight lines I decided to use dotted lines just so I could have some more texture on them because I really like having that kind of texture when I have an image like this it's just going to be this little small image. I want to make sure that I get some really good contrast and I had lost all that white on his belly so the white of the pen really worked well. The last step is adding just a little bit for a background. I didn't add very much at all just a couple of light colors and made some vertical stripes that just blend out into nothingness on the top and the bottom. Because I wanted it to feel like shafts of light were coming in from above him and just casting some columns of color. I did add a little bit of bubbles in there with my colorless blender. Stamped it and added the panel onto a white card base kept it really clean and simple and this will be another one of those great thank you cards that I sent to my wonderful patrons. We had a bunch of people join lately. Thank you to all of you who join my Patreon family where you get to have little benefits, little perks, get a card from me once in a while and other perks along the way as well. Thank you so much for watching. Click the like button if you enjoyed this and I will see you again next week with another great video. Bye bye.