 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube to give you a couple tips on picking colors and doing some watercolor pencil work. The stamp set I'm using is from Sunny Studio Stamps. It has these cute little pigs, two jumping pigs and one standing. I stamped all three of them first and then masked them out and stamped two of them again in between so that I have a row of five pigs. For the pigs I decided to use a dark flesh and a matter color. The dark flesh is a warm tone and the matter is a cool so I can balance those two out so I get a little more control over the color on the pigs. Then I knew I wanted a background. I wanted to make a barn in the background and I wanted to use a soft version of a gray and a brownish color like a sanguine. But the colors that I picked with them are a blue and a green because those are going to stand out against all those pigs. If I were to use red and greens or something like Christmasy I wouldn't actually be able to see much of that because the pigs are going to be all pink and red. So adding the other colors to them just makes it something completely opposite and then those colors will stand out. And when you've got something like a whole row of pigs that are all the same basic color you kind of need to find a way to define each element separate from each other or it's going to look like a big pink blob and nothing else. You won't see anything else on here. Imagine if all the hats and the scarves and the gift box were all red you would just have a mass of really dark dark and light red and pink colors. The blending of the warm and the cool color on these pigs allows me to play around a little bit with shadows. Shadows tend to be cooler colors and areas in the sunshine tend to be warmer colors. So I'm playing the two off of each other to give myself a little difference in the pigs. Since I have five pigs here they could all go really blah really easily and I didn't want that to happen. So going from worms to cools helps a little bit in taming that difference between the two. If you have a whole bunch of animals that are all different then you have a different problem than what I have here because then you have gray animals and brown animals and that requires more of balancing out each animal across the picture so that your browns aren't all in one section and your grays aren't all in one section and kind of spacing them out a little bit better. I wanted to put a barn back here but I didn't want it to be a complex scene so I just kind of drew a little shape for the door and a window above with some snow that I'm picturing being on the top of the door sill and the bottom of the window sill and then just threw some color in there really simply and put some of that gray color into the inside of the door and I'll put a little bit inside the window and a bit as well and then shadows under each of the critters if their toes are touching the ground then their shadow will touch their toes. If they're jumping in the air then their shadow will be distant from their feet so that's one way to let your shading indicate whether the animal is jumping up off the surface of the ground or whether the animal is kind of standing literally on the ground with their toes down and you can see how that kind of plays out. I also have a difference in my piggies in that like that pig in the back there I made sure had plenty of the cooler color so that that one is going to be different than the one to the left of it because I didn't want these to all feel like one big massive piece of bacon. Don't tell the piggies that I call the bacon but I didn't want them all to look like one big mass so I varied the amount of pinks and reds that I put in them so that each one will stand out from the other one just a little bit. Sometimes that's not possible sometimes that just kind of takes over your picture but it is one way to help create that difference in between each one of the animals that's on it when you've got a card that has all of the same critter. I used the pigment that was already on my brush to do the snouts and the ears just adding a little bit of extra color in there without having to color any pencil into it. Now I will water out all of the little shadows underneath of them and kind of soften those edges a little bit and then work on the background. Now underneath of the snow whenever you've got snow piled on something often it's just kind of lumpy on the bottom side as if you know some of the snow is drifting down off of the whatever it got collected on and on the top side it's usually a little bit smoother and you can look at pictures if you're trying to create a scene you might pull up some pictures on Google of a barn in the snow and see if that gives you any ideas on how to get started and I opted to remove I was going to put a little wooden frame around the door and I decided I wanted it even simpler because the pigs picture is really complex and I wanted the background to disappear a little bit and I wanted it to become simpler so I removed that and I just left the snow sticking out and I'll add a little bit more detail into the picture as I go so that I can make sure that that reads as a barn but I need to wait for it to dry because I don't want paint or or do any actual pencil work on top of wet paint because it just won't show up it's just not going to work so while that was drying I did put some pencil some blue pencil into the snow along the bottom side of it you don't have to put shading in the snow but it often will just make it stand out a little bit more so once it was all dry I could add in just a few lines to indicate the boards and if you need to go back in with a brush and loosen any of those lines up or soften a few things here and there then that is fine add a little bit more color into the door and the windows because I wanted that to be just a slight bit darker but not a ton because I didn't want to draw attention to that I wanted to draw attention to the pig leaves because they're so darn cute and then I added snow because every card I make in the winter seems to have white pen snow on it that is just my thing every year I should take out stock in the uniball company and just yeah I'd make a fortune on myself selling myself pens so just adding a bunch of that and then I got it all mounted up onto the card and I decided that I would use the little hearts that are in the stamp set there's a ton of them in there and the sentiment that goes with this card is hogs and kisses and I wasn't going to put the hogs and kisses in there I decided to use hoggy holidays there's an S in there and I'm assuming it goes with the holidays instead of holiday but I thought I'd add the hearts across the top and notice that since I didn't put a lot of crazy color in the background I could add these red hearts right over top of other colors and it doesn't really matter that they're going right over top of that gray color or the brown color I could just add the hearts on there and they would even be fun added with a little bit of glossy accents too I hope that was a helpful little short lesson for you on choosing color when you're making a picture with a whole bunch of the same color animal in it I will see you again in the next video because you know there's more coming and that will be very very soon take care and have a great day go out and make something beautiful and add to your Christmas card stash for this year see you later