 Well, hello everybody. It's Sandy and today I'm going to look at a house mouse image that I'm going to color with my Copics. I'm going to do a little bird and little mouse and I will show you some ways to add detail to these that you may not have thought about because it's tough with Copics sometimes on little tiny images. On this one, I decided to go to my hex chart and pick some colors. So instead of using my normal E5-1 which is my my favorite skin tone color, I went for an R-triple-zero and then I jumped down I wanted to go for something a little more on the orangey side for the ears and the feet and stuff. Normally I go for a more pinky or peachy and I decided to see what happens if I go into a YR and I kind of like it. So the hex chart is making me branch out into other things and use my other colors. And especially if you have markers that you're like, man this color is not at all like what I thought it was going to be, try it with some things that you hadn't tried it before. Because you bought the thing so use it, use it on your coloring. So here I'm going to color my little mouse with cool gray as the base color and then I'm going to go in and add shadows with a warm gray and then a series of warm grays to build up the fur and give him more depth to it. If you look at photos of mice online then you'll see that a lot of them have kind of two-toned, so warm and cool gray little fur on them. So this image is not going to have as much detail in it when I color it with my copics or especially if you color over top of it with your colored pencils because that covers up all those pencil lines. So I'm going to show you a technique at the end to add some of that detail back in. And here I'm adding my BV for my shadows like I do on my skin tones with the mid-tone over top of it and then I'm going to go in with the light color and blend that. Alright, now I want a color for the inside of the mouth and I'm going for the light reds. So I'm using an R14 because I didn't want to use like an R46 or an R29 which is kind of a bloody looking red and I wanted it to be dark and rich but not not like like their mouth is bleeding from singing too much. And here I wanted to use the B32 and the B23 and while I do that I'll talk about the difference between them. Sometimes the numbers if they just flip them the markers look almost identical but in this particular case they don't. The B32 has a 2 for the last digit which means it's lighter and then you'll see in a moment ignore this B000 for a moment. I'm just trying to blend that so it'll go softer into the white. But now look at the difference with the B32 that we had and the B23. The 3 means it's a darker color and that's why the the 23 which to some people if they're misunderstanding the number system 23 sounds like a lower number so it should be a lighter color and it's not. Okay, now the thistle I pulled up a picture and the base color the main color is a V04 so I'm going to go with a B12 for the highlights and RV19 for the shadows. There isn't a whole lot of RV19 in the photo so I picked a more intense color just because I wanted to add some really rich pop of color. If I had gone with the V colors like the V06 or 09 or something they would stay more with the purple but it those were kind of dead purples they're not really bright intense purples and the RVs tend to be a lot more intense and it's going to give you a lot more brightness on the image. I'm adding some V12 around the edges of the bottom of the thistles to add a little bit of difference to them because in that photo I saw a little tiny bit of that purplish color. Now I'm going to add my shadow colors at the bottom of each of these little tassels of the thistles and then on top of that I'll add the V04. The V04 will then bring everything back to feeling like a purple flower but again you're seeing that it doesn't look like there's a lot of detail in those little tiny lines because the the pen lines from the stamp are actually so small that it makes your your Copic coloring look like it's fat I guess. Some stamps don't do that but I will show you technique in a moment. So I was going with a YG63 and a 61 and then I jumped over to the BG99 so you don't always have to stay really close to it when you choose your colors because on this one I wanted to have some kind of medium to bright light greens like I saw in that photo and then add just a little pop of a dark green in the shadow areas and that'll really make them look dimensional and you'll see how that plays out in just a moment. I'm going to color everything with a base coat of the YG61 first get all that in there and trying to use just the tip of my marker to get thin lines and here's where that BG99 comes in. The some of the thistle photos that I saw had almost stripes up them up the sides of them and I'm making it go around in a curve in the same direction that the actual round shape does because it's going to give it more of that dimension and it's also going to create kind of those little rows of pores I don't know if that's what they're called on on thistles but it's going to have those little rows which will make it look more natural and then I'll add just a tiny tiny bit in some random places on the the greens on the thistles and then it's time to just take that medium color and blend some of that together. You can see I'm getting a real rounded shape on that bottom now because I put the medium tone on the bottom section and left that light kind of highlighting the top part of that round little shape. I don't know if they're called the same thing like I think rose hops rose hips if they're called the same thing with thistles and of course I don't even know the name for the the part of the roses but you know don't know it for thistles either. Alrighty now let's move on to that tree trunk and I'm going to use an E34 and an E57 because I don't want a super dark color in this. If I use super dark it's going to overwhelm the rest of the image so I want it to be light enough but have enough punch of color that the flowers show up against it and yet that it's going to have enough color but not too much so these are both kind of good medium brown types of colors. I've left a little white around that thistle that's right in the front because I wanted to make sure I add a little extra of the purple color all the way around it as it blends into the brown just to make sure that it looks like it's got a little thistle glow on the outside and now it's time to make the wood texture in this. You can color it just solid the way that the stamp is drawn but when you're using your Copic markers a lot of times those lines tend to disappear and you lose some detail so I'm going in with just the tip of the marker and making kind of just squiggly lines down the length of those pieces of wood and there's a few sections that had shadow in them so I'm letting those have heavier coverage of this darker brown and just creating some striations in the wood texture along here using just the tip of the marker and the lighter you lighter touch you can develop the thinner a line you can get. There's also a little lip underneath of their feet and around the edge of that stump so you can get a little bit of dimension there. Now I'm going to go back in with my my E34 again and just soften some of those areas and I'm you know you can see I'm not being really super tight and super careful with it because I'm going to add something else to it in my last step when I add detail so quickly I'm going to add a little Y11 just to put a little sunshine in behind them you could do it with a blue as well but I wanted something that would contrast with that blue bird if you did the bird in a different color then a blue would look really nice back there and then I'll soften that out with a Y000 and now it's time to add detail with a color pencil I've got a super sharp color pencil I use a sharpener an electric pencil sharpener that gets them this sharp and I do go through a lot of lead a lot of people were asking in one of my recent videos if I go through a lot of lead and yes I do because that's what my technique requires and I like getting a lot of super sharp detail in things so I keep my pencils super sharp and a sharpen them repeatedly as in coloring because as soon as you start getting a big fat nub it's going to get harder and harder to get any extra detail in there so I'm adding in a couple places the darkest darkest detail just to add a little bit you can just kind of squint at it and see that all of a sudden that detail is starting to pop out right here between the toes you can see each of the toes start to appear as you darken that detail and when you have a stamp with tiny tiny lines like this and all that detail drawn in sometimes that really gets lost when your coloring is over top of it so I like to go back in and add some of that detail right back into the image and now I'm going to add way more detail to the wood grain and I'm even going to change some of the directions of some of it and add deeper shadows in some of the shadow portions and adding here I'm even putting in a little knot you know I have to do is kind of draw a pointy oval and then go around it to create some lines that are going around the knot all kinds of really fun things you can do with a little bit of texture and here I've got a purple pencil because I didn't want to go in with the black on the flowers and I'm adding little lines to that and all of a sudden now they look like they're detailed flowers instead of looking like they're Copic blobs to finish off my card I didn't have any paper that was the purples that I used in this particular piece so I decided to airbrush my own paper you know because you can do that right you could use marker strokes if you want but airbrush allows me to do these thin layers so I did the rv19 and then I added some v09 on top of it until it became the color that was going to work well and I have my sentiment from Mama Elephant that's stamped in here and I added a little bit of yellow since I had the airbrush out and I'm going to add these little tiny they're supposed to be suns because it's a sunshine set but I made them like little little poofy things flying through the air little little dust blobs and I think it came out really cute so look how sweet this is you spend a little time coloring on the image and it just makes the card pop I've anchored the image down at the bottom and it just really really sings I love the contrast in it and all that detail that I got in so here are a couple other videos you can go and take a look at one is Copic and the other is colored pencils you can see a little more of both of those and I will talk to you guys later have a really fabulous day if you would like to subscribe please do because I put out videos all the time for you talk to you guys later bye bye