 Hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And beam me up Scotty, we're going to color an alien invasion today. I picked up this really cute little stamp set from Gertis Steiner Designs and it has not only the space elements like the moon and the sun or the moon and the planet, but it's got little critters, it's, you know, the little alien critters, it's got a spaceship and I thought it would be fun to make it look like one of the aliens was beaming up the other two. There are some smiley faces in the stamp set that you can add on to these little guys with no mouths, but I decided not to. I thought it would be kind of funny for them to be mute and you can imagine how they talk. Maybe they only talk by mental telepathy. I drew in the planet that they're standing on with a Copic multiliner, but if you want to draw that in later you can always just sketch it in with a marker and add your black line with any kind of a pen over top of your Copic marker when you're all done, but you also, if you get enough contrast between them, don't necessarily have to have a line there. But for me it helped to define where the sky begins and the earth ends and that sort of thing. For the the beam, I'm just using a bunch of yellows and you can use whatever collection of yellows you have to create a beam like this. Just keep adding more and more. You're practicing blending not only left to right, so I'm doing this circumferential blending, which if you've taken my my Copic Hex art class, you'll know what circumferential blending is, but I'm also doing blending from the bottom to the top. So it's blending two directions at once, which can be challenging, but it worked here, so that was good. I was glad that that came out the way it was in my head when I had this idea for coloring this card. I chose red for the planet that they're on because I knew my sky was going to be kind of blues and purples. I had the yellow in the beam, my aliens were going to be green, so the other color left to me was kind of a red color. I am going to darken that a bit as we go on because one of the things that I like to do is add a lot of color. A lot of folks tell me that they recognize my work instantly on Instagram because they just they see it and they know it, and one of the reasons why is the contrast that I get because I'm not afraid to put a lot of color down. A lot of you guys are just afraid to use up your markers, and I know that because refills are not cheap, but if you're going to create this kind of artwork, that's one of the things you just have to suck it up, buttercup, and realize that you'll have to do is you'll need to have enough colors and enough free inkers that you can feel comfortable doing this because since I know I have the reinkers, I feel very safe in using a lot of color on my work. I'm using Nina 80 pound cardstock. This is the solar white and it's a little harder when you're using 110 pound even though some people like it because they don't want it to bleed through and it doesn't bleed through as much on the 110, but the way that Copic markers blend is within the fibers of the paper. So if you're trying to avoid the bleed through, then that might be why you may not be getting as much good blending and you also may end up with some shiny color on top because with that heavier paper, the ink doesn't sink all the way into the fibers. So that is one of the reasons why I like to use this 80 pound. So the back of my work is always pretty messy. So now that I've got my base color down for that sky, I'm using kind of some purples to transition from the blue into the beam and adding more and more layers of different colors to just keep narrowing that beam down a little bit. Now on the video here, it does look like I've got a weird stripe of purple, but in reality, there's just something about video that doesn't always capture things that little purple stripe does go away when you see the finish card at the end. So now I'm going to work on the ground. The reason that there is a circular little area around them is that light beam is coming down in a circle, which is an oval when you're looking at it straight on. And that's a whole perspective thing that takes a little bit of art school to understand, but it definitely makes it look like they're standing in that beam of light on the ground. And I'm letting a little bit of spill light go out there with a lighter red around the outside edges. And I'll add some shadows then right underneath of each of my aliens because they're going to be casting a shadow because they've got this strong light on them. Speaking of those kinds of highlights, I'm going in first with my lightest yellow-green pen to just mark some of the areas that I think are sticking out furthest. To try to give them a little bit of dimension, I want to use a really dark green to knock everything else back because I want the light to look like it's really super strong and that they're in a really, really dark situation on this planet that they're on. And stay tuned, I know it looks like a hot mess until it doesn't, but I'm adding my really darkest shadows and leaving those highlight areas which I will soften then with a mid-tone green because I want that outside edge, that very top edge of each one of these shapes and even just the tops of their toes and stuff to look like it's being lit from above and everything else is in the dark. But I want them to retain the look of being green aliens. So it's kind of a challenge to balance both of them together and make that work. So I'm softening out a little more with the light green pen and then I'll need to go in and do a little bit more with the dark again to really enrich the area at the very, very bottom, the really darkest spots, and then go back in with that mid-tone and get that transition going so they start looking good and round. And of course their eyeballs aren't going to be completely white except up at the top as well. Now I'm going to go up and work on my spaceship and give that a little bit of color. I wanted him to have some dramatic lighting too so I'm putting all the shadows on him on the backside of his head so the light is going to be coming up from his control panel on the spaceship. So he's going to have just a little bit of glow on that bottom left side of his face and on his nose and everything else is going to get knocked back around there. Now for those who were worried that my purple went over top of that little bottom part of my spaceship, no worries. Sometimes you go out of the lines but just cover it up with something else and it'll be fine. It's one of the reasons that doing scenes works really great because you can constantly be covering up things that may have been an error or may not have worked as well as you'd hoped. And so now I'm just going to add a little bit more detail here on the outside of my spaceship, give him a little more depth, and add some darker blue in the bubble around him so that that starts looking like it's, I don't know, shiny and transparent. Add a little bit of color onto the moon and then I'm going to add some bubbles. And this is one of those fun things I like to do with the color of Splendor just to add a little bit of motion so it almost gives that light from the aliens look like it's got a little bit of, I don't know, moving up and down going on. And then I'll take my white pen, of course the Signo white pen is my favorite little white pen to use. And I'll outline some of the bubbles I did with the color of Splendor as well as just adding some dots here and there. And this is the actual color on it, much richer, a little less of that weirdness that I was talking about earlier. And look how contrasty it came out. It was really a fun card to do, a lot of interesting challenges to give myself in getting the blending to go two directions at once and make that really strong lighting. But I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, click the like button. You can subscribe by clicking on my face. You can watch some other videos there or click to go see the classes over at my new website with classes and leave a comment. And I'd love to hear what you have to say. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.