 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Olnock, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to do a storybook card, which you can do with a lot of different stamp sets. I'll be using one from Hero Arts. When I bought the Christmas Mouse stamp set from Hero Arts, it inspired me to get out some Christmas colors and start doing some Copic coloring. And I got out some 110-pound card stock as well, so that I have a nice crisp feel for this card. It's going to be one that people will flip through again and again, so I wanted it to be nice and strong. The color does bleed a little bit through the card, through the heavier card stock, but that's just the way it is. I leave that. I don't bother covering it up, but you could alternatively stamp all the images and cut them out and glue them onto the front of the card if you don't want any Copic markers showing through. But to me, that's just a sign that it's handmade. So for my little mouse here on the cover, I've got him running off the side of the card because I wanted this card to have that feel of scurrying around and getting ready for Christmas. So I've got my little mouse colored in a couple of the warm grays, and I realized I wanted to put some motion lines behind him. Just dragging some color out from the little critter. If you're doing something like a red mouse or you have some other object that's a different color, you may want to do these motion lines first. If you do the motion lines first, you're not going to drag any of that red color out into the motion lines. Although dragging some color into them might actually make it look more realistic. Well, not that it's really realistic given that you wouldn't see motion lines in reality, but sometimes some of that color when you see animation, the color actually flows out into the motion that goes behind something. So that a little color onto the candy cane, a little white in the eyes. And then keeping the color simple on this is what I wanted to do. Because if you want to make multiples of these, get your Misty out and get a bunch of the stamping done. Make one prototype and then you can get all the rest of them set up and the coloring goes really quick. Because literally on a card that's this cute, you don't have to do a lot of detailed blending. And I'm doing just a little bit on these mice, but I'm not really fussing over it. If I were making this image the hero of the card, I might spend more time on each of the images. But the whole idea of telling the story on the card is what I was trying to do here and focus on that. So I didn't even put any shading here on the bag. And I threw just some really little hints of color on the objects in the bag, a little line for the ground underneath. And then we have the mouse was stirring all through the house. Now this is where the sentiment goes wacky because it should be not even a mouse. And the all through the house goes in the stands up before this one. But, you know, we're going to forgive hero arts for changing that because maybe they didn't want to say that the mouse were not stirring because the stamp set is all about the stirring of the mice. So maybe they did that deliberately. But it still works for communicating the story and the poem on the card in multiple panels like this. So I've got my little creature colored, my little mouse. I'm going to throw just a little bit of wall color here with a light, light warm gray and then start adding some richer colors into the interior of it as I start to build that up and create a little focal point of the little house that he lives in, which I think is kind of cool that mice, you know, I did not know this until I bought this stamp set that mice have Christmas trees, they have rugs, they have their own little fireplaces. I thought that was kind of a nice thing to learn about mice because I never knew that about them. I thought they might, you know, live in a little hole. So they add some darker color in the shadow part right around the doorway and then start adding some fun Christmas colors inside because of course now we know that mice decorate for Christmas. So we got to give them all kinds of red and green stuff for their Christmas tree. Yeah, I take things a little too literally sometimes, don't I? But on a card like this, it was just really fun, fun coloring to do, and I'm going to make some more cards in a different way, maybe sometime during this Christmas season because it was really fun to think about the little mice living in this little house. I'd love to put some wallpaper in there, do some different kind of carpets and stuff, be really fun. So again, I'll add a little bit of ground underneath of my mouse just so he's not floating and then move on to the final panel on the inside, scurry on over for Christmas. And again, I've got the mouse off the page. It looks like he's coming from off the page, pushing the Christmas ball in there. And it gives a sense of motion and a sense of incompleteness of the image when you stamp it off the edge because a lot of times we just try to stick everything smack dab in the middle, which doesn't always communicate something fun. It doesn't have that playfulness to it that stamping off the edge of a card can do. Now this is a Christmas ball, but I'm going to do some kind of simple shapes for some highlights and shadows, not get into it too deeply because I'm trying to keep my coloring kind of simple on this card. If you want to learn how to color like a really crazy wacky, super detailed and looking like reality kind of Christmas ball, there is a clearly Copic class over at art-classes.com that you might be interested in. It is an advanced Copic class, but I thought I'd mention that since I'm coloring a Christmas bulb here and getting a little bit of color blending on this one, put a little more time and effort into that. I added a little crisscross onto the highlight so it looks like a window is casting that highlight. But here you can see the one from clearly Copic. Isn't that beautiful? So if you want to learn how to color beautiful images like that, all different kinds of glass images, there's 10 different lessons. Then there you go. So let's get back to this one. And I've got my panels cut, my pieces of paper cut. You can see the inner panel, the inner insert for the storybook is smaller than the outside. And what I'm going to do is do a second fold on the inner card base and do another line so that I can actually put my adhesive right in between there. And that way when I open the card, I can flip through the panels without kind of having to worry about one panel sticking to the other because I need to lift up that back panel. So I have four pages to my story. Now make sure when you glue it in here that you leave yourself room to close it. If you put it up too high, don't ask me how I know that it won't close. So make sure you get it in there. And then here we go. Not a creature was stirring all through the house, not even a mouse, scurry on over for Christmas. Isn't that a fun little way to tell a story on a card? So you might have ideas for how to do that with different stamp sets or you might need to go pick this one up so supplies are all listed in the description down below. As always, pinnable images are over on my blog. And I will see you guys in the next video. Have a really wonderful day. Go create something beautiful and get busy on those Christmas cards. It'll be here before you know it.