 Well, hello there. It's Sandy Allknock and today's deep dive is going to be making clouds using erasers and colored pencils on two different types of paper. As much as I love Stonehenge paper, when I started playing with these erasers, I found something that another paper does better. I'm using a kneaded eraser, a gum eraser, a sticky eraser, and an electric eraser. And I'll talk about each one as we go. But first we're going to do the Stonehenge experiments. The first step in this project is to get your paper out and start making powdered pigment. What I'm doing is taking a Prismacolor pencil and drawing inside of a tea strainer so that I'm getting the powder coming out the other end of it. You need a nice thin, very fine-grain type of tea strainer. So I got mine for three or four bucks, I think, at the grocery store a number of years ago, and a cotton ball. I use the oversized cotton balls now. I used to use the small ones, but the oversized ones give me a little more room and I don't end up scratching my finger on the paper because the cotton ball is so small. So the big ones are nice. And just move that around. Now I'm leaving an empty space for the cloud in the middle because I wanted to make some valentines and I thought that would be a nice thing to do, but you could do this with any kind of cloud in whatever kind of drawing you're doing. I used a darker blue around the center because I wanted to do some god rays around the cloud. So the sun is going to be back behind the cloud and those rays are going to come out from it. And then I used a little lighter color around the outside, but since I had used the same cotton ball, I basically blended all the colors so it looked about the same. And I left a white cloud in the upper left in the lower right. I didn't want them to be real even, but I wanted to have some other cloud formations out there in the sky. The pigment doesn't need to be perfectly blended because we're going to be adding god rays to it and that's going to cover a myriad of errors. And if you have any places that you don't like what's going on, you can always just add another cloud to it by erasing some of it. That is my old college dust brush. I still have that thing after all these decades. This is a gum eraser and it's a credit color, but there's tons of different brands out there. All of them work slightly differently, but I wanted some hard edges. So that's why I got this eraser out to make those lines coming out from the center of the cloud. If your cloud is off center, then wherever that cloud is, if you want the sun directly behind it, that's where the sun is going to be. So just know that that's going to dictate the location of it. For the center of the cloud itself, I switched to a gray pencil and just put the color down there in the center and I got a new cotton ball, so I wouldn't be dragging all the blue in there, although you could mix some of the blue in with the gray. And I'm making this look like it's backlit by putting all of the shading in the center of the cloud. The thicker the cloud is, the darker the gray. So if it's a really dimensional super puffy cloud, it's going to have darker color. If it's really thin and wispy, it's going to have some lighter color and you'll see more of the sun coming through. And if the light, by the way, is coming the opposite direction, if the light is shining on the cloud, the thickest parts are going to be the whitest and the thinnest parts will be darker because they're they're reflecting what's behind them. In this case, the light is what's behind. So what you're seeing is the shadow side. In my research on clouds that were backlit like this, I looked at a whole lot of them and there were some that had these beautiful dark edges with feathery points on them and stuff that were so beautiful, but I shouldn't have done it with the pencil directly. I tried softening it using a q-tip first and see if I could blend that enough and it blended some but it didn't soften it very much. So I would recommend probably if you were going to try that instead use a q-tip along with the powdered pigment in order to add that refined edge instead of the pencil directly because the more the pencil has been pushed into the paper in any way, the harder it is to erase. So I did some scrubbing at it to try to loosen up some of those edges once I got them all in there. Now, one of the questions you might have is why use a dark pencil in the first place if you're only going to erase it? And the reason that I wanted to do that was so I could get some of those God Ray looking lines. And if I had tried to draw them all in, it would have been a lot harder. But I needed to put enough color in there that those lines would show up. So it's sort of a balance between figuring out what the color is. And this was a mid tone kind of gray might have gone with a lighter color in that upper left but I needed to have enough that erasing it was going to show up all of those beautiful lines and there's rays coming out of it. But I wanted to cover up with the light that upper left side so the cloud had some real character to it. And I also realized I wanted to add even more character. I didn't want the heart to look like it was a perfectly formed heart up in the sky. Because that doesn't really happen. Usually when we're playing the cloud games were kind of manufacturing something in our minds when we're looking at it. Oh, look, that looks like a heart. Maybe doesn't really. But our eye tells us that it's kind of heart shaped. So I added a broken area in the middle of it where some light could come through. Decided to try my electric eraser to sharpen it, you just press it on the surface of the desk or table and let it run for a second and it will shave off all the excess parts and give you a nice sharp edge. It doesn't last very long. You do need to sharpen it pretty regularly. This one is a $35 electric eraser and I have also one that was $8 and I haven't found a real big difference between them at this point. So that's one of the few cases when buying something less expensive can do the same thing. I'll link them both in the doobly-doo and you can see if there's anything in maybe the comments on the purchases, the reviewers that say whether one is better than the other. I just find them pretty much they work the same. So there you go. I decided to do a little more shaving off and trying to create a little more refinement around the outside. So I'd have a looser edge to my cloud, which of course led me to adding in a little more color to make the line thinner so I added more gray. I just went back and forth because that's how it goes. When I start playing with it and wanted to get those edges nice and soft, I was able to soften those edges with the kneaded eraser and I was eventually super happy with it and decided to turn it into a Valentine card, but you could do this kind of thing on any drawing and you could make shapes of clouds in whatever kind of shape you want to. The next experiment was UPO though. Now, why would I even think to try UPO? Well, I had a pad of it sitting here and it was staring at me and I thought, well, why not? Why not give it a try? Lots of people will ask me questions like have you ever tried so and so on such and such and my answer is always no, why don't you go do it? Because until one of us tries it, we don't know what's going to happen. One of the issues I had with it was the first layer because you have to get enough color on there that you can erase something. So I started with a lighter blue and then I had to start adding darker blue pigment and it took me a long time to work the color into the surface of the UPO so that it would be dark enough to actually erase anything because it just kept moving the pigment around. You can see it just keeps making piles of it outside of the page and then I kept moving the color back on and switching to darker colors so that I could have a little more pigment there to work with. Quite difficult to do this step, but once you get this step done, everything else is a piece of cake. You could do this in a rainbow, you could do it from like pink to yellow and make a beautiful sky and then erase clouds in that. Lots of beautiful things you can do with it. And this one, I wasn't going to make a god ray with it. I was just going to make clouds in the sky and I wanted to see what ways I could create different cloud formations using erasers. So first off is just making the heart itself using kneaded eraser. That was easy as pie. Oh my goodness, was it simple. And then using some simple circular motions, I could create all kinds of other clouds. You might want to look at pictures of clouds and get ideas on what kinds of shapes that they make and what kinds of patterns. Because sometimes there's patterns that are more linear, sometimes there's just fluffier, looser types of clouds, all different sorts. And the kneaded eraser did an amazing job. It got really white. That's one of the things with UPO when you work with other mediums on it, lots of it will go back to white when you start removing it with whatever you need to for that medium and pencil is no different. If you erase it, it just comes right back up and you can easily with just a very slight amount of pressure make very soft and delicate kind of cloud lines. So this is using the kneaded eraser to make those little tiny wispy clouds. And here I wanted to try one of those types where they have almost fluffy balls but they're all in rows almost. So I don't know what you call them. I should have probably looked all that up before I started doing this voiceover but these are patterns that you see in the clouds all the time. And I just wanted to put a bunch of them in different areas around the whole picture. And from time to time you might get some areas that get too white. So just use the cotton ball that already has all that pigment on it and go over it and you can lighten some. I wanted to have these others either wispy enough that they disappear or have them be blue enough that the white heart is the thing that appears. So if you're trying to put emphasis on one cloud, knocking the others back a little bit is really helpful. So you can see how the kneaded eraser works so nicely to make those kind of linear motions and adding a little bit of kind of fluff ball things around the clouds so that it doesn't end up being again a straight up heart shape because that just didn't seem quite right. It didn't seem like that would happen in real life. And then I switched to a stick eraser. This is one of the Tombow Mono Erasers and it has a really fine point so you can get in real fine details and put in little super tiny wisps that you know if you see a picture of something on the internet and you can't replicate it with a kneaded eraser just grab a stick eraser and you can do that. With some of the lines that I had made earlier they felt too linear. The linear was nice but they're softer in real life. They don't come out quite that harsh. So I just used the kneaded eraser to pull away from those lines just make a sideways motion instead. That softened all of that and created a beautiful type of cloud line up in that corner. I'm going to add another big cloud in the lower left corner something nice and bright and again if you need to darken that go for it and darken it. There's another stick eraser and this one is one I've had even longer and it's a little wider than the Mono Eraser but works just the same and you can basically draw with it. I'm going to be drawing with my erasers all week long on social media so hopefully I can get you some other inspiration. I want to do some drawn patterns and things with it so I'm excited to see what else I can come up with. So I'm going to refine some of the shapes and then if some of those edges of the stick eraser come out too harsh I can go in very easily with the kneaded eraser and soften them. This paper just erases so much better than the Stonehenge that the drawing that I have to show you on Friday I kind of wish that I had done it on the Upo because it was so easy to erase but everything else on that drawing would not have worked well on Upo because drawing directly on Upo with colored pencil is I would say challenging. Yeah that's a good word for it because it's not easy to do because the waxiness of the pencil doesn't react all that well but here I trimmed that one down. I had to sort of whack off some of those other areas to make it into a greeting card so I now have two Valentine's to send out this year. So here's a little peek at what I was doing for Friday's video so please do come back because you're going to get to see some fun with erasers and it's going to be a full drawing so it's just going to be a lot of enjoyment for your eyeballs. And I hope you visit again with me and follow along on social media because there's a whole lot going on out there and share your experiments with erasers as well because I'd love to see what you come up with. I will see you guys later. Take care. Bye bye.