 Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I'm going to talk about adding graphite accents to a card coloring. I've used graphite in other videos from time to time, but I thought I would jump in and do one where that was really the intent of the video. And with these little mama elephant stamps, I thought that would be fun. And with the new release of the Dumbo movie, which I love Dumbo. Dumbo was one of my favorite little books that I had when I was a little girl. So I'm just really into the whole elephant thing right now. But these little guys were so cute. I stamped them in a gray ink so that I can do some no line coloring. But some people may not do no line coloring because you can't get a lot of detail in it a lot of times because you're stuck with these fat Copic markers. And while I'm able to get a number of details in there, there's some things that are just so tiny. There's no way a Copic marker is going to do that. So what I'm doing is putting down my series of colors starting with my darkest moving to my mid tone and my lightest and getting that gradation going. And if you're going to use any graphite and by graphite is me pencil. Graphite just sounds fancier and more artsy than just pencil. So get all of your coloring done first before you go in and add any pencil accents because Copic marker will bleed the pencil. It will drag it across the card. Don't want to do that because you'll end up with like a weird gray haze going on. So with this little guy, I've got him stamped so that he's flying off the top of the card. And that means the sun is going to be coming from way up high. I'm going to leave the top of his head as blank as I can. So as I'm doing my shading and blending all that color, I'm trying to make sure I soften it up toward the top. So we got lots of nice beautiful highlights up there. Added just a teeny bit of some R20 into his ears just to add a little tiny tinge of pink. Now this little guy is even harder because he's got even tinier details than the big elephant. And he's going to need a lot more detail than the elephant because he's just so small. And both of them are, you know, the lines from the balloons that they're carrying have even disappeared. They're like everything has mushed out because of the Copic coloring. So I'm going back in with just a pencil. This is a mechanical pencil. It's nothing special. You can do a number two pencil and just get it really sharp because the sharper the pencil, the better the detail. And if you've got a bunch of drawing pencils, you might want to use some card pencils. So those would be your H pencils. Those will have the least amount of graphite left on the page so you can kind of get those nice sharp details without them brushing off. That sort of thing. But here I can even add not only some detail around his hand or his paw, his foot, whatever it is an elephant has that he holds balloons with, but I can add the little strings coming out of the bottom of what he's holding his balloons. I can add just a little tiny line in the shaded areas. I'm not outlining the whole thing. If you outline the whole thing, you might as well have stamped it. But here I can add them just in the shaded areas, the areas that are supposed to be dark anyway, and it adds to the shading I've already got. It adds to the depth because it's really outlining it right around those spots. You can add it, add outlines in other areas if something got mushy, but just do it a little bit lighter. And the cool thing about pencil as well is if you don't succeed in doing that the way you want it to look, you can also erase it because it's on top. If you color Copic marker on top of it, then you're not going to be able to to get that effect of erasing in the same way that you would end up with a whole bunch of bleeding and smushing of it. So there you go. The rest of the coloring is going to be really simple. I'm going to keep it pretty basic and not get into a whole lot of massive numbers of colors just to show you you don't have to do that with your color. You don't have to get all of the pens, but I'm going to use some grays. Just put down a base coat on each of the I almost said umbrellas on each of the balloons. I think I need a rest break. I'm apparently not able to talk today, but on each of the balloons I'm using a C3 and a C1 to create shadows. And if you end up with them looking too gray, just go over them again with whatever the color was that you used for the balloon. Very easy to do. You get really soft simple shading and you didn't have to figure out what colors are going to go with it or anything. Just keep it basic and light. And I'm using pastel colors and this is a great way to do some simple shading with those. I decided to put some grass under them. I was still trying to decide whether they were floating down or floating up in the the seam, but I love the idea that that one of them is off the top. So he's actually clearly engaged with the edge of the page, which I tend to love on my cards when there's something toward the outside edge. It just indicates there's more going on in the story. There's some action taking place. And the grass is down below. I did some YG11 and then added some C3 and C1 and then went back into it with the YG11 again, creating this grass that has a different look to it. It's not just a plain old light green. And then for the clouds on the top, just create some scallops in the areas that you want to make your clouds and color behind them. You're coloring the sun or the sky behind the clouds. You're not coloring the clouds themselves. I'm being a little bit careful right here trying to make sure that I don't touch any of the graphite. So I would recommend doing your clouds first and then doing your graphite last. But there you go. I wasn't sure I was going to do clouds in mine and ended up having to fuss with it. But look how simple and cute this kind of a thing can come out to be without having to use a gajillion colors, without losing all that beautiful, delicious little detail on the elephant and the mouse because you could just draw it right back in. How simple is that? So there you go. Another video from me. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for the likes. I haven't said thank you for the likes in a long time. You can get all the supply links in the doobly-doo as well as over on the blog. And I will see you again in another video coming up really, really soon. Take care and have an awesome day.