 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Allnock here with Create in Color for this month. I'm going to be using the Adorable Adventures stamp set, which is so cute, and I'm going to focus on the skin tones here. In the stamp set, there's tents and all different kinds of trees and grasses and all sorts of stuff. I'm not going to be using all of that to make a scene. I just want to focus on the four kids and talk about making different skin tones. And for this particular project, I'm using Luminance pencils. You can use whatever brand of pencils you have, most of them have a bunch of different browns. And the trick is just in learning how much of each color you want to put down to get the kind of skin tone you want. Here I've got a flesh tone kind of color, and I am going to provide you with all the colors. Don't worry. I'm going to have a picture over on the website with all of them in it. But I am creating a highlight and shadow side, the highlights on the left and the shadows on the right. You can go the reverse direction if you want. I find that makes more realistic people than does just doing all the darks around the outside and the lights in the center when you're coloring skin. So I have poured some Gamsol into a little container with a cotton ball in it that allows me to dip in my blending stump and pick up a bunch of the liquid without getting it sopping wet. It also keeps me from spilling things all over my desktop surface and go over all the colors and blend them together. I've added back in some of the features because I've stamped this in craft ink so that it's on the lighter side and feels more like a no-line coloring type of look. Next up is this little girl. I'm going to use a lighter skin tone color or lighter tan color for the first layer and then start adding in some darker colors using the same shading. Again on the right hand side it just tends to give the whole picture a focus when you do that as opposed to I see a lot of people send me pictures of what they've colored and it all got mushy and turned into one brown because they started trying to put the shadows on all the sides. This allows you to put less down at once because you're only putting the shadow on one side. When you're coloring people that have glasses on the color inside the glass is generally lighter than the color of their skin but there is color in there and I leave a little highlight on top as well. Here I'm going to give her glasses even a little bit of outline with the pencil. I use a quiet sharp electric pencil sharpener and then when I'm doing this tiny, tiny detail on things like outlining the nose or that sort of thing I take my hand held and I go one little tick around just one little turn and that gives me the super, super, super tiny sharp point that allows me to get into outlining things like those tiny glasses. This little boy is going to have darker skin so I've switched to darker colors and I've added even some colors to try to make him a little redder. You can see the red coming out of that blending and becoming more of a warm color because I wasn't satisfied with the first colors that went down. That's the joy of colored pencil. You can layer on a little bit more of something else if you don't like the tone of it and if you need to push it more toward a blueish or a purplish color then find a brown that's going to achieve that. Then lastly is this little girl she's going to have really pale skin compared to the others and a little more on the yellowish side and each one of these has a slightly different combination. Some of them share the same colors as well and that's one of the ways to play with whatever browns are in the set of markers, pencils that you have. Same with markers, same with watercolors, same with whatever you're coloring with. If you try all of them out in different combinations and different amounts of each color, if you put down more of the dark color it's going to make a person with darker skin. That's just simple fact and mixing them at different levels is going to help you play around with all the different colors. Make yourself little swatches like this, stamp one face just over and over and over again and try out all different combinations. That's one way to get to learn how to do that. It works really well to have a book that you keep all your color references in as well. When I first started doing a lot of coloring and I was getting to know my mediums I would do that I would just stamp one image over and over again and try out different things with each other. That's where I learned that if you put down more of the dark then you get someone with darker skin on them. This little boy I wanted to change his hair up a little bit. Since I had stamped it in the craft ink I could change it up and give him more of a little mini afro instead of the scalloped hair that he had drawn into the stamp. You can change up stamps that way especially when you're coloring dark hair over top of each one of them. For the rest of the image I'm just going to zoom quickly through the coloring and doing the same kind of process of having the highlights on the left hand side and the shadows on the right hand side. The way that this looks to me the sun is going down and I'm just going to pretend in my head that these children have permission to be out in the late evening because the sun is going down. It's low on the horizon. Especially if it's midday or afternoon the sun is going to be higher up but the way I colored it they ended up with this very low light. So we're going to hope that they have permission to get out there and be hiking at this hour of the day and that their parents know exactly where they are. Maybe they're just over the hillside from the campsite. They're also not social distancing these little kiddos. So we're going to pretend this is in non-COVID times. So don't forget to do your own social distancing and don't hike like this with all of your friends all at once. I do have some videos over on my channel about adding masks to stamps and if you're interested in learning how to do that then you can check those things out over on my channel. And I'll put some links to them in my blog post for today which I will also link in the MFT blog post so you can go find those easily if you're looking for socially distanced cards. I'm creating just a really simple ground for them. I've made a hillside out of light greens and then added long shadows since it's evening time. In fact these long shadows coming from low on the horizon and making them start out at each one of their feet and go off into the distance. And then I've added some sky color. Just a little tiny bit in order to make the whites of things like the little girl holding the map. Make that look more white and in order to blend that into the white of the paper I just used a cotton ball to spread that around. No solution on it. Just move the color of the pencil with the cotton ball. So this was really fun to do. I almost did a full scene but the coloring of this took long enough. I figured we'll just make do with a simple scene instead of filling the whole thing with color. And that is it for me for today. Go check out more details on the blog. I will see you all later on. Take care. Bye bye.