 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to do some warm Christmas coloring using the Lawn Fawn Christmas Dreams set. It's kind of the best name I could come up with for this video. It's always hard to come up with names, but that Christmas Dreams set is really fun. It has puppy and kitty and little things for them to be thinking about. It's got a rug and a fireplace and a Christmas tree. And you know me, I like to use all the stamps if I possibly can. This is not all the stamps, but it's close. And I did crazy masking. I do have a tree that looks like it's floating, but by the time I'm done coloring, it will not look like it's floating in the air. That was an oops. But there you go. Now if you want to make a fireplace look like it's glowing, the first thing I like to do is take my yellow and just mark off all the places that are closest to the fire. And you might think about when you're sitting in front of the fireplace, which part of your body is warmest when you're sitting by the fireplace? Like that little doggy, his butt is going to be cooking and maybe a little bit of his head, but his front, the front of his face is not going to be hot. So that's where you want your highlights to be is closer to the fireplace. So if you're ever wondering what direction to put your lighting when it's coming out from the fireplace, it's going to go different directions based on what is in the picture. So it's not like a single direction light. It's all coming from that center point. And if your fireplace is on the left, then you might have everything on the one side, but when it's in the middle like this, it'll be all different directions. It doesn't have to all remain yellow in order to remain highlights, but I find that putting a yellow in there reminds me not to color it later on. So when I do that first, I'm thinking about it and I don't forget. So I'm adding some shadows off in the direction away from the light. So again, I'm using that same idea where the light is coming from the fireplace and putting my darker colors away from it. And then on the fireplace bricks, this is potentially getting into crazy sandy coloring territory, but I colored a base color on all of it. And then each one of the bricks, I'm leaving the corner of the brick that's facing the fire. I'm leaving that corner lighter if that makes sense. And so on the ones on the right hand side, it's going to be toward the left and the ones on the top. It's going to be down toward the bottom. And then on the bricks on the left hand side, it's going to be off toward the right. So I'm just kind of looking for if you were that brick and there was a fire right there, which end of you would be hot? And that's where your highlights were going to be if the light is shining out from the fireplace. And if you were to make those a little bit yellow and use a little yellow highlight on them or a yellow or red, you might be able to convey more of that warmth. But I think in this, it's fine to just use a couple of reds. So I'm going to use mid-tone R37 to kind of blend them out a little bit. And you can go over it again with your lightest red, if that's helpful, to smooth it out. But by the time this is all done, don't stress out about little things and making everything absolutely perfectly blended. Because when you have a whole scene on a card, nobody's going to stop and pick at one little area that didn't get blended really perfectly. I think I haven't said that often if lately, but you want to keep the main thing the main thing. If the biggest thing here is that fire and the little dog and the kitty and their butts, and you nail those, it doesn't matter if the rest of it works out or not. Don't worry about it. So I'm even going to just use some plain browns to throw some dark color around the fireplace and then throw a little bit of orange and some, of course, Y17 into the fire itself to give myself a little bit of really warm glow. I love that Y17 and how nice it is next to that bright yellow. For the tree, I'm using a very light, light, light, G03 first, and then I'm going to darken it with some other colors. You can choose to leave the little bit of yellow there on the edge that's toward the fireplace. Remember, don't get your tree too close to the fire. It might catch on fire and that would be very bad. Have your card explode in fire. And especially your real Christmas tree. Don't do that either. So you can either leave it with a little bit of a yellow on that, those tips right down there, right where the fire is so it can cast a little bit of that yellow light. And then I'll use a middle green and then go back in with my light green to blend. And again, don't stress out if it doesn't get perfectly blended because really people are going to be looking at the overall effect and if it doesn't come out totally perfect, do not beat yourself up. So I'm throwing in a little bit more yellow on those tips and then I'll start working on a few other areas. I debated whether to draw the floating tree to have a longer tree trunk down the bottom. Decided not to. I thought I'll wait and see what it looks like when I get to the end of the card, whether or not I need to fix anything in there. But I'll start adding in a little bit of color with a different brown up here for my clock. My grandmother used to have clocks like that. I've always wished that I had one that did some chiming. I do have a clock around here somewhere that did chiming but I've never been able to find the key that winds it up. I moved once and the key went away and that was the end of that. And that was really a bummer because I really like the sound of that clock. Anyway, now I'm going to do the little popcorn strands or I guess it's not popcorn if I'm making yellow and red but the little strands garlands on my tree and I'll do those in the red and the yellow. And I'm leaving just a sliver of white on the right hand side facing again the fire. It's pointing toward the fire. If your tree's on the left, your highlight will be on the other side. And it just adds that tiny little sparkle to it. Now for the gifts, I'm not going to get crazy. I'm not going to do shading on them. I'm just going to put the colors in and alternating my reds and my greens and my yellows so that I get a nice selection of different packages. If you like getting into the fussy detail, you can draw patterns in them. You can get all kinds of crazy with them. And here I was trying to figure out which part that I want to have next to the puppy dog ears. I didn't want to have the yellow too close to the puppy dog so that it blended in. So I have to remember when I get over there to try to use the green so it differentiates from the puppy dog ear. Finish out my little packages. And there we go. I did remember, yay! Because I didn't want that color to not pop out nicely. Filling in the rest with some yellow of course because yellow is the best color. And now I'm going to finish up the cookies up on top and then I decided to start the background and the rug just to see how this was going to play out. I wasn't sure what I was going to put in behind the whole fireplace. You can get crazy and put pictures on the wall and paneling and all kinds of crazy stuff. I'm going to do it fairly simple so you can see how to do a simple background. You don't have to draw in all of the pieces especially since this image is really complex anyway with all these stamps. And by the way if you do start stamping stuff like this and you end up making a really good one you get all the stamps exactly as you want them and you can do this only for your personal use but scan that thing and then print out more of them so you can color them again without having to re-stamp it. I generally use a misty to do my stamping and then I try to make several so that I can color it a couple different ways and a couple different times but if you scan it then you can print them out just do not ever share that if you do that's for personal use only if you were to do that but it'll save you some effort when you're making mass Christmas cards. Although I'm not suspecting too many people are going to do this card for a mass Christmas card because it does take a while. So I'm going to add a lighter green carpet down here at the bottom with some YGs to just add some some brighter color down here toward the bottom section and the YG95 and then flowing into YG93 down below that and put enough color down there to try to get them to blend a bit and to get the colors to work out a little better and then go back up to the top and finish the whole wall I decided in the G99. After the green was all dried in the background if you do this too soon you could end up with the color getting a little mushier. I picked a color that was a little bit different slash darker than the G99 and I'm not sure if the G99 is really darker except that it just has this effect when you color them over top of each other but it's going to give a little bit of a tone on tone look to the wallpaper and it gives it a little bit of some interest without taking away from everything else and you don't want it to take away from everything else you want everybody to be looking at all these details you colored in the fireplace etc rather than in the background but it also covers the fact that your coloring may not have been even because mine isn't even but when you add some texture to it it just looks like it was supposed to be there so I've added some colors now to some of the other pieces because I didn't want anything now to be fully white so even that little thought bubble has some light gray in it and that way it just feels really warm and yummy all this color on there rather than feeling like there's any kind of a harsh white bright light but the white in the thought bubble does catch your attention so you definitely see it so that's about that I hope you enjoyed this video if you did click the like button there's more videos you can watch there's classes you can take all kinds of fun things and uh yeah I guess that's about it there's a link in the doobly-doo if you want to go pin this card to your Pinterest page and I'll see you next time have a great day