 Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Olnock and today I have another Random art vlog since it's Friday. It's still quarantine season. So let's do this So I'm gonna start off with some overdue Thanks because I am remiss in saying thank you to people This one I've actually posted on my blog asking who sent it It got separated from the card and I know I still have your card It's on my shelf, but I don't know who gave me this Chico bag But I've used it twice it came. I think it was around Christmas time ish and I used it a couple times and then we had the pandemic and That was it. I just used it. I think twice in January and then things. Yeah So I can't wait until we do shopping again and things go back to normal So thank you whoever you are. This was sent by Lisa and I have a wallet like this that I use as a purse That's thicker and I don't like how thick it is. It's just too big I don't keep that much stuff in it. This is the perfect amount I don't want to carry a bunch of stuff with me and it's yellow and it's perfect. Thank you, Lisa This one was sent by Sharon. She sent a little notebook. That's made with Tomo River paper a nice little Notebook and it's gonna be fun to draw in I can't wait to get my fountain pens out and start doing some doodling in that Thank you very much And this little thing is an anonymous gift and it's a pentallic sketchbook an accordion Sketchbook and it's on my favorite pentallic paper Pentallic sketchbooks are great for using pen and ink and then you can do watercolor with them as well But when you use the ones that are bound like at the seam They fall apart an accordion one is not gonna fall apart because there's no seam sewed together So I can't wait to fill this with some sketches and add some watercolor to them Thank you whoever it is that sent that Next I want to share a six-hour card. I don't have any footage of this I'm sorry, but I got out my pencils one night I was sitting around watching movies and working with the new purple onion release and I made this card now This fence is not part of the stamps that are in the release But the ice cream truck is and I started by making a whole scene on the outside with the beach and the fence and The front of the ice cream truck and here is the part that took more time than even the outside Doing the back half of the ice cream truck The umbrella with the little birdie and I think you could do it as an owl You could do it as a penguin lots of different type of animals and then there's the The bunny holding ice cream and I added my own scene Just making this beach fence and basically I did the strip of blue for the water and then did the fence over top So if you ever want to do that make sure you do a darker color on top Then the water would be keep the water nice and light So this took forever to do I did put my own little words on the sign and on the truck You could put a name for who the card is going to go to for signage on there I wish them a happy birthday or some such But this was so much fun to make and I've never had a card take six hours I've had a video take six hours because I had a lot of parts to film But I've never just sat and colored one card for six ridiculous hours, I Also did two of these other cards with more in the release There's even more stamps than this, but I did two using the little pier the little dock And there's two guys that jump two different directions off of the dock You could do one card with them leaping off and doing some synchronized jumping, which would be fun One is done in pencil one is done in Copic and you don't have to do a whole scene You could just do a strip at the bottom like I did and let the rest of the card be nice and blank There's gonna be pictures of these over my blog if you want to see more of them and links, of course to the stamps And doobly-doo and now for some paper comparisons. I Told my folks on my live morning videos. I've been doing Instagram TV and Facebook live in the early mornings For the pandemic period and I mentioned that I bought a bunch of art supplies in the last couple months that I needed to try And I didn't know that arches made drawing paper So I bought one of the white and one of the cream the white is thin like drawing paper Like like a sketchbook type of paper the cream is a little heavier one is 110 one is 123 pound But they're not like a Nino 110 which is a heavy weight paper. It's more like a lightweight drawing paper And then I got out some stamps I got out the set from Mft that has this really cute little mushroom in it and some other images And I'm gonna do something with both of them to test out this paper because I wanted to see how this ranks against the Stonehenge that I've been telling everybody for I don't know a year or two years I don't know how long I've been even working with Stonehenge, but I adore that paper and I'm gonna have to say that I Still adore that paper. I don't adore this paper which makes me sad I love arches arches makes the watercolor paper I love and I was hoping this would be amazing But I'll tell you a little bit about it and what I was working with this cream colored paper has a texture to it that is more like a I guess you'd call it a metanthus an M-I-T-E-I-N-T-E-S. I've never known how you pronounce that. That's more like that It's got a bigger grain to it a bigger texture and you end up Kind of working around the texture a bit. It also doesn't take the pencil as heavily as I like it to this is a 6b and I wasn't feeling like it was accepting that much pencil I was really having to work hard at it to get some really rich dark blacks in there and I even go in in a few minutes with a 9b to really get some of those really deep contrasts in there And I don't know what it is about it except the paper just doesn't feel as soft as the Stonehenge that I love Because the Stonehenge is just super easy to work with and whether you're using graphite pencil or colored pencil It just loves it. I don't know. It's the texture of it in my mind. I picture. It's like scraping off the The pigment from the tip of the pencil in a really consistent way on the Stonehenge because of the the way It's evenly textured and when there's a paper that's not as even it's hard to get even areas So here's the 9b. You can see the contrast that I can get That's what I was looking for and even though a 6b is never going to get quite there I expected it to get a little further and was kind of disappointed that it didn't but you know such as life It's not going to be perfect, but it was still satisfying to do this It was still a fun paper to work with and what I found was the little lip on that Small mushroom that I wanted to make it look like it was sticking out from underneath of the shadow of the big mushroom I had to put a little bit of tint in the background behind it so that that would pop forward and give it a little bit of dimension and Smooshing with my finger definitely worked nicely. This does blend that way Very well, and you could certainly of course use something a little nicer like oh, I don't know a blending stump instead of your finger But this was just a test to see how it would work And this is the other paper the white color and it's the thinner of the two papers It was definitely better. It had a totally different texture than the cream one Which very much surprised me I figured if they just did one paper in cream and one in the white even though they're different weights I just assumed they would have the same consistency the same texture to them But this one has a little more like the Stonehenge not as much and it's not as heavy as the Stonehenge The Stonehenge paper the weight of it is just much heavier and nicer. So for something like this You wouldn't be able to pop this piece of paper With any dimension on your card if you were going to use it without putting something really heavy underneath of it Because it would sag in the middle if you put some like dimensional adhesive around the outside edges Whereas Stonehenge wouldn't do that And if you aren't a card maker and you have no idea what that means don't worry about it It just means this feels like drawing paper and that doesn't mean it's bad. It just means for card making You might want something a little bit heavier than this. I Would like to now answer the question that I bet is running through your mind You can tell me if it was or not, which is Sandy Why are you sketching these in graphite rather than working on them in color because that is a silly thing to do, right? You can admit it you were thinking it you were thinking I would love to see some color in there Well, I wanted to do two different stamps for the two different papers But if I did that with different colors, I wouldn't really get an apples to apples comparison If I'm just using graphite, I can tell what the paper is doing a lot better with just simple graphite How it's receiving the color how dark I can get it etc with one pencil knowing how it compares to other pencils And that is that's what I'm doing There's another reason though and that is because I want to say a huge I am proud of you To a bunch of people while I'm doing this and especially those who are in the 30 days to more confident sketching class because I Have seen some people doing some work in that class that has been blowing my mind I have always been a person who's thought of card makers as artists I've never wanted to demean anybody or hear them demean themselves when it comes to making art on cards Because you're creating something that wasn't there before you might be using stamps But you're making something and that makes you an artist You're a different place in your journey than somebody like me Because I just draw things on a blank piece of paper a lot of people don't have that experience and they belittle themselves Because they think well, I just stamp and color and that is not the way things should be I want people to see themselves as artists Well in this 30 days class, it's basically a bunch of exercises for people to Learn how to draw every day and it's there's teaching in there But the real heart of that class is drawing every day every day every day every day fill a sketchbook page every single day And yes, you'll learn techniques and things along the way You'll be challenged to draw things that are going to be hard and then other days It's going to be easy and some days it'll be silly and it'll make you laugh There's all different kinds of things that you end up doing in that class But the the really big deal for me in that class is getting people drawing every day And not just coloring stamps, but just a piece of paper and you and a pencil drawing Well in the last couple of weeks, I have seen some amazing Amazing art not just the drawings from the class because you know, those are that's those are exercises and things but I have had a couple of my students who have posted work and tagged me on Instagram or Facebook or wherever and They are so tickled with the work that they've done. They took a blank piece of paper and Three of them. I know made Mother's Day cards with a blank piece of paper And they were so happy that they could just draw something that they wanted to draw that made a Mother's Day card for their mom and They had done that from scratch No template, no stamps, no nothing. They just Picked up a piece of paper and started drawing and I can't tell you how exciting that is for somebody like me Because I want you to see yourselves as artists even if you're quote-unquote just a card maker Because you make art. I want you to feel The the passion and the creativity that art brings that's just what Card making is about. It's what art is about We're just all at different levels and I love seeing people progress and grow and get confident in their skills and start to Experience that artist's life that joy of oh my gosh. I made that So that's another reason why I did some cards in graphite today To honor those students who are learning how to just take a pencil and make something special With just a pencil. You can do this with your stamps as well Now the Stonehenge paper I decided I wanted to go back to because I wanted to get more of an apples to apples comparison between the papers because I didn't want to just rely on only my memory of like I love this paper and diss on the others because Because I had a different memory of it, but going back to coloring just this little bunny was enough to tell me Oh, yeah, yeah, I really do like this paper. It was just a lot easier to Get the pencil the pigment to lay down on the paper. I could get a lot more contrast with it I can still add more of that dark 9v pencil But I can get a lot of those richer darker blacks From my little 6b on this paper So I'm still going to definitely say this is the better of those drawing papers I haven't found anything so far that beats Stonehenge But if you do have some cold press watercolor paper from arches that is really close to the same And I only say that because if you have some of that paper and you haven't liked it for watercolor You could use it for pencil I did end up using a blending stump on this one and I overblended the chinny chin chin and the tummy So I used my little stick eraser from tombo And it got rid of a little of the excess color And here I'll add a little bit of the 9b so I can get just a little bit more darkness in there A little bit more contrast, but I was still really pleased with this paper's performance compared to the others To finish off this card. I used some dies and I wanted to explain a little I took this frame die And it cuts the full frame And I cut out the drawing and then I cut out An oval from the front of the card So it leaves a little gap in between there when I mounted it on the inside of the card So I get the benefit of having the little extra color from the inside peeking through the front and it Kind of nests in there nicely without getting stuck on it because it's got that little frame space Does that make sense? You can do that with all different kinds of shaped frames Each of my graphite drawings I sprayed with fixative and I use the Delacroix by Sennelier You can also use this for color pencil if you're one of those who worries about your pencil smushing You can use this. I like it because it's a little bit of a lighter type of coverage There's some that are so heavy and so permanent that they make the drawing look weird So I'm not worried too much about this drawing on the left because there's room to Touch the card and to hold it and nobody's really going to dive in there with their finger and mess with your drawing The one on the right though has so much of the graphite around the outside edges that I didn't want to risk that So I built it like a shaker card I put a sheet of acetate over it and built a frame using a die to go around it So that that one is fully protected So think about that when you do your card designs are there things you can do to keep that drawing from getting touched in any way If you'd like to pin any of the cards that I have showed you today They are all over on my blog and you can check them out over there There's a link in the doobly-doo. There's also links to the supplies in the doobly-doo and on the blog Because I do that all over the place for you And there's also a link to the sale page on my teaching site where the drawing classes are currently on sale in may of 2020 If it's not may of 2020 you can go see what else is on sale because there might be something fun. You never know I will see you again on monday. Have a great weekend Have a socially distanced yet super fun Weekend because I want you to be safe out there and come back on monday because I'll be back with another video Click the like button before you go and I'll see you then. Bye. Bye