 Well, hey there, it's Sandy Olnock and I'm an artist and crafter here on YouTube and I have a new audio system and new intros and outros for my videos now. Kind of excited. I'll talk about the tech stuff later on, but I'm going to be making a farm card. And this one uses the Sunny Studio Stamps set that has the scarecrow and the chickens and the goat, and it has the whole buildings in one big group so you don't have to mask anything. Just kind of nice. And I've used some no line ink to stamp the building so they'll look far away and wiped off the bottom edge of the fence so it will merge nicely into the field. And I also wiped off the bottom edge of the goat's feet so that he will also merge into the hay that he's standing on. And I chose some prism colors. I tried to pick some colors that were more intense and more saturated compared to some desaturated colors so that I'd have a range in my picture and I'm going to use some of them in the foreground and some in the background for specific reasons. So we're going to talk through some of that as we go. But first I'm going to do a base coloring on the scarecrow here so that I can start talking about intensifying this image to make it more realistic. The paper that I'm using is by Stonehenge and I love their Stonehenge white paper. This one is from the pad that's called, quote, colors. And I wouldn't really say they're colors. They're more of various shades of tan or cream as opposed to being what I would call colors. I was hoping there would be a blue and a yellow and a green and whatever, but they're just tans of various sorts. And they color the same way as the white paper, though. So if you do like the white paper, if I've convinced you to try it, then the texture on this is just the same and they color really nicely with the colored pencils. They have just enough tooth to them that I think they, in my mind, this is how I picture it, that they scrape off enough color off the pencil to get good coverage and to get good intense color. When you're using a really smooth paper, you have to work really hard and it starts building up that surface of the paper before you actually get a whole lot done in terms of soft color blending. So the yellow that I'm using here is not a sunshine, screamy bright yellow. It's a little on the desaturated side. I'm going to use it as both a bright and a not bright color. It's very much a hay color, but it's not super sunshiny and that's going to make it look more natural. If I had done that in a really intense, super intense bright color, I wouldn't have had the look that I'm going to get for the hay on the ground. It might have been okay on his hat, but I wanted the hay on the hat to match the hay on the ground as well, so I'm choosing to kind of stick with the same color for both. The desaturated shadow color is also a really dark one in this particular case and look how rounded those arms suddenly look and that pole suddenly looks like he's hanging in front of it and all of a sudden that hat gets some real depth in it because it's got those deep dark shadows underneath of it and then I put a cast shadow across his face. I know that scares a lot of people because, you know, goodness gracious, you're putting a big old line across his face, but look at the realism that it gives you. It might be a little hard and a little scary to think about doing that, but the difference that it makes in your art is quite amazing. I used that really intense orangey brown color and went over his arms again to just smooth things out and then I'm going to add some saturated blue to his jeans. He's going to be in the front and I want to have a little more saturation to his colors so that he's going to pull forward and the background, that building and trees and everything back there will really recede into the distance and if I have his colors a little more intense, it's going to help that visual difference between the two foreground and background and then I'll add a little bit of that orangey color to the hay on his hat and his little arms. He feels like he's missing shoes. I know scarecrows don't have shoes. I just feel like I want to give him shoes and then I intensify the shadow under his chin too using again a desaturated bluish color so that I get some real roundness and depth to it and next came the goat. I looked up goats on the Googles. The Googles are my friend and I looked for one with cute markings. So this one had some fun spots on him and it made him more fun to color than just making a plain old brown or gray goat like lots would do and made him a little bit more unique because he's got some very distinctive spots. In the picture he didn't have dark brown legs but I decided this little guy needed some dark brown legs to separate his legs from his body since there's a hard line in the stamp set. It would kind of emphasize that difference between when his legs started and stopped but notice that his feet I've kept them really soft so that I can blend that right into the hay that he's standing on. The shadows I'm using the same orangey brown color for but his body even though it was yellow in the picture I wanted to reserve that decision for later. It might be better if he was more of a paper colored body meaning the color of the paper itself the white of the paper I hesitate to say white because this isn't really white white but I will make that decision later on when I see it all in context because color is always changed by what's around it. Next up is the hay at the bottom so I'm going to put down a base color of the hay and notice that I'm going to add a line of hay behind him that's going to make him look like he's set down into the hay that there's some distance between him and where the field starts. If you were to just do it right to his feet he would be kind of standing on a mountain of hay as opposed to standing into it and I'm using the orangey brown color to add more of that overall color of the hay and in general lots of people would leave this as is and and just use the the bright color in the foreground to pull it forward wouldn't be wrong but I want to show you what happens when I start adding more desaturated colors to it as well so I'm going to intensify a few of the the bright areas of yellow and then I'm going to go in with some of the dark brown colors first to just add some shadow under the goat so he has something he's standing on and then just make some little tick marks in the hay that's going to dirty it up he's on a farm farms not going to generally have really bright hay not after everybody's been walking on it and the goats been marching around on it and there's mud out there and I wanted it to look more realistic so I've got that underlaying layer of the really bright colors but I'm adding the shadows with the dark colors and also as I move forward toward the foreground of the picture my marks are getting bigger and heavier and as it moves further back in the picture I'm making them smaller and allowing more of that yellow color to come through so that I create that depth just in the hay section itself now when it comes to these greens I have a very intense saturated green and the one in my hand right now is a desaturated green so you can see the difference between them and I was wishing by the time I was done with this that I had a green in my collection for this particular card that was more of a yellow green but that blueish green is going to end up being the green of my field the field tops and I wanted the base of it to be very dark down at the bottom so the plants are you know getting deeper darker green as they go down I opted not to make it look like corn stalks I considered it but there was enough in this video I thought I don't really want to clutter it up with trying to make corn stalk looking things so I'm just making vertical lines so very much looks like tall grass but since it's a farm people will make up in their mind that it is plants and food that's that they're growing so it'll be just fine and I'm going to just extend this dark green along the bottom and I decided I was going to use the desaturated green for the dark shadow portion because this is the part that's not going to have a lot of sun on it the sun is hitting the tops of the plants and that's where I'm going to use the more bright intense type of green but before I did that I wanted to get that fence tackled because it needs to look like it's setting down into or behind the the whole field so I'm just using the same color that I use for my first shadow on the scarecrow's face to make kind of a brownish fence but I used very light pressure and a desaturated color and that gives it the look that it's much further away than everything else so I went in with the bright green to do the tops of the field and that way you have this transition from the desaturated and darker color at the bottom to something a little bit brighter up on the top but what I found was that I also didn't have enough contrast in the bottom because I had more contrast in the scarecrow and the goat so I went in with believe it or not a dark blue color yes you can use blues when you're doing plants you don't have to stick to greens whatever you've got that's dark and I used a navy blue and I made it dark enough that the the parts in the foreground would pop against them I wanted that goat to really stand out so I made sure I kind of decided I set the intensity of how dark I was making that based on the goat and then I had to make the rest of it match so I just went around the rest of the corn I have some light areas coming down so it looks like you could walk into the the field of whatever that is corn or whatever and make some some areas that were darker in some areas that were lighter just to give it a little bit of variety along the way and then it's going to be time to add a little bit of that color into the hay and the reason I'm doing this I'm adding some of the green and I'll also add some of the blue into the hay so that it doesn't look like there's this really sharp hard transition if you're actually standing in a field it doesn't look like there's a sharp dividing line there's really bright colors on this side and really dark colors on that there's just a lot of the same colors in everything because all these colors play off each other and look how interesting that ground is getting by adding some of these different colors in there you do have to be careful that you don't add too much of it and get rid of all of the brightness but it's just much more interesting because it's got all the same colors that the rest of the picture has in it so there's that next up is the barn in the background and the barn I started with that really intense color should not have done that as soon as I started I was like oh now what am I going to do so I took a deep breath and figured I'm going to have to figure that out I will I will come to a decision shortly and even adding just some soft shading to it to try to get rid of the intensity of those lines because the lines were bucking me too they were too too contrasty so this helped a little bit to soften them down but I still needed them to be desaturated but I left it for the time being and decided I will fix it in a minute I will figure out what to do with it in just a few minutes I used that same fence color for the barn doors and then moved on to work on some of the shadows on the barn itself and I chose that really dark brown color for it just to put a really strong shadow right under where the shadow would be cast by the roof as it hangs over and then tried to make a little bit of color kind of trailing down from that a little more shadow and would that be enough to soften it and I knew it wasn't because I wasn't going to put enough of that color to dull it all down but just wait and see there's going to be a little bit of magic in just a few minutes to make that happen got the windows in there a little bit of detail and then I decided to move on to the tree and I'd come back to the barn the tree is what taught me what to do with the barn because I was working on the branches using that same bright orangey color and then I went for a really desaturated soft green for the top part of the tree and as I was coloring it I accidentally with my pencil went over parts of it and I thought look at that it made that desaturated because orange and blues and greens are on the other side of the color wheel from each other so they're going to neutralize each other and then ding ding ding what happens if I start adding that green to any of the browns in the background that need to be desaturated and so I tried it first on the tree trunk and then tried it on the barn and it'll be magic you will enjoy the little magic trick that comes up I love when color does that so it's going to suddenly gray out this barn so that it's not this kind of orangey color and it looks much further in the distance isn't that cool the rest of this is just going to be choosing some desaturated colors to work on that windmill or whatever that is I think it's a windmill might have a different name I'm not a farm girl so I don't really know people in comments I'm sure will correct me but while I'm finishing this part up I thought I would mention the excitement about my new microphone hopefully you're enjoying this audio more than you might have others I've had the same microphone for oh years and years and years and years and it started in the last probably year or so acting kind of weird on me and I kept trying to change settings and once you change settings on things you can't get it back to where it was and I couldn't figure it out and I was doing a lot of trying to edit sound in post and that was just miserable it took forever to try to do and then I'd still end up with weird verbally sounds and stuff so I've been saving for quite some time and bought a professional audio system with a soundboard and everything and a really good road mic and I'm hoping this will make life a lot easier I have been playing around with my mic this weekend hopefully I've got the settings working I did decide to add some yellow into my goat because look how much brighter he looks and he pulls much more to the foreground because he's got some of that yellow in him now and that has all the intensity of color in the foreground and much less of it in the background and then I've got that mid-ground which could have stood for maybe having some yellow greens in it but nonetheless I'm still happy with my little hey there card I love chickens enough that I had to make another card with this stamp set and this one I split the background so the barn and the tree are on one side and I moved the paper over so I could stamp the windmill on the other side and this card is in Copic marker it's going to be a speed video on social media later today so check my Facebook and Instagram I'm also showing you a sneak peek of two different cards two different videos coming up one is a Thanksgiving card with this poor little guy looking on at his cousin sitting on the table I had to give him googly eyes so he wouldn't be quite so sad about that but I'll show you the coloring of that soon as well as this Christmas card using an activity set and I'll show you how to make two different light sources in one card in that background and you'll be able to see that one come alive here on YouTube as well sometime in the next month and I've linked the stamps and dies for both of those sets in the description along with everything for today's card thank you so much for joining me for this video and for checking out my new fancy swanky audio equipment let me know what you think of the sound I'm going to be playing with the settings for a while so I might have some videos that sound better than others but I'm hoping to figure it out and there's a thousand buttons on my new soundboard to mess with so I'm going to have some work to do to figure out how that works let me know what you think of the new intro and outro as well because I've been kind of geeking out just a little bit I will see you guys later thanks for stopping by smash that like button if you got anything at all out of this video and I'll see you guys later on take care bye-bye