 Hello friends! It's Sandy Olnok and I've got two colored pencil cards night and day, both masculine designs with the new Ellen Hudson Avery Elle stamp set. I hope you've been enjoying the summer of stamping with Ellen Hudson. She's been celebrating just stamping all month long with new releases every Monday this month. And this week I'm part of a blog hop celebrating this Avery Elle and Ellen Hudson partnership. So they are doing these cute little images, it's got a canoe and a whole bunch of critters to put in it and fishing things. Lots of stuff to make a great masculine card. I eliminated a bunch of the little things and I'm going to show you some ideas for coloring this with colored pencil. What I did for my masking is first stamping the canoe and made a mask for that one. And I stamped it first in black on cream paper and then I stamped it in white before I removed it from my Misti. I stamped it in white on navy blue paper so I could get both stampings done at the same time. And then I stamped the raccoon and the bunny and masked them and then I stamped the bear and the fox. So I just did it in a couple layers and just traded out the paper that was in my Misti and it was a really easy way to get two very different cards by just setting the stamping up one time. I'm using my Prismacolor pencils for this one and using a very very limited palette. I'll show you over on the blog if you want to know the color numbers. I don't have the color numbers handy while I'm doing this voiceover but you can find those over on the blog. I used a dark gray and a medium gray and with each one of those you could get a full range of gray. You could go from very very light to very very dark but I found I got a little bit more difference when I used the two grays in conjunction with each other because then sometimes I could use it with the light one with the dark gray and get a different type of gray looking animal. The orangish color that I'm using here I shaded with the gray because I wanted it all to feel like it was in one simpler colorway instead of adding another color to the palette. That also made it duller because I'm using a gray shade. Grays are just going to desaturate whatever you shade them with so if you want to do that but not have the desaturation happen then after you finish the coloring go over it again with say the orangish color and that will brighten it up again a little bit not completely but it'll brighten it up some but for masculine cards I tend to not make them super colorful. I know guys like color I realize that some of them like rainbow colors but the men that I know that I would send a card to are not quite that into like cheerful bright bright rainbow types of things so I wanted to do something that would suit the men that I know in my life that I might actually send a card to there are not very many men on my list of people I send cards to which is not a good thing it's not very diverse of me to only send my cards to women but guys don't also tend to appreciate the card making gifts that get sent their way very much not as much as the girls do we like these types of things a little more than the men folk however this would be a great birthday card idea making one like this it says here's to another year of adventure now this could be sent to somebody for any reason wouldn't have to be a birthday card but it would be great as a birthday card so you can see here I'm adding some of the orangy color on top of the gray which gives it a little more brightness and then I went back in with some of the dark gray to add some darker shadows and deepen up the dimension on that the last thing I was faced with was what the heck to do with my my ground underneath or my water underneath because I didn't have any blue colors in the the upper part in that that main portion of the image I decided to go for a desaturated blue and what is a desaturated blue it's more of a grayish kind of a blue and that's important to do because you want to make sure it stays in the same color way if I used a really bright blue for that it just would not look right it just looked like it's garish compared to those other colors so I'm adding a few more little tiny nosium bugs because those nosiums are the ones that always get me up in the sky there and then I turned it into a card which I think came out really cute lots of fun and you might want to try something like this next up is my card on blue and this is a really old piece of blue paper it's got a lot of texture to it I don't even know who made it it's been in my little stash or like years ago I cut up all of my cardstock that was not full sheets and chopped it all down into card size and I have this giant stack so I don't know where this one came from but it does have amazing amounts of texture which is not always good for those who are trying to get it smooth so I will just put that out there for you you might have better luck with a smoother paper than what I ended up having here but my camera also didn't film that first section of it and I will apologize for not seeing the very start of the coloring of this something happened then when I downloaded it it wasn't there but you can see that what I'm doing is using the light coming from the sky from the stars to highlight the tops of each of the animals and then letting it fade down to just barely any white color down below this is a technique based on something that's in the color pencil jump start class and it's not the same but it's based on the same kind of an idea so my students who have taken that class will kind of get where I'm going but instead of using other colors like I do in that class here I'm just using an indigo blue pencil for all of the shading when you look at something at night you don't really see much in terms of color just try going outside sometimes and everything has a sameness to it sometimes it's more blue sometimes it's more blackish sometimes it's more brownish or greenish depending on what you're looking at and so what I wanted was for that glow of the starry night to come down onto these creatures it allows me then on things like that raccoon to separate out the white section on the top turn that into a blue section so that the white around the mask looks white by comparison and for like the fox in the back there I use less shading on the white parts around the eyes than I did on the part that would normally be the red of the fox you could do this with colors but I love the idea of all of this being in the same color frame so that everything felt like it was all this little little mystical blue night sky casting a little bit of light on these creatures and don't worry I am putting eyes back in so don't don't stress out about that they are going to come back in just a few minutes but I wanted to get some more done on the canoe down here below so I'm doing the same thing though I'm using my white pencil to create highlights and then going back into it and leaving just the white parts that I want highlights for leaving those parts white adding extra shadows underneath each of the paws that I drew in there are paws in the stamp set so if you want to mask all those out you can do that I decided not to do that because I didn't think it was all that extra effort when I'm doing this much coloring so there you go with the water I changed my mind part way through and you'll see what I end up doing with this because it felt very much the same as everything else in the picture and I am going to change that up but in the meantime I'm going to go back and do some other things that I forgot along the way one of which was to color in the stars and add in the eyes I promised you the eyes were coming back and just using a sharpie pen to go right on top of the picture that's there sharpie pen will cover it up I blacked out the eyes of the raccoon for a reason you'll see me add the eye back in or both eyes back in with a white pen later so here I'm just adding in the ones that can be dark and when you go in with a white pen with a white gel pen this is my uniball signal that I love so much you can see how much brighter the white is for that than you get with a pencil so I'm getting the extra brightness of that on the very tops and very edges of some of those highlights I can even add a little fur on the raccoon on this little white part around them which is kind of fun so you can add all kinds of little fun details as you start to bring up the contrast even higher what you might want to do is test out on whatever paper you're going to use whatever dark color paper and make sure that whatever color you choose for the secondary color like that blue is going to work on the paper some blues are more they have more white in them so they're going to be more opaque and they're not going to work really well for this because they're going to show up not as a dark blue they're going to show up as a light blue when you color them on the dark blue so you need something that's going to go make that transition from being on top of the white to being on top of the blue and look right doing doing it that way now down below here I wanted something else at the bottom because it was a big empty space so I added some reflections but I'm not trying to redraw the animals down there I just wanted to have some kind of highlights in the water and notice the water above it I knocked out most of the white there that was where I told you I was doing the adjustment because it just felt too bright and white so there we go there are my cards I mean this was so much fun to play with a limited colored palette to do masculine cards be sure to check out my link in the do we do to go over to the blog because you know blog hops are fun and there's always giveaway stuff you want to check that out and all the links to the supplies and everything you're over there as well I will see you guys later have a great day bye