 Hello there! It's Sandy Alnok and today I am going to be talking about colored pencil transparency. These are the two cards I'll be making. I wanted to make some clean and simple cards using a stamp set that I recently purchased and also the colors from Pantone for the year. The Prismacolor hues that I'm using are listed here and they'll be over on my blog as well if you want to pick up that list. The stamp set is from Penny Black and the colors are from Pantone and I recently did a video using Copic markers in that chart but I was trying to find card stock that was close and I didn't have anything that was super close. I just picked the lightest yellow that I had and gray that was kind of a middle gray and I blocked off with a masking little piece of masking just using sticky notes the leaves on either side of the stamp because I wanted to simplify it. They had all those curly hues on them and I didn't like that particularly much for a clean and simple card but I had to finish that off somehow. I could have had a branch floating in the air but I kind of prefer things to be a little more realistic so I connected them to the outside of the card stock using just a fountain pen. This is an eco twizby and since I'm going to use colored pencil I can use whatever ink, whatever pen in order to create the stem and the extra leaf on the end to finish off that branch really easily and if you were using Copic markers you just have to use something that would be Copic friendly. Same with watercolor it would have to be watercolor friendly. For the gray card base I'm going to use some white as an undercoat like a basically if you were thinking about priming something so that the color that sits on top would be pure and the parts of the bird that I want to be really really bright yellow I'm going to put the white underneath and I'm going to use a yellow that I tested out on some scratch paper to color over it because there are some of your pencils that you'll find if you get some scratch paper and try them out you'll find some of them are transparent so if you color half on and half off a spot of white like this you'll get two different yellows and it's a really great way to stretch the colors that you have in your collection you can get a dark and a light out of each one by coloring over top of the color that's underneath so though the white is just a basic undercoat and then the whole bird is going to be yellow here. I didn't go look up any birds to see exactly what kind of breed they were going to be or anything I just wanted yellow birds on the gray cardstock and gray birds on the yellow cardstock so it's covering quite nicely right over top of the the white pencil doing just fine there and the the color is not super bright it's not as bright as the yellow cardstock that I have because the yellow cardstock should have been lighter in order to match that Pantone color a little bit but we'll get over that but this is more of the color on top of this white that the Pantone color would be it's not my my Y17 yellow my really warm creamy sunny yellow not so not so much the color that they chose so here where I'm doing the bellies look how I'm getting a different highlight color on the highlight portion of the bellies and a darker portion when it's just the yellow pencil on gray makes a big difference in creating some depth in your coloring when you're coloring on colored cardstock each cardstock that you use will react differently with different colors though so you're going to want to have a little scrap of whatever it is handy so you can test out your colors ahead of time to make sure you can get that transparency some pigments in the pencils are going to be more transparent than others and others will be more opaque than others so try it over a swatch of white and that will show you whether or not that will work. I'm going to use my pen to do some of the detail work by the way because when you color over top of something there is some opacity to the pencils that I used already there's some opacity which means it's going to cover the pencil lines it's why your pencil lines get all kind of mushy and grayed out so when you're using pencil you may find having just a little bit of extra black pen on top will help to refine some of those areas strengthen them back up and redefine those outlines of the images and as I said my fountain pen has some waterproof ink in it and it really works fine for cards like this I can't use that pen when I'm using anything Copic though because that is not Copic friendly the gray birds did not work out nearly as well and I had tested this and you know it looked like the right color it looked like the right kind of gray this is a cool gray 30 percent color and the birds just ended up feeling very flat because it didn't matter on this to try to put down a coat of that white underneath because the card stock is really light would not have made much difference at all in trying to create the highlights underneath so instead on the light card stock I'm adding darker shadows this is a 90% warm gray color which is nearly black in order to add some shading to it so that they end up being darker birds I debated whether I would I would try to make yellow birds on the yellow paper I thought about that and then I realized they would totally disappear and I wanted something a little stronger so there we have gray birds and with colored pencil the blending can get really complex or it can be really simple depends on your card stock both of these card stocks that I have I don't even know who makes them I have a huge collection of stock that's just sitting on my shelf and it's in all different kinds of colors and I didn't keep packages because I got rid of all that plastic it was annoying me one time so I have no idea who makes it but different card stocks will have different textures to them different amounts of softness that will make your blending either easier or harder so you may find if you test a certain brand that you love the texture of their paper and you may find that you don't like certain ones that the softer it is I find the better it works with colored pencil so I'm going back into this with the 30% again the lighter gray to try to blend out some of those areas and make them a little bit smoother didn't really do a whole lot for me I knew I was gonna need to go back in and do some pen work as well but I decided that these birds at least deserve to have bright white bellies so I added some white to their tummies to give them just a little bit more color to them and then came the leaves you can do the same thing with other elements in the picture not just with birds but put a little highlight onto the leaves and then when you color a green over top of it that's transparent and this one is semi-transparent so I'm getting a lighter green where I put the white pencil down and you can see I didn't put it down very carefully I just threw some on there then you'll get two greens out of one instead of using two green pencils and if you do that nicely instead of just slapping it on like I did you can end up with a nice gradation using the green pencil that way the there's an exercise in my color pencil jump start class that covers this and talks more about coloring on actual black paper not just on colored paper so this is just a way that you can experiment as well using colored paper to do your color pencil coloring so finish off my little leaves and their little branches and then the birds on the left did not get beak colors so I added a little beak color and then started doing some finishing work on these because I always try to look at the image at the end and see if there's any little tidying and the birds on the right the the graybirds needed some serious work because I'd gone over them with so much pencil that I lost a lot of the detail and I can also add extra detail I can give them black markings with the pen after all the coloring is done underneath and create some real depth in the the wings and in the feathers on them and everything so you can go all kinds of crazy with it with a pen when you're finished with the pencil work just know that depending on what pen you use if you go back into the pencil you could end up making mush if the pencil drags the pen around so there's always that there's always an opportunity for me to mess up a piece of artwork late to stage into getting it done but what I do find is that continuing to work on it even if I feel like oh I've messed something up I was working on a piece just the other day of a painting and I nearly gave up on it like four times I almost tossed it and then it ended up coming out really beautiful and I sold it believe it or not so there you go you never know whether something's going to work out in the long run if you don't finish it but you also want to learn as much as you can from that piece of paper to finish off the cards I'm using my quarter chomper it has two different quarter rounds on it two different angles or or I guess circumferences one is a quarter inch and one is a half inch I thought I'd show them both to you do one on each card and you can choose which one you like better I tend to like the larger one the bigger rounder one but it also depends a little bit on the image and the size of the card as well which one works a little bit better for the image but there you go my finished little clean and simple bird cards with a few tips on using colored pencil and their transparent characteristics thank you so much for joining me for this hit that like button if you could it really helps the channel out share it with your colored pencil friends and I'll see you again very soon you know me I'll be back with another video so go color something beautiful bye bye