 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter and today I want to share the Crafty Girls stamp set with you for World Card Making Day. I've saved this one all year long. It's been around a while, but it seemed like this is the perfect day to use it. So I'm going to color this up for you and show you how to make a really simple background. I'm going to do crazy lighting, but you can do much simpler lighting than what I'm going to do because I'm crazy. Just going to tell you that right away. I had an immediate, I guess, vision of what this was going to be. There's going to be a light hanging right above the gal that I'm just coloring right there. And I'm using the same skin tone on all of them because I wanted to get this moving quickly because we have videos coming all day long. And I just, I don't want to suck up all your time watching videos. So we are speeding this up as well. I'm trying to get through these fairly quickly to get you moving on your World Card Making Day because this is a holiday that's made just for us and it's time to celebrate that. So I am sharing videos every three hours here on YouTube. This is the first one. So every three hours, check out my YouTube channel or check out my blog because there will be a blog post going live for each one. And what I'm going to be doing is sending out all of my Halloween cards as well as this card to a bunch of people who participate today. And by participating, what I mean is you have to go make cards using some of the techniques or ideas somehow from the videos. Now you can stretch that a little bit, but I want to see that you have watched the video and you've gotten some inspiration and you've gone to make something because my channel is all about being for the makers, not for the collectors of crafty stuff, but for those who actually go out and make things and create. So that is what I'm encouraging today. I hope you have gotten my previous notices and have decided you're going to spend the day crafting with me, even though we're not together, we're crafting together because I am also going to be crafting all day long myself. I may jump on to Facebook Live or something and do a quick shout out or Q&A or something at the time that I'm recording these videos. I don't know exactly what that plan is going to be, but I will definitely be making cards right alongside of everybody, maybe doing an alternate coloring of whatever is in the video. So we can pretend we're all together. Wouldn't that be fun? So I am just throwing some color in here. I didn't do much shading other than on their skin tones so far. And part of the reason for that is when I'm going to do dramatic lighting, it's usually helpful to get the background set before I start doing almost shading because as you're going to see, the shading just has to keep getting darker because the background on this one is going to be darker. Now you could do the same kind of thing. It's a real simple background design that I'm going to use, but you could use lighter colors and don't have the spotlight thing right above her head, but use much lighter colors. You can just use browns. I'm using purples as a base just to get some really nice dark color in here. The BV2 series is almost a gray if you don't look at it next to anything else, but in this situation, it does look blue violetish, but a lot of times it looks pretty much like a gray marker. And I usually forget to use them because they end up in, I don't know, they're just not very exciting colors, but for something like a muted background like this, they're perfect. So I'm creating a little triangle of light where there's like a light bulb hanging down from the ceiling that is shining some light on the girls. And I struggled a little bit with trying to make sure that I lightened the area above the light a little bit so that the sentiment is readable because I didn't want the sentiment to completely disappear. But here's the background and you can get detailed with it if you want, but there's so much detail in the girls that I think a simpler background is going to work better. I'm just drawing some rectangles for shelves. And look at me. I'm not even being real careful about them being perfect and beautiful. They're just going to be different rectangle shapes. And since I'm making mine dark so that there's just the light coming down from that light, then everything's going to keep getting darker. If you want to do a light background and not worry about the crazy light source, then just do them in lighter browns. Just do a whole bunch of brown colors or gray colors or something in the background. You could draw all kinds of little things on the shelf, all of the crafty supplies, etc., but that's, you know, too much for something like this. So I'm adding some detail to my shadows. I'm looking at the objects that are above and kind of drawing a mental line from the object to the light source to figure out kind of what angle they'd be at. And I didn't make it all perfect. I just kind of threw in a few key shapes in order to make it sort of look like I was trying. Because, you know, sometimes if it looks like you tried, then that's pretty good. So I'm going over all of those purples with some browns now to make them more cabinet looking. And I'll just kind of go over them a little bit with a few layers of color. The light wasn't kind of hanging out on the right, on that left-hand side very well. So I used an E00 to sort of erase some color and make it soften out that way. And add a few more layers of browns on top of here to make sure that that all recedes back there because I really wanted to draw attention to the ladies. So now that I know what the background looks like, then I can start in on the gals. And I wish, you'll see the picture at the end, but I wish my camera didn't constantly adjust one of the things it does when I'm doing these backgrounds that have like all the white is gone. It uses a white balance type of thing, which is why I always get weird color on videos for a lot of stuff because it's looking for white and when there's no more white left, it kind of freaks out and it starts making everything wash out. But you'll see the finished picture. It is actually quite gorgeous. I was pretty proud of this one. So I'm adding shadows underneath of where all the objects are, where they're blocking the light that's coming down from that light bulb and then just starting to darken all of the other shapes because everything under the table you won't see very much of. So I'm just going to kind of throw some grays over top of it. And a lot of people might be thinking, well gee whiz, you've just wasted all of your time and energy coloring all those things just to gray them out. Well, they do have a tinge of color underneath all of that gray. So they, you know, they're not supposed to take up your attention because what I want to do is draw your attention to the ladies. And that's in general what I always suggest is to make sure you know what the main thing is that you're trying to get people to look at. Spend the most time on that and on making it really shine because that's where you want the attention to be. Yeah, so I'm not sure what I'm really saying here, but yeah, you want the, you want people to pay attention to that. So if you're going to put a lot of detail in, if you want to put polka dots on their dresses and that sort of thing, then that's where you can put some some love and attention and leave all those shelves in the back and everything under the table being relatively just blobby and that's perfectly fine. So mine got a little overly blobby so I decided to add some dark shadows in a few spots right underneath the very bottom and then re-emphasize a few of the shadows that are on some of those objects and blend them out just a little tiny bit in order to create a little more contrast there so they don't totally disappear and wash out down there in the bottom. And here is how rich it really was. Isn't that sad that my camera just doesn't pick that up? Because I love this card. So if you would like to have an opportunity to get this card in the mail, then go over to my blog and there's instructions there on how you can enter. You have to enter by making something inspired by this card and there's lots to be inspired because there's tons of crafty supplies. So you can even use some crafty stuff that's on there, color something with your Copics, use some art impressions, whatever you want. And I will be picking winners at the end of the weekend. All right, I'll see you guys in the next video in three hours. Bye-bye.