Hi there, it's Sandy Alma and it's Friday, which means I have another of my crazy epic projects combining alcohol ink with colored pencil this time, a little bit of copic in here. So let's get started. This week's videos came about a little bit backwards and I don't know that anybody cares about this, but normally I create one epic piece, one big piece a week and and it's whatever medium I want, whatever technique, whatever subject matter I want, I don't hold myself to anything I just create and then on Monday I take one element of that and do a deep dive on that so I can do some teaching around it and the week in between on social media is expanding on that, trying it in different mediums, trying it in different ways and just spending the whole week on a subject of some kind, ending with a crazy thing on Friday. Well this time I started out with Monday's video. If you were here and watched that and I did the absolutely adorable little bird band, then you know that I worked with alcohol inks making circles out of them and drawing on top of it with a black colored pencil. I was intrigued with how the black colored pencil worked because it wasn't perfect but it was interesting enough that I thought it had some legs and I wanted to try something else with alcohol inks and colored pencil on top of it. Now colored pencil is not really made for Upo very well so this was going to be a challenge to see what it takes to overcome some of those things, where does colored pencil work well and where does it not work well, what kinds of things can't it do. So I began by just putting the alcohol inks and 99% isopropyl alcohol onto the paper and then used my Copic Airbrush with no Copic markers in it. You could use a regular Airbrush or whatever kind of thing to blow the ink around and I just wanted to make some beautiful shapes that I could use for the pencil doodling and to be able to draw into this by having some interesting things. I just blew in different directions so I had something that was swirly and just felt like it had some movement to it and that's one of the things I'm starting to realize about my doodling is that there's there's a style that I am developing finally. I'm so excited when when something becomes recognizable to me when I start feeling like I've got something consistent in the type of work I do in a particular medium for years. I've been working with Copics and like you can recognize my Copic work pretty quickly but it's a little more difficult with the other mediums because I haven't settled on exactly what I do and what my style is but I think with this piece I started really settling in on some types of some types of lines that I like and you'll see a lot of that developing. So once I had all of the ink moved and dried I started using a series of prismacolor pencils and they were warm reds and cool reds and darks. There were some purples in there and what I found out as I was working with this is that even though the paper is really smooth and the pencils go on like butter they don't go on creamy like butter they go on really smoothly like there is no resistance from the paper but what that means is that it's hard to get dark areas it's hard to get real contrast and if you know me and you know my contrast that I love it's challenging when I don't get to have the contrast in my pieces that I want and there is some contrast in here but at the end you'll start to see how I I started going in to get some deeper deeper darks in here because I had lots of midtones and I had plenty of lights but I just didn't have those deep darks in the the tiny recesses the little tiny areas of this piece. I did get lots of lights put back in by using a glass pen that was dipped into a little bit of the isopropyl alcohol so I made patterns with that that was really satisfying to watch that happen on the paper and all of this became sort of coral themed I was thinking fish and you know like fish flowing inside and outside of seashells and rocks and that was just what was going through my mind also when you you see the end piece it's almost like there's there's a lion's face or a horse's head like a chess piece or something there's all different kinds of things I started seeing in this it's almost like playing the cloud game but as I was working with the lines that were created by the alcohol basically I was enhancing them and trying to make them more prominent now here's where I wanted to make some real darks in that particular area I had done it with pencil at first and it just didn't get dark enough so I went in with a dark copic marker and I liked that enough that I started going in and adding just single little pieces here and there little little spots in the deepest darkest corners where all the darkest shadows should be so as I worked my way around the piece I was trying to have some consistency in how much dark there was across the piece so that there weren't any areas that didn't have some darkness to them then there was this big section in the middle that ended up with no ink in it and I started just putting some line work in with the colored pencil and just added more and more and more to it until I had an area that almost look not really as if it's trying to be alcohol because pencil is not going to look like alcohol the texture is not the same at all but I wanted the colors to feel like it belonged in this and that there wasn't a big white gap in the middle of the artwork so I just layered pencil over and over it didn't end up with the same texture but it does end up with the same look so this is with just the alcohol on it and you can see where some of those plain areas are and then the richness that I was able to add with the colored pencil and then just a tiny bit of Copic so that I could get a few of those really strong contrasting darks so if you have an idea for a title for this please do let me know I'd like to have something more official than Coral Doodle which is I guess what I'm going to call it for now it's going to be in my shop if somebody wants to buy it take it home with them and frame it on their wall there's also going to be Prince at Society 6 so you can get all different kinds of items made with this piece of artwork there as well links are in the doobly do for everything and I'm going to head out and shop for some giant nupo paper I'll see you guys