Hi, I'm Sandy All-Knock, artist and papercrafter here on YouTube. And today I'm going to color Mondo Sakura, which is cherry blossom, with Copic Boka background. And the stamp set itself, brand new one from Elan Hudson, has all the flowers in one group, which is kind of nice, so you don't have to do any masking, it just all is in one cluster. To do the no-line coloring, I'm pouncing some Distress Oxide-picked Raspberry onto my stamp, and using my mini-misty to do it, so that I get a very light color, because I want that to disappear into my drawing. I was trying to choose which pink that I wanted to use. So I tested them out, and then I looked on Google, and I was trying to find out which kinds of colors I wanted to use. Any one of these would work, but it really depends on which kind of picture you're going to choose as your model. I like to use a model for my flowers, just so I can get some realism to them. And for this particular background, it was going to be inspired by one of those pictures, because I saw a lot with a beautiful background behind them that I wanted to try to replicate. But I'm going to start off first with the flowers themselves. For some of you who are only going to color the flowers, because the background is not for the faint at heart. I chose an RV10 for my base color, and in the picture that I was looking at, there was zero white in it at all. Even though the flowers look kind of white-ish, there was zero white, there was pink everywhere. And there's going to be a lot more color added to these, so it's going to make them look wider as we go, because what makes something look white is the contrast with the things around it. So I'm using a really dark red color in order to make my leaves and my stems, and I'm even going to add more stem in here. The stem that's not even on there, I wanted to attach it to the side of the card to make it look like there was a branch. I added a little more of the branch in the interior, and then I'm going to do some negative coloring in between some of the flowers, just to create a little more contrast and give the flowers a little something to be against, because in order to make each of those shapes show up, they have to have something behind them, in order to make some pull forward and some stay in the background. My second color for my shading is an RV11, which is surprisingly desaturated compared to the brightness of that RV10. You would not think that. If you move to an RV13, it gets really crazy really quickly. The RV1 family is just an odd one. It goes from one thing to another really quickly. So you'll need to test them out, but when you're doing your mini misty work, just stamp a couple of them so you can try out on a couple different petals, which colors are going to work best for you. You can see how nicely I'm starting to get some soft blending and some dimension just by adding that really dark center to each one of them, and then blending a little bit with this RV11. You may need to go back with the RV10 and start doing some blending too, but hang tight because we have a long ways to go on this one to finish off the coloring on this. I decided to use an RV39 for all of the little parts in the center of my card or my flowers. And if you're having trouble getting those thin lines, try using the edge of the chisel nib sometimes, depending on the condition of your chisel nib, that will make you a really thin type of line like that. I'm using a YG63 for the little bits in here. It makes them look right now a little bit like they have flower measles. I don't know if that's the thing. If you're going to just do the flowers themselves, I would use a lighter color than that to add a little bit of green there. But I'm going to be using a lot more color in the whole thing, so I need a little bit more of that heft of that color because I'm going to add a lot more to it eventually. To add some more contrast to it, I grab my E49, it's the darkest of the browns, to add the very, very, very darkest, and go in and look how all of a sudden adding that contrast makes everything pop. Just immediately, it makes a huge difference. And even adding some of those extra branch parts in the middle makes it a giant difference as well. And then I started playing around with the background, and I was going to use my RV5-2, but it was too pink. I didn't realize it was going to be quite that pink, so I went back to my RV11, because I wanted the background to be less bright than the flowers, because when you're doing distance, the things that are in front of you that are closest up to you should be probably brighter colors, and lighter colors, more intense colors, and then in the background it gets washer and more desaturated. So I'm combining it with an E04, those two colors together seem to work really well, and I'm just going to put a lot of color in there, and I'm not drawing specific flower shapes, because with this bokeh background, the rest is completely out of focus. You may have some flower-ish kind of shapes back there, but you're not going to see very much of them, but I wanted something where that background was going to start to push the flowers forward as I colored in that outside color. And these two colors, it was kind of an interesting thing as it happened, because I don't use my E04 very much, which is one of the reasons I chose to use it, because why have a marker in my collection that I never use? But also I ran out of the RV11, and I needed to re-ink it. Well, when it was all sitting on my table while I was working, the RV11 refill was in my hand, but the E04 marker was in my hand, so I ended up filling my E04 with RV11, and then I switched over to an RV34, because I remembered also I had that marker overfilled recently, and it blobbed on me, so I thought, oh, I'm going to use some of that too, and it also made it more pinky, so that was kind of fun. But a background like this is a great place to scribble off, so if you have any colors that are just kind of going crazy on you, and you don't want to just scribble off on scratch paper, make a background like this on something, and also you can use colors that you may not normally use, because maybe they would be great for a background like this, even if the marker is sitting in your marker collection, not seeing the light of day very often. The background is starting to come together, but like I said, it's not for the faint of heart, it's going to take a lot of marker, and potentially some re-inking along the way, and I wanted more contrast than this, so hold onto your horses, don't panic, I'm adding darker color, and I chose an E7-7, I tried a little bit with some other colors first, and they were too warm and too bright, so I had to go for something really dull, so I went for the E7 family to add some really dark, strong contrast, and then I had to blend that with something so that I'd have some mid-tone, and I don't know if you necessarily call that a mid-tone, it's still a dark color, but I needed some sort of transition color, so I went back to the R59 that I'd used on the flowers, I thought I'll pull some of that color back in, and then I started trying to fill in between that, and I went back to that RV34 that had been the marker that needed to be scribbled off, and it started pulling everything together even more. It takes a long time to get this color to work, and I'm gonna stop short of making all of that blend really, really well by going to my little bottle, it's a mini-Mr. bottle that I keep some colorless blender in, and I took out the inside, and I'm just gonna put little drops, I'm almost using it as a dropper, it doesn't suck up the liquid like a dropper would, but you can dip it into the bottle, and then make little dots onto your paper. You can do this by using your colorless blender, marker, but you're not gonna get this kind of an effect. This really looks like drops itself. You can see as it sets there, it starts to spread out a little bit, it will soften as well over time, as it dries, but it's going to break up some of those areas that may not have had really good blending, and I can sort of cover that up by adding this little texture to it with the colorless blender drops, which is really kind of fun. So once that is kind of in place, I wanted to see where it was gonna go before I decided if I wanted to do anything else with it, and I was cleaning up a little bit with my RV34, just some edges and adding a few little spots that needed to be tidied, and then I thought, wait a minute, I need more contrast now in the flowers because they had lost their contrast because now they're against all that beautiful color in the background. So I started adding some of the RV34 to the insides of the flowers. Who would have thought at the beginning that that dark RV34 was gonna work as a shadow color on those flowers? At first, it seemed like that RV11 was almost really intense for a very light pale flower, but at this point, it worked really well, and then I can blend that in with my other original colors, either the RV11 or the RV10, or the RV10 and the RV10, so I just wanted to make the color and start to add that softness back to the flowers. But you can see how soft now those green dots looked, it doesn't look any longer like flower measles because I've got all this other contrasting color on it, and I also went over it with a layer of the lighter color when I was doing my blending. So I stamped my hello in black and my beautiful in white embossing it onto a card base. How beautiful is that? Really fun. It's a nice flat card, but with so much love poured into it that hopefully the person that gets it is going to be really happy and feel very loved for getting a card like this. Thank you so much for joining me for this video. If you liked it, click that like button and all the supplies are listed in the description down below. It's all over on my blog. If you want to pin stuff and I will see you guys again next time. Have a really great day. Thank you. Bye bye.