When I started this channel a year ago, I planned to do a lot of coloring,
but I didn't expect to be coloring so many kids coloring books.
Over the past few months,
my kids coloring book videos have been the most popular, and now I have more kids
books than adults books, and more coloring books than my six year old.
Don't tell him I just bought Star Wars.
I don't totally understand it,
but I'm loving it. So I couldn't finish the year without at least one more.
And to be seasonally appropriate, it's time for a Christmas coloring book.
I've already chosen my Disney characters for today because I've been wanting
to color something from Toy Story for a long time now.
Ever since I saw the posters from Toy Story Four,
I've been wanting to draw these characters with lighting like this.
So while my scene will be totally different, I'm going to be using these
colors and lighting as my inspiration for today.
So I've got a few choices for pages here.
I do want our main characters, so Buzz and Jessie here is pretty cool.
We've got Jesse and Rex and Woody.
I do like the gingerbread house,
but I don't think that's going to work with the lighting that I'm wanting.
These ones aren't quite what I'm looking for today.
Or there's this one, and I think I'm going
to settle on this one with our two main characters, Woody and Buzz.
If you going to color Toy Story, this feels like the right picture to me.
In almost every coloring book challenge I've done so far this year.
I've colored directly in the book, working with the limitations of the cheap
paper and using my markers as a base layer.
So I don't need so many layers of pencils.
But I really want to give this art my best today, and I want to enjoy this process
and not be limited by this coloring book paper, which is fairly thin.
So I've decided to trace the coloring page from the book to my own paper,
keeping all the artwork exactly the same, but just using a fine pencil instead
of recreating the bold lines from the original artwork.
This will allow me complete freedom in my design, and I get all the benefits
of the high quality paper with my artist grade pencils.
I'm using the Fabriano Hot Press Watercolor
paper today, which is great with colored pencils and has a fairly smooth finish.
If you want to see some of my other paper recommendations for pencils or markers,
I have a full video comparison for you to check out after this.
With my outline done, it's time to start coloring.
This is still technically a coloring page.
I didn't create the line art myself, even though it won't be visible
in the final artwork, but taking this approach of tracing it
to a new page will result in a completely different look to my usual coloring pages.
It will end up looking hopefully more like
a realistic drawing than just a typical coloring page.
I'll still color a section at a time,
but my shading and lighting is key to making this look right,
and this is where I have created a bit of a challenge for myself,
because the reference photos that I'm using aren't the same as the picture here.
My reference is a great indication of colors and how the colors interacting
with the light, but the lighting isn't exactly where I want it to be,
and my characters aren't in the same pose, so it's going to take a little bit
of creativity to adapt this to the picture.
Look it probably doesn't sound that hard,
but I am finding it to be quite challenging, and I'm constantly reminding
myself to trust the process and stop assessing each little section too closely
as I go, especially these white areas because these are not white
and I don't really feel like I know what I'm doing here,
but it seems to be working, so I do know what I'm doing, sort of.
But this is often part of the process.
Being creative means stepping out of your
comfort zone regularly and taking risks that feel a little beyond your skillset.
I learn the most when I do things
that don't quite feel comfortable at the time, and I always surprise myself.
In the end, I forgot that I don't
technically even need a reference photo because I've got Buzz right here.
He's a bit roughed up, but he's okay.
Shaking your head side effects and not make me look stupid.
There's a snake in my boot.
By the way, I'm using my Caran d'Ache Luminance
and Caran d'Ache Pablo pencils today, along with a few Prismacolor pencils.
The Luminance are doing most of the work.
They blend beautifully on this paper and are great for both big and small areas.
The Prismacolors are helping to fill a few areas where I want a specific color
that the Luminance didn't have and that I don't feel like mixing a new color.
And the Pablo's can hold a sharper point, so they are perfect for finer details or
to create a crisp edge along the sides of each section.
This is currently my favorite combination
of pencils, along with the Faber Castell Polychromos
pencils, which I currently only own a small handful of and I've said I won't
buy the full set until I reach 100,000 subscribers.
In fact, I set a crazy ambitious goal earlier this year when I had just 15,000
subscribers to reach 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2021.
If I do, I'm buying myself a set of 120
Polychromos, and I'm buying one of you a set of 120 Polychromos too.
We've got just two weeks left of the year
at the time that I'm publishing this video and wow, it is going to be a close race.
I am not feeling confident about this goal right now if I am being super honest.
We were on track to reach the hundred thousand a few months ago,
right up until YouTube switched its focus to YouTube shorts.
Something broke, something changed, and now my videos just
don't get the same algorithm boost on YouTube that they did six months ago.
Even after two amazing collabs with Jazza and ADC Art Attack, two of the best artists on YouTube.
And the awkward part?
Shane already bought the pencils!
I have been waiting to unbox this insanely
big box, and I think I'm going to have to return it.
So I need your help.
There is still time.
We can still get there.
But if you haven't already subscribed, please do it now.
And if you're up for, like, a video binge session, ya know... just.
That'd be cool!
But anyway, enough of my little vent.
Let's get back to Buzz and Woody.
Look, I found Woody, too.
Not quite the same scale, but...
I'm actually pretty happy with how this is coming out so far.
I've decided that their gifts should match
their characters, or maybe I should have swapped them.
Well, it's too late now, and this works.
I don't often draw the characters faces first.
Usually I leave them to last so I can
practice my technique and get out all my mistakes on the background.
But today this kind of gave me a quick win
and it's helped to build my confidence for the rest of this coloring page.
Now, even if I totally messed the rest
of this up, at least I know this looks like Buzz and Woody.
Pixar has always been such an inspiration for me.
In fact, when I was a kid, I wanted to work for Pixar.
Their movies are some of my favorites,
and I've always been inspired by their innovation and creativity,
not just as artists, but as engineers, animators, and as a company as a whole.
I think I watched the first Toy Story movie at the Drive-in movies.
Let me know in the comments if you are old enough to remember the Drive-in movies.
So I'm looking at Buzz's Jet Pack
and it looks quite different to every single picture I can find of him.
So I'm just going to make some adjustments to try and make this look a little bit
more like what I can see on my toy and on these other pictures.
I think the white plastic of Buzz's suit
is definitely the most challenging part of this drawing because it feels extremely
dark compared to my white background as I'm drawing my first layers.
But white is almost never actually white.
In fact, I have a really in depth video if you'd like to learn more about coloring
white objects and finding the right colors.
Even the brightest points here are
actually a medium grey, but the more I draw, the more these colors
are looking right as I have a bit more context with the rest of this picture.
I am almost finished our characters now
and I'm trying to decide if I want to leave this background white or attempt
a full colored background, I'm kind of liking this as is,
but a colored background could really bring this to life even more and give some
context as to where these blue and pink lights are coming from.
In Toy Story Four,
there were obviously Carnival lights, but I'm imagining mine are Christmas lights.
I'm using some washi tape to quickly mask
off a border around the edge so I can make a start on my background.
I want to keep this background simple
because I don't want to detract from our main characters,
and I still like the color scheme of our Toy Story Four posters as inspiration,
so I'm going to attempt some bouquet lights on a deep blue background.
A bouquet background is a fun way to add
some interest to a coloring page, and it does take some patience,
but it's not as complicated as it looks once you've learned the technique.
Essentially, each light is a circle that fades into the background,
so you want to work in light layers and work back and forth between your light
color and your background color to create a smooth gradient.
It definitely helps to have at least one color in between, so I've chosen a medium
blue for my blue lights and a purple for my pink lights.
If you need some help with blending the colors together,
I have a playlist with some videos to help you learn the same technique I'm using
here and work through some common mistakes that people make.
I'm trying to keep my pencil as sharp as
possible and work in light layers, adding more pressure on my top layer
to remove the extra white gaps and really burnish in the final colors.
As you can see, the final layers really make the bouquet effect work.
I also realized with my overlapping
circles that I can't just simply overlap my colors as well because I'm working
with pigments, but I'm drawing lines, and if you know anything about color
theory, you'll know that colors mix differently in light compared to pigment.
So I'm using my white pencil in the middle
to create a different light in between where these colors will overlap.
Please tell me in the comments which of the Toy Story movies is your favorite?
Because I have now finally watched Toy Story Four recently,
and I have to say I actually don't know which one is my favorite movie.
I love Toy Story One and Two for so many reasons, but then Three and Four actually
did a very, very good job of reinventing the story and bringing new things in,
and so I'm kind of left really unsure as to which one I like.
I think I genuinely like them all, so I'd love to hear from you.
Do you like the original, first Toy Story?
Do you like the ones in between?
Do you like the most recent one?
Have you seen them all?
Do you have a favorite, is there any that you don't
like; tell me in the comments I am very curious.
The background color is almost the same as Woody's jeans so I've darkened this area
of the background by adding a light layer of black underneath the blue
for the ground I've put in some shadows but I've also brought in my lighter blue
and purple, partly for variety but mostly because my dark blue pencil is really
taking a hit here and I don't want to use more than I need at this point.
Thank you for your sacrifice
and I just broke my blender pencil so
apparently I am holding this way too tight and need to loosen up my grip of it
and after three days of coloring we're done.
What a huge difference from the original coloring page to the final result.
This is definitely my favorite drawing I
have ever done and I will be framing it for my wall because I love toy story and I
love everything about how this has come out.
If you enjoyed this video please check out
my other coloring book episodes and coloring tutorials on my channel
and subscribe while you're here, let's end with a fun fact.
Pixar follows 60 accounts on Instagram and all 60 are basically either verified
accounts, Disney accounts or Disney employees, but just a few months ago
they were following 76 accounts and while it was probably by accident I will forever
hold my claim to Fame that Pixar once followed me on Instagram.