Pink and purple Christmas

I thought I would try making a quick Christmas card to add to my stash while supporting a good cause at the same time, because the lovely Jingle Belles are donating 4 dollars per linked-up card to help fight breast cancer.

This card was inspired by a this card I saw on Iwona Palamountain's blog. I think I need to go shopping for one of those big and bold Christmas sentiments, but for this card, I simply used what I had.

I stamped various snowflakes from the Hero Arts Designer snowflakes set onto a standard A2 size card (Neenah solar white) using my new Studio Calico inks (Flamingo and Purple rain - don't you love these colours) and then filled up the area with two small stamps from the Swanky Snowdudes set by Paper Smooches that I had lying on my table. To finish I stamped the sentiment from the Cheers set by Elle's Studio.

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:

Jingle Belles - Pink Christmas

Merry Monday - 131 Christmas card in non-traditional colours

CHNC - 199 Use something forgotten or never used
(all 3 stamp sets, 2 of which I have had for quite a while)
Addicted to Stamps and More - 118 Holiday
Christmas at Sweet Stampin' - Snowflakes

A little colouring practice

With a lot of translation work and chancing upon our new dream home, only 700 meters away from our current home, I haven't had much time for crafting in the past weeks. I did manage to wind down in the evenings after work by watching all the inspirational videos and tutorials of the most recent Online Card Class, Copics for card makers. I don't own any Copics (yet), but I assumed I could learn a lot of tricks, tips and techniques that would also be useful for the alcohol-based markers that I do own, and I was right.

One of the great things about this class was that it came with several printable practice sheets, so we could try out colour combinations, blending techniques and so on and colour along with the teachers and guest designers, who were all using the same images. Plus these sheets will serve as excellent reference material for future colouring projects.

So here's a peak at my colouring attempts. 

This first sheet is perfect for keeping track of colour combinations that do and don't work. For this class I practiced with a selection of Promarkers and Flexmarkers that I own. These exercises also made me realise I could use a few more colours, such as a wider selection of reds.

The second sheet is perfect for practicing two and three colour blending and shading (on the presents).

Last night, I was able to do some more colouring and decided to jump to day 8 to try my hand at a technique shown by Debby Hughes, namely using a colourless blender with your markers to achieve a soft watercolour look and blending into white. After colouring the first two leaves (top right) and two petals, I thought this would never work. My colours were too dark and there was a lot of bleeding going on because I had to go back and forth with my markers, but I kept going at it. When I looked at the image again today, I decided the result wasn't half bad, considering this was my very first attempt at this technique and having to figure out my own colour combos. And once I have fussy cut the image and used it on a card, no one will know I had any bleeding issues LOL.

BTW, this last image was one of the images that had been donated by several generous sponsors for printing and use during class (and after LOL). This lovely flower image is by Clearly Besotted and is available for purchase as a clear stamp (Happy Everything set).

That's it for today. Thanks for looking.

FTHS August Stamp of the Month + sketch 77

For today's card I combined the free stamp of the month August stamp by From the Heart Stamps with their current sketch challenge.

I printed the image onto Neenah Solar white cardstock and coloured it using Derwent Coloursoft pencils and then blended the colours with odourless mineral spirits and a paper stump. The papers are from the So Sofie 6 x 6 paper pad by My Mind's Eye. The buttons, twine and pearls are from my stash.

I'm entering my card into the following challenges:

FTHS - Free stamp of the month Augus

FTHS - Sketch 077

Simon Says Stamp - Anything goes
Totally Gorjuss - 251 Pearls
Top Tip Tuesday - Anything goes