Crazy bird and distress crayons

This card was inspired by Kathy Racoosin's inspiration piece using one of the techniques shown on day 4 of the Creative Chemistry 103 OCC class.

I didn't like how my panel turned out at first, especially because of the dark green and blue, but after I had matted my watercolour panel onto some dark blue and gold print cardstock and had added my sentiment using a die by Little B (Block out), I figured my first attempt at using distress crayons didn't look too bad after all.
When I first saw the Little B sentiment dies 2 years ago, I just had to have them, but this is actually the first time that I used it. Does this sound familiar? I left the letters in the dies (Happy & Birthday) so I could add some glue using a glue pen, placed them where I wanted them and then pressed the letters onto my panel using a big round embossing tool. I discovered I could add some extra dimension this way and also better define letters like the 'd' and 'p'. I die cut the 'day' part an extra time so that I could use the 'd' instead of the 'th' to read 'bird day' instead of 'birthday'.

I'm linking my card at:

Penny Black and More - August Anything goes with a stamp

Stamping Sensations - August Anything goes

STAMPlorations color blooms page samples

Hi there! I have been fun practising my Promarker blending skills using the color blooms page sampler that I downloaded for free from the STAMPlorations blog. It's a sample page from the adult colouring book that STAMPlorations has just released.

As I'm posting this, there's another 11 hours left to link up your coloured page to enter for a chance to win a copy of the colouring book.

Hand-drawn roses

Last Sunday, I was determined to do a little more colouring for Kathy's 30 day colouring challenge and I decided to try and doodle a few roses using my black Memento marker. After all, if I can draw penguins (see my post here), I should also be able to draw some simple roses, right? My first attempt did not go so well, but I simply turned my panel over and started again. This time, I was quite pleased with how my roses turned out, so after colouring my blooms using Promarkers and Flexmarkers, I used my panel to create 2 cards.

I first cut out 1 panel using a stitched rectangle die by SSS, which measures 5.25 x 4 inch and adjusted the size of my base card to match. I cut the panel into 2 parts using 2 more SSS dies from the Stitched slopes and hills set (1 to cut and 1 to stitch) and also cut a black mat using the same die.

For my first card, I cut my sentiment from my panel using a Hello die by Wplus9 and then cut it 3 more times from black cs so that I could add some dimension. 

I'm linking my card at:

Less is More - 286/287 Use something tactile

Passion for Promarkers - 357 My favourite things (stitched dies, word dies, inlaid die cutting)

SSS Wednesday - Fabulous florals

AAA Cards - 70 Stitching

For my second card, I matted my panel using back cs and then stamped a sentiment at the top using a stamp by Clearly Besotted and black Archival ink.

I'm linking up this card at 

Bunny Zoe's Summer Florals challenge

Below are a few more pictures showing the process: