Hello, is this thing on?  Welcome back and I’m so excited to share something NEW with you this week!  That’s right, I finally found my way into “The Pink Room,” aka the hobby room, and created some cards and tags.  And not all of them are booming with holiday spirit but I’ll save some of those for a little later.  First off, I wanted to show these adorable snowball girls which I used to create some tags. 

This first one is my favorites but all the images I used are from Snowball Fight from Make it Crafty which comes with all three girls!  One of the gift ideas I saw this year was to create a snowball fight in a bucket and that’s what they fun tags are for.  Weren’t they perfect?!

The snowball bucket I’ll show off next week so you’ll want to stick around for that idea.  I saw it in a magazine and thought it would be a great gift for some family friends.  There’s no snow around here but the weather is cold enough that we still have to bundle up tight.  Now, with plush snowballs to throw around the kids can have a little traditional white Christmas activity to enjoy!

Thanks for coming by and hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season – weather it’s hot, cold, white, green or brown!  I think I’m going to curl up on the couch now with some hot cocoa and pepermit icecream.  Mmmmm…. just don’t tell my Mum!  He he he

“No! Not the gumdrop buttons!!”  Yes!! And Gingerbread too!  😀  This is a project for the Make it Crafty Store Blog and the image I’ve used in the Gingerbread Candy House.  (And yes, I’ll make this one into a card too … eventually.)

In much the same way that Viv colored the stone bricks at MiC, that same technique can be used to color other things such as this Gingerbread Candy House.  I practically used the same technique for the gingerbread and the gumdrop candies.  However, this time I started with my darkest colors and worked my way up to the lighter ones, using dots all the way.  If they’re done right after the other then eventually as you get to the lighter colors the texture starts to blend a little and making it come all together.

Here’s a close up of the side of the house which shows the gingerbread and gumdrops in more details.  There was a lot of dotting that went into this one but the effect is perfect for what I wanted.  I also wanted to bring in all sorts of colors to make it bright and cheery like candy usually is but hopefully I’ve used enough reds and greens to keep it holiday oriented.  😀  After all, it IS a Gingerbread house!!

This is a back-dated post for the Make it Crafty Store Blog and a few fun tips to share.  As the Holiday season is fast approaching I wanted to share a few images I had colored (ahem… last year) but thought this was a great time to get them posted.   For these two angel images, I had wanted various methods for using white … or in other words… leaving spaces uncolored.  Now that’s always a hard concept for me since I tend to get heavy handed with my coloring and go wild all over the page!  You might be laughing but it’s true!

This first image s Angelica in Flight.  On her wings, I knew I wanted them white with a lot of shadowing so they’re actually actually much darker than you might expect white to be.  However, I had wondered if I kept the highlights void and left them white, then would it still turn out?  However, the true test is… what do you think? I liked how it turned out and will certainly try it again.  😀  On the second angle’s wings you’ll see I left even more white.

The other technique I tried on this image was to use white as the highlight in her hair.  As usual I became over zealous with my coloring and almost forgot to leave any white!!  But if you look close there are a couple spots so that still count, right?  LOL  With hair is should be much easier to use the flicking/feathering technique and just remember to keep the strokes short.

This angel is called Angelica Praying and is available in the Christmas Angels Collection.  On her dress I wanted to give it a gold look so knew I would have to use white as the lightest spots.  This would be even harder for me because unlike the hair, I’ll try to get blending as seamless as possible and often end up darkening my highlights the second or third time smoothing out the colors.  This little section below shows the best area and you can clearly see the white areas.

Thanks for sticking with me and I hope this gives you some ideas on how white from the paper can be useful in many different techniques.  It’s something I’m still working on myself so we’ll be learning and improving together.  😀

Welcome!!  It’s my day to post at the Make it Crafty Store Blog! I can’t believe how fast the rest of this year is speeding by and it feels like it should be past Christmas already.  Yikes… I haven’t even had time to truly enjoy Halloween yet.  So for this post I thought I’d share a little spooky inspiration using SweetDevilina .  I won’t even mention how long ago I colored this one (nope, my lips are sealed!) but I wanted to attempt coloring this image in red to give her a more demonic devil look. 

Who knows, maybe this will be Hellboy’s new girlfriend!!  he he he.  I wish I had the colors of reds I used but it was probably a combination of R20s with a bit if R40s or R50s to help.  It turned out much brighter butHellboy would be pleased.  😀  Since her skin was so red, I chose greens and browns to tone them down a little and hopefully give her a more earthly tone rather than a Valentines theme.  The black was a goodneutral to help as well and I used two different tones for her hair and her boots.

Although I’m not sure if I like her in a light skin tone or this darker red.  Either way, she was a fun image to color and I didn’t mind coloring her twice… maybe a third time next year!  I hope to get this one made into a card soon so you’ll have to hold me to it!!  A couple nudges here and there would be good.  LOL  Hope you like her!

That’s all for today and I hope you can be brave enough to try it out on your next project!