The beauty of nature

Here's a fairly straight forward 7x5 card I did with some of the new stamps I got at a rubber stamp convention this summer. The edge underneath the mountains is also a new Spellbinders Edgibilities die. The mountains have been colored with 4 shades of  nuetral gray Copic markers with a little bit of warm gray mixed in a few places. Rather than try and make a scene with the mountains, I opted to cut them out and mount them on dark blue cardstock since the words speak about the beauty of nature and giant mountain peaks are awe inspiring examples of nature that dwarf anything man has built.

As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

Happy Birthday Definition Cards

Here are two more new cards. These were inspired by two new stamps I got and some one pound packs of cut up paper that had bunches of a few different colors cut down to 4x6 or smaller. Everything except the white card stock and the card base came out of these bargain packs.

I started out making a male design and decided to make a female version with pinks and yellows from a second pack. Like the last design, it's practically the same except for the color choices and glitter on the pink one but the choice of colors made the male card a female one. The cupcakes weren't part of the original design but that area looked too empty so I colored coordinating cupcakes and added them to the design.

As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

Purple Daisy Bike

Here's an any occasion card I made using a delicate looking bicycle stamp. Usually I would make my card a little brighter but I wanted to do something different with this stamp. I wanted to avoid using white paper, since a lot of the cards I make incorporate white paper so I can color the image. With that direction in mind, I decided to stamp the image on pink and emboss it with a super fine gold embossing powder to preserve all the delicate lines.

I didn't avoid using white paper, you just can't see it. The "gold" cardstock you see started out as white. I used a gold Adirondack dabber to paint the edges of the paper gold so they would accent the bicycle.

The embossing folder was chosen to play on the curled spokes in the wheel and finish off the edges. Since the image was so large and I was making an A2 card, I didn't try to squeeze a sentiment on the card front so now it can be for any occasion, even a simple note to someone.


As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

A Purple Daisy Design Letter Card

Here's another card I did with the Purple Daisy Designs stamps that fit in the EK Success punches.

Rather than color the flowers, leave them white, or glitter over the whole thing, this time I used pink card stock and stamped on it with a darker pink. This gave me a pink flower without any coloring. It doesn't have shading, but it took a lot less time to make. To add another dimension I used Stickles over the stamped areas on the flower at the end after it was mounted. This allows me to finish the card in one sitting and just set the finished product aside to dry. This works well for Stickles because it has a lot of glitter in it so you can don't need to apply much which means the paper won't warp up on you. For cheaper glitter glue products, you might need to let it dry first so you can glue down any warped areas.

This is what I call a letter card. It's sized to fit inside a standard business envelope in the US, so they are easy to mail and it's easy to find envelopes for them. This format works well for a long narrow design like this one.

Overall the card isn't that complicated to make but with the Stickles on the flowers and the dimensional foam under the petals it looks nice. As always, click on the card for the full directions on the web site. When making these, I did put things together in a specific order for specific reasons and the direction on the web site explain this order.

Loon Birthday Wishes

Here is another birthday greeting card designed using Purple Daisy Designs' stamps. This one is designed around masculine colors. For this one I decided to play with airbrushing the water since it was a larger area to cover and there wasn't much else to do since a loon is black and white.

I thought it might go faster and require a little less ink. It should have except I though I had refilled the B91 marker I was using a few days ago and was starting with a full marker, but not much color was going on the paper for some reason. It turns out B93 had been refilled, not B91. It should have been obvious from the result on the paper. No ink in the marker means no ink to go on the page. I had myself convinced this marker had been refilled though.

I didn't figure out the problem until I decided to just color it with the super brush and the marker tip started turning white, which is a bad thing. It was then that I went over to my container of refills and pulled out the B91 refill and found myself staring at a new, sealed, full B91 refill, sitting next to B93 refill that was missing about 2 oz of ink. Since I had the B91 refill I was able to immediately refill it, and the super brush tip seems to still be working fine, although it does have slight discoloration now where it went white. If I hadn't of had the B91 on hand I would have needed to keep it wet with either colorless blender or a little B93 until I could get B91 ordered and shipped to me.

Here's the card. As always, click on the image for full directions.

Pink Retro Bouquet Card

I am still working through some of the Purple Daisy Design stamps I've been using most of the month. This card is a play on an idea I had when making the Copic colored purple daisy one that was posted last week. I had the idea to extend the field of flowers all the way across the front of the card and mount the sentiment over them, but that would have required me to color and mount at least 25 flower images per card and added another hour or two of additional work per card so I stopped the flowers half way. For this one I tried to go for a similar look to my original idea of mounting the sentiment in the middle of the flowers but simplified it so it was easier to make. To try to speed things up a little more I glittered each flower with a quick thin coat of Stickles instead of coloring and shading each one. You do have to wait for this one to dry but takes a lot less effort to get this one done. The hardest and most time consuming thing on this one is peeling the backing off of 31 pieces of dimensional foam tape.


As always, click on the card image for complete directions. Often times the directions have some helpful tips and explain a few things I didn't here and that's especially true for this card.

Copic Seagull Card

Here's another greeting card based on one of the Purple Daisy Design stamps I brought last year to color with that has finally been used. If you recall from previous posts, I'm trying to start the year off by being less of a stamp collector and more of a stamper. I've been buying their stuff at conventions for the last few years but have done very little with some of it because I have too much stuff and not enough free time. I have not gone crazy and decided to stop buying new stuff though if there is cool new stuff out there that I don't have, so it's admittedly a lost battle. (Note to the local crafts stores like Michael's and AC Moore - you need to get new stuff - I have all of your current stuff that I want!) I actually haven't had this stamp that long if you disregard the Thanksgiving and Christmas cardmaking seasons so I guess I did pretty well on this one.

I thought about stamping something on the background to step this up a bit but I really didn't want any other elements on the card to distract from the main image and the saying. One thing this card does really show off is the visual color difference between the warm, cool and neutral grays available in the Copic marker line. The bird was colored with the neutral grays, trying to match the normal feather colors of a real bird. The posts were colored with the warm grays and the bolt was colored with a cool gray, which is perfect when you want something metallic. As always, click on the image to be taken to the website for full directions including the marker colors and paper sizes if you want more information on how to make the card or even if you just want to see the bigger image you can get to from the directions.

Purple Daisy Bouquet

Here's my latest handmade greeting card and another one using the rubber stamps from Purple Daisy Designs that I've been catching up on this month. Fair warning though, this one takes forever to make. You'll have to stamp out 11 flowers and color and shade all the flowers using Copic marker, or your favorite coloring technique. You might want to have an ink refill handy for your light purple marker too if you decide to make a lot of these. One of the nice things about this stamp is that it's designed to fit into a punch. To punch them out you just turn the punch over so you can see the cutting parts and then insert your paper into the punch so you can see the flower through the hole. Line up the flower image with the die inside and squeeze the punch. It's much faster than having to fuss cut out each flower. The really time consuming thing is arranging the bouquet on the paper and putting pieces of the right height of dimensional foam under each leaf. The flowers are at three different heights on the card but taking the time to lay them out right at the three different dimensions makes the card look fabulous. Another really cool thing about this card is the design lends itself to being whatever kind of card you want - all you have to do is add the appropriate words inside.





Click on the card image if you want the full direction sheet from my website on how to make this card.

Did you frog-ot?

If you have frog-otten someone's Birthday already, it's never to too late to send them a card. Here's another card I put together with Purple Daisy stamps that I decided to stop just collecting and actually use this year. It's a fairly straight forward card. The images were colored with some quick and straight forward Copic marker blending and then because of the image size and my desire to make an A2 (4 1/4 x 5 1/2) sized card the frogs and sentiment are just mounted on top with dimensional tape.

It's probably not the last time you'll see this image or idea this year. I've got some ideas for more complicated cards with this that might get made in the next month or two so stay tuned.



As always, click on the images for full directions including the marker colors and paper sizes and if you've made similar frog cards, share them in a comment.

First card of 2011 - Happy Valentine's Day

Happy New Year!

Here's the first card for 2011. It's an early start on Valentine's Day which is only about 5 weeks away now. It was also an opportunity for me to play with a bunch of products I brought last year and hadn't got around to playing with yet. The new Valentine's Day section of the website was kind of bare too so I thought I would try and get a few more Valentine's Day designs out there. There is at least one more coming once I get the web page for it done and there are 2 more heart stamps I have as well that I'm hoping to work into a smaller design before next month gets here.

It doesn't show on the web well but the hearts are covered with a Crystal Lacquer product that makes them look glossy in person so they stand out more. You also can't tell right away but this cards is also an A7 card (7 x 5) because the hearts were so big.




As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

Thanksgiving Cornucopia Card

Here's my latest creation for Thanksgiving - a Cornucopia stamped out and then colored with Copic markers and matted in fall colors for Thanksgiving. I tried another coloring technique initially but for something this you really need the colors to match up exactly to real life because everyone knows what fruits and vegatables look like. Copic markers were the easiest way to get a realistic color.

---

Some blog viewers remove and/or reformat content, breaking it in the process. If this has happened to you, the original content is available at http://sharedcards.blogspot.com/.
For supplies and directions, click on the card image to go directly to that page on http://www.sharedcards.com/