Splitcoast Tutorial - Coloring Hair

This week's tutorial is a coloring tutorial - Elizabeth Whisson is sharing her techniques for coloring hair with alcohol markers. I tried her steps with oil-based pencils, just for fun - here's the card I made! This digital image is 'Between' by Mo Manning.

Hope you'll try out the tutorial - it takes practice to color hair, but Elizabeth has some great tips.

Enjoy today!

Splitcoast Tutorial: Checkerboard Flooring

This week's tutorial at Splitcoaststampers is a fun one from Irene Rhodes - she's sharing how she adds checkerboard flooring to her cards for a a realistic scene. I needed a couple of crafty thank you cards, so I printed two digital stamps and pulled out my markers - it's been a long time since I used them together!

 The image on this card is from Mo's Digital Pencil...it's called Jo Painting.

To add the floor I chose a point (I think it was the tip of her nose, actually ), and let all my floor lines radiate from there rather than measuring along the horizontal line. The sentiment is one of my designs at Impression Obsession.

This second image is from Saturated Canary (it's a newer one called A New Canvas). I used Irene's  instructions for wood flooring - love how that turned out!

 The wall art was 'painted' using ink from my markers and a waterbrush filled with rubbing alcohol.

My vanishing point was the bottom point of the heart on her sleeve. I used a lighter color (Sand) over the floor boards (Leather Brown) to add a little depth and grain to the wood.

These are the Touch Twin Markers I used - to save time I used the same colors on both cards, and added some shading with Polychromos Pencils.

Technique challenge: Backlighting

Thanks for all your visits and comments throughout the week last week! I have been mostly absent due to a very frustrating internet cable situation that still is not resolved… so sad that I’m missing all the reports and sneak peeks from CHA. But…. I’ve been creating and playing and organizing, and having my own fun in the meantime. Hope to be online again soon, and I’m so thankful for our co-workers who let me borrow their signal!

Sandy Allnock and I occasionally exchange coloring challenges, and this time she chose a backlit photo as our inspiration piece. Backlighting is a fun technique to play with in photography, positioning a light source behind the subject for a glowy halo effect. It was a difficult challenge to duplicate the effect using markers, since I usually imagine my light source as coming from the upper right, or front of an image. I have a couple of practice cards which I’ll share later – I finally settled on this image from Mo Manning, where light could be coming from behind the child in the window. I don’t have a good color map for the image, because in some areas I had to play around with colors for a while to get the right effect, learning as I went.

I also learned a little about using pencil with markers – in the areas that I wanted to remain really white, I put in highlights with a white pencil first. The pencil resists the marker ink to a point… after some time it will begin to break down because of the alcohol ink, but it does help define those sharply lit areas. I also used a Sakura glaze pen to mask the nails in the window frame.

I adjusted the brightness of the digital image in Word to 72% before printing it, so that it would have a light grey outline. For the lighting effect, I didn’t want a bold black outline, especially on the hair. 

These are the Touch Twin Markers that I used:

I hope you’ll pop over to Sandy’s blog to see what she’s done with the backlighting challenge! She also has a little peek at my new stamp designs on display at CHA - that was fun to see!!!

Happy Birthday to Me!!

New Year's Baby checking in!

Celebrating with an older card from my Dirty Girl days!! The image I used is by illustrator Maurie Manning – it’s called Penelope’s Party Wagon. I colored the image with Touch Twin Markers. The sentiment is from Skipping Stones Design.

I love that my birthday is on the first day of the year - a clean slate, and the promise of many new adventures and opportunities. After looking back all that happened in 2012, I'm excited to see what's ahead!

I know there will be more stamp releases...

I've been working behind the scenes with a new challenge team...

...and I have some freelance mixed media work coming my way, new products to work with, life to explore... I'll share more about what life is like around me too, and try to remember that designing is not my 'day job'!

I'm 38 today and 38 has always been my very favorite number - that makes me even more excited to live it out. I'm grateful for those of you that will be along for the ride!

Just a'swingin'.......

Yesterday I watched this video tutorial by Sandy Allnock on coloring a nighttime scene and was so inspired that I had to try out her technique as well. Thanks Sandy! This really pushed me out of my comfort zone, and was so much fun. I always love trying things that stretch me as an artist.

I printed out a digital image from Mo's Digital Pencil and colored in broad color blocks, as Sandy explains in her video. The colored and white areas (except for the face) were shaded with cool greys,and the background was colored in with blue greys. I think this may have been the first time I colored anything Fluorescent Green...

I borrowed the sketch from this month's challenge over at The Craft's Meow, and I'm also entering Oozak's monthly challenge, since my card has a Christmas theme! So much inspiration everywhere.

Have a great weekend!!