I'll Be Here

Happy Friday!
It feels like it's been forever since I had the chance to stand at my desk and just let my mind wander into the creative realm to come up with a card design.  My time has been so dedicated to one specific task these last few weeks, and that will be the case all through June.  But it will be worth it, I hope.  Once my confirmation comes in, I will be able to share the good news with you...but for now, thanks for sticking with me through the long gaps :)

I did manage to get a card put together quickly yesterday for Sami Stamps using an image from our most recent release.

Keeping with the theme of our current challenge to Use Stripes, I played around with my ShinHan markers a little bit.  I made a pile of all my blues and a few of my blue-greens and put them in ombre order.  Then made thick stripes across the piece of diagonal cut card stock.  I did use a colorless blender in between each color transition to try and give it a different faded look, but it wasn't as noticeable as I wanted, so I added some stitching between each color as well.

Then set to work on my Three Loyal Friends puppy image.  Dogs can be tough to color...since I usually stick to cats...but I wanted to feature several colors of Labs on this card so did a google search and had a perfect image pulled up on my computer screen while I worked.  My first go around with this image was going great until I got to the middle pup...and my markers bled so far out of the lines that I had to start over...so I printed this image again on some thicker card stock and started over.

But that little bit of bleeding ended up working in my favor in the end because I needed a mask in order to add the ink blended sunset behind these pups.  So I just trimmed out my previous colored image and added a little re-positionable glue to the back.  Once the glue was dry (you want to let it dry so that it becomes tacky), I placed it over my colored image and added my sunset!  Worked perfectly.

I kept the background plain white outside of the striped piece at the bottom.  I did add a little ripped up piece of vellum along the side and some twine to pull everything together.  The sentiment was stamped right onto the image panel in some black ink.

Remember we have our Use Stripes challenge running for this month, so stop by Sami Stamps and join in for your chance to win!  Just be sure to use a Sami Stamps image!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Addicted to Stamps #197-Make Your Mark
    Crafty Catz #328-Animal Magic
    Retro Sketches #217
    Simon Says Stamp-For a Guy
    Word Art Wednesday #234-Anything Goes

Thanks so much for visiting! <3