Colouring Challenge: non-blended hair

Hi everyone!  Hope you all had a good weekend and that the week ahead has only nice things in store for us. Thanks so much for the lovely comments for my last card, you make my day you really do.

News

It's all change at Make It Colourful. The fortnightly challenges have now ended BUT the colour addicts still love a challenge so we've all moved over to the Make It Crafty store blog and have become Colouring Inspiration design team members. We'll be choosing our own colouring challenges from a list that Zoe has given us, and as we all post on the blog on different days during the month there is something new to see and hopefully be inspired by every couple of days. Look for us in the Colouring Inspiration section.

Also on the store blog, you'll find inspiration for using Make It Crafty projects in the Design Team Inspiration section, and lots of colouring and craft tutorials in the Techniques section. So something new to see every day.

My card

My card today is my first project in my new role, and it is hopefully OK to blog as it should have arrived at it's destination by now (wink!).  I chose Zoe’s challenge of Hair With Fine Detail, i.e. no blending, and I used Copic markers with a little pencil overshading in parts. The hair I did with Copics only.

The digi image I chose to colour is Ginger House Wife and it doesn’t have a lot of fine detail in the hair, so it can be coloured fairly quickly without blending. I used short, light feather strokes with just the very end of the tip of my copic markers to achieve this layered look. The shades I used were: Y17, YR23, YR27, E37, and E19. Y17 is the colour that I wanted my hightlights to be – the parts where the light catches the hair and we see a shine. So I laid down a base layer of this colour first. Then I took the next colour (YR23) and made feathered strokes from the hairline towards the highlight and from the ends/outside of the hair towards the highlight, then with the next darkest shade I went over the same areas but with slightly shorter strokes so that the lighter-coloured layer underneath still showed through. To make sure that the inks didn’t blend I let each layer dry before putting the next colour on, just to be sure that I complied with the challenge!

Ginger was merged with another Make It Crafty image, Home Sweet Home. I think they go well together, don't you?

Tip: Get the stroke right

When making these feather strokes, practice using only the very end of the tip, keeping your stroke light – you are hardly touching the paper at all really. At the end of the stroke, lift the marker upwards so that the marks on the paper taper off to a point. This gives finer strokes with a tapered end so that you can more easily achieve the effect of strands of hair and texuture with strokes that are defined and not smudged together. This is the sort of line you are aiming for:

You can see how the copic marker brush tip makes a much finer tapered point than does the promarker regular tip, I don't have a fine promarker tip to compare (sorry).

If you're going for defined layers, let your ink dry before putting the next colour on - you can see the effect of feathering onto wet and dry inks:

The wet ink on the left causes the strokes to blur into each other, whereas the dry ink on the right makes the strokes much crisper.

Marker Recipe:

Hair: Y17, YR23, YR27, E37, E19

Skin: E00, E01, E11, R20, R22

Dress & Shoes: R32, R35, R37, R39

Stair carpet: YG61, YG63, YG67

I kept the card fairly simple as the coloured image is quite large, so just a couple of sheets of Papermania paper, some gold mirri card and a Prima flower were enough.

I'd like to enter this in these challenges:

Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Girls Girls Girls
Crafty Ann's - It's a Girl Thing
Oldie But A Goodie - Anything Goes (my papers are a few years old)
Papertake Weekly - Anything Goes
Stampin Sisters In Christ - option 2) Just an image on your card (no sentiment)
Touch Twin Challenges - Getting Hairy

Thanks for dropping by today and for any comments you'd like to leave. Have a good day and happy crafting!

Tags or Tickets at Sundays With Crissy

Hello everyone, how are you all? I'm here today with a card for our challenge at Sundays With Crissy. The theme this month is Tags or Tickets, so if your project has either of these on it, or if your project IS a tag or a ticket then it fits the bill perfectly. I've used a tag in my project which is where I stamped my sentiment. 

This was another chance for me to use this gorgeous image by Crissy, Rose Butterfly. I used it last month too in a different colour scheme, but it's too nice an image not to give it another outing. 

With the tag tucked in place

I wanted to create a Shabby Chic look, so I took these gorgeous papers by Prima and aged them by inking and distressed them round the edges, and added some handstitching. The image was coloured in copics and also handstitched. The tag is one I made some time ago for my DT project for Dream Valley Challenges which you can see HERE. The sentiment is by Tim Holtz and is stamped onto the tag.....it reads: "What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it". The tag was then tucked behind the sentiment and can be pulled out.

The tag taken out - you can see the sentiment now

I'd like to enter this card in these challenges:
Bunny Zoe's Crafts - Anything Goes
Come And Get It Challenges - Flowers and Butterflies
Crafts & Me - Lace
Crafty Cardmakers - Distress It
Papermakeup Stamps - Tic Tac Toe
Papertake Weekly - Anything Goes
Ribbon Girl - Use ribbon or lace
Southern Girls - Things With Wings
Whimsy Inspiration - Things With Wings

I hope you'll come along and show us your projects with tags or tickets this month. You have till the end of the month to enter and could win your choice of some fabulous digi images. Happy crafting!

We're off to Hollywood!

Hi everyone - today I've got a card to show that I made for our latest blog hop at Make It Crafty, for which we've teamed up with Simply Betty Stamps. Details about the hop follow, and my card is further down my post. The hop is for a release of some fun images that can be mixed and matched to make great scenes, and I've used a couple of them in my card. Here's a little sneaky peak before the hop write up:

 Make it Crafty and Simply Betty Stamps are really excited to be bringing you the combined Hollywood Release!

Simply Betty Stamps has a range of characters from Betty Monroe, through to Action Chris the movie director!!

Make it Crafty has a range of background scenes perfect to switch and match with your famous characters!!

Of course we are going to have heaps of fun with this theme and June 1st & June 2nd we will be showcasing our stuff and then June 3rd we're bringing you a fun guessing game... Will you be able to guess the movie??  We'll be giving you some clues to help!!

Join us for the two inspiration days and leave a comment along the way for your chance to win a selection of new images.

There will be FOUR winners each day receiving a surprise character with matching background digi stamps.

Then on June 3rd, guess 6 out of 12 movies correctly and you will have a chance to win:  

Grand Prize

A DVD Movie of your choice
PLUS the whole collection of MiC & SBS digi stamp Hollywood release images.

 

Second Prize
The whole collection of MiC & SBS digi stamp Hollywood release!

 

 

Can't wait?!!

But we know some of you just can't wait so both Betty and Zoe are offering you 25% off
their Hollywood collections between June 1st and June 3rd!

Click Here for Simply Betty Stamps & Click Here for Make it Crafty!

We hope you have lots of fun with us this weekend!!!

You should have arrived here from Lelia, but in case you want to go from the beginning, the hop order is included below.

 

I made a shadow box card using Simply Betty's Little Usher Miller and Make It Crafty's Watching Movies. It's quite a big colouring as the card is A5 sized, and I made some filmstrip ribbons of paper to cover the frame. I've left it pretty simple, it was mainly about the images and the colouring.

Image is sunk about half an inch into the card

Here are the other stops in the hop:

Barbara

Colleen

Betty

Cyndi

Viv

Alison

Jenn D

Suzi

Beccy

Lelia

Carole (you are here!)

Hope you like my card, and don't forget to leave a comment if you're following the blog hop.

Happy crafting!

When is a free blog not a free blog?

Answer: when you've been a busy little blogger and filled it with too many photos - more on that in a second.

Hi all, well I think I gave you the wrong impression when I said I 'had the builders in' on my blog, I didn't have major changes planned - I did that a few weeks ago with my blog makeover. No, I was getting to grips with how photos on our blogs are stored in cyberspace and from there set about reorganising my albums. I deleted a lot of stuff in error so there were big black squares all over my blog while I tracked down the correct photos to replace the voids - didn't look very nice! I did move a few things round and tidied up a bit though, so maybe i should have said I had the de-clutterers and Feng Shui peeps in. I was intending to make this blog post before now but got ill again so it's taken a while to let you know the builders have left now.

Anyway, after reading Mel's panicked post about messages she was getting saying that she'd used up all her storage space for a free blog and was being asked to pay for more storage (what the???) I had a look at the way it works when we put photos on our blogs, our free blogs. Turns out, they are only free up to a point. Photos we put on our blogs are stored at Picasa Web Albums and there is a limit to how much we can store - 1GB - and after that we have to pay, yes pay!! a couple of quid a month. 1GB is probably plenty for many bloggers but for us crafters the photos are pretty essential to our posts and a gigabyte won't go so far. 

Sounds worrying, but I did a bit of looking around and found out some useful bits which I've put here in case this is new to anyone else. It's a bit long, so I've broken it up into segments.

Please excuse my appearance....

Royalty-free image from freedigitalimages.net

Please excuse the appearance of parts of my blog -

I have the builders in!

In other words.....I'm tinkering LOL.

"Error 503 - Service Unavailable"

So I'm trying to visit blogs and keep getting an almost blank white screen with the same old message:

Service Unavailable

Error 503

Does anyone else get this when you try to visit a blog? It's been happening a lot to me for the last couple of months, and I assume it's to do with the code for the new Blogger interface (don't you love it when they "improve" things?) 

Anyway, I've found that if you simply refresh the page, the blog will load fine. Bit annoying to have to keep doing this but at least there is a way round the problem.

Hope you like the little clip art piccie, it's how the computer makes me feel sometimes, lol. Feel free to save it and use it if you like it, it's free from clker.com

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Edit: I've been getting this error message as I've been leaving comments too but the comment still gets published. Just click your 'Back' button to get the blog to display again, and then refresh.....your comment should now be displaying.

What a palaver! I suppose they'll never fix it grrrrrrrrr. Have a good weekend all.

Things With Wings at Sundays With Crissy

Hi everyone, I hope all those in the UK are enjoying their Bank Holiday Monday - I notice we have typical Bank Holiday weather, lol. Don't worry, there's another Holiday at the end of the month to look forward to.

Today I have a card that I made for our challenge this month at Sundays With Crissy. The theme is Things With Wings, so that could mean birds, butterflies, airplanes, or anything else you can think of, as long as it has some wings it will be perfect.

I chose to use this gorgeous digi image by Crissy called Rose Butterfly, which I coloured with copic markers. I went for an overall colour scheme of purple and white, which are 2 colours I just love together, so I searched through my stash of papers and found 2 very old packs by Paper Cellar and Papermania with some nice papers in the right shades. A square doily and some leafy diecuts provide the white to go with my purples.  No extra embellishments on this card, so just a little stitching around the inner mat finishes it off.

I'd like to enter this is these challenges:
2 Sisters - Anything Goes
A & T/Emerald Faeries - Anything Goes
Anything Goes Challenge - Things With Wings
Aud Sentiments - Anything Goes
Crafts & Me - Favourite Colour Combo
Crafty Calender - Things With Wings
Great Impressions - Anything Goes
Just Traceys - Anything Goes
Oldie But A Goodie - Diecuts & punches (leaf die cuts plus papers which are way over 6 months old)
Papertake Weekly - Anything Goes


Hope you like my card today.....if you want to join in the challenge you have till the end of the month to upload your entry. Happy crafting!