Christmas Bouquet

Christmas from Flourishes! We have more to show you and what could be a better start to Flourishes sneak peek week than a floral from Marcella's sketch book.

This is a simple card using just white as the base card and image layer and red as a background layer, with plenty of green in my coloring and ribbon. Copic's give me the color depth in my images that I have come to expect with my color medium of choice.
Christmas Bouquet is my favorite of the month, in fact I used it for my ATC swap too.


Christmas Bouquet comes in two sizes and both are easy to color. If you are making just one or many what better way to celebrate than with a Christmas Bouquet.

Flourishes newsletter will provide more looks at a Winter Bouquet.





Flourishes design team have come up with more to see with this beautiful set.

Sketch With a Purpose

Which comes first.................? The image or the sketch design?

In this case it was the stamped images that I had colored and "matted", then I to find a sketch design to show case them! I turned to SCS with all of their sketch challenges. It makes it easy just to go to the thread that has all of the challenges listed by number.
I went down the line, well I stated close to the bottom, until I found a sketch that would work. The sketch I found was SC248, that seemed to fit very well with the two images I had stamped.

I stamped the image with SU true thyme, then colored them with atyouspica glitter pens. You are able to see just a hint of sparkle, click on the image to see it better. The best thing about this card, for me anyway, was the fact that I used some of those snowflake brads that I have had for a number of years.

I could have done much better on the picture, but I got my foot tangled in my cell phone cord (it was charging on my work table) and pulled it off onto the floor. Yikes!!! My camera came off the table with it. They both fell onto a carpeted floor so when I picked them up everything looked OK. It wasn't until I got ready to take a picture of my finished card that I saw the lens to my camera was bend at an angle...........not good. It will no longer auto focus, so here I am moving my whole body back an forth trying to get my card into focus.

I do have a long range lens for my camera but the closest I can take a picture is from 30 feet away...........not good! Do I see an early Christmas present in my future??? I Believe!

Thank you for stopping by.

Time for A Challenge

As soon as I went to the site for SCS inspiration challenge for Saturday I knew I would play along. Franz Porcelain has so very many beautiful pieces that I have to talk myself out of buying something every time I look at one of them. This card instead, along with taking pictures to show how I color with Copic markers using the color collections as sold at Flourishes. I used the Poppy collection for the poinsettias as well as a couple of markers from the soon to be released Fuchsia collection.

The first thing I do is to lay down the lightest shade in which ever collection I will use, in this case it is R20 blush (as shown at the bottom left). As you can see this first picture shows the four stages of coloring I used for the poinsettia.

When I am coloring with Copics, I like to hold all (or most) of the markers I am going to be using in one hand. That allows me to color fast, especially when I have so many flowers to color. And, when I am coloring I do not work on more than 1 image (if it is small) or 2 at the most. Copic's blend their best while they are wet, and being alcohol they dry fairly fast. That is not to say it is impossible to blend more images (like I am doing with these four and taking pictures too) at a time, I just don't want to use more ink than I have too. There is always the blender that you can use....although I have not mastered that...I find I lighten areas TOO much when I use it.

After I lay down the color with my 1st marker I go back and use the next darker shade, R24 prawn (I think, why is the writing so small, it is hard for older eyes to see) . Sometimes I will blend the two colors using the lighter shade(R20), not this time.

I went to R29 to add color in the areas I wanted a little darker, then using R39 I touched up the darkest areas of the poinsettia where I wanted depth.

That is when I went back to R24 to blend all the colors together, that "smooths" out the color transition from lightest to darkest which allows the dimension of the shades to pop!

I knew I wanted to use the poinsettia's as a "frame" but I did not know around what or what shape of what to do with the rest of the image! My inspiration comes from this Franz Porcelain plate.

I hope you enjoy my card as much as I enjoyed making it.

Thank you for stopping by.