Friday, January 27, 2012

Another Friday, and another card class update

I have a couple bits of news today...okay...maybe more than two bits of news. First is that my class is full at Pickle and we have secured Saturday March 3rd date for a second class. Call the store to sign up. Second I want to show you our second class card, which I sneakily worked into this weeks Bellarific Friday sketch because I'm a busy babe and had to multi-task last weekend so you guessed it, another Bella! This card we will do a Mo because my observations from last class is that you all can ROCK those Mo's so this time up we are gonna colour Sorry Shanna. All class supplies can be found at the end of this post!


Again, we will start with copics and add some depth with pencils. If you are missing any colours be sure to call or drop in at Pickle to top up your stash and if you want to learn to create some soft shading around the image be sure to have B0000, B00 and a colourless blender! I really think you are gonna like this!

Next week our challenge is Vanentine's...now you don't have to make a traditional valentine's day card, anything with pink/red/white, or a love card of any sort will do. The ONLY rule is to use a stamping bella image. To answer some questions...the 'winner' of bella bucks will be drawn from SCS...so upload your card to your gallery using the keyword BELLARIFFIC0412. Head on over to the forum to find this weeks  challenge thread to tell us you entered. AND if you want your card to be featured on Emily's blog, email it to her by Thursday night at 5pm the night before the challenge airs! Although this is not necessary to win, It's like a double whammy to get your card featured.

Hmmmm....now that I have typed this, in between talking to my mom, emailing with Paula and Pauline, and chatting with my hubby, I can't remember what those other two tidbits of info were! There is a name for that because I know someone has sent me an email on that subject. It has something to do with aging, multitasking, and not being able to remember what you started out to do. There is an acronym for it...but sadly, i can't remember what it is!

Welcome to the senior years! I think I have arrived!

Linda

Monday, January 23, 2012

Pickle Classes are BACK!

Yes, for all the locals here I will be teaching a copic class at Pickle...no certification or anything 'formal' like that (I'm, not certified!)...more of a 'this is how Linda does it' type of class. My classic style of starting with markers and finishing with pencils. It gets me the best of the two things I love, colour saturation and texture! Of course I had to throw in some bella goodness into the class and this week I'll be posting both of the cards I'll be doing with a total list of class supplies at the end of this post so you can start getting those supplies in order. Remember, you must come with your own supplies to this class.

First up is Birdie Jane.


There were a couple different ways I could have approached the folds in her skirt, but I decided to go simple to give you all a chance to create long strokes of colour without paying attention to detail.. Another thing I am going to show you is how to create some soft shading around your image using copics. The biggest problem I hear in class is that you all have trouble doing that with pencil so I thought we would give copics a try this time. DON'T FORGET TO BRING THAT BLENDER because you will need it!

Class details:
Where: The Paper Pickle
When:  Saturday February 18th
Supplies: listed below (this is a complete class list that will cover both images)

copics:
colorless blender
E0000, 000, 00, 11, 35, 37, 51, 53, 55
BG10, 11, 32, B0000, 00, YG0000
G82, 85, R20, 30, RV32, 34, C4

prismacolor pencils:
904 Light Cerrulean Blue
905 Aquamarine
1004 Yellow Chartreuse
1081 Chestnut
1029 Mahogany Red
930 Magenta
French Grey 50% and 90%
White

Sharpen those pencils and juice up those markers and I'll see you soon!

Linda.

Friday, January 20, 2012

What's your fav?

Our challenge this week over at Blogabella was to use one of our fav Stamping Bella images. really? I have to pic a fav? So I decided to go with my current fav line which are the uptown girls and chose an image that hasn't seen ink yet...this is uptown girl CLAUDIA has a candy. Do you like how I just used a portion of the sentiment so it would fit in my tag? But don't look too close, because I did get just a smidge of overflow ink, however, not enough for me to trash it and try again.


As with all my uptown girls, she is on a large 5x7 card, stamped with memento ink on bella's BESTEST paper and coloured with copic markers. I added some shading with prismacolor pencils and gamsol and they really did come in handy on the candy. After I coloured it with markers, it was too pink to match my paper...No worries!....a bit of some deeper orange on there with pencil blended out with gamsol altered the colour perfectly.

What did ya think of the release and Emily's new artists? It was a great release with a little something to please everyone I thought. Now me, I am a little smitten with little matilda and romana, but LOVE tHE cool sophistication of the Jane Davenport line. Can't wait to get my hands on them and hopefully you can't wait to see them all coloured up soon.


Next week we are taking the pressure off and going back to a sketch. I really think we need a shout out to our fantastic Ebru for making these for us so go give her some love this week. Remember to upload your image to the Stamping Bella SCS forum using the keyword BELLARIFFIC0312. And to make our gallery the BEST on SCS, add the keyword StampingBella.

Now for a puppy update, Bessie had her CCL (equivalent to a human ACL) surgery yesterday and is resting comfortably at home. Her spirit is totally broken because she is an active ole' gal and I'm sure doesn't quite understand why she can't run and jump and play and bark at all the dog walkers in 'her' field nextdoor. On a good note, when I came home from work today she perked right up to see me and managed to eat something. Two weeks of restricted movement, then we can start trying to get her to use the leg again. I love my sassy little dog and can't wait till she has her old personality back. (i say that now, but I may regret that in a few weeks when I'm trying to get something done and she shoves a toy in my leg).

Monday, January 16, 2012

Sneak Peek Monday

Did ya hear? Did ya hear?

Stamping Bella is having a release tomorrow and from the little tid bits I have seen on her blog it is gonna be a doozer! One thing about Emily is that she is VERY sneaky and doesn't even reveal to her DT everything she is releasing. We have to wait with baited breath just like everyone else. But she did give us some bits and pieces on her bloggy, and if you follow her on twitter, she may have even spilled something there too. Now me and twitter, I'm not a tweeter. I do have an account, and have the app on my phone, and follow two people MAYBE, but I have not embrassed twitter and have no plans to do so in the near future. For those who do though....and want to follow Emily....check out her post here.

Back to the release...and one thing I DO know is that there are gonna be some uptown gals in there. If you have been on SCS lately and taken a close look at the Stamping Bella banner you may have guessed this already....there are new Uptown Gals in da house and I'd like to introduce you to Felicity and Blair.


Can you guess which one is me? I'll give you a hint...I don't eat cupcakes! I prefer to enjoy my sweets in a liquid form. And I think my gal may have been holding a bottle of champagne, but I don't drink that, so I 'altered' it into a bottle of Merlot! It's all about perspective! And all about ME when it comes to these Uptown Girls because I see just a little bit of me in every one of them.

They were stamped on bella's BESTEST paper with memento ink and coloured with copic markers and prismacolor pencils. Be sure to check out all the other babe's blogs today becaues there are many more sneak peeks to be seen! You can find a link to all of them on my sidebar. And we will be posting these up on SCS and if you want a 'quick glance' you can see them all by searching on the keyword SBJANRELEASE in the gallery.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

AJ Monday is BACK!

YAY!!!! I don't think I have messed around in my art journal since the beginning of December and this was a much needed change of pace.

Emily's theme for this week was "RESOLUTION" and I don't make resolutions, I am much more a 'go with the flow' type of person but that didn't stop me. I put all my 'carding' stuff away, cleared off my space, and pulled out my mixed media products. On this page I mainly stuck with sprays, stencils and gesso. Specifically, S.E.I. tumble dye sprays (LOVE THEM!) and crafters workshop stencils.


One tip I learned from Roben-Marie is to work on plain newsprint paper. Use it to catch the 'over spray' or to blot off your stencils. In the end you are left with some lush 'inky paper' which can be put to use in so many ways. Lately I have been using it to die cut out a word for my page and this time I used a Quickutz alphabet for the word resolve. I love how the 'inky' paper ties in the colours of the page and lets me add a focal word that doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.

I was also pretty excited that I got to use my new Stamping Bella grungy sets that are OH SO PERFECT for art journalling....journal your art out moody fingers and journal your art out grungy set #1. LOVE both of these and hope to put them to use in a card soon.

Now if you click on the pic, it should blow up large enough to read my resolution, which is NO resolution at all! But just to take life one day at a time and enjoy the things that make me happy day by day. Once they don't make me happy anymore, I'm gonna move on to something that does.

I'm an easy rider!

Linda.

It a Sunday morning coffee post

I haven't done one of these in a while. Sitting here with my coffee, watching the news, looking at the snow (ugh) in my backyard. It feels kinda comfortable.

Still nursing the princess here, she is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday. It's gonna be a long 6 weeks but by summer she will be good as new. If you missed my last post, the princess is Bessie our West Highland Terrier and she blew out the ACL in her right hind leg. The vet said with feisty little dogs like her, if they blow one (which she did back in 2009) they are very likely to blow the other.

On to other things, I have been anxious to colour up Stamping Bella's SHOPPERS united since I got it but with Christmas cards in full force it kept being pushed aside. But now that I've done it, I can't wait to colour up FRIENDS united because it was really fun to do. And I think I might even use the same layout because it works really well with this image. Whenever I have a busy image it can be daunting to decide what colours to use. That is when I look for a striped paper to pull my colour scheme from and this one is from Basic Grey hello luscious. A subtle background paper, a little peek of the stripes pulls everything together without being too busy. I love the look.


I used copics on this one with some added prismacolor pencils for shading. I also tried to keep my colouring and shading a little sketchy looking to compliment the image. It is okay for me to say I really LOVE this card!

Our first bellarific friday of the year was awesome, and last night I went and read some of the chatter in the forum. So fun to see everyone coming back there.

Now I've got soup to make for this week's lunches and hope to get a little messy with some Art Journalling this afternoon. It's been a while so it should be a nice break, I'm feeling something with a floral theme coming on. And Emily's AJ Monday theme this week is 'resolution'. I don't actually make resolutions so we'll see how that goes. But I do have an idea floating around and may pull out my quote books to look for something to go along with it.

That it for today, but i'll be back tomorrow with something exciting!

Friday, January 13, 2012

Oh, it's been a long day....

....of technical difficulties, both at work and at home. I called in three tickets to our support desk today, and I probably don't ever call one in a month! Then I couldn't upload to splitcoast because a) my password was messed up, and b) my picture was too large. I tried THREE TIMES to shrink it and finally got it there. So now I know what I need to do.

Then to top it off, I just got home from the Vet and my girl, Bessie, blew her knee out and needs surgery on Tuesday. Those darn squirrels! She took off after a squirrel, took a quick turn and that's the end of the story. She blew out her other knee back in 2009 and the Vet said that with feisty dogs like her, if they blow one, it is only a matter of time before they blow the other. So I've been carrying her around for the last two days because she is really having trouble walking. We've had a lot of couch-time bonding! But that's okay, that what mom's are for! hahahaaa! I know, only a pet owner can really relate to that.

With all of my trauma behind me, I can move on to business, the REAL reason why I am here, BELLARIFIC Friday and this week we had fab sketch from our bella-babe-a-sister Ebru. She is so multi talented and her sketches are right up there along with the best of them. I decided to take Stamping Bella's Uptown Girl Posh has a Present and crop her off with a spellbinders oval die so I could use her in the sketch.


Then I paired her up with some Basic Grey Out of print so I could put her in a hot pink dress created with a variety of copic RV's. I'll admit, I used a lot of pencils on her, especially for the prezzies, so I didn't keep track of the copics.

Next week, is all about fav's....pull out your FAVOURITE bella image and ink it up. And if you haven't heard our challenges have moved over to the Stamping Bella Forum on Splitcoast Stampers.

Here are the deets:
  • this is the link in the forum to our Jan 20th challenge
  • be sure to use the keyword BELLARIFFIC0212 as a keyword because Em will search by THAT keyword to pick a winner
  • AND to make our gallery the bestest on SCS also add the keyword of StampingBella (one word) and when we want bella inspiration we can all just search on that keyword.
Whew! I think that's it for today. I do have another image coloured, something a little different! Hoping I have a chance to get it together tonight if I get a break from nursing my puppy girl!




Friday, January 6, 2012

we're baaaaaack!

on SCS that is! Yup, after a bit of a hiatus, Stamping Bella is back on Splitcoast Stampers.... So what do ya think? Are you all happy about this. I know I need to get my gallery up to date, because I have also been on a bit of a SCS hiatus and haven't uploaded anything there in quite a while but you can find some of my early works by looking for the link on my sidebar. BUT, if you are gonna look, be kind because some of them might be a bit cheezy and I didn't take pics in my early days, I scanned, so they are pretty washed out.

For now, I have another Mo....and for some odd reason I like to do things in pairs (maybe it has something to do with raising twins! LOL!) So after doing big CHAIR girl, I decided to do big CHAIR boy and I'll fess up, this little guy is my fav of the two. Maybe it is the red chair that I love, or the combo of denim blue and red which is one of my secret fav colour combo's. I don't use it much, but when I do, I'm always happy.


He was stamped on bella's BESTEST paper with black memento ink and coloured with the following copic markers.

E000, 00, 02, 11, 31, 33, 35, 13, 37
R22, 24, 29, 59, BG000
B0000, 00, 41, 32, 34, 06, 91, 97, 02
C00, 1, 3, 6, 8, BLACK

And for you copic fans...did you happen to see that copic is coming out with 12 new colours again for winter CHA! Ya...I'll be getting them....(Emily...did you hear that...that means you have to get them in and save a set for me!) you can find the deets here on Debbie Olson's blog. I {heart} Debbie Olson!

that's it for today...'till next time...
Linda

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Holidays are done, are you back in the swing yet?

I'll say I am NOT.

After almost 2 weeks vacation I did manage to hit the pillow by 10 last night but was up at 4, 4:30, 5, and 5:30 and when the alarm went off at 5:45 I was in no mood to get out of bed. In the last two weeks I've come to learn that my 52yr old self likes to sleep till 7am! Unless of course it is New Years Day when I have been out till 1am the night before and I'll sleep till 9! O-M-G...sleeping till 9 makes me wake up and think I have lost half my morning! With working full time, I really don't like to spend my non-working hours sleeping because there are so many other things I would rather do. And I'm a morning person so I'm most productive in the pre-noon hours and sleeping till 9 totally messes up my day.

Now that you know my sleep habits I'll change topics to cards and I do have one to show ya...I pulled out some Stamping Bella's Mo images this week and during what little down time I had I managed to colour up a couple. First up is big CHAIR girl and I decided to colour the chair in a non-conventional turquoise colour. I picture her bedroom is all turquoise and pink and that was my inspiration for the colours. Some glitter on her pink panties and socks with some liquid applique dots on her dress makes her a total girly-girl.


She was stamped with memento ink on bella's bestest paper and coloured with the following copic markers:

e000, 00, 11, 21, 31, 33, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44
e47, 37, 17, 27, 53, 55, CO, 2, 4, W4
R000, 12, 00, 20, 21, 22, 24, 32, E08
BG000, 01, 02, 11, 07, 09, 45, BV00

That's it for tonight, but don't forget about our sketch for Jan 19th....our Ebruabella came to the plate and created us PHENOM sketches for 2012 so if you are a sketch gal....just stick around because it's gonna be a good year.    Well, that's it for today, hitting the pillow to get up early for another day at the 'gas'

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Small Valise Gift card holder

In other non card related works of art I came across a blog called The Gentleman Crafter via Tim Holtz. He makes some pretty amazing projects out of paper and had a tutorial for this small Valise gift card holder. Unfortunately he took down the post with the tutorial so I'm wondering if he is tweeking it up. No matter, I got lucky enough to view it while it was still there and created these little pieces of 'luggage' for the hubs young nephews. They got gift cards for Chapters and EB games which is fun, but not as much fun as finding them in here burried under chocolates.

The outside was adorned with a chain that had a little snowflake and their initial
the inside has a holder on the right for the gift card and on the left a spot where I
slipped in a tag.
Pretty darn cute aren't they!!!! I will say, they were very time consuming but in such a good way I made one for Kim at Pickle too! OooooH....I'm seeing emails pop up from Paula and Pauline...better go check out what was going on....I saw the word shopping in there which has really perked my interest!

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