OWH Our Daily Bread Designs September Challenge

Our Daily Bread Designs challenges Operation Write Home card makers each month.  For every 50 cards linked to the challenge, they will pay for shipping two boxes to our heroes.  This month's challenge is wheels.  I haven't made to many cards with wheels on them.  Guess I'll have to look for more stamps and papers with some wheels.  At any rate, here's my submission:

The background was cut on the cricut from various papers I had in my stash.  .

Had a wonderful "field" trip yesterday to My Favorite Things.  I love their boutique.  It's so well laid out.  They refill copic markers so that was the main goal.  They also had several of their pure innocence stamps on sale.  Now I have more images I can practice coloring with the copics. 

Hope you are having a wonderful Sunday!

OWH Birthday Party Card Class

I enrolled in the Operation Write Home Birthday Party card class.  There are several neat tutorials and videos in the class.  I finally finished a few of my cards from the class.  Here's the results:

I think they came out kind of cute.  I tried coloring different skin colors for the faces and outfits with Copics.   The stamps are from My Favorite Things and I used cardstock from my stash.

Copic Skin Tones and Hair Colors

Now that I am in the middle of the CreativeLearning.com classes, I've started to experiment with coloring skin and hair.  I found this cute little digi by Kenny K and thought it might be a good image to practice on.  I just might be getting this coloring thing down so I can improve my card images.  Here's my latest attempt:

I colored the skin on the blond with E00, E11, and E13 and her hair is YR20, YR21 and E31.  My favorite is the redhead.  Her hair is YR14, YR18, and E09 and her skin is E00, E000 and BV000.  The Latino skin colors are E11, E13, E15 and BV11 with hair colors of E37, E39, and E79.  The black skin was done with E33, E35, E37 and BV11 with the hair done in E79, E57 and 100. 

Next lesson is to do a real person's face.  That should really be a challenge.    Hope I can master it!

Online Learning and Copic Markers

Well now that Creative Ladder is up and running, I decided to take their first two classes.  Creating Cards with Character is presented by My Favorite Things stamps.  It covers a lot of different techniques to use in card making.  The second one that I'm taking is Chiaroscuro: light and shade by Sandy Allnock, Exec. Dir. of Operation Write Home.  She covers how to shade different objects to make them more realistic.  So I have been doing a lot of practicing in coloring.  My first ones were objects from Sandy's class:

 

I did these with my Prismacolor pencils.  I don't think they came out too bad.  The differences in color on the different planes is very subtle.  It was hard to get a good contrast.  Both classes recommended copic markers so I got them and started practicing.  My second set of images are also from Sandy's class:

 

 

 I think the apple came out really well and the egg doesn't look too bad.  I'm not sure about the flower.    Sandy has us practicing on faces now so here's my attempt at coloring her drawing:

 

 

Well now it's time to start coloring some images for cards.  So I stamped some images from My Favorite Things and started coloring.  Of course, I first needed to get a Momento tuxedo black inpad like they both recommended.  

 

So now with all of this, we'll see if my cards improve as I go along.  Till next time, have a great day!

 

Taking a Card Class

Most of my crafting friends in my community have gone North for the summer.  Really miss those folks!  So to fill the void, I decided to take a card making class at She Scrapbooks in The Villages.   You can see her blog at: http://www.she-scrapbooks.blogspot.com/.  The class was about making masculine cards.  Since Operation Write Home is always asking for Masculine cards, I thought this would be just the thing to do.  Here's the results:

 

To make the cards, we used embossed backgrounds, distressed and inked them.  Then chipboard accents were added.  They were inked with two colors of distress inks and then clear embossed.  It's been a long time since I have embossed but it was fun to get back to using it.  I think they came out very well and I'm sure I'll use this on other cards. 

On a trip to Michael's, I found the cutest ever sock monkey magnets in the clearance section.  I thought they would make perfect cards for kids. 

 

Each one had accessories to go with them and I had just the right papers in my stash to go with them.  I really like the chef monkey.  The background was perfect for his outfit. The camo monkey just needed to be in the forest.  The background I used there was a scrap I had left over from as 12X12 sheet.  Unfortunately it had a big chunk out of it.  So I had to get creative in the placement of the monkey to cover that part up.  I think the card works ok.   I still have a Sheriff and Rock Star monkey left.  I'll have to mull those over before I come up with the right backgrounds for those two.  These were just so much fun to work with. 

 

All of these cards have found their way to Operation Write Home.  Hope all my friends are having a crafty summer and will be back in the fall ready for some more fun.  Keep cool.  It's been hot, muggy, and very wet here.



Fourth of July!

I had hoped to do a better job of keeping up with a blog but time has gotten away from me again.  It's been a good month of card making even though many of my crafty friends have gone North for the summer.  With the heat waves across the country though, I doubt they are fairing much better than we are in Florida. 

One of my favorite completed cards is made from Graphic 45, one of their steampunk lines.  I love the look of this Victorian lady and thought that just the paper with some small embellishments was enough.

 

 

I've been having a great time this month learning new techniques from the Operation Write Home website as well as various items on YouTube.  There are so many things out there to explore!  It's just amazing.   I purchased the Close To My Heart Artiste cricut cartridge.  This cartridge has so many things on it, it will take ages to go through it all.  I had purchased some robot paper at Tuesday Morning a while back and thought the robot from this cartridge would be perfect to go with it.  What I like about the CTMH cartridges is they have stamps to coordinate with the cuts on the cricut as well as information about what size to cut.  I thought a general robot card would be great to send to a little boy for any occasion.  So here is how that card came out when I finished it:

 

I'll be experimenting more with the Artiste cartridge and coordinating stamps.  Hope you're having a great Fourth of July!





Happy Memorial Day

After spending all day Saturday and part of Sunday going through the Operation Write Home blog hop, It's time to make some cards.  There were so many wonderful ideas on the hop.  I'm sure I will be reviewing some of them for months to come.  I bookmarked a lot of pages for reference later.

It also seems like a good day for AnyHero mail.  Today is the anniversary of my late husband and my wedding.  Well actually we got married on Memorial Day when it was May 30th so we would always remember what day we got married.  Then they changed Memorial Day to the last Monday of May.  So there are many years we have 2 anniversaries, the holiday and the date.  He was a Marine before we were married and I still have many of the letters he wrote while he was away.

One of the blog hop features I liked was the assembly line cards.  So thanks to the Efficient Crafter's wonderful guide, I decided to try it out.  I used some of the 8-1/2 X 11 cardstock I have on hand, an old Stampin Up set and a new sentiment from My Favorite Things.  Here are the results:

 

The stamped images are very subtle in white on some and gold on others.  It was fun to do these.

 

I had a lot of help making cards for OWH with the wonderful crafters at Pennbrooke.  Marge helped put kits together for the group so a bunch of the cards were her design.  Here is a link to some of the cards we made together: Operation Write Home cards.