sundays are for the birds

luckily they're hilarious color burst birds, so this sunday should be pretty awesome, actually.

on the other hand, the beginning of the work always seems to move at a snail's pace. which... depending on the snail, might still be too fast! 

whatever happens, let's make sure we take time to stop and paint the flowers, k? or in this case paint with color burst, embellish with gelato crayons and add pen doodles to the flowers:

we can't spend the entire day drawing, alas. so let's cut up paper scraps and arrange them into shapes! like circles...

...or squares? either way is far more fun than just cleaning them up, i assure you!

after all that exertion, let's stop and paint the flowers again, k?

i hope this beautiful sunday will bring your fair share of fun and treats! 

♥♥♥

ALL the colors!!!

i've been playing along, when time permits, with kathy racoosin's latest 30 day coloring challenge and i'm really enjoying it. i especially love seeing what everyone else is making (via instagram) even though it has become clear to me that, realistically, i will never come close to being the "epic colorer" that kathy is. apart from the fact that i don't approach her level of talent, i also just do not have the patience. sad but true. on the other hand, i'm finding the practice valuable and fun, which is the main thing, right?

for most of my coloring, i "base coat" the largest part of the image with a tombow dualbrush pen in the lightest/highlight shade of whatever i'm coloring. then i go back in with several darker, coordinating colors of prismacolor pencil to add the shading. finally i blend with either white, or with the colorless blending pencil.

(studio g lotus stamp)

figuring out where the shading should go is probably the hardest part of the coloring process for me; especially on curvy stamps. so it's fun to draw the occasional geometric, straight lined shape, on which it's super-obvious where the shadows and highlights ought to be!

if this one looks a bit familiar, it's because you actually saw it on a completed eyelet outlet easter card earlier this week!

(hero arts oversized "happy" + pink paislee winged heart)

i'm not in love with the way i've colored these uber-cute monstas... tho i think the blue one is not too bad of a first effort at fur?

(monsta stamp set by recollections)

something i realized in the last two weeks is that i don't actually *OWN* all that many stamps which require coloring. so when i was up at paper anthology last weekend, i borrowed some of elisabeth's. this rose + heart number is a fave.

(stupidly, i didn't write down the manufacturer, but it was an older woodmounted stamp)

while i was there, i got to do the lettering on the brand new paper anthology sign. it took me a couple of tries to imitate the style of the logo... 

(which you can see right here)

after a prolonged effort at coloring precisely within the lines of tiny stamped images, i had to go a little crazy and fill a 7x10" sketchbook page with blended gelato crayon shapes... then outline and doodle with a sharpie and some posca paint pens on top. 

and yes, on these occasions, it's obviously entirely necessary to use 

EVERY. 

SINGLE. 

COLOR!!! 

♥♥♥

it's the first mandala monday of march...

...coincidentally a month in which the lovely kathy racoosin of the daily marker is hosting another 30 day coloring challenge. i've participated intermittently in a few of these --mostly via instagram-- and it's always fun to interact with the other participants and see the gorgeous things people post. every single time i say, "i'm going to use this month to practice my stamp+color skills, particularly blending and shading!" and then every single time i wind up just doing my ordinary sketchbook funkiness, but with markers or colorbursts added in. but not this time! i'm determined to do some real PRACTICE!

dina wakley "scribbley birds" colored with a base coat of tombow markers; shaded and blended with prismacolor pencils. 

lawn fawn "critters in the sea" colored with tombow markers and prismacolor pencils. 

gemstone mandala drawn by me, colored with a base coat of tombow markers, shaded and blended with prismacolor pencils. 

it's a bit of a funny time right now. my mom had (scheduled, fairly routine) back surgery last week, for which i cleared the decks and allowed extra time for commuting back and forth to help out. she's doing well, but there have been a few bumps in the road to recovery and instead of heading home last wednesday, she started an unscheduled week of inpatient rehab and physical therapy on friday. so i haven't been spending a huge amount of time online or on social media and i hope you'll bear with me for a bit longer! ♥

because... ♥NARWHALS♥!!!

i could call this post, "why it's not always a bad idea to do something pointless just because you feel like it" but for one thing, that's a really long title; and --more importantly-- it doesn't mention ♥NARWHALS♥ at all!!! i've been slightly obsessed with said unicorns of the sea ever since sprint used the narwhal song in a commercial that only ran for like three days in may, but made an indelible impression on both lovely husband jeff and myself. then last week i saw this pink plushie narwhal on etsy. consider my mind officially blown. clearly the two ideas were meant to be combined in my sketchbook. clearly. duh. :)

my excuse at the time was that it was the first day of kathy racoosin's third  "30 day coloring challenge" (#thedailymarker30day3) and i did this in marker, and even shaded it a tiny bit, but really... i just wanted to draw a pink narwhal in a swirly sea with hand-lettered lyrics. so i did. i've found that when an idea --however silly or tangenial-- is burning a hole in my brain, it's best to just go with it and get it over with. but in this case, it actually led to what i think is a pretty cool (well, definitely unique, anyway, lol!) birthday card for niece lindsay. because having drawn a narwhal, it occurred to me i could paper-piece a narwhal; and then obviously i'd also need to paper-piece a skyscape* for her to inhabit. with a rainbow that emerged from clouds of ice cream. obviously. 

white ledger paper background: basic grey; other paper scraps from: recollections, scrapbook wizard, prima, k and co, american crafts, glitz design and... probably a couple more too small to identify; also a scrap of hobby-lobby kraft cardstock that i had "faux croc-ed" and then not used... turns out faux croc makes an AWESOME ice cream cone... just sayin'; tiny "birthday" letters: mme; "happy" is cut from scraps of vintage music paper, i had actually stamped the letters using an old autumn leaves alphabet set but wound up using this layer --that was held behind the one where the actual stamping took place. so basically, there's another "happy" in this same font that will get used eventually; there might also be another couple of pink patterned narwhals, who can say??; brads: oriental trading and queen and co; wooden sunshine: freckled fawn; cloud punches: ek success; ink: colorbox and ranger distress; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, gluedots, sewing machine

the really interesting thing about this card is that lindsay-- who just turned TWELVE, btw (!!!) --and her cousins had absolutely no problem with the logic of it in any way. afterall, we spent the summer drawing kawaii foods, feathers, minions and in nephew matthew's case, quite a few "lego guys"; to them it is perfectly reasonable that you draw whatever you most love drawing at any given time, and further, that you give your favorite drawings to your favorite people on their birthdays. period. i think there's a fairly awesome lesson right there: stop overthinking and just make something you love... then give it to someone you love. easy peasy. i'm off to do just that darlings and i hope you are, too! ♥♥♥

*for those of you who'd argue it should possibly be a seascape i'd like to point out that whereas ordinary narwhals swim... the pink plaid ones totally fly. seriously. you could look it up in narwhalpedia. g'head, i'll wait. :) :) :)