Creative Expressions Thursday.

Hello lovelies..

Thank you all for such lovely comments yesterday  I really am very appreciative of all your kind words and I answered them all so far yayyyyy, it felt so good to communicate with you all again haha
I truly feel so blessed to have each and every one of you here with me and your kindness really supports me and touches my heart. It really is such an honour to read and reply to your comments.
I am looking forward to catching up with all your emails too.

On to today's lovely little card, isn't that Kitty a cuttie haha..

So please meet Poppy ...

This is another clean and simple card with lots of matting and layering which keeps your eye straight on poppy in the centre but then your eye will wander to the butterfly  and flower with the tiny pop of colour, I gave her a little shadow too which all helps with the illusion of a bright day. The shadow actually continues all around Miss Poppy which kind of lifts her from the card but you do not notice it at first glance. Don't you just love little visual tricks like that? or is it just me haha..

Here is another view to peak at the gorgeous backing stamp, its in the A6 size and it extends beautifully as you can see, the lining up is sometime hard with rubber stamps but this one is quite easy as you can see where the little paws are on the edge of the rubber if you lean over. I love this background, its called The Paw print Lattice stamp. If you look closely the lattice part is little bones so you can use this for the dog stamps in the range too, clever.

 So I stamped Poppy in archival and heat set her. ( bit anthropomorphic but I feel like the characters do come alive once you have stamped them haha).

I coloured her very subtly with my Distress markers  I used antique linen for her fur. I brought in just hints of colour, which seem much more vibrant in person, but I used a combination of the pink range of distress and the green and my trusty white pen to add some little dots on the flower and the kitties eyes etc, again little things that you do not notice but all help in the realism in adding a little shine or light etc.Lastly I used an alcohol marker to add her shadows to bring her forward on the page.
Once she was coloured I added her to a layer of black card, as this card was in all white and black.

 So next I added my sentiment which I thought about keeping for the doggy stamps in the range with the 'Ruff ' in the words, but then I loved the cuteness of Poppy with the words so thought well its my card so I am gonna add it. haha.

 Then came the tricky part of practising lining up the stamp, as I said you can get it to line up really well as I discovered later by looking to the side of the stamp and seeing on the edge where the paw lines up but at first I just randomly stamped and hoped, so in the spirit of not wasting it, I knew I just needed the outside part as the centre would be covered with matting and layering and Poppy.
Once I got this and knew the centre totally did not matter , I mounted it onto black card again.

 I took my sentiment card and mounted that onto black also and added foam to raise it from the backing card , lining up the edges to keep it even. I just love the simplicity of it.

I added more foam to the back of the main image piece and added that to the card, allowing for the sentiment to sit in the centre of that layer too. and last to finish four little flat backed pearls in the corners of layer two. I am very pleased with her as every time I coloured her before this I used many more shades and gave her a total filled image but I really wanted to try this subtle colouring technique and then the bright flowers. The last thing I did was to use a black pen and give Miss butterfly in pink a black dotty trail as butterflies look so cute with them in my opinion.

What do you think?, do you prefer totally coloured images or do you like the simplicity of the shading method? let me know in the comments, its so interesting to hear all your thoughts and I will be answering them as I did with yesterdays too.

As I type this it is torrential rain here in Hertfordshire and soooooo cold. I really do not like winter at all and will be so glad once spring starts to appear round the corner again, lighter nights and not stepping out of work to street lights and dark nights will be a wonderful thing for sure.

Anyway all I hope you liked today's Creative Expressions stamps and card and I look forward to answering your lovely comments and getting back on the blogging track again.

Love and crafty hugs to you all 

Kim

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