Inspire Me Monday: One Layer Creation

 

Hello all and welcome to another Inspire Me Monday! It's me again, Lisa, and I have another simple method this week, one layer creations! It doesn't matter if you are using clear stamps or digital stamps, one layer cards are a quick and easy way of getting creative.

Let's Get Started! 

I started out by choosing the digital stamp I wanted for this card. Because I have a ton of them in my yard right now and because they are my favorite little flower I went with the Pansies Digital Stamp Set. Using Microsoft Word I arranged the stamp how I wanted it on my card, put a sentiment on it and then sent it to my printer.

Purple and yellow pansies are really the only ones I get, I just love that color combo, so that's the palette I went with for my digital stamp. The coloring went nice and quick because I have colored this image so much. When I was done I just did a quick light gray border around the flowers and called it good! If you are like me and always pressed for time I hope I inspired you to consider creating more one layer cards!

Here are a few other one layer cards I have done with Power Poppy images:

Have a fabulous week, and don't forget to check out the month long The Blossom Challenge going on!

Creative Confetti: Pop of Personality!

Happy Tuesday and welcome to a new Creative Confetti challenge! I'm Lisa Johansen and I am thrilled to be your guest host today! Let's get right to it, shall we?

The temperatures have dropped and most of my flowers have wilted and died with the freezes we've had here in southcentral Alaska. As I was putting away my pots and preparing my yard for winter, I started to think about the flowers I have throughout my gardens and why I chose them. Hardiness? Color? Height? There are so many reasons we lovers of nature choose the flowers and plants that we do for our yards to make them stand out. Then, I started thinking even deeper and wondered if I had to choose a flower that matched my personality which flower would I choose and that's how today's challenge was born folks!

HOW TO PLAY: This is a nice and simple challenge! Just pick a flower that you think best represents your personality and color away! Are you a demure Easter lily? Maybe you are a fun-loving daffodil or a wild and crazy dahlia? There are so many possibilities with this challenge!

I knew right away that I was going to go with pansies, I just adore them. They are the first flowers in my garden to bloom when the snow melts and they are the last ones to say goodbye when the cold moves into the valley. 

How do I compare them to my personality? Well, I see pansies as colorful and bold but yet also hardy and reliable and I can definitely say all of that about myself! I've got a pretty loud personality and will talk to anyone, one of my best friends says I've never met a stranger, but I also like routine and am not a fan of surprises. Living in Alaska one has to be pretty hardy to make it through the different things that get thrown at us out here and those who know me know I'm always reliable, whether it's at work, meeting up for a hike or just to be there for someone in need. 

Now for my card.....

I used the Power Poppy digital stamp set, Pansies for my card and just repeated the image across my panel, turning it and manipulating it in my Word program until I got the look that I wanted. I then used a sentiment from the Easy Breezy Coneflowers digital stamp set to finish off the card. I used Copic markers to color the image and colored my pansies in the colors that I love for my garden, the purple and yellow pansies, and then the orange and purple pansies. It's funny, I'm not a fan of the color purple but in my garden, you'll find it mixed in all over the place! 

Okay folks, now it's your turn to show us what flower represents YOUR personality! Remember, after you create and play along, link up your project using the linky below so we can all see. Since this linky is up all month, every entry with our weekly challenge is one more shot at a $25 gift code to the Power Poppy Shop! Woo hoo!

If you need a certain image for your creation don't forget Power Poppy has a bonus for you! Look at this coupon below for $5.00 off your purchase of $15.00 or more. If you haven't grabbed this great deal yet -- now is the perfect time! It's good until Oct.14th!

Before we let you go, we do need to share the winner from our September Creative Confetti challenges! We put all the names in the virtual hat and random.com drew the number...

Which means the winner is.....

**** CYNTHIA OLHEISER! ****

Just look at Cynthia's gorgeous card using Spring Meadow Bouquet!  She took this beauty "Over the Edge" for one of our challenges and wowed us all! Cynthia, just email Marcella at bloom@powerpoppy.com and she will get your code sent to you for your next shopping trip! 

Thanks everyone for stopping by! I hope you join me this week so I can see what flower shares a bit of your personality! 

~Lisa

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Digis on the 5s release: Pansies

Hey hey hey do I have something really fun to color today! I can speak from personal experience on this one, as I spent a bit of time in the predawn hours painting in my studio before the pitter patter (or electric guitar amp) of four children and a snoozing man broke the sweet silence. I enjoyed my coffee accompanied by a trio of Pansies and a palette of watercolors and gouache. Can’t really think of a better way to start the day!

Here’s what I came up with, after Googling images of peach and purple pansies, and then on the last one, “let’s throw in some blue!” What do you think?

I really can’t underscore enough the value of Googling the flowers you’re coloring to help you along in your color choices. It frees you up from feeling like you have to come up with everything by staring blankly in to your art supply stash and thinking, “where the heck do I start?” You can start directly from nature! And that handy Google!

Here’s what Pansies, our newest digital stamp set download, looks like without my extra leafy fluffery:

In my painting above, you can see that I added extra leaves and green background shading, as I don't cut out my paintings and make cards like many of you all do. (I hope to do this someday!) But for now I tend to make little artworks from my stamps, and often I will enlarge the image a bit to be sure I can get my paintbrush in those tiny areas (another reason I love digis!)

For the artwork above, I changed the opacity of the image to 60% so that it was a light grey, and then printed it at 130% of the original size.

Now, Pansies come in such a gigantic range of cultivars that your coloring options are endless. And what is really great about this new digi is that the “faces” of the pansies are large enough that you have quite a nice canvas on which to get super artsy. There aren’t too many teeny tiny petals the way I have in many of my sets. These are broad, with lots of shading and veining to help you determine where to put in your highlight and shadow. You can really get into artful experiments with these beauties, I know you can!

Would you like to see what some of our Bloom Brigade designers came up with using Pansies? Each creation is so unique and so FUN, I do think you’ll be inspired to try this one for yourself!

Cindy Lawrence

Stacy Morgan

Tosha Leyendekker

Thank you for popping over to the blog today to check out our new Pansies download, and be SURE to come back on Monday to get some wonderful coloring tips from a very special guest!