Inspire Me Monday - Trendy Pumpkins

Hello, my Power Poppy Friends! It is my turn once again to share some inspiration with you. I want to give a little disclaimer before we start. I am a TRADITIONAL colors girl when it comes to holiday decor. Just saying that right up front. {smile} But...  

I confess that I enjoy seeing some trendy colors, if only to look at in the store or online! Like these trendy beauties! 

Aren't they interesting?! I am seeing a lot of blue and pink this season, as well as black with pastels. I decided to give you a little taste of trendy! 

I printed the Pumpkins and Pears Digital Stamp Set twice onto white cardstock. I sized both images at approximately 4 1/4" tall. 

I used Prismacolor pencils in shades of gray, plus black to color the three pumpkins. I wanted them to have a bit of chalkboard finish to them. 

I wanted to give the whole display a pretty look, so I chose to use pink for the pears and flowers, and a nice green for the leaves. I used a combination of Prismacolor and Castle Arts colored pencils. I used the pale gray pencils for the display stand.

I am not sold on non-traditional colors for fall, but I admit these pumpkins and pears look striking! I can see them at some sort of theme event!

The second image I decided to color blue pumpkins and pink pears. I have see so many blue pumpkin displays this season! And why not give it a try?!? 

I used a combination of Prismacolor and Castle Arts colored pencils and created two paler blue pumpkins and one darker blue. Such a soft display! The display stand is a farmhouse white, which is perfect for this color palette. 

I used some golden brown pencils for the stems, which gives this image a bit of a vintage vibe...so is it vintage OR is it trendy???

What do you think? Are you team black, team blue, or team traditional? What colors would you like to paint YOUR pumpkins? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for stopping by today!

Power Poppy Products Used:
Pumpkins and Pears Digital Stamp Set

Other Products Used: colored pencils

Prismacolor Premier colored pencils

Castle Arts Soft Touch colored pencils

Scallop edge rectangle die
White cardstock

Black cardstock

The Blossom Challenge: Eat Your Fruit and Veggies

Hello Power Poppy friends!  It’s Christine with you here today and we’re headed into harvest season this month with The Blossom Challenge and our theme “Eat Your Fruit and Veggies”.  Today I am showing off our “vegan” concept with two cards celebrating both gratitude and yummy fruit and veggies.

My first design showcases Power Poppy’s Cabbage Patch set.  Each of these cabbages or kale are coloured with Copic Markers and trimmed out.  I have more photos of this design on my blog, as well as a short tutorial on how I created the coordinating cabbage and kale background.  The mini-slimline size is perfect size for this design to make it feel long and lean, and with lots of room for the images, sentiment banner and background.  

The sentiment is from the polymer version of this set, which is embossed in white and inked in black below. I love all the rich green colour!  It’s the colour I love best!

Next up is a card with one of my favourite fall sets from Power Poppy called:  Pumpkins and Pears.

Marcy always does little vignettes so charmingly and they are such a delight to colour.  I started with Copics for this design and then finished off the colouring with Prismacolor Pencils to add in the fine details.  

The background is a Kraft panel that was masked off with tape and then Distress Oxide Ink was added (Crackling Campfire, Abandoned Coral, Fossilized Amber and Seedless Preserves).  After splattering with water and some white ink and it was dry,  I ran the panel through with a pierced die.  I love the look it gives. It’s finished off with some patterned paper, inked die cut leaves and enamel dots.  

Have you been eating your Fruits and Veggies?  How about creating a card with them?! 

Join us this month with a design using some form of Fruit or Vegetable in the card and at least one Power Poppy stamp.  The Challenge is open for a month and you could win a $20 gift card to the Power Poppy Store!  

To top it off, Marcy has a SALE on some of my favourite Fruit and Veggie themed digi stamps in the store if you’d like to add to your collection and play along!   

You have until October 16th to submit your link below.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Want to know the WINNER from our Sentimental Challenge last month?   Congratulations goes out to..... Maggie S ! Maggie, contact Marcy at bloom@powerpoppy.com to get your prize code!  We look forward to see what you create!  

Enjoy and be inspired with more Fruit and Veggie goodness from the Bloom Brigade playing along today.  

Gloria

Essie

Inspire Me Monday: Celebrating Cheryl

 

Hello friends! Lisa here hosting another edition of Inspire Me Monday and this week we have a very special theme. Last week the Power Poppy family lost a kind, beautiful soul when Bloomie Cheryl Scrivens was called to her Heavenly Home. Cheryl was known for her sweet comments, the wonderful encouragement she gave to so many and for her deep faith. What better way to honor such a fabulous soul than with an Inspire Me Monday that CASE's Cheryl's Power Poppy creations.

CASE Cheryl

Cheryl created so many wonderful projects that I had a hard time narrowing it down to one. Because we have leaves changing and fall is in the air here in southcentral Alaska I decided to CASE her card that features the digital set Painting Pumpkins.

Cheryl's Painting Pumpkins Card

When CASE'ing this card I used the general layout but switched from a square card to an A2 size. When choosing my patterned paper I wanted to use contrasting designs like Cheryl did and I tied them together with a brown strip of cardstock across the middle.  I love how she created her own designs on the pumpkins with a sentiment and hand drawn "doodling" (as she called it) but I decided to leave mine plain.

Here are some more of  Cheryl's creations:

For this Inspire Me Monday we would love to see your cards that have been inspired by Cheryl. Please feel free to share your links in the comment section, and if you'd like to share your memories of Cheryl we would love that also.

Garden Dirt: Copic Marker Swatches for Power Poppy Stamps, Pumpkins

It's pumpkin spice season!

Pumpkins and Pears is one of my all-time favorite stamps from Power Poppy.

Today, I've got an unusual underpaint recipe for coloring an heirloom ghost-pumpkin variety with both Copic Markers and Prismacolor colored pencils. 

Hello, my name is Amy Shulke and I’m the illustrator and art instructor at VanillaArts.com. Welcome to another edition of my blending combination series here at Power Poppy-- The Garden Dirt. 

Why dirt? Because underpainting is a method that relies on layering clean bright colors over the top of contrasting or complementary colors. We're making the dirty colors necessary for realistic looking depth and dimension.

I’ve got a whole series of artistic coloring articles here at the Power Poppy blog; here’s a quick link to a bunch of my previous articles.

Let's color a speckled pumpkin

Today I’m showing you a close-up of one lumpy, bumpy pumpkin. Yes, I was the strange kid who always picked out the misshapen, un-perfect pumpkins with weird tinges of green at the top or funky warts on the side. It drove my mother nuts! 

Marcella's Pumpkins & Pears stamp has three pumpkins to color but you can see that just this one fellow makes a really nice composition for a harvest card. It also wouldn't be hard to add a Jack o' Lantern face to it!

You can find other Power Poppy pumpkin stamps here. This recipe would work on any of them!

The secret to my dimensional pumpkin is the gray marker... and then a green pencil

Where’s the gray? Where's the green?

The gray marker is UNDER the red, orange, and yellow pencils in the deepest valleys between each lobe of the pumpkin. You can kinda see a bit of the gray peeking out up top near the stem but that same gray Copic marker runs all the way down each valley.

The gray desaturates the bright colored pencils, toning them down and making them shady.

Its dirty color and this dingy, slightly unappealing color is what our brains interpret as shade. If this pumpkin were bright orange, bright red, and bright yellow, it would look terribly flat.

Real shade is really dirty.

Then to amplify some of the deep crevices, I came back with a Kelp Green pencil. You can see a little bit of the green up by the stem too but where the green really kicks into overdrive is in the valleys at the very bottom of the pumpkin as well as behind the pears.

Green over red over orange over yellow over gray?

Yep. It sounds like madness but it looks amazing!

Underpainting and desaturated color takes a bit of getting used to. The technique feels weird at first and the color looks even weirder… let’s call realistic shade an acquired taste. 

But once you get used to the color of real shade, you start to see it everywhere, all around you! Your entire life, you’ve been surrounded by murky colors, you just never noticed them.

Don't be afraid to add a little dirt to your next project. It's fantastic!

Want to color Power Poppy’s “Pumpkins and Pears” with me? 

Silvered Pumpkins is part of the my Marker Painting Workshops series of online classes for intermediate to advanced Copic colorers. 

This class is available now with no wait. Work at your own pace, color it as many times as you want, no expiration.

Silvered Pumpkins uses Power Poppy’s beautiful Pumpkins and Pears digital stamp set.

We use a combination of Copic Markers, and Prismacolor Soft Core colored pencils, with accents and splatters of Finetec Metallic Watercolors for an antique mercury glass feel.

You can find out more about the Silvered Pumpkin online class here.

And I’ll see you back here next month for another fun color swatch!

Creative Confetti - Colors of Fall!

Hello and welcome friends to Happy Tuesday! There are a few things I truly miss when we go to Florida for the winter -- the cooler days and the wonderful colors of the leaves! Yes, there is plenty of color in Florida all year long, but the seasons don't compare to the ones that we have in the north. The wonderful colors of fall just beg to be used on a project. And that's what this week's Creative Confetti Challenge is all about! 

HOW TO PLAY: For this week's challenge, let's see your fall colors on your entires! I've provided some fall colors for you above and I'd love it if you gave them a try but really, any hues of fall will do!  

For my project, I choose the digital stamp from Power Poppy called Pumpkins and Pears. It is on sale right now and you can find it HERE

On to my creation! 

Finishing the inside gave me an opportunity to stamp and color up some leaves. Often, I wait until I have a need for a card to stamp on the sentiment. This one could be a Thanksgiving card, or a Hello, or even, How have you been? card.

I printed this image on Copic-friendly paper by Hammermill (100 lb), in the no-line version digital stamp. Then I used my Copic markers to color it.

Here's a look at the Copic Markers that I used to color up my image:

• YR18, YR 15, YR21
• YG95, YG93, YG91
• E37
• C0, C1,C2,C3,C4

I also used the die from Simon Says Stamp called Frames. 

I hope that you join me this week? Simply create, and then link up using the linky below! As we always say, if you get those fingers inky and play along, each and every link is an opportunity to win a $25 gift code to the Power Poppy Shop!

Until next time!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter