Thinking of Easter

 Just thinking of Easter and preparing and playing with line art which will eventually end up as digital stamps. Here is one which at present a little boy who is at present an ACEO :)  He is coloured with yummy prismapencils blended with turpentine. During the colouring I had to repeat to myself one of the Jane Davenport's mantra - Trust the mess - as the egg was not doing what it was supposed to. In the end it came out okay and I found a use for the newspaper's black ink that likes to come off on my fingers :)
Hope you have a great day :)

Wanna show your digi stamp talent :)

Yup that is right another competition is happening - yeah!.   For those who ask what is a digi stamp or more properly called a Digital stamp, it is the digital equivalent to an physical art stamp you may buy in a craft store, cover with ink, stamp on paper and then colour, A digital stamp is also just the black and white line art without shading. One of the main uses of digital stamps is in the making of hand-made cards. If you pop over to my other blog you can see lots of digital stamps in use.

Okay back to the competition.
Digital Crafters Art Center is holding the competition "CDAC First Ever Drawing Competition". The competition is open to folks who already draw and sell digital stamps, and to folks who would just like to try it out. If you click here you can read more about it.
Cheers

A little cucake card :)

I just adore this cute birthday card made by Tazza of My Everyday Gifts. She uses one of the cupcake doodle line art/digital stamps set which can be found here.

Wacky pens and cupcakes

Taking a little break from illustrating the book on this blistering day, and finally completed the inking out on the pc of some doodles I had in my little sketch pad. I wanted to do something back to school but I think I missed the mark with the pens :)
These fun sets can be found at the shop.
Cheers

One day Sale at MG :)

A commission gone wrong :( or :)

Every cloud has a silver lining. Sometimes it's hard to see, other times it's not. Early this year I did some work for a new client who half-way through the project disappeared. On the one hand I am not happy that the person just up and left me in the lurk with no payment, but on the other hand it was a relief as this client was very difficult to please. So after more than 2 months of unanswered emails and no payments, (here's the silver lining) I pulled up my art and began to change them to suit me. The result is that while I am out of pocket in a way, I am now very happy with the end line art :D . This digital stamp will be out later this week in mygrafico.
Cheers

A taste of something sweet

I finally finished drawing my cupcakes :) now I need to just save them and put them up lol. However at the moment I am still garden focused and being like a jack in the box since I really wish to be outside digging in the soil and planting Dahlias and going and getting the three apple trees I saw yesterday in a nursery. ... but back to art . Since I got a baker's dozen, I will put a cupcake or two as a freebie in the very near future. The line art / digital stamp version of the set is also finished and is just waiting for me to save them too as single files and upload.
Hope you have a good day :)

Nature's Child 1

Nature's Child the first in a series of whimsical fairy creatures. To be rather honest they are rather popular with a number of artist at present and this is my version. I guess about 18months ago or more I saw something in this line and it reminded of some Danish seasonal plates an exchange student gave an aunt way back in the 1980's. When googling I was not able to find them, but if my faulty memory serves my right I think they must have been Danish Bjorn plates for the style looks similar to what I have found on the net.

The digital stamp/ line art for this first one can be found in my mygrafico shop :)

cheers

Emo ..sort of

Three little emo girl stamps that I am working on. At the moment they will only be in non vector format. I sat with my daughter, borrowed some of her coloured pencils and then cut out the printed digital stamp. I wanted to try to make a card but alas I had printed the line art to big :)

Birthday cards ... digital

I was told that I my digital stamps need examples and not just to colour them :(..."Oh dear I thought", for as I might be able to draw a bit crafting is really not my forte :(, but after a fellow artist showed my that she was trying her hand at the crafting I decided okay I could at least try, and of course since I have no crafting supplies required to make cards and the like I decided to pull out the old Photoshop with some rather cool atomic actions I purchased a while back and give it another go. These are the results: The boy card is made using the little boy stamp
which I then coloured and shades in Photohsop using the burn and dodge tools to get the copic colouring effect. I am quite pleased with this as I think I have finally figured out the colouring technique I wish to use in the Anancy book illustration, which I am about to pick back up. The dots and arrows I used the atomic cupcake action felt tool, and around the sentiment card I used their ink edge action, and little chain - a tin action (but this one did not really come out) lol.
On the little girl card I use the little girl stamp and coloured it the same way as the boy. I then used some paper from the free digital paper (I used the pink and the green - to get the green rim), then I used an atmoic cupcake flower template, and then used various brushes and textures I created in photoshop.
I rather like both cards, and once I get some coloured printer ink and maybe some card I can print them out as see how they actually print. While the boy card will be a straight print the girl card will require a bit of delicate cutting at the top by the green "cord".

Mermaids

I decided to do something a little different with the mermaid set. Instead of the whimsical pencil line I like and I have been using recently I tried the "live trace" that illustrator has. Now there are benefits to live trace in the it is faster once I spend all my time making the sketch a complete line art drawing and then cleaning it up. But there are two serious draw backs it seems (well there are more but two that erk me at the moment).The resulting line is not a smooth as the ones I create when I use the "pencil" brush and two - there are tons of anchor points - which makes the file horrendously large - or maybe I have missed something in a layer. The good points is that this drawing might be easier for digitisers to use - the line issue (again) and also seems to conform with most of what people are doing in the digital stamp world. The problem is I don't really like it. Anyway after saying all of that, the result was not bad, and quite workable. The pic is using one of the mermaids from the mermaid line art set and playing with it.

February Freebie

Just a quickie here, I am rather exhausted today - physically as I have been shoveling snow all weekend and looks like I will be shoveling again tomorrow and the kids will be home as the road to the main road will be snowed-bound until county tractor/plough comes and frees it up :(. Where am I shoveling - our beautifully long @#$& curved driveway.
Anyway I just wanted to let you know in the yahoo group February's freebie has been posted.
Oh I forgot to add, I did complete the butterflies from 2 post before. This pic is one of them where I have used an embroider effect filter. The actual set can be found here.

In progress...

I will, I will, finish this set I started. I swear I will. It will not go the way to the alphabet (after a comment from my darling mum "is that an F"), nor the way of my cat of swirls with its tail problem, nor the intial older pealet creation. I will finish my flutterby designs. BUT, I got to finish a project tomorrow and then should pick another up on Wednesday, AND the car's accumulator died AND the kids have been home for a week again and are well and full of energy. But I will finish my flutterby designs. I am a third of the way and thinking of making it a blue work but not sure. I just need a day.. well a day and a half for I find I can't upload and do the net stuff the same day I finish the drawing - for some reason it really taxes the brain and I have to really struggle to get the set uploaded..ahh the joys of being an artist.

Here's a what the one of the designs looks like. I wish I could make up my mind as to colour or not. This would not be a problem if it was general but I am thinking of making it limited...hmm Oh well I am off to fold clothes and to try and figure out how to get the dog from shedding in the middle of winter. A massive amount of hairballs roam the floor even if I sweep the day before. Can't vacuum as lego pieces might get vacuummed up and that is definitely not worth the results

Another tiger cub freebie stamp :)

At mygrafico.com I have up another tiger cub free stamp. Here the cub cuddles the bear with a blankie :)
Please note free sample from mygrafico can only be used for personal use.
The stamp can be found here

a card by Birgit

In the mygrafico ning community Birgit of bigganed.blogspot.com posted this beautiful card creation. What can I say but WOW!! The colours are muted and some may say a bit drab, but when she combined these muted natural colours with basic materials - card board, a heavy weave (looks sort of like linen) the result is just stunning.
While Birgit lives further north than me, I had hoped that maybe she sells her card. But alas she doesn't.
The line set used in the card can be found at mygrafico (5 clipart set).

A Beginner's Guide to Digital Stamps

Here is another one where a coloured clipart is used in the composition of the card. This one takes you through the whole process of downloading the clipart to your pc to finishing the card.

How To Download, Re-size, and Print Digital Stamps

A while ago I looked for some U-tubes about using clipart as digital stamps but could only find ones where folks used traditional stamps and coloured. Now there are a couple out there :)
Here is one where the person used a black and white clipart as a digital stamp. This is quite basic and show just how to add the stamp to a word doc.

By Artful Xpressions

I just wanted to share a card Micki of Artful Xpressions made with the Jessi stamp. I really love the colours, colouring and background and how alive and happy the card looks. Thanks for doing a great job.
A direct link to the card is here

Dotti's cook out

Here is an attempt using the Dotti digital stamp which can be found at mygrafico.com. I was not totally sure what to do with her, so in t he end I blotted out the star with a pot and wah-La got decided on a casual type invitation. Since the party is to be on the 4th of July I decided to go with the appropriate colours :) A digital paper as a the background, a corrugated cardboard jpg colour changed, resized. On one I used a glitter edge action but had to then trim it as it was too wide for my liking., figured out how to get the stitching action to work, but I am not overly happy with it. Then I added some brads, coloured the dotti clipart, her pot and steam. And then of course added some shadow. Of course this is a photoshop project as I don't have the materials to do the real think but if I did I am not sure I could do it with the kids around nor will I find by some mysterious monster my things decorating the house in one form or fashion. (I have now got to remove a page which mysteriouly was stuck to the parquet floor

Little peacock as a stamp

Converted the little peacock into a digital stamp this weekend. I'm still fretting over line width as I found the freebie I did - hug a cat ( to download it go to http://www.mygrafico.com/freebies/cat-hug/prod_826.html) the line to heavy for colouring - something I did not realise - and in the below post and this I made the line thinner, but now I worry may it is too thin and what if someone wants a heavier line and have only really jpg or png etc etc.

Oh this of course is done via the pc in totally - all expect he original sketch (which may have been also done via the pc but I can't remember now lol). The background and bird were painted - the former via the paint bucket, the latter with the airbrush took to get shadding etc, then I used atomic cupcake's destressed action and added the created effect to a new layer with the colour burn properties and reduced the tranparencies. I found some ribbon I created for an earlier scrapbook set, resized it and changed the colour, did the same thing for some tacks/ brads. Added a shadow to each element to give it (I hope) a more 3D effect and then my book mark was finished.