Have yourself a merry little Christmas {Purple Onion Designs}

November 27, 2020November 27, 2020 ElinLeave a comment

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a new Christmas card to share today, featuring some awesome images from Purple Onion Designs.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of penguins and polar bears, and even though their habitats are on opposite sides of the globe, they’ve come together for this card. I mean look at them; that cute cub with a scarf and hat and that penguin sitting on a present with a candy cane in his hand – just too cute to pass up.

The little polar bear’s name is Icicle, and the penguin’s name is Merry, I love that these characters actually have names! I put Merry on a sled, masked everything and stamped the frozen pond horizon behind my cute critters using fadeout ink from Inkon3.

Here’s a bit of a closeup. I swear the bear has some color, even though he looks very one dimensional here. I stamped a sentiment from the Holiday Blurbs II set in blue ink, fussy cut that with a thin white border and popped it up on the front of my card, making it look like the penguin is wishing you a merry Christmas.

Once I finished my coloring, I took the largest of my A2 Stitched Rectangle STAX dies from My Favorite Things to create a nice edge on my scene. I sprinkled on chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous, heating the panel from the back until the granules melted. I glued my panel straight onto a top folding card base I made out of Papertrey Ink Blueberry Sky cardstock.

I wish you could feel the texture of the embossing powder once it’s melted. It’s raised, and kind of like braille, it’s really cool. The Gina K foam tape adds a little lift to the speech bubble, but doesn’t add too much bulk, I love it.

The Purple Onion Designs holiday sale starts today and lasts till the end of next week. 25 % off rubber stamps is a really good deal, and nothing stamps better than rubber stamps, I love them so much!

I still haven’t redone my template for the Copic graphic I usually share, I’m hoping to have time to do it next week, I know there are people relying on it to choose colors!

Have a magical holiday season! {Purple Onion Designs}

November 15, 2020November 16, 2020 Elin4 Comments

I’ve created another card with the wonderful images from The Sweetest Little Town collection from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Stacey Yacula. This time I created a slimline card, albeit not the regular size slimline, if there even is such a thing. This measures 8 1/2″ x 4 3/8″, took hours to color and no less than 45 Copics. Lots of fun, though.

I stamped and masked Woodstock (the fox), the mailbox and Wallace (the penguin) using Extreme Black ink from My Favorite Things, before stamping the bakery background using fadeout ink from Inkon3. I also masked off the left part of that and stamped the Frozen Pond horizon stamp, also in fadeout ink, to tie everything together.

Whenever I have background elements, I pretty much always start with those, and today was no different. I colored in the snow first, both on the roofs and on the ground, before coloring the sky and then the building.

After I’d also colored in the fox, the mailbox and the penguin, I added a sentiment from the Holiday Messages sentiment set, before sprinkling on chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous and heating the panel from the back until the granules melted. I’m usually careful not to get any embossing enamel on top of my letters, but I went in a second time with more and forgot to remove a granule from one of the letters before heating and melting it. I decided not to do anything else to it, but just glued my panel straight onto a white card base.

Plenty of colors used, but there are a lot of images in this one.

Delivering a little holiday cheer! {Purple Onion Designs}

November 9, 2020November 9, 2020 ElinLeave a comment

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a tri-fold card to share with you today, featuring many of the adorable stamps from The Sweetest Little Town collection from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Stacey Yacula. I wanted to create a scene with a couple of the cute critters (Chestnut the bear and Tinsel the squirrel) decorating the tree (Sparkle) and a couple of others (Flannel the racoon and Timothy the hedgehog) meeting to exchange gifts. I stamped the church horizon with fadeout ink, colored in the entire panel with my Copics and used a craft knife to cut everything above the horizon line.

When you open the card, the sky’s still there, but below it are the snow crooners and the snowy fence from a previous collection, stamped again using no line ink. I like using no line ink for the background elements, it makes the focal images really stand out. Open this panel to the right, and there’s lots of room on the inside of the card to write a personal greeting.

I also stamped a sentiment from the new sentiment set between the hedgehog and the raccoon, using Blueberry Sky ink from Papertrey Ink.

In this photo, you can see that there’s another layer of the card behind this panel with the singing critters.

A lot of Copics used for this one, and even 3 out of the 4 different gray families.

Silver Bells {Purple Onion Designs}

November 1, 2020November 1, 2020 Elin2 Comments

Hi, everyone! I’m back with another card using stamps from “The Sweetest Little Town” collection from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Stacey Yacula. For a limited time you can actually purchase the entire collection in a bundle, with a whopping 30 % discount off the regular prices in the Purple Onion store here. They’re all such great images, the sentiments are wonderful and this is an awesome deal. You’d better hurry though, the promotion ends November 15, 2020.

I love these stamps!! And I do believe this is the first time I’ve colored a goose! And it’s such a cute goose too, she (her name is Poinsettia) even has a beanie and is definitely dressed for the season! I wanted to create a scene with a few of the shopping critters and the toy store in the background.

I was going to make a 5×7″ card, but changed my mind. It meant that Hank the owl wouldn’t fit on the front. I chose a dark gray card base and needed to add a panel to write a personal message on the inside, and decided to stamp Hank in a corner and color him up. Isn’t he cute?? Maybe he’s been shopping for his wife, or daughter, or mother, based on the color of his shopping bags. I wanted to keep the color scheme going from the front of the card.

The bears are Miles and Beth. I’m imagining Beth is Miles’ grandmother, and he’s dragging her into the toy store. I really wanted to use the City sidewalks sentiment, and to make it even more fitting I found the vanishing point for a one point perspective using the lines from the buildings and drew in a sidewalk with my Copics. I added a fence and a tree in a park off into the distance to complete my little scene.

To me, this color scheme is a bit untraditional, but I didn’t want to go with the same red and green combo I used for my last card, so I had to come up with something new. Somehow, I had it in my head (thanks to Liz) that my toy store needed to be red, so I came up with a combination of a pink based red, a light, peachy color and a brighter green than the greens I usually go for.

Lots of Copics used for this one, I did color in the whole front of the card, after all. I stamped the background using Fadeout ink from Inkon3, so once my Copic coloring was done, I went in with a gray Prismacolor for details on the windows and a little bit of brown for the horse and the ribbon on the presents in the display windows.

The Sweetest Little Town {Purple Onion Designs}

October 30, 2020October 30, 2020 ElinLeave a comment

Hi, everyone! I’ve got some very exciting news to share. I’m a guest designer for Purple Onion Designs!!! I had to pinch myself when Michele reached out asking me if I wanted to create cards for this new holiday release with images illustrated by Stacey Yacula. As you may know, I’m a massive fan of Stacey’s style, and holiday cards are my absolute favorite to make, it was a match made in heaven! I jumped on the chance, and I’m having so so SO much fun! This is my first card with images from the new release, and there are more to come with awesome, super cute stamps!!

When I first got the stamps, the first thing I did was create masks for each and every single one of them. Time consuming, sure, but so worth it to be able to create scenes like this. For this card, I started by stamping the Sweet Snow Friends stamp (snowman, penguin and bunny) and adding the mask before stamping the Cozy Holiday Home stamp and adding the mask for that one. I usually color my background skies with my Copics, but for this one, I chose to ink blend, and the masks made it super easy. I used Altenew Iceberg ink and Distress Ink in the color Tumbled Glass for my sky.

I colored the scene using Copics, making sure to use muted, soft colors for the background and brighter colors and more detailed coloring for the snowman and his friends. That penguin chick had me, I love him!! I stamped a sentiment from the Holiday messages stamp set on top of the snow in Stormy Sea ink from Papertrey Ink. That particular green color matches the BG90s from Copic so incredibly well.

I cut my colored piece down a little and was going to add it to a 5×7″ card base, but realized I’d cut too much off the height, so I had to shrink the card front accordingly. The finished card measures 5 x 6 1/2″. A bit of an unusual size, I guess, but I think it works. I added a piece of green patterned paper from Papirdesign to my white side folding card base and mounted my colored piece with plenty of foam tape. Normally I’d use Stormy Sea card stock for my base, but I didn’t have a piece big enough, and that patterned paper (without much of a pattern) was a great match.