Girl in window

I always take a pad of Strathmore 140lb cold-pressed watercolour paper to work with me so I can stamp and paint during breaks and lunches.  Earlier in the week at work I stamped this, and yesterday (also at work), I watercoloured it.  The bird is from the set Love Nest and the window and the girl are from the set Open to Love, both by Flourishes.  They sent me these two sets for free *silly grin* because I drew these images for them.  It was extra hard for me to draw the girl – I couldn’t get the proportions right, nor the pose.  For the final image, I must thank my husband (also an artist) for the ton of help that he gave me on the drawing of the girl.  He pointed out gross errors in anatomy that I had drawn regarding the elbows and the hand structure, and suggested that I pose my own arms and hands in front of the mirror.

After stamping the window, the girl, and the bird, I drew some legs on the bird. Also, when I inked up the window, I didn’t ink up the bottom of it.  That way I could stamp the girl and the bird, and then use a straight-edge to draw the bottom of the window back in.   I so dislike masking – well this way I don’t have to mask! 

Gift tags

A co-worker asked if I could wrap a couple of birthday presents for his wife, and of course I said YES because I love wrapping presents!  I picked out some paper that matched the grosgrain ribbon that I recently bought at Really Reasonable Ribbon.  Then I wanted to make gift tags that matched the wrapping paper.  I used watercolours and a really fine-tipped brush to paint the tag on the smaller present, but before making the second tag, I thought for the umpteenth time, “boy, it sure would be neat and a lot easier if I could somehow use my fine-point calligraphy nib instead of a brush!  Previously, I had tried to mix paint in with some water in a little container so I could dip the nib into the mixture – that got good results but that resulted in a huge waste of pigment if I only wanted to write a tiny bit.  Then I wondered if I could load up the brush and just wipe it off on the side of the nib like this…

And it worked!!  It left enough on the nib for me to write just a little bit!  If the colour was too concentrated, I found I could simply add maybe half a drop more of water to lighten the colour. 

 I applied watercolour to the second tag on the larger present using the nib.  Here are the tags (the green words on the right one are painted with a brush, and everything else was done with a nib):

and here are the finished presents…

I hope his wife enjoys them!

Love birds by Flourishes LLC

I made this card for my sister and my husband wanted to keep it!  Argh.  I love it that he likes my cards so much, but I so dislike making the same card you know?  So I made a similar one here…

It was the perfect opportunity to use one of the stamps from two new stamp sets that I got from Flourishes!  They sent these sets to me for free *happy dance*!  Guess why guess why!  Okay it is because I helped draw some of the line images!  *ear to ear grin*  I have been crowing about this to all my immediate co-workers, but none of them are card makers so they don’t much care.  Doesn’t stop me from crowing.  Hee hee.   

I am so grateful to the Flourishes company for taking a chance on me!  I hope they sell a lot of these sets so they don’t regret it.  (yikes)

I am also grateful to my sister, who provided me with the “training” needed to crank out pictures fast.  She is religious and wanted to help her son learn lots of Bible verses, so she asked if I would be willing to illustrate stuff for the verses so he could look at a picture and remember a phrase from a verse.  I said “sure” so she gave me lists of things to draw.  The first sets of drawings took me a long time – ’cause I would draw it in pencil first and then painstakingly ink over it.  Eventually I got to where I was just cranking them out with no rough draft and no pen and just watercolouring the little scenes right off.  I even pretended I was a company and made up a name for it: 

Discount Illustrations* 
•Lowest prices! 
•Free shipping and handling!

and then in smaller print:
*satisfaction NOT guaranteed

Heh heh.  Well, my sister is easy to please – she said as long as she asked for a drawing of a man, and got an image that looked more like a man than say, a refrigerator, she’d be happy.   She asked me to make them all a 4 X 6 size so she put them in little photo albums with the picture on one side and the corresponding phrase on the other side. 

Okay, I’m done rambling…I’m going to go surf SCS now and try to start making some Christmas cards!