Happy Easter!!

I hope the Easter Bunny treated everyone well this year. My kids always love the egg-hunt, it's always a lot of fun, especially when they find eggs in strange places like the refrigerator the cutlery drawer! 

I've been working hard on new card designs in anticipation of my first craft show coming up in April! More details coming soon.

Today I'm posting some designs that have an animal theme:

New cards for March 2013

I've been working on a new batch of greeting cards, I've been focusing more on the art and less on the embellishments and I'm quite happy with how they turned out. Here they are:

Valentine's Day Cards

Just Wacky

Sometimes I make cards out of random doodles simply because I like the character and think they'd make fun cards. Here are a few of them, they have all been colored using Copic Markers:

Introducing Mopey Dolls

Unfortunately I didn't blog as much as I had planned to last year. I'm going to start 2013 by posting some pictures of cards I made over past eight months. I have a series of cards I've nicknamed "Mopey Dolls" which featured a chibi styled girl. These are fun to draw and lend themselves to bright cheery backgrounds.

First up is one of my favourites, this blue-eyed cutie was the first time I tried colouring in the image with pencil crayons (on the dress) in addition to markers and it came out better than I expected. It's embellished with coloured paper, ribbon and stamped words embossed in gold:

For this next one I used a more horizontal design. The face and eyes were coloured with Copic Markers the rest is coloured with pencil crayons (Prismacolor) and embellished with some ribbon and heart shaped punches:

The next card I decided to cut out the "Mopey doll" image and glued it to some coloured paper. I then experimented with stitching a boarder around the image. It's embellished with paper flowers and a gold embossed stamped word: 

When I made the next three cards I was trying out a ribbon cutter that cuts a pattern in paper that makes it easy to tread a a ribbon. Two of the cards used a stamped background and  the middle card features more stitching and some paper punch flowers:

Making a Birthday Card

My mother sent me a photo of a flower in her garden. I thought that it might make a nice card so I printed it out and sketched out the out lines and coloured it in using Copic markers. I then added some patterned paper, ribbon and an embossed Happy Birthday. I think it turned out all right.

Start Again

I think I’m beginning to iron out some of the flaws in the posting of this card blog. I’ve been trying to figure out a better way to photograph the cards. I’ve been looking at what other card bloggers do and decided that using a neutral background looks best, so I’m ditching the black.

Also, I found taking pictures of the cards upright is easier plus you avoid casting weird shadows. Another issue I’ve been tackling is trying to make all the pictures the same width so that it looks more pleasing when I post, by avoiding the annoying varying sizes of photo frames.

On the cards making front:  I have been continuing to make cards out of my doodles. Now that I have a few cards under my belt, when I look at some of my early cards they seem very plain. I didn’t use many embellishments or many layers. I’m finding as I get more comfortable with the process I am starting to experiment a little more.

This week I am posting some more of my early card designs. Two Birthday cards, one for a boy and one for a girl, plus a Thank You card coloured two ways. Once again, the images were drawn by me and coloured with Copic Markers. The word stamps are from Stampin’ Up! and the background papers are from a variety of different sources.

I am always open to suggestions, comments or critiques, after all this is a learning process.