It is finally Friday.   Yeah!!!!  I wish that meant we were going to have a slow weekend, but alas, that is not meant to be.  But after this long week, it is nice to know that the super early alarm will not be going off.

I am super ‘mom ‘tired today, since yesterday I spent a wonderful, but yet exhausting day at the zoo with the kindergarten field trip.  Five year olds, needless to say, have an endless supply of energy and excitement.  However it was a perfect day for the zoo with an over cast and cool weather.  The animals were out all day.  My favorite place yesterday was the hummingbird enclosure since the delicate little birds keep zipping around out heads and then landing for pictures.

Somehow I lost a bet with a five year old and she expected me to paint her a painting of a hummingbird to settle up.  So, having never gone back on a bet, I spent a few minutes today playing with a little brusho and watercoloring a quick little hummingbird.  When I dropped the bird off at school, the little girl’s eyes just lit up.  While I’m not crazy about the finished product, she thought the world of it.  She couldn’t believe how much it looked like the hummingbirds we saw in the enclosure.  Now I just have to figure out how to not lose bets with five year olds.

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Today in our list of cards hopefully meeting challenge goals, we have a color challenge from the gals over at Always Playing with Paper‘s The Challenge.  This week they have challenged

us to design with light blue, green, dark blue and yellow.  I loved the inspiration picture, but I am just not feeling florals at the moment, so I tried to push the colors into a different direction.

I stamped out this great image form La-La Land Crafts and started coloring her in with my copics, trying to hit the colors in the challenge.  Yes, I colored her hair dark blue, deal with it.  We lived in Japan for a couple of years, and frankly it would not be that odd to see a hip young girl with dyed blue hair attending festival.  I miss lots of things about Japan and seeing girls of all ages in kimonos.  The colors were always extraordinary.  This little stamp reminds me of out time there, and needless to say brings a bit of a smile to my face.

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Next up is a sketch challenge with a bit of holiday cheer from the Christmas crew over at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown.  Their sketch this

week has a bunch of layers, and I may have gotten a little over excited with layers in this one.

I thought my little window die might perfectly fit this sketch and designed a little Christmas morning scene.  I colored in a image from CC Designs with some alcohol ink and trimmed out a tree and presents from Penny Black.  I know the little girl doesn’t really look holiday-ish, but I know many a Christmas mornings my girls have walked into the living room looking just like this, forgoing Christmas jammies for girly pjs.  I may have gone a little over board with this sketch, but I had too much fun creating the scene.

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The ladies over at Freshly Made Sketches this week tossed out a really interesting sketch this week.  I am not always known for my clean and simple cards, but this week I

really tried to go for it.

I didn’t want to do lots of layers on this card, so instead of adding a different color panel to the bottom of the card, I instead just used a large sentiment stamp from Fiskars.  I added a bit of glittery gel pen to the red Archival Ink on the stamp, and a strip of kraft paper above the word.  Instead of adding a literal line on the left of the card, I instead added a bunch of red crystals.  I added the heart from a wafer thin die from Savvy Stamps and colored in the negative space with glitter pen.

I know this is only a suggestion of the sketch, but in the end I think it worked.  If nothing else I like it.

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Finally today we have a color challenge from the gurus of color over at Color Throwdown.  This week they are daring us to color with cobalt blue, kraft and gray.

For reasons I won’t go into I, pulled out my new die set (thanks again family for the Mother’s day gift) from Stampendous and rigged a card that would allow this sweet little kitty to pop to play with us.  I colored the Stampendous kitty in with some alcohol ink and put some simple paper designs onto the cover of the card.  I have a little person in my world that soon will be receiving this fun little card, and I hope they enjoy it as much as I do.

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That is it for today.  I’m packing up the art desk for the next few hours since my kiddos and I have a movie date now, but I should be back at it after bedtime.  Hope you all have great weekends planned and make some time to craft something lovely.