Hello and welcome to the start of a new week.  I can’t believe it is only Monday…I am having a hard time remembering what day of the week it is, since the kids are always home.  It doesn’t help that my husband got home from work at lunch time on Friday, so it

was sort of like having a three day weekend.

Thursday, when I painted at the plein air competition at the San Diego County Fair, went really well.  No, I didn’t place, but I didn’t expect too either.  Artist who are good at plein air are so good that I don’t ever expect to compete with

them.  But I learned so much from my six hours of painting that I can’t give back that time for anything.  Really I had so much fun.  I painted just outside of the children’s garden, and going against every instinct I have as an artist, I used bold bright primary and secondary colors.  No, this isn’t a master piece, but I like it anyway.

I am continuing with the #Watercolorwithprima 30 day challenge on Instagram.  I wish I could say my work here was brilliant, but I find watercolor sometimes so hard.  The good news is this challenge is stretching me, so there is that.  I hope more than anything the work I do here
makes my watercoloring on my cards better in the end.

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 I’ve been slacking off a little in my card challenges this summer, so this week I’m going to try and get myself back together.  First up today we have a sketch challenge from the CAS group Freshly Made

Sketches.

I am really trying to get better at CAS but I’m just not there yet.  Today I took a couple pieces of  of printed velum and die cut them with a Little B die.  I heat embossed two different Stampendous floral images onto the velum using some emerald green embossing powder.  Then using a piece of printed paper I laid the base for the card and constructed the image with a bit of torn card stock.  I add a bit of green glitter paper to break up the image a little and stamped out a Stampendous sentiment.  Yes, once again it was sort of a literal translation of the sketch, but I think it works in the end.

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This week the gurus of color over at Color Throwdown present a very bright and fun summer color challenge.  They were asking for the colors red raspberry, hot pink, lime green, and bright yellow.

I was all over this card.  I pulled out a stamp set from Your Next Stamp and stamped repeating images of summer treats, flipping them each time I stamp them.  I stamped out the sentiment from the same stamp pack and covered it with a bit of post it tape so that the images wouldn’t interfere with the words.  I colored in the images with both my Copics and Spectrum Noir markers (I just don’t have a great combination for bright pink in my copic collection).  I added a bit of red printed paper under the card stock and called it a day.  I may be alone, but I love this card.  I think for once, I made something that really works.

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 Finally today we have a really interesting color challenge from the queens of color, Colour Q.  This week the queens were looking for going gray, chocolate chip, blush blossom, peach parfait and white.  To be honest I’m not sure I like

these colors together, and yet at the same time their designers did such amazing work that I loved the color combinations in the design inspiration cards.

I didn’t want to head down the floral rabbit hole, but really struggled
with what to do that would use all four of these colors.  While digging through my stamps, I ran into my crazy cat stamps from Tim Holtz, and realized I could make a really cute tabby card with the blush and peach color, so I launched this design from there.  I colored in the kitty with my copics.  I added some brown and gray printed paper under the fussy cut image to create a ground and wall feeling.  Then to round out the card, I added a funny little sentiment from Dylusion sentiment stamp pack.  I may have been at a loss at what to do, and I may be a little none traditional with my approach here, but I really like this card.  It makes me smile.

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That’s all for today.  I’m off to go do a little watercoloring and then we as a family (minus one working husband) off to the pool.  Hope summer is treating everyone else well, and that you all are finding time to make something that makes you smile.