Welcome to the fun and freedom that a Tuesday brings…I have a hand full of hours before we pick up the kids, so I thought I would spend a few minutes here.

Day three (half of week two) of the art program at my kids’ school is at an end, and I am whipped.  Working with the kinders is amazing, but there are so many of them.  In fact over 120.  They are very forgiving which is wonderful.  I get to make my mistakes with them and learn how to do things better.  But I won’t lie.  The kinders are very intimidating.  And it is so easy to loose their attention.

The most amazing part of this program for me is that it pushes me to do more of my own work.  So more experiments on canvases are happening, and more paper crafts are exploding.  I am even venturing out to a few new challenge groups, just to break out and see what else is out there.

Up first today is a festive Inspiration Challenge from the designers over at Always Playing with Paper‘s The Challenge.  They are looking for a Christmas Inspiration and based on the photo, a snowman theme seems to be in order.

I pulled out a great little stamp pack from Stampendous that allows you to mix and match your snow people.  I stamped them out onto some good quality watercolor paper, masking where I needed to.  I pulled out my Daniel Smith Primatek watercolors and painted the image.  Now I ran into a bit of a problem.  I may have accidentally stamped out the whole image in my Memento ink, which is perfect for my copics…not good for watercoloring.  The ink smeared.  But as I stopped freaking out, I realized that the smeared ink was working.  I actually really like how all this came out, and I think my little snow friends were pretty cute.  I added some dark blue snow flake paper onto either side of the card, and put the focal image on with dimensional tape.

The gals over at Inspired by All the Little Things this week handed out the most beautiful inspiration photo.  The orange in the picture is absolutely stunning, and just knew I had to emulate it.

Now I don’t really have a floral stamp that looks exactly like the mum in this photo, so I pulled the next best thing from a Walter and Winnie stamp pack.  I stamped the floral straight down the card stock, masking where I needed to.  I used several shades of orange (really yellow, yellow red, and red) copic makers and colored in my mums.  Then I pulled some pretty green textured card stock and white embossed lots of leaves onto the paper.  I added the green card stock with dimensional tape so that it stood up over the floral image.  Now in the end I left the card with zero sentiment on it, but I debated long and hard whether or not to put on on.  I just couldn’t find the right one, or the right place to put, so I just left the card as is.  I think the card speaks volumes even without words.

Up next is one of the new challenges I am trying on, the Muse.  This is a slightly different that is run more by its community than an actual design team, and I find that intriguing.   The inspiration card was in fact designed by a community member this week and we are to be inspired by that design.

I loved the way the floral wrapped around the corner and wanted to recreated that look.  I pulled out a Stampendous floral stamp pack and started stamping out the images.  I colored in the images with my copics using a more muted pallet than the inspiration, but the same color combination.  I pulled what appears to be a really pretty sentiment (even thought it is sort of snarky) and stamped it out in some black ink.  I went with this stamp cause while I was looking at the inspiration photo and one of my kids came in an in a very sarcastic voice said ‘hello’ to get my attention.  I, from that point on, was unable to see the photo as anything but a snarky hello.  So snarky sentiment it was. I added a scrap of pink paper to the edge of everything and called it a day.

Finally today I have a a sketch challenge from the design team over at The Paper Players.  I loved that they star could be replaced with any shape and knew I had a new die that would be just perfect for this challenge.

I wanted to go beyond my comfort zone here and decided to play with some vellum.  I die cut the heart onto the vellum and with a white gel pen traced the image to highlight the heart.  Then I pulled out a faith inspired stamp from Recollections and stamped it onto the vellum with some Stazon.  I pulled some pretty butterfly printed paper and laid it out under the vellum.  I put some purple card stock under the butterflies .  I added a bit more with gel pen foe stitching onto the printed paper and added a few pink dew drops.  I’m not sure the design worked in the end, but it is pretty.

That is all for today.  I am off to fold laundry (jealous aren’t you).  Till next time, find a way to make something that challenges your comfort zone.