So do you ever find that you have pigeon hold yourself into a corner?  Lately, I feel like I have done that to myself.  I sort of have gone down the coloring path for so long, I have forgotten to play…to fail…to mess totally up.  I am sort of going to give my permission to try again, like I did in the beginning, to see what I like doing.

With this decision made, it was sort of the perfect week for it.  Challenges all over the place seem to be searching for something different than what I normally do.  Without further ado, the good, the bad, and the play.  (and yes, I may have forgotten to stamp something and color it.)

Up first is the challenge where this play choice came from.  Over at Art Impressions the challenge this week is a ‘text only’ challenge.  Needless to say as a colorist, this sent me down a spiral…but then I pulled it together and figured it out.  I pulled out a couple of sentiment heavy stamp sets, and decided to fill a bottle of wine with wine themed sentiments.

I sketched out a wine bottle, and then carefully stamped out sentiments from Wine Divas, Love Birds, and Hop, Hop Set.  I die cut out a piece of white card stock from a Craftin Desert Diva die and matted it with some black cardstock.  I (yes, I did some coloring) pulled out my copics and colored in the wine bottle.  Do you know how hard it is to color white wine?  The combination I finally came up with was E40, Y00, and G00.  I think it worked.  I fussy cut out the bottle and added it to the card.  There…a card made up of text!.

This week over at Muse there was a really fun dark card with lots of bright colors and a die cut sentiment.

For my card, I pulled out some watercolor paper, and smooched some distress inks onto it.  I used black soot, mustard seed, salty ocean and picked raspberry.  I then splashed some Black Soot and Picket Fence Distress Paint onto the card.  I matted the watercolor paper with some black card stock and then, using a Ellen Hutson Essentials die, I die cut a sentiment adhered it.  Everything got added to a white A2 card frame and called it done.  I forgot how much I like distress ink smooched backgrounds.

Over at Ellen Hutson’s The Classroom Pin-Sights Challenge, I whipped up a die cut heavy card inspired by the colors on the pin challenge.

I pulled out my Ellen Hutson Essentials Bold Blossom Stand alone dies and cut out three large floral in blue, pink and teal textured papers and a small flower in yellow.  I then die cut a sentiment from the white cardstock using Brushstroke Hello.  I put some red textured card stock under everything and added some crystals.  I am struggling with this one a little since it really is out of my comfort zone, but never the less I think it works.

Finally, the team over at The Paper Players has a sketch challenge going on.  There are times where I find sketch challenges so hard, and for some reason, this incredibly open ended one was exceptionally difficult.

In the end, I pulled out a (new to me, but I think now retired) Some Odd Girl stamps, and stamped out a kitty and mouse onto a piece of white card stock that I die cut into a funky shape using a CDD die.  Then, pulling out a piece of grey card stock I stamped out a mouse and fish repeatedly creating my own paper.  I colored the kitty in simply on the white paper, and adhered it onto the grey paper.  I grabbed a strip of paper cut into the same funky line of the cut out, and adhered it above the image to give the card a bit more interest.  I think I strayed a little too far from the sketch, but you all are just going to have to except that this is where I landed.

That’s it for tonight.  I am off to bed, having stayed up too late once again.