Color Me Beautiful Challenge #1

There's a new color challenge blog, Color Me Beautiful, that I found out about from an internet blogging friend who made the design team ( congratulations, Margaret !). They posted their very fist challenge this week:

The colors are from Stampin' Up!'s color palette: Basic Gray, Rich Razzleberry, Perfect Plum, Wisteria Wonder and Lucky Limeade - that's a lot to work with ! 

Originally I made a different card, a trifold card with My Digital Studio, but felt it had too much white so I made this one concentrating on using all of the colors. I'll share the other one tomorrow. 

So here is how I made my digital card and a tip for My Digital Studio users.

Basic Gray textured card stock background with Basic Black stitching around the edges for the base.

Three flag punches elongated and filled with small polka dot designer papers: Rich Razzleberry, Perfect Plum, "Wisteria Wonder". Notice that I added quotes around the Wisteria Wonder name? I did that because there is not a digital designer small polka dot paper in Wisteria Wonder, I had to try to create one on my own. 

It will take a little bit of patience as you are trying to line up designs on the papers as well as trying to figure out the color combination, opacity. This process will work well enough to get some colors close enough to those that are not available in the basic digital designer papers if you need to. However,  I've read that MDS2 has a recolor feature that will make it much simpler to recolor items, especially embellishments. I've not seen it first hand though. I'm patiently waiting for the new program to come out on disc (and hopefully go on sale, fingers crossed!!). 

Enough rambling,  here is my TIP, how I made Wisteria Wonder small polka dot designer paper: 

I used a base flag punch of Almost Amethyst small polka dot paper, 100% opacity.

Copy and paste in place, fill with Perfect Plum small polka dot paper at 40% opacity.

Copy and paste in place again, this time fill with Bashful Blue small polka dot paper at 25% opacity. This combination of colors and opacity levels made a fairly close match to a digital  punch I had filled with Wisteria Wonder sitting on top of the project for comparison. I did need to play around with lining up the polka dots a bit (and if you were to look really closely at the image full size you'd see they are not in perfect alignment). I imagine you could do this with any of the basic designer papers that use one color and white to make the digital designer paper, obviously those with more intricate designs would take more work to line up.

Leaves = 5 petal flower punch color filled with Lucky Limeade and enlarged.

Paper Daisies = once I have MDS2 on disc, I will have the capabilities to change colors of embellishments (the digital download trial version took 90 minutes and then didn't work for me)! I did try to add some color to the daisies by adding large drop shadows. Pixel offset is X:0 and Y:0, opacity is 100%, blur is full and I changed the colors to the three purples from the challenge. Drop shadow on the middle flower is Rich Razzleberry. Drop shadow on the top flower is Perfect Plum. Drop Shadow on the center circle punch is Wisteria Wonder. Also, I copied and pasted in place each of the flowers and center circle punch to make the color a bit more intense.

Center circle punch filled with Wisteria Wonder. Add one more circle punch, slightly smaller, filled with white and reduced opacity to 50%. Top off with a stamp image from Punch Bunch in Basic Black.

Thanks for looking =) 

Note: I know that some of the items from My Digital Studio can be recolored in Photoshop Elements, but it will be so much easier to do within the same program as I am working on a project in My Digital Studio once I get MDS2.