Oddball Art Stamps December Challenge + Coloring Tutorial!

Welcome to the Oddball Art Stamps December Challenge! You can read all about this month's challenge HERE; it's Anything Goes with Optional Twist of Christmas Lights! There are plenty of prizes up for grabs!! One project I have made to showcase this challenge (it follows this month's theme - so fun!) also comes with a coloring tutorial! This is a step-by-step coloring photo tutorial, as I have yet to master video tutorials. Maybe I can get my kids to help me with the editing in the future?! I hope it's easy to follow and that it can be helpful to some of you lovely stampers out there. We are going to do a step-by-step breakdown of creating and coloring this project:

Sounds fun? Let's get started!! 

One reason I chose to work with this image for a coloring tutorial (aside from DYING of CUTENESS and the fact that it follows this month's Christmassy theme) is that it's not an overly complicated image. When I was new to coloring with my Copic markers, I was highly intimidated by them. I didn't understand blending or layering colors or shading AT ALL. I would shy away from complicated images or scenes because I didn't want to have to try to color them without knowing that I could do them justice. SO, the last time I did a coloring tutorial it was an entire panel scene with merged images and backgrounds and EVERYTHING. So this month, I'm stepping way back and showing you how to take a cute image, a few colors of markers, and make a great project out of it with little to no complicated know-how needed!

We are coloring Bobby, Image No. 133. He's printed on Neenah Solar White cardstock.

I used a handful of markers in complimentary colors for shading and a soft look for this Christmas card.

I started out by laying down a base color for the ears, toes, cheeks and heart design on his leg. 

We are going to do some shading of all the areas with a darker blush pink, and then we're going to blend with our base (lightest) color.

Now I'm going to put down a base color for his body. I chose shades of Cool Grey for this. We are using C-0, C-1, C-3 and C-5.

  

 

 

Blend all the layers with the lightest base color...

Reindeer elephants need antlers!

We're going to shade them and then again, blend with the lightest color.  

 

 

Instead of making a complicated background, I just added a puddle of shadow underneath him to "ground" him within the image. I eyeballed it using my light aqua color. After I cut the image with my die cutting machine, I touched up the blue so it conformed to the circle shape I chose for the finished piece.

Put it all together on sweet Christmas card and you're all set with an easy-peasy hand-colored but NOT intimidating project!

That's it for me! Thanks for stopping by today! Be sure to enter your gorgeous creations into our challenge, you have until the end of December, so get creative!

Oddball Art Co. Tutorial - Shaving Cream Backgrounds

Hello stamping friends! I'm here today with a new Techniques & Tutorials post for Oddball Art Stamps. This technique is another funky, fancy and fun background paper technique. You know I love those! 

Shaving Cream Marbled Backgrounds

This technique has been around FOR.EV.ER. And it's incredibly easy. My kids have done this one before too; it's messy and fun and produces unique results every time. Intrigued?? Let's go!

Ok! Assemble your supplies. You will need some nice cheap foam shaving cream (Gel doesn't work nearly as well. Get foam. The cheaper the better.), inks or watercolor paints, a tray of some kind to create the magic in, something to scrape the foam off the paper once you dip it, and something to swirl the foamy ink around before you apply it to your paper. You'll see what I mean.

 

The first step is to choose the colors you will want for your background. As you can see above, I have chosen red, green, blue and black, to match up with the colors I used in Image No. 252 Fearsome Fiona. Take your tray and add a layer of shaving cream to it. As you can see above, I used a plastic tray that some ground turkey came in. I washed it out and it was perfect. The nice thing about these is you can either wash and reuse when you're done (no worries about stains), or throw the whole mess away and start over next time you want to do some messy art!

Awesome! A nice layer for our ink or paint to sit on. Start adding drops. Anywhere you want. You can't do it "wrong", it's all right!

Yay! More colors?

Now, we are going to swirl/marble the inky shaving cream around to get some funky random patterns to imprint on our paper. A note - I pre-cut several sheets of plain white cardstock to A2 size (4.25"x5.5") before I started this project. These will be the papers that get marbled.

You can see that I used a stylus here for my swirling. I might recommend something more like a popsicle stick that has 2 sizes you can manipulate to change the way your pattern comes out. The stylus was quite skinny and I had to swirl a lot. 

 

Yay! We've swirled, and now we place our paper splat down on top of our marbled, inky, shaving cream masterpiece. We're having fun now! 

Yikes! It looks kinda ugly! Let's fix that. Once you place and press (not too hard) the paper into the inky shaving cream pot, peel it out by one corner. I put my tray on a scrap piece of cardboard, so I put the foamy paper down just next to it after I lifted it out of the tray. You will now want to scrape the foam off RIGHT AWAY. You don't want the paper to get any soggier than necessary. You can see I used a bone folder for this task, but you can use anything with a straight, flat edge. Ideally you want to scrape only once, because setting the scraper down a second time will leave a line on your paper where the edge touches.

Here is how it looks after it's scraped. Every piece will be unique. For this piece I started at the top and scraped downward. I wiped the bone folder off over the sink (or trash) and then moved on to the next piece. After 4 of these quarter sheets, I added another layer of foam and more ink, swirled it around, and did another 4 quarter sheets. 

You're done! Once they are dry, you can use them just like any other paper you've ever used. Decorate and assemble the rest of your project in any way that you envision. I'm a cardmaker, so this is going to be a card! I created the final project using Image No. 252 Fearsome Fiona, which I've colored with Copics and Prismacolor pencils. The bat is a die from Fun Stampers Journey. The other dies are all from Gina Marie. Ribbon and tear drops from my stash.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If I've inspired you to create something, please link it up so I can take a look! Have a fabulous day and thanks for dropping by.

Fancy Fold Blog Hop with Imagine That Digistamp

Happy Thursday crafters!!  

Welcome to my stop on the "Fancy Fold Blog Hop" with  Imagine That Digistamps! We hope you will be inspired to try some of these card folds, treat boxes or other 3D projects which is perfect timing with Christmas right around the corner!

I made an Easel Card using the Red Nose Reindeer digi set (in shop HERE). I followed this easy tutorial from Splitcoast Stampers. I LOVE Easel Cards, they are fun to make and they look like a million FANCY bucks when finished. When I need to step out of my comfort zone of.... "Standard A2 Card", LOL, I reach for ideas using this type of project layout first!

Here's a view of my card, this is the finished product, but it's closed. If I were to mail this or give it to someone, when they took it out of the envie, this is what they would see.

Then....the magic happens! Final, finished card, standing up in Easel form. This image is perfect for Easel cards. PERFECT. You can crank out a whole pile the MOST AMAZING Christmas cards for everyone on your list in a matter of hours. I used the pre-colored version of the most adorable Rudolph ever for this project. Try it, you'll love it, I guarantee. Impress your friends! ;)

Thanks for joining us on our Fancy Fold Adventure today! I hope that you've been inspired. 

Be sure to start at the Creative Playground!! Here is a full list of the hop....

The Creative Playground 
Audrey

Chrissy

Deanne 

Doris 

Helen

** Jennifer **
Julie 

Kris

Lisa

Lisa Lynn

 Margreet

Sherry

Oddball Art Stamps - October/November Challenge and Coloring Tutorial!

Welcome to the Oddball Art Stamps October/November Challenge! We have revamped how we do challenges, please stop over and read all about it HERE. There are still plenty of prizes up for grabs!! One project I have made to showcase this challenge (it follows this month's theme of "Cemeteries of London" - so fun!) also comes with a coloring tutorial! This is my first step-by-step coloring photo tutorial, so I hope it's easy to follow and that it can be helpful to some of you lovely stampers out there. We are going to do a step-by-step breakdown of creating and coloring this project:

Sounds fun? Let's get started!! 

I forgot to take a photo of this merged image before I started coloring. Whoops! So just imagine this first image with ZERO color on it, and that's where we started. ;)

I started out by laying down a base coloring for the grass. My plan is to make it still greenish, but dried out and crunchy...."fall" and "spooky" looking. This is Boneyard Image No. 349. (BTW - You can click on any of these photos to see an enlarged version).

 

We don't want the grass too pretty. Let's dirty it up with random specks.

 

Keep going. I'm using several shades and layering colors to give a mottled/trampled dry grass look.

 

A lighter color to blend...

 

Gotta have some dead spots!

And some dehydrated stalks...

 Blend it together to flatten the look.

 Let's shade the bones a bit to start out.

 More shading. They are laying here in the grass and dirt. I imagine they are a little bit mossy and damp. Then use the lighter T0 to blend what you have so far.

 Laying down a base color on the fence pieces.

 Shading...

 More shading.

 Base color on the tombstone.

 Add shading and highlights.

 More dark spots.

Dark and creepy fun!

 Eeek!

 Blend.

 Orange accents.

 Shading for the orange.

 Darker.

 Blend.

 Fence nails and dark spot accents.

Mr. Ghostly Bat, Image No. 84 is flying above our graveyard. Let's make him unique...we had a lot of grey with the tombstone, and he's got some highlights from the moon, let's say. I'm thinking a purpley-grey.

 I'm thinking we will be able to see gradients in his wings as he is flying by. We'll make the inside skin the thinnest and lightest. Add dark around the edge of your base.

 Darker.

 Darker bits.

 Blending into a dark grey here but just a bit, don't over do it.

 Blend.

 Let's add veins!

 And clean up our shading a bit.

 More clean up. Start blending.

 Blend more.

 Use Copic Multiliner to fix parts of the wings. Because the lines are delicate and a few of my marker tips need to be changed, I wasn't able to get all the way perfectly to the edges of each line. So since I had these wings getting darker and darker as they got closer to the outside, after I had the color laid down as well as I dared, I filled in any white spots with black fine point multiliner.

 Add a little pink to the eyes to make him spooky!

 Viola!

Put it all together on a creepy cute and FUN Halloween masterpiece! I added sequins, enamel matte dots, Tonic Nuvo drops, and I did some Amethyst clouds VERY LIGHTLY  in the background sky area of the scene.

That's it for me! This is my first coloring tutorial, so be gentle. I hope you enjoyed it, thanks for stopping by today! Be sure to enter your gorgeous creations into our challenge, you have until the end of November this time around as we transition with our challenge changes, so get creative!