OLW36 - Bare trees

This week's OLW36 Challenge is hosted by Jennifer Styles at Styles Ink.  Our challenge was to use a bare tree, or bare vegetation of some kind which means no leaves, no needles, no buds, no flowers. We could use as many images/sentiments/colours as we wanted to, but needed to use one plant image that is “bare”.  Well, I hope this counts as one image....after all the trees were all on one stamp.  Does that count?

I had trouble getting a decent photo of the card since it's so cold and overcast here I took the photo inside and I couldn't get the white to look white!  I tore a mask for the ground and punched a circle for the moon.  Then I used my Copics air gun (YAY me!!! I finally used it!!) to spray the sky.  After spraying the sky, I inked up the tree stamp and stamped it so that the trees would appear to be behind the hill of snow.  Then I removed the lower mask used for the ground.  Some of the trees appeared to be floating in the air, so I just colored in the bottom of the trees to meet the ground with a marker that matched the ink color.  I added the fence with a stamp from Stampscapes.  I had to stamp it three times to get it across the card.  Then I added a little Copics light gray shadows for the trees and fence. I'm still working on getting the shadows right.  But practice makes perfect...right?  The sentiment stamp is from PaperTrey Ink.

I thought I'd also post another layout I just finished the other day, too.  This is photos of my granddaughter, Helen Grace.  Whenever she comes over to the house, and I'm in my office/scrap room, she always wants to join me and "make a card".  Her favorite color is pink and she always grabs a pink marker to get started.  On this particular day (December 31, 2010), we decided that I'd help her make bookmarks for her Mama and Daddy.  I showed her (and helped her) stamp a few leaf images on a bookmark size cardstock (in green - not pink!) and then she wanted to write on the back of the bookmarks.  Now, bear in mind, she just turned 5 in November 2010.  She worked so hard and wrote on the back of each bookmark "to Mama Love Helen Grace and to Daddy love Helen Grace."  It took her a while, but she got it done. 

For this layout, I used some older stuff from my stash.  I have no idea who makes the patterned paper but it worked well for this layout.  The pencil border was cut from another piece of paper and layered on red.  I added a little doodling in white, a scalloped border to ground the pencils, a few brads, and some journaling.  For the title work, I used plain chipboard alphas and colored them with Copic markers then coated them with glossy accents. A quick and simple layout...but I like the end result.

Thanks so much for stopping by!  Until next time....

Hugs!