Flourishes Focus: Coloring up the Season

Hello Flourishes fans, Latisha here.  Today the design team is coloring on their cards, a Coloring in the Season if you will.  I am showing you a couple of cards that have a fall theme, but some of the ladies will have a Christmas feel to their cards.  When I think of fall, my mind goes to really earthy rich tones, like orange, red, brown, gold and green.  Have any of you seen the new Indian Summer paper from Basic Grey?  Wow is that some beautiful fall paper or what!  For my first card that is where I got my inspiration from.  If you look closely, you will notice that the trees have been paper pieced using the Indian Summer paper.  After I paper pieced the trees, I started to color in my image using some Copic markers.  Its easier to see the blending I did on the grass and stone walkway than on the house.  The way I blend is from lightest marker to darker.  I add a little bit of a darker color, then I go back with my lighter color to make the blending seem more natural.   I distressed the edges of my paper, and sponged the edges with some brown ink, this look can also be accomplished by taking the edge of your Copic marker and running it along the edge of the paper, its a lot quicker too.  Before I adhered my stamped image panel, I ran some ribbon around the front of my card and tied a bow.  This is a clean and simple card, but with the coloring and paper piecing its makes the card seem like is has more depth and dimension than it really does.

For this card, I stamped my leaf images onto paper, colored them in, again with Copic markers and then cut them out.  Once I cut my leaves out, I popped them up with foam tape/dimmensionals, it just give the card a little more depth to it.  Oh, before I adhered the leaves, I tied my ribbon and stamped my sentiment.   The best advice I can give you, on becoming better with the Copic markers is to practice, practice, practice.  You can even go onto Youtube and search Copic markers, there are many tutorials on there.  Before I became Copic Certified that is what I did along with going to Marianne Walker's blog, she is the queen of Copics.  I hear through the grapevine that Flourishes is adding more Copic color collections!!  Stay tuned for more information on that!

For more coloring inspiration head on over to the rest of the designers blogs.  Christine is not playing along today, but go to her blog and wish her a Happy Birthday please, yesterday was her birthday.  Happy Birthday Christine!!!

Pay these talented ladies a visit:

Julie Koerber

Cindy Lawrence

Laura Fredrickson

Leslie Miller

Latisha Yoast (me)

Stacy Morgan