Adding a little shine to your images

I know I have been MIA lately. Seems like life just gets in the way of creating sometimes or I am busy working on design work that I can't share on my blog. Even my son, who was visiting this weekend, commented when he visited my blog that the people were going to revolt as I had not posted in so long. When your 26 year old son notices, you know you better get busy!

Last week, we were in South Carolina due to the death of my husband's aunt. Since we were there several days and I was kind of bored, I called up one of my stamping friends that lives in the area and we had play dates for three days straight. There were two scrapbook stores closing in the Greenville area, so we visited (and revisited) those! I think we were bad influences on each other, but we sure had fun! After we had purchased more than we should have, we went up to her studio and I stamped some of her images I liked to color with my Copics, which I had thrown in the car. I also gave her a little lesson on using them. Thanks, Kathy for a great time!

I like to stamp a sheet of images and then color them and have them ready for a quick card. Sometimes House Mouse images are a little hard to color because of all the detail, but I really like doing them with Copics. The colorless blender is great to pick up some of the color from the strawberries to make them look more realistic.

Another thing I did was to add some clear dimension to the strawberries, the candles and the bananas. Anything that might have some sheen to it can really be set off with this simple addition. A friend in SC had given us a tub of strawberries so this card was appropriate for him and I did a thank you card with the monkey for a neighbor who brought over some banana pudding when we were there for the funeral. We always go bananas over her banana pudding. There are several different brands of the clear dimensional stuff and you can get it in shades of color or with a matte finish also. It's a good thing!