Millie day one...

With the last release, Emily gifted us with some wonderful new characters in the Stamping Bella family. Millie is one of them. Actually she has a twin (or is it her brother?) anyhoo she comes in a set with Milo (Millie and Milo Exchanging gifts). Neat thing about these two are they can be stamped alone or together and either way they are cute as a button. So, this is Millie's day one for me...I can see many more cards in her future!

Next note is her hair. You'll notice that it's blonde, dirty blonde actually, just like my daughter and I. My daughter (Jess) has professed that I color too many brown haired girls. We recently moved Jess back into the house and she looked at all the cards in my craft room and declared that I needed to color more blondes. Funny thing is that I rarely see pure blonde and with copics and prisma pencils I don't think the bright yellow is very realistic. So I like to create blondes with golden highlights and sometimes even light brown to tone the bright yellow down. I will typically color a base of Y11 and then add strokes of Y21, Y28, E23 and a little YR14. Now you'll know why you're seeing a few more blondes on my cards.

Ok and the last note is polka dots. You'll be seeing lots of them too. I have an order for 20 cards and all of them have to have some form of polka dot paper. Now the funny thing is when you give me a "rule" like that, I usually have a hard time incorporating it into a card. It's like the Bella challenge this week, to use polka dots, I could very easily make a card and polka dots find their way in but when you stipulate that it has to be there I can't decide how to work them in. But I have some help, the new My Mind's Eye Miss Caroline design paper 6x6 packs have an assortment of complimentary polka dot paper. In fact, I made 5 cards this weekend and each and every one has polka dot paper. Neat thing is that some are soft and subtle like in the middle panel here but they're still there.

Now onto the card details. You know I stamped Millie onto Bella's Bestest paper using Memento Tuxedo black ink. Hey when the formula works, I stick with it! I then colored her with copis and added a touch of shading on her shirt with prismacolor pencil French Grey 50% as well as the ground shading but added French Grey 90% too. Oh and I know I pulled a turquoise for the balloon too. I didn't add shading around her...I really wanted a clean and simple look about this. The layout is from this week's I Spy sketch challenge. They come out on Friday so I find them to be another great resource for my weekend crafting. I did alter the sketch, big surprise huh? They're minor changes though. First, I moved the scallopped edge from the middle panel to the image panel. Millie needed some height so I added it to her border matt. And then I had to place the sentiment in the upper left corner as there wasn't room in the lower right. Finsihed card is 5x6.

Hope you start your week off well. Thanks for stopping by.

Cath