Greetings,

I wanted to share with you a little project I have been working on.  Yes its colouring lol ....

I am so totally inlove with these "little houses" from makeitcrafty they are adorable and really take you on a trip to a fantasy world, the artist must has such a beautiful imagination, to be able to create such amazing life like little places to live.

They are SO much fun to colour and the detail is absolutely AMAZING, I chose to start (yes i plan to colour them all) with a steam punk tree house, it is just so gorgeous. HERE is a link to the tree on the shops website.  I bought myself the digi of the tree, and started colouring .... 

My medium of choice was my copics and my daughter is also colouring one with pencil water colours. 
I did "borrow" my colour choice from the website where I bought the digi, for two reasons ....1. I believe the artist who drew the design had the perfect colours in mind while creating the design and two, It was the biggest image (full A4 page) that I had ever coloured and felt rather intimidated.

The combination of copper, wood, brass and silver made this digi so much fun to colour.  The light that was shining from the inside looked both warm and mysterious at the same time.

I started with the copper coloured pieces and started with the lightest shades of peach and worked on from there.

Start of steam punk tree house colouring

Next I moved onto the tree trunk, the thing I found most challenging was getting the light to look as tho it was bursting from inside the trunk, It took many layers of colour but I think I eventually achieved the look I was going for.
 

The Start of the trunk

I took a little break from colouring the trunk which after an hour had started morphing on the page, and coloured the leaves on the branches the challenge here was getting the clump of greenery on the left to look further back than the greenery on the left, it was all about the strength of the colour and the shade and direction of shadow on the branches, I am happy with the effect I achieved. I also did a bit of red.
 

More layers on the trunk

I had "rested" enough and did more layers and shading on the trunk and roots, at school whenever we could choose the theme of our art I always drew / painted / sketched an old tree with knotty branches and huge roots - it was just my thing and I loved it! So I think that also helped when I was choosing which little house to start with.  As I mentioned i also did a bit of red this helped to expose the white wood on the balcony, which until I coloured the red, just blended into the house.

Almost completed tree

 In this image i was practically finished I smoothed out all the shading on the tree and I have to toot my own horn as I was most impressed with the effect of the door and the little canopy above the door, Iit really looks 3 dimensional and i was really proud of that.

The above picture I took showed the colours up beautifully but was taken at a really odd angle and made the tree rather fat and short *giggle*,  so then I retook the picture and it didn't turn out as clearly as the one above but the proportions are better.  I have been asked to colour one for someone and they are going to frame it :) What an honour!! I also want to frame this one and possibly do the others and frame them as a set.  

The completed Steam punk tree house

I understand that this image is designed to be coloured with markers or pencils, and that the challenge of the craft is to get the metal to look like metal and the wood to look like wood etc by only using one medium, HOWEVER .....I would love to use foils and accentuate certain parts of the image with foils to give it a real metallic look.  I am not sure yet if it will add a whole lot to the image or completely ruin it.  For now all my foils are still packed in boxes in my garage, so it will give me extra time to contemplate my foiley dilemma.

Thanks so much for reading this post.  It always amazes me that someone would acctually get to this point of the post, so if you did - THANK YOU!!  As always your comments and queries on this post or this project are most welcome and I will endeavor to answer you soonest.

Till next time Keep it crafty.

Greetings,

I wanted to share one of my latest cards with you. I made it for my mom inlaw who is so special and has us over for dinner every Friday night and insists we don't do or bring anything.  The thing is that there are 5 of us (DH and three kids) so I always feel that when ever we go to someone for a meal we ARRIVE!!! My inlaws live on their own and make no mess so to have ALL of us over for a meal EVERY Friday is quite amazing!

What is more is that it is not just Friday food - no one pot wonders, no fish n chips, there is always AT LEAST 3 courses, starts with soup and there are usually two choices of soup, then stunning salad and sometimes fish, then a truly devine main meal, always beautiful tasty meat and veggies and then ALWAYS ice cream AND another pudding and then if you have any space left cake or biscuits and tea!  It is amazing and I so enjoy these Friday night dinners!  

I grew up in a house (Catholic) where it was either fish on Fridays or a toasted sandwich - end of the week food always delicious but definatly not a few course traditional feast (my DH is Jewish) 

So it is VERY difficult to try and portray our true gratitude for this amazing meal each week. We look so forward to the beautiful Jewish traditions, to the lovely time with no technology, just chatting and sharing the evening. 

So I made my MIL a card, I bought the digi from Mo Manning at mosdigitalpencil.com/‎ and it is called Bekka with Challah- I LOVE this image, look at her beautiful face and she looks so humble and kind.  When I saw this image I knew I would have to do it for someone VERY special!!

This is the completed card, I did it blue and white and coloured with Copic Markers.  I made an easle card.

Completed Shabbos Card

Here is a close-up of the coloured image.
 

Close up of Image

As always if you have any queries or comments about this post or this project I will be most grateful to receive them.

Till next time keep it Crafty...