I won Letraset Markers and SK8 boy Happy Birthday Card

So it's Saturday on Memorial Day weekend almost noon and I am not in the best of shape with my back, as usual, but have a lot to do that I don't feel like doing LOL! I really just want to make cards and post them to my blog which has been very neglected. I had been working on a card for my daughter's boyfriend's birthday (which happened to be on Memorial Day) and wasn't real happy with it because it needed something more and I just didn't know what to do with it. I had gone in to change clothes to put something cooler on since it was getting way too warm outside and came back into the living room where my husband was looking at the mail he just brought in. I walked over to see what arrived and saw a box on the back of the loveseat and he asks, "What did you order now?" I looked and saw that it was from Letraset and knew I didn't order anything and I voiced my only thought exclaiming "Did I win something??!!!" I grab the box, run to get something to cut the tape, open it and find these letters on top:

I stared at them quite dumbfounded, then had to read them out loud - half to myself to make myself believe it was real and half to my husband to prove I did not spend a bunch of money ordering anything. We both pulled the marker sets out of the box - 2 sets of Pro markers and 2 sets of Aqua markers!!!!! WOOHOO!!!!! I was more than ecstatic!! All I could say was "WOW!" and "Holy cow!" and "Praise God!" and other things while trying to keep my jaw off the floor hehehe. My husband asked, "Are they expensive?" "They aren't cheap", I answered, "but I was contemplating buying these or Copics that everyone is using to color their stamped images with, and now I don't have to!" I grabbed the markers and sat down on the couch to open them up.

Up until now I had been using watercolor pencils and a waterbrush to color all my card images, envying other people who colored with Letraset or Copic markers and now I had my very own. I wanted to test all 48 markers right away but restrained myself to read the inserts first. The two different sets both needed paper other than regular copier paper or even the color copy paper I was using for the images I had been coloring with the watercolor pencils so I went looking and brought back 3 different kinds of paper hoping I didn't have to go out and buy some because I wanted to use the markers right away. I tested all of the papers and found that one of them was a color copy paper but it was coated as suggested in the marker literature and so the markers didn't bleed through. I was in business! I colored 48 swatches all the way across a sheet of paper to see if the literature color samples were accurate. Almost all of them were, and if not, then the color on the marker label was close enough. I looked through my printed out digis to see what I wanted to color for testing. I chose a D2D bloom image that was simple and open because I didn't really have time to color anything complicated. The markers are awesome! I found that I can still use my waterbrush with the Aqua markers after coloring to blend the colors to control how much water I want to use for blending. The Pro markers do not work with the waterbrush, and they are somewhat translucent that get darker as you layer the ink. The blending pen can be used for blending the inks or for when I want to draw ink out of a marker to get a gradient result. I just kept thinking, "This is so cool!" The bloom images came out pretty good so I will be using them on the next cards I make, but I needed to do something with the SK8 card and wanted to use the markers.

I decided to draw some extra skateboards a little bigger than the one on the digi and then drew outline text of HAPPY on one and BIRTHDAY on the other. Then I colored them in with the Aqua markers and blended the ink with the waterbrush. The result was fair and since I didn't have time to keep experimenting, I decided to go ahead and use them.

A few years back I signed up to be a Leaving Prints rep. I only did it for a couple months because I wasn't really ready to do that, and also had to start packing the house up to move from Tennessee to Louisiana where my husband had gone down to help rebuild after Katrina. After I had colored the SK8 digi I had a sort of revelation of what to do with it for a card. I had this "ribbon" (ripped fabric strips really) from Leaving prints that I never knew what to do with and it matched the digi colors perfectly. Since it has a textured look I decided to use it as a background instead of patterned paper so I cut strips and glued them onto the card front. I matted the digi onto red, yellow and blue paper to match the digi and ribbon, then I cut pieces of foam tape to make it pop. I cut out the skateboards, matted them on yellow cardstock and cut them out again and used zots to attach them to the ribbon strips. I like the CAS style so I quit there.

The inside and back are even more simple. On the coated white paper I stamped a cupcake with a candle using the bold point of the Aqua markers on the rubber stamp. It took 2 tries to get a good result and then I still had to go back over the lines a little with the fine point of the markers. That will need more practice. I matted the cupcake image on a larger piece of the yellow cardstock and cut another piece of white paper to glue onto the yellow and wrote a sentiment with the bold point of a red Aqua marker. I stamped "Love is homemade" onto white and matted it onto yellow cardstock and glued it onto the back of the card. That is one of my favorite stamps, so it will show up on one of these card posts soon. I think he liked the card. It was a little juvenile for a 32 year old, but men are just boys inside a big guy body ;o)

Well, that is all for now. I have a lot of cardmaking to do to make up for such a big gap of time on the blog. I promise I will multi-post some cards right away. This card was actually supposed to be for the D2D challenge, but since I had a creative block of what to do to it after the digi was matted, I didn't get it posted in time. Cute cards deserve to be posted whether they are for challenges or not and I have more waiting to go digital.

Be very blessed! Deborah


Challenges I would like to enter this card in:
Creative Stamp Friends - #27 Birthday