Colourful Monsters

Hi everyone, outside the window its bright blue skies and sunshine, but go outside and its blinking freezing, that said I noticed more of the Spring bulbs are pushing their way through the cold, damp soil which must mean that Spring is in sight? Think I'll dig out some Spring and Easter stamps and dies and have a see if I can create something that will encourage the Spring along in the house.

I posted the other day about having a day off and spending it mostly crafting, I went a little nuts printing off things from CD's to use after Si installed a new DVD drive for me. The old one gave up the ghost and refused to even open anymore, apparently the bearings had worn out that allowed the drawer to open. The shiny new one means I can print things off again with a relish.

I have lots of CD's with images for toppers and backing papers, I've been using papers I print off to make cards for a while now, and I love the fact that if the images are not the right size or colour I can take them into Paintshop Pro and tweak them to get the colours I want.

These two cards are a perfect example, the purple distressed background was a free download - and I can't remember from where! - I decided that I wanted to make the same card but using the different monster toppers in colours to compliment both, but the background paper came only in the purple variant.

So I took the image in to my paint program and tweaked the colour, hue and intensity and shifted the colours over from the warm (red/orange/purple) side of the spectrum to the cool (blue/green/white) spectrum, it worked perfectly and looks almost like it was made to match in the beginning.

The monster toppers are from a "Making Cards for Boys" CD that came free with Making Cards Magazine in March 2017, it has over 120 papers (an assortment of backing papers and toppers) and includes the lovely dinosaur set that came free with the magazine last year. Again I made my own card blanks for these two cards, I can't believe I'd not done this before, I've made stepper and easel card bases so its amazing that I didn't, I really have to stop thinking that things are too complicated because each time I try something new, I realise its not as hard as I think it is!

To create these card blanks I used Lavender and Xmas Green centura pearl card stocks and a die from the Tonic Studios Bowscale die set. I cut the toppers and sentiment circles using the Creative Dies Plus Wonky Stitches Nesting Circles Die Set and backing it with a slightly larger circle cut from a plain circle in the same colour centura pearl that I'd used for the card base.

I'm trying harder this year to make more cards that can be given to male recepients, I find when I create without an intent or project in mind that I gravitate towards making cards for female recipients. So when I enter a challenge or I create a random card I'm going to try putting a male slant on the challenge or making cards that can be given to either a male or female recipient.