Late Night Cards

I took tonight off from work so I could go to my BF Erin's bridal shower this afternoon. The shower was from 2-4pm, which left the rest of the day/night to do whatever I pleased. I decided to make some agape cards (to hopefully sell eventually). Here's the first set:

The Cow Orchestra!

Here's the final piece I did for the Doodle U theme 'animals playing instruments' :

Hopefully it enlarges when you click on it so you can really see it. 

Can you spot all 33 instruments? (in addition to the conductor)

This took forever, but it was pretty fun researching/trying to draw each of the instruments. Contrabassoons are difficult to draw by the way. I looked up what instruments are typically in an orchestra and how they are arranged. This would be a more modern day orchestra; I didn't realize saxophones typically aren't part of the orchestra, and weren't included at all until modern times. Who knew! But my dad's a huge sax fan, so I felt like I needed to include them. I drew each cow/instrument individually, inked each, colored them with colored pencil, then scanned them into the computer.

Here's one of the original scans:

After I created a clipping path for each in Photoshop, I dumped them all into InDesign to do the arranging. I duplicated the cows to get the multiple instruments for the same section (which why, for instance, all the violins look identical - I'm not that crazy to draw all of those!) Then I drew a separate background and put that in. The hardest part was figuring out how to arrange them so you could still each cow/instrument. I love how the finished piece came out! And I made poster size, so I should be able to print it 18" x 24" eventually.

Animals Playing Instruments

Doodle United's latest theme was "Animals Playing Instruments." I was super excited when they posted it (cows!). While I had cow plans, I did also color some banjo playing pigs I drew a long while back:

These are inspired by the site Dueling Banjo Pigs. Colored in Painter.

Next, I drew a couple of individual cows playing some unique instruments. 

Medieval Cow playing a hammered dulcimer.
Inspired by my love for the middle ages, the desire to one day learn to play the hammered dulcimer, and an obsession/longing to join 3 of my friends in SCA. (one day!)

Highland Cow, in a kilt, playing the bagpipes.
Inspired by my friend Elise, who has a fierce love/obsession with both Highland cows and all things Scottish. 

The fourth piece I did, I will post in the next post - because it's pretty epic . . .
 CLICK HERE FOR NEXT POST.

Oops! New Unicorns

About to post the lasted Doodle U and realized I never posted my unicorns from 2 themes ago. Anyhoo, here they are. See everyone else's unicorns HERE.

Sometimes Things Click

It amazes me sometimes how God works. Like when you hear the same scripture verse multiple times in the same week, or the right song comes on the radio at the exact right moment, etc. Well, tonight one of those weird-cool God things happened to me. I go the Baptist Collegiate Ministry on ISU's campus on Tuesday nights whenever I can make it. It's been such a huge blessing in my life (another post on that later). Tonight Rose, one of the BCM leaders, spoke on "spurring one another on toward love and good deeds" (see Hebrew 10:24). Basically, on encouraging one another. One of the last points she touched on was encouraging others by sharing your own story. She challenged us all to go to www.MostImportantThing.org - a site where you can share your testimony. I've heard Roger and Rose both talk about this site before and I've always wanted to do it but haven't yet.

But here's why Rose's challenge to share your story was a God thing -

My first OLW assignment (see previous post here) was to make 12 intentions for the year. Here's my intention pages that I created back in January:

So no big deal there - but now take a closer look at my April intention: (and note that today is April 2)

Yeah. I'd call that a God thing.

So here I sit trying to type up my spiritual story. As soon as I can pare multiple pages down to 300 words (a The Most Important Thing requirement), I will post my story on there. And I hope to share the full multi-page story with some of the close people in my life. Thanks for the encouragement Rose!

Old Unicorns

This current Doodle United theme is 'unicorns.' I was really excited for this one because unicorns were one of my favorite things to draw in middle/high school. While I'm busy inking/coloring my new sketches for the theme, I thought I'd pull out some of my old unicorn art: (click to view larger)

Top Left: an early ink sketch (probably from middle school)
Top Right: a plushy sketch (from college)
Bottom Left: another middle/high school colored pencil sketch
Bottom Right: Unicorn batik from high school. This is one of those things I'd love to try again. Batik has kind of a learning curve, so I didn't really get the hang of it right away. Super fun process though.

Stamps At A Glance

       This week I decided to try something I saw on Pinterest. I have a LOT of stamps. The problem is they don't all fit in one drawer. Most my wooden ones are shoved in one drawer, but then I have a 2" binder full of clear stamps (another Pinterest idea), and some other wood stamps stuck in a few other drawers with other stuff.  My wheel stamps just get shoved wherever they won't get stuck, and I have one more pile that's not in this picture for the jumbo stamps (over 4" wide). They're everywhere! 

        The bad thing is when I'm crafting I'm terrible about not using any of my stamps - because I can't remember what I have. I'm not about to take 30 minutes to dig through the drawers just to see if I have a stamp I might be able to use for a project. 

        So, la Pinterest, I went through and either stamped or photocopied each stamp/set that I have onto white card stock. Those pages went into a tiny 1/2" binder. It doesn't help with actually storing them, but now I can quickly see what stamps I have just by flipping through a binder. Yes, this did take a while to do - but I have a feeling I might actually use my stamps more now! 

Some pics of the finished binder.