Week 14: Day 6, It's a Wrap!

Well, I have completed 15 weeks of blogging in just 6 months...not quite what I had planned, but I am determined to complete 52 weeks.

After a hiatus, I started back with Week 12 and a new format to help me be more consistent since I'm a fly by the seat of my pants kinda girl. It's tough to be constrained by a schedule and routine. When I have someone else to hold me accountable, I am much better at keeping a schedule. But as you can see, when that person is me, I'm not so great at it.  Anyway, I used to check every day to see how many people have downloaded my cards.  I actually haven't done it in a while, so I thought I would look and share with you.  It makes me proud!  WOW! so far there have been 533 downloads of the cards.  The most popular is the Week 3 card with 113 downloads:

Download Card

 

OK fans, I want to know!  What you are doing with the cards? Are you sending them, downloading or printing them?  Which one is your favorite?  Is there anything you would like to see me do, or do differently?  Do you have an inspiration photo you would like to send me? I would love to hear from you!

Coming Soon:  
My friend JoLene and I have been friends since high school.  We were roomies at Arizona State University, and she was one of my brides maids.  Even though we are on different coasts (she's in California), we have been able to maintain our friendship through the years.  She does needlepoint and loves my blog....thanks CB!  She has been on a leave of absence from work while battling breast cancer over the past 9 months. She doesn't have the energy that she used to have, she does have time to work on her needlepoint projects.

She proposed to me that we work on a project together. She is picking out the needlepoint piece....I have no idea what she will choose and although I trust her, I am a little nervous. She is going to complete the project, and send me pictures (she's out in California).  Then I am going to use her work as an inspiration piece. It may take a while, but you will see it before week 52. I am so excited! I can't wait to work with her.

Week 14: Day 4&5 Freebie Card

I am definitely off on my days & weeks, but I will continue along until I have 52 complete weeks of the blog...a year of blogging.  Then I'll probably be crazy enough to do it again, and try to be more consistent.  You never know where life will take you, huh?

So this week I have a card designed on the abstract design and dark color palette.  Enjoy!

Download  Link

Week 14: Day 3–Playing with Color again

Since my Bleh! day, I have had my daughter graduate from 5th grade...I think the only times I graduated were from high school and from college. I can't believe my baby is growing up so much.  Next year I will have one in high school and one in middle school, a teen and a tween.  Boy, the hormones are raging around here. I never know if what I say will make someone laugh or cry. It's always an adventure!

But, back to blogging...the other day I tried an abstract image with the colors. I didn't like the result, so I decided to try again.  It took a few tries, but I finally ended up with any image that I liked.

The Result:

The Process:
I started in Adobe Illustrator and drew a shape of curly squiggles.  I then cropped the image but didn't like it, so I started over.

To try something different I started with the image size and drew squiggles within the box.  Then I cropped the image and used the pathfinder tool to create individual shapes.

I stared with light colored lines, and then used the darker colors as the fill for the shapes.  I tired a couple of different variations:

With this variation I thought, maybe....

So I tried turning it to see if it worked each way....

But I still wasn't quite feeling it.  So I tried more variations, changing the outline and fill colors to see what I could come up with. 

So still not feeling it, I looked back at what I had already done, and guess what, I thought the first was what I was looking for, but it wasn't quite right so I made a few alterations to the outline colors and weights to come up with the final image:

So I darkened the line up, made the lines thinner and made the frame color the same as the outline color, and voila, I have an abstract image using the dark color palette. 

Week 14: Day 2–Playing with Color

My word for today is bleh!  I woke up in a funky mood this morning and haven't found a way out of it.  Despite that, I have actually made myself work on the blog.

Step 1
In Illustrator, I have used the pencil tool and drew a curvy and overlapping line.  Then I put a box around it and then used Pathefinder tool to divide into different shapes.

Step 2
I used the color palette to color each of the shapes in the image...bleh!

Bleh!

Double Bleh!

Step 3
After playing with the lighter colors, I found a very abstract image and re-colored the image accordingly.....what do you see?  And no, bleh! is not the answer!

Week 14: Day 2–Color Palette

Today I am created the color palette for the inspiration photo. Wow! I think I need to consider the color palette when I choose the photos....it's a learning experience!  I love this photo but it is quite dark.  I guess this that will be my challenge -- keeping the patterns and designs interesting without looking too dark and without losing detail.

Week 14: Day 1–Inspiration

I took a look back at the revised schedule, and I'm supposed to be doing a card this week from the inspiration photo of the sea shells and sand dollars.  Hmmm, I have already created a few cards based on those, so I guess it's time to do a new inspiration photo.  

I looked through my many photos, and I came upon these.  They are from night my kids and I spent with my cousin S and her son G-man.  It was a fundraiser movie night in the barn where she volunteered.  

G-man & K playing before the movie

My son S, he had just lost a tooth.

S had invited up there several times before to see the horses and other animals.  We loved it there. It was a great for the kids to be around all the animals and help feed them.  

After the movie was over, we took a walk  down to see the horses with only the moon light leading the way...it was dark, 

but once we got down to the run-in, S turned on the lights at the run-in. We pulled some grass and fed it to the horses.  It was so much fun!

S, G-man & KK picking grass to feed the horses

KK picking grass

G-man & KK petting the horse

S feeding the horse

KK feeding the horse

The Inspiration Photo:

KK & G-man feeding the horse.

Week 13: Days 6 - Freebie Card

It's Freebie Card day!

The Result:
Based on my sketches of Sand Dollars, I created this card.

Link to download your card!

The Process:

The first step of the card today was taking my scanned image into Illustrator (top), then using the Live Trace tool, I created a vector image (bottom).  After creating the vector image, I copied and pasted it into Photoshop.  

From a sketch to a vector image.

Once in Photoshop, I added color, duplicated and manipulated the layers, applied transparencies and effects, to achieve the final image:

The final image.

Enjoy!  Next week: Graphic Interpretations.