Cloud tutorial

Hiya!  I've just posted my second ever tutorial over at the Some Odd Girl blog.... I thought maybe I should copy it here too. We are having loads of fun with the Facebook Fun Day ! I hope you haven't missed out!

Here's my tutorial:

Hello!  It’s Arabella here with a little tutorial on how I colour my clouds with copics.  I used to try to use Distress Inks and a cloud template to create clouds on my stamped images, but I’m not very good at it and I am never happy with the result I get, so I thought I would have a go at colouring clouds with my copics instead…  I haven’t looked back since!

Warning!  This post is picture heavy!  I probably should have made a video, but I haven’t done that before, so I thought I should stick to what I know!

Before we get started I wanted to share a photo of some clouds I took recently while we were out on the boat… 

You can see from the photo that although clouds are perceived as white, they have a lot of purple/grey shadows.  You can also see that the sky appears to become a more intense blue the further away from land you get.

Copic Cloud Colouring Tutorial:

I start by printing out my image (Reading Mae) and cutting it to the size I want to use on my card.  Then I grab my pencil and lightly pencil in some clouds.  

Next, I erase the clouds so that there is only a very faint pencil mark left on the page.  

TIP:  You can’t erase pencil once you have coloured over it with copics.  

Next I decide what colours to use.  For this one, I used BV20 as my darker colour and BG70 as my light colour.  I start by laying in the shadow areas on the clouds (using a flicking upwards motion from darker into lighter) with my lightest colour (BG70).  

Then I add my BV20 but don’t flick up as far as with the BG70.  You can see it’s looking quite messy now, but don’t worry as we will come back and blend it out.

Blend the darker BV20 out with the BG70 again using a flicking motion (dark to light).  At this stage I also put a little bit of shadow along the top v’s.

Now if you are happy with the blending, start adding some blue for the sky.  I used B000 at the top, coming down to B0000 and finally BG70 closer to the ground.

And here is the finished Reading Mae:

I followed the same procedure with Bicycle Kaylee, except I used different colours for the clouds and sky:

For this one I used the following colours:

Clouds: BG0000, V20

Sky: BG0000, BG10, B12 and B14

Grass: G20, YG03, YG17

I hope you liked the tutorial!  These brand new and totally awesome digital stamps will be available in the Some Odd Girl shop from Monday!

Arabella

SOG Glass Tile Pendants

Good afternoon!  I'm sharing my first project feature post and first ever tutorial over on the Some Odd Girl blog today!    What do you think?  Here's what I'm making:

 Glass tile magnets, a pendant and a Prof Hoot keyring that I thought would be perfect for a wee graduation gift, especially if you made a matching card to go with it!  HERE's one I made earlier that would match perfectly!

So, let’s get started!  Here’s what you will need…

• Images to use on your tiles
• Glossy Accents, Glamour Glaze or something similar
• Strong glue
• Pendant casings
• Glass tiles
• Punches to match the size of your tiles 
• Strong magnets if you want to make magnets
• Chain for the pendants or a keyring if you are making keyrings

I got my supplies from Annie Howes on Etsy and her shipping was super fast!

To start with, I resized my Some Odd Girl digital stamps down to very small in Word before printing them out.  In retrospect I think next time I would leave just a little bit more space between them for the circular punch.

I coloured my images in with copics.  Since they were so small they didnt take very long to colour.  One tip for colouring small images with copics is that it may be easier to skip the middle colour in your blending trio and just use the lightest and darkest to blend with as it is a such a small area you are colouring and you don’t want to over-saturate the area.  

Once the images are coloured, lay the glass tiles over the top to see how they will look and then punch them out (or cut them to size with a craft knife).  I turn my punch over so I can see exactly where it is punching:

For the square tiles, you can round the corners of the images with detail scissors now before you start the gluing stage.  As well as images, I stamped some SOG sentiments onto colourful scraps of DP to use as magnets.

The next step is to clean the tiles before adding a blob of Glamour Glaze to the top of the image or sentiment and placing tile on top.  I found the easiest way to do this was to put the blob of glue in the centre and then lay the tile on top and smoosh the glue to the edges.

Let the tiles dry for a few hours (preferably on a non-stick baking sheet).  Then turn them over and coat the back surface with the Glamour Glaze as well before leaving them to dry overnight.

 Once the glaze is dry, you can decide what you want to do with the tiles.  Use the super strong glue to add magnets to the back or glue the tiles into pendant casings.  I suggest purchasing the very strong Neodymium magnets if you are going to make magnetic tiles as there is nothing more annoying than fridge magnets that won’t hold anything up!

Something else I discovered while making these is that the Copic Opaque white on Prof Hoot’s eyes smudged when I added the glue, but the pen I used on the girl’s eyes did not.  I’m not sure if that was because I didn’t let give the Copic Opaque white time to dry properly first or if it just does that.  I would recommend you experiment with that.  I also noticed that some of the reds smudged a bit… I suspect that is because the ink was over-saturated in those areas.

Here are my finished pendants:

These images are all available in the SOG shop.  From left to right I have here:

Mushroom Fairy, Giggle Fairy, Kimono Kaylee, Kite Flyin Mae, Shy Kaylee and Angel Kaylee.

I hope you enjoyed my wee tutorial!  

Arabella