Guest Designer for February - Introducing Kym Upshaw

 Happy Sunday everyone and welcome back!

Again at Love 2 Create Challenges we are extremely proud when other crafters agree to be featured as a GDT on our blog and today we are sharing a project from Guest Designer Kym Upshaw. You can check out Kym's fabulous work over on her blog - Kym's Crafty Cards

Here's a short bio about Kym ...

My name is Kym and my blog is Kym’s Crafty Cards. I have been married to my husband for 26 years. I am a mother to two boys aged 25 and 21. I started cardmaking about 10 years ago and the cards that I make I sell solely to raise funds for different charities.  I love to use decoupage, toppers, rubber stamps but my first love has to be using digital stamps as you can print them any size that you want. I love to work with many different styles of rubber stamps/digital stamps eg cute, vintage, fantasy, Christmas etc and will have a try with any image to make some wonderful cards/creations so that I can sell to raise funds for charities.

Here is the fabulous card Kym created for us using Polkadoodles 'Ula - Be a Mermaid' ...

After being offered my GDT slot, I was lucky to be allowed to create with a Polkadoodles image and I chose to use "Ula be a Mermaid". I have coloured the image in with Promarkers and fussy cut around the image. I also printed off a sentiment that I got with the image, die-cut and edged with my Turquoise Pan Pastel.

For the background I used a Turquoise, Diarylide Yellow, Hansa Yellow and Pearlescent Yellow Pan Pastels to colour the background. I then used various seaside orientated stamps (greenery, driftwood, bubbles and fish) and stamped these onto the background.

I then used a Marianne designs die to make the mount for Ula the mermaid. I have finished the card off with some die-cut greenery and a die-cut shell border and individual die-cut shells highlighted with the the Pan Pastels used for the background and two large pearls.

Here is a list of the products I have used to create my card :-

Promarkers used: Face/skin - Saffron, Spice and Oatmeal
                             Hair - Yellow, Canary and Lemon
                             Mermaid/shells etc- Duck Egg, Turquoise, Putty, Tan, Burnt Orange & Dusky Pink.

Pan Pastels used: Rich Gold
                            Diarylide Yellow
                            Turquoise
                            Copper Metallic
                            Hansa Yellow
                            Pearlescent Yellow.

It's a honour to be a Guest Designer as I have followed the Love to Create for quite a few years now and participated in lots of the challenges..

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Thank you Kym for your fabulous project and we look forward to seeing more of your projects in the future both here at Love 2 Create challenges and also on your blog.


Just a quick reminder to everyone that Challenge #5 ends tonight at midnight which means you still have a little time to add your project. All details for Challenge #5 can be found HERE.

Join us next week for another new challenge but until then ... happy crafting to you all ...,

A Fab Tutorial by Terry

Happy Sunday everyone and boy oh boy do we have a treat for you today ... a stunning tutorial from Terry who uses a digi image to create a mixed media project. Terry's full tutorial is below.

Our monthly "anything mixed media/creative goes" challenge is still running and we'd love it if you could play along. The link to the challenge is HERE.

Now over to Terry ......

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It is my turn, Terry to put a tutorial together for your inspiration and I just loved doing this for you all.

I colored the ULA Image from Polkadoodles, with my copic markers.....I love coloring and this amazing cute girl was a lot of fun to color.

What I did was I cut a piece of paper that I wanted for my background, took different coloured Distress Ink and splashed some water on top to let it flow over the paper. The best way to do that is to hold the paper between 2 fingers and then spray the water. You can rotate the paper so that water goes over it. That way you get a mix of colors on your background.

After the background paper is dry, I have added some color. Also, the brown color along the edges of the paper and a bit of green.

Then of course I wanted to be sure that the background colors would fit with Ula....and I thought she did fit in perfectly.

I thought the background was a bit bland, so I used a stencil to fill the background. The Grit Paste gives the flower a 3D-effect and takes in the color from the Distress inks.

When the Paste was dry I got my waterpen, the fabulous stampset from Polkadoodles, calles Bonfleur and stamped 2 butterflies from the stampset. I colored the butterflies with the Distress Oxide and cut them out of the paper. The background was colored with the Oxides too. This time I used the Distress Inks but you can easliy work with the PanPastels too. They work great on the background and also to color your Digi stamps and Stamps.

Working with the Paste gives the flowers a real 3D effect. Still thought the background was a bit bland so I stamped a few tiny flowers on the paper. I colored the tiny ones with distress too and I was happy with the result. 

A bit upclose so you can see what I mean with the flowers having a 3D effect with the Paste. 

Oke so my background is finished with the fab colors and the stencilled flowers. Now all I need is the colored image from Ula, so I decided to get some doublesided tape on it and placed the image on my background paper.

So what do ya all think, I am pretty happy about it, and if you tell me Mixed Mediums don't mix with digi images, you'r totally wrong eh? All it needed was a few words...I thought Sending Lots of Love would be just perfect....and to finish I have placed the colored butterflies on the flower and on top of the card and my card is finished. 

So there ya go, my project that I wanted to share with you for your inspiration is finished. I sure hope you are going to get your thinking cap on and get those fabulous digi stamps from Nikky, from Polkadoodles...I am sure you are going to love these cuties.....

Thank you all for stopping by and hope I gave you some ideas on what you can make with Mixed Mediums and Digistamps mixed with stamps.

Have Fun.

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A huge thanks Terry and next week, our inspirational post is from another ubber talent crafter, Zeljka Jurkovic-Grizic.

Don't forget you still have time to enter our November monthly challenge and you can find all the details HERE.