3 cards and my new colour guide

Hi everyone! Hope you're all having a great week. As usual in the Honey Bootique household it's a case of another day, another drama. Really at some point, things have got to settle down, it's getting ridiculous!! I ended up in casualty yesterday morning- a severe allergic reaction to anti inflammatories I've been taking for my back. I'm covered head to toe in ugly red big spots and my mouth and lips are all swollen!!!! Apparently when it reaches your lips, you're in trouble as if it gets to your throat you can have trouble breathing. I do have spots in my mouth but luckily it didn't reach my throat.

We do have some good news though- my Mum's drain has dramatically reduced in the last week. We reckon she's down from about 17ml to about 4ml now!! Yay yay yay!!!

Today I have 3 cards to show you and my new colour guide I made using my Bind It All. I think it's going to be really useful so I'd like to share it with you.

Onto my first card. I LOVE this Stamping Bella stamp. Now you know I can't get enough Bellas but I seriously think this is one of my favs. It's such a big stamp and I just love her smile. It's so wide, it cheers me up every time I look at it. I coloured her with watercolour pencils and used Lyra pencils for the grass and outlined the whole image with copics. I tried to make the coffee look like Starbucks and the donuts like Krispy Kreme! I adore this beautiful paper by My Mind's Eye and did plenty of paper piecing. The sentiment is Papertrey Ink.

I'd like to enter this into:

Sketch and Stash- sketch

Stamptacular Sunday- Lovin' from the oven

Tuesday Throwndown- buttons

Our Creative Corner- Cut it out (used paper piecing)

Here is a close up.

Crafty stash used: Stamps (Stamping Bella, Papertrey Ink); Watercolour pencils; Lyra pencils; Copics; Nesties; Papers (My Mind's Eye); Buttons (Walmart); Sewing machine

Onto my second card which is for my friend's twin girls. I used this gorgeous Penny Black teddy coloured with watercolour pencils, again grass coloured with lyras and outlined image with copics. Papers are by Making Memories and scalloped borders are Die-namics dies.

I'd like to enter this into:

Penny Black Challenge- pretty in pink

Friday Sketchers- sketch

Scrap Creations- spring fever

Crafty stash used: Stamp (Penny Black); Watercolour pencils; Lyra pencils; Copics; Papers (Making Memories); Assorted cardstock); Nesties; Die-namic dies; Bow (?); Lettering (freebie); Stickles

My last card is another Bella! As usual I coloured her with watercolour pencils, paper pieced her dress and outlined her with copics. The papers are by Basic Grey. Sentiment is Hero Arts.

I'd like to enter this into:

Stamp With Fun- sketch

Secret Crafter- use flowers

Crafty stash used: Stamps (Stamping Bella; Hero Arts); Watercolour pencils; Copics; Papers (Basic Grey); Assorted cardstock; Nesties; Flower (Ebay); Button (Walmart); Pearls (freebies); decorative border (K & Co); Corner punch; Stickles

And lastly here is my colour guide!! Yay. I'm really pleased with how this turned out. I decided to create this to get organised with my colouring and I put ALOT of effort into working out what pages I was going to have and the layout etc but I have to say it took ten times longer because of the Bind It All products. Maybe I've missed something but you'd expect the 8" x 8" page protectors to work with the 8" x 8" covers or at least the coveralls. Well, they don't!!! They're too big so to cut a long story short I ended up making my own covers out of some old cardboard so that they could incorporate the page protectors. So here is the cover made with papers from DCWV. I added some stitching, used Sizzix lettering and the large zig zag die from MFT.

On the inside cover I made a pocket to put extra template lists in.

This post shows how I've divided my colour guide up by the different colour mediums I use- brush markers, copics, lyra pencils and watercolour pencils and then I've added a section at the back for notes (ie useful websites with colour tutorials on, useful books with colour techniques etc). I made these sections using my new Stampin Up tab punch with computer generated text. Eagle eyes will notice that the font is the same as the one used on my tabs on my blog!

I took ages creating all the pages using a free graphics package I downloaded. I wanted the whole guide to incorporate the feel and look of my blog and to have a uniform feel so I designed a header and footer for each of the pages using the fonts from my blog and a cartoony design. I'm also going to be designing a craft guide soon (more on that another time) so I will be designing very similar templates for that.

Each colour medium first contains the colour groups. With my watercolour pencils I decided purely to list the colours I had as I'm not going to expand my collection any further. Some of these colour groups go onto 2 pages so I have put them in page protectors. I also did this as I like to take the pages out to place next to my designers papers to check for the right colour match to know which papers to use.

This second photo show my Lyra pencils colour groups. This is how I have done the other colour groups for the other mediums whereby I have listed all the colours but merely coloured the ones I actually have.

For each medium I have also done a template for my favourite colour combos I use. I'm sure if you're like me, you have some colours you use regularly eg to do grass or hair etc but if you're disorganised like me, you never write them down and then have to figure them out every time you colour a new image!! So I decided to get organised. As you can see this one is for watercolour pencils. I'll use the example of my Bellas as I generally colour their hair using the same colours so under description I would write "Bella hair colour" and then under watercolour pencils colours I would colour a bit of the colour on the top of the first box and then underneath write "032 light ochre", "059 brown" in second box and "049" umber in third box.

The smaller templates are actually also removable and you can add several pages underneath as you can see closely they are held in place by photo corners, this makes using the guide much more flexible if you want to change things or make a mistake.

For the copics, I did an additional page of recommended copic colours. This is because there are so many sites out there with copic tutorials where they recommend certain colour combos eg for doing black hair but maybe I haven't tried them out yet but think I will use them in the future. So if I come across them, I can immediately write them down and know where there are for future use.

And here is the back page.

I'd like to enter this for:

Little Claire's Blog- anything goes

Stampin with the dragon- anything goes

CRAFT- not a card

I hope you liked my colour guide! I've used it loads already and can't wait to start filling it in. If anyone has any questions about it, don't hesitate to ask me!

Crafty stash used: Bind It All machine, wires, page protectors; assorted cardstock; recycled cardboard; papers (DCWV); Sewing machine, Lettering (Sizzix); Flowers; Buttons (Walmart); Punch (Stampin Up)