Hubby's B-day card

I wanted to make a birthday card for hubby Mike with my new digital image, "Ride 'em Cowboy" from Whimsy Stamps.  I remembered that Anna Wight had some really sweet western cards in her gallery on Splitcoast Stampers, and so I went through her gallery and found this beauty of a card here.  It isn't exactly a CASE but I did keep her card up on my screen so I could copy the sketch and a bit of her embellishing style.   I love Anna's art and attribute a lot of what I learned about colouring to her.  I really appreciate her talent!

I coloured the image with Copics.  Now, I did something I would not normally do: I wanted to get the look of a buckskin horse, and I was not pleased with any of my choices in my Copic bucket.  So I started with E31 all over the horse body, and added E93 overtop.  The colour was a beautiful buckskin with those two shades.  HOWEVER!! This created a real problem for myself, that I was not anticipating.  What happened was, when I began to shade using E33 and 35, I was unable to get a good blend.  I tried going over everything with E31 to blend out the darker colours, but it actually just began to look like a dull grey!  I decided to quit trying to blend with Copics and instead use coloured pencil.  This was an attempt to rescue the colouring I had done, and it worked, thankfully. 

I won't bother giving you the Copic colours for this one, because I went over most of it, even the saddle, with coloured pencil, which altered the colours entirely.  Sigh... lesson learned! 

As in the Autumn Harvest Ride card I did with the workhorse two posts ago, I looked at various photos of horses so that I could get a realistic rendering of the shadows of the muscles. 

I am entering this card into the following challenges:

Craft Your Passion: Anything Goes

Lexi's Creations: Anything Goes

Cards for Men: Anything Goes

Freshly Brewed: Anything Goes

Copic Creations: Brown and/or Make a Scene

Digi's With Attitude!: Anything Western

For Fun Challenges: Use Metal

Little Red Wagon: Use the colour Red

A Spoon Full of Sugar: Relish to Embellish

Anything Goes Challenge Blog: The Letter B (my card is for a Boy and I used Black and Blue!)

Papertake Weekly Challenge: Penny For The Guy (guy cards)

Paper Sundaes: For the Boys

Splitcoast Stampers Free 4 All: Tail Waggin' Greetings (use an image with a tail)

Anyway, Mikey loved his card and I loved making it for him!  Here is the inside.  I thought of photoshopping out what I had written and then thought nah.  I don't mind sharing what I wrote to my Luvy with you.  I'm not embarrassed over how much I love him!  He is truly a gift from the Lord to me. I love him so much!   We just celebrated 25 years of marriage last month.   It doesn't feel like its been that long.  I'm so blessed!  

The beautiful birthday greeting is actually two stamps, from Oval Snippets.  They are in a beautiful set from Whimsy Stamps and are designed by Raindropecho Designs.  I think they are gorgeous! 

Well I've chatted on long enough! Don't forget that all month long there are fantastic sales and specials and giveaways going on at Whimsy. It's their second anniversary sale-abration! Check out the button at the top of my side bar for details. 

AND

A new rubber release is coming up in just a few days!!  So stay tuned, I will be in the hop on Wed Nov 10th to help launch that release!

God bless you and thank you for your kind visit today!