Peony in Pencil

Hi everyone!  Have you been enjoying your Saturday?  We got up early and planted a bunch of tomatoes and bell peppers and banana peppers today.  That wind is just killer today - it kept trying to knock us over!  After we ate some lunch, I spent the afternoon playing in my studio.

I just got some new stamps from Power Poppy and I wanted to try my pencil coloring on one of these gorgeous peony stamps.  I stamped the smaller peony from the Peony Muse set along with some of the leaves using London Fog Memento ink (a soft gray color).  Because I knew I wanted to color these with pencils, I stamped them onto some Canson drawing paper.  It actually took me several days to color this flower and the leaves.  I worked in short intervals of 10 to 15 minutes at a time so my hand and fingers wouldn't cramp up.  I used Prismacolor Premier pencils and I applied the lessons learned from Kit and Clowder to shade and highlight everything.

Power Poppy just came out with dies to go with their newest release of stamps, so of course, I just HAD to get the matching dies when I ordered the stamps.  I cut these out with the dies and I am THRILLED!  Fussy cutting is not my forte, so I am ecstatic that Marcella will have matching dies for her stamps!  Yay!!

I just happened to notice that they have a fun new challenge up on the Power Poppy blog for April.  They have three sketches, so I picked Sketch #2 and found some papers to go with my colored flower.  I stamped the sentiment from the new Loving Tulips set (which is on backorder right now - proof of how popular this is!!) on the notepaper layer.  This turned out rather cute!  :-)

Enjoy your weekend!