Dustin Pike Rocks!

For me, there is just nothing like the smell of fresh rubber in the house. Right now, I actually have a small pile of it on my desk, mounted and ready to stamp, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about digi stamps and the every amazing Dustin Pike. Sometimes the perfect image comes along and it just happens to be a sweet black & white printable line art rather than deeply etched rubber. So what's a girl to do? Well, heck, print it off, of course!

Dustin Pike is an amazing artist. I actually found him years ago through his Mooseberry graphics clip art. I bought a couple of pieces way back then, but haven't a clue where I stored the files. To be honest, they're probably gone forever due to a hard drive crash a few years ago. Aside from that, I'd really lost touch with his art. That was way back before blogging became a daily (hourly?) word.

I must say I was delighted when I saw a post on Splitcoast about a free dragon digital art image. I adore dragons, but good stamps and images of them are hard to find. When I found out it was a Dustin Pike dragon...I had it snagged onto my hard drive before you could say "Dustin Pike Totally Rocks!". Actually, by the time I saw the post, he had TWO dragons up for grabs. They're extremely cute and are both now living on my hard drive.

So how do you go from sweet digital image to great looking card? The majority I've seen are using Word to get the image from computer to printer. I used Photoshop Elements. It allows me to place my images for the least amount of cardstock waste. I created a new 8 1/2 x 11 blank image and then layered two each of the dragons into the file. I also added two each of a couple of Greeting Farm images I bought last month. I saved the file for later use on a hard drive that does an auto backup each night (see, I do learn from my mistakes!) and then printed. Now, I understand that some people have problems with smearing. I did not, but I'm using a sweet high end Brother color laser printer. It's the same one I used for my Prismacolor chart, so I knew the images were going to work perfectly with my coloring medium of choice. I printed onto a sheet of Gina K's Pure Luxury Base Weight White. Man, I love that stuff!

I didn't get a chance to make the images up into a card just yet, but I did have some time to color. I seriously love how they turned out.
I used the My Minds Eye Bloom & Grow papers, the Grow Just Stripes in particular, to match up my colors. I bought a selection of these at the local scrap store the other day intending to make cards out of them. I know they're going to be perfect with these dragons. My colors are:

Dragons - Goldenrod, Pumpkin Orange, Crimson Red, Burnt Ochre, Jade Green, and Muted Turquoise
Grass - Kelp Green
Chick & Egg - Goldenrod, Yellow Ochre, Warm Grey 30%

What do you think? Heck, why are you still reading this? You should be off snagging those cute little dragons from Dustin' blog. Scroll a bit, you'll find them. Take a moment to leave him a comment and let him know he totally rocks. Hopefully, he send a few (lots) more critters our way!