Dustin Rides Again

Last month I devoted an entire post to raving about Dustin Pike and his awesome graphics. In the time that has passed since that post, he has continued to offer up great freebies (check his blog on Wednesdays!) and has created an Etsy store stocked full of great images. He's even put out a call for a design team (yeah, I'm totally applying!). He continues to provide great dragons on a regular basis along with other wonderful characters. I had a group of them printed off and tucked into my stash of images to color and the MME Grow colors just seemed to suit them perfectly! Once again, Dustin just rocks.

Of all the cards I made up, this one is my favorite. This little bee is just waiting for the April Showers to abate so the May flowers will bloom. I pulled out my new classic rectangles nesties for this one. I love how the scallops perfectly frame out the image. You can't see it so much on the picture, but the white rectangle is also embossed. It looks great in person though. I have a stash of flower shaped buttons from a recent raid on the Creative Cafe at my local scrap store. The white one just fit so perfectly for this card. I waffled on the umbrella color and after I had the card made up, I wished I'd gone back in and done the canopy in orange instead of blue. Still, I love how it all turned out.

On this card, I wasn't sold on this dragon at first. As much as I love dragons, I just couldn't place what was off for me. I went ahead and printed him out, though. In a conversation with my buddy Becks, she pointed it out to me. His basket it empty! Once the problem was pinpointed, he took on a whole new personality to me. He's a very sweet little guy. He now adorns the front of a great little "Miss You!" card. In his next appearance, he'll be pointed the other direction and featured with the dragon holding a hatched egg from my last Dustin post. I think together, they'll make an excellent long card...perhaps for a baby shower.

I'm short guy cards at the moment, so when Dustin posted his little knight, I knew I needed him. Here's another that I could have tweaked up my colors a bit and added in some of the orange, but I really like how he's all done out in blue. Looking at it when I was writing up this post, I realized that he probably would have popped a bit more if I'd done a dark card base rather than the white. He looks pretty good on the white, but next time I'll probably try him on something else.

I had a lot of fun with shading on the armor. I used the cool greys in my Prismacolor box. I started with 20% and worked that with 50% and 70%. The challenge is deciding where all the shading is going to be while trying to keep it from looking like he's wearing dirty armor. I nearly added some metallic silver, but stopped myself at the last minute. I do think he needs a shield design, though. The blank shield bugged me when I was coloring it up. Knights need a good emblem on their shield like a crest or something to make their opponents think twice about smacking it. Dustin's got a couple of great "manly" dragons in his Etsy shop, so I need to figure out which one is going to be best on my knight and snag that with my next order.

A few of you have asked if I would do before and after photos of my coloring/blending. I've done one a few weeks ago when I was starting my experiments with baby oil. It's a bit problematic as when I said in my last post that I'm a lazy artist, it's not entirely true. My style of coloring/blending involves lots of layering of color and blending and shading and a bit more color and perhaps a bit more blending....I can easily do a quick shot of my "before" as I tend to lay down all my base colors before I do any blending. It's the after that I think would probably disappoint. I have a couple of options at this point. I can do a more step-by-step photo shoot. This requires me to remember to stop mid process and take photos. Once I really get going on an image, about the only thing that stops me is a crying boy, demanding food or nap. :) The other is to charge up the Vado HD and do a video tutorial. I need to charge the Vado either way, but I've never done a video tutorial and I'm not sure how it would all work out. As I plan to play more with the Zest-it this weekend, I'll see what I can come up with.