A "Bear-y" Productive Day!

I signed up for a "Convincing Shadows" class offered by Sandy Allnock on her Art Classes site.  Buyer, beware - it's a Give a Mouse A Cookie thing - take one class and you will be looking for more!  Sandy has a great way of breaking skills down into manageable steps and make folks like me (never trained in art) feel successful.  The shadows class was done in pencil, but the skills apply to Copics so I thought I would try applying what I learned in a couple of lessons to this bear.  The first idea involved creating a muzzle on the bear and the second was to give it fur.  I feel like the fur needs some practice, but the result was good enough to make into a card.  I think I had almost every E Copic marker out on my desktop for this guy!  In case you don't recognize him, it's Taylored Expression's Big Grumpy Bear (stamp & die combo), plus Big Grumpy Birthday for the sentiment and present. The ballon is from If Balloons Could Talk (stamp and die combo), and the sentiment is from Simple Strips in Reverse. Aside from TE products, the background stamp is Shiplap, from Hobby Lobby, and the splot behind Grumpy is MFT's Watercolor Wash Free Form stencil.  

I always stamp an image more than once to play with coloring, so for this bear, I focused on the muzzle and shading.  Some of my E Copics were gunky, so the ink built up on the paper and is a little splotchy, but it's good enough for a card!!  Grumpy is paired with his Christmas supplemental stamps, and TE's Snowfall embossing folder.  A little paper from my stash, some twine, enamel dots, and another sentiment from the Simple Strips in Reverse collection (worth every penny of the $4.50 cost!!). 

Big Grumpy is perfect to have in my collection - he's a bit snarky, but it makes me smile! Hope you are smiling, too!

In kindness, Cathy