Peacock Beauty

Once again, Designed2Delight has given an AWESOME digi stamp to complete the Friday's Freebie Challenge.  When I first saw it in my email, I was stumped on how I should color it.  It has such flowing lines and curlicues in the feathers, I was afraid I would really blow it.  To work it out I printed out some small versions of the digi to experiment on.  Low and behold, the first combination of colors I used turned out really good if I do say so myself.  Now I had my colors and I had to decide how to execute them on the image.  Peacocks have a shimmer to their feathers that I also wanted to make sure to have on the image.  To encompass all of these different aspects, I first clear embossed the outline of a larger image of the peacock.  Next I turned to my standby of CTMH stamp pads and Tombow Blending Pen.  The colors used were Clover Meadow Green, Tropical Blue and Goldrush.  After coloring everything, I cut out the image, went over it with an embossing pen and put Ranger Holographic embossing powder on it.  This gave it a very sparkly shimmer to the peacock.  This card I layered onto Best Occasions Pearlized paper, the ivory and pink cut with a spellbinders nestabilities die set.  On the blue pearlized paper, I used a Martha Stewart corner punch.  These were all layered on  K & Company - Life's Journey.

I wanted to try an alternate coloring method on this image because it has so many possibilities.  I have a gel pen set that includes some with a pearlized effect.  I pulled a blue, green, and gold pen with this ink type and just colored my peacock.  I really love the way it turned out.  I cut it out and layered it on ivory pearlized paper cut down with a spellbinders nestability die and then embossed it in a cuttlebug Victoria embossing folder.  I did sponge the edges with some tropical blue to give it definition.  I had a Basic Grey undressed chipboard Periphery set and I punched out 2 pieces and colored them with a Color Box gold stamp pad to dress up the edges of the diecut paper.  All of these pieces were layered on another piece of K & Company - Life's Journey.

After coloring these two images, I can not wait to try some other ideas out.  I am not sure that I really showcased the images to their best advantage because something seems missing on my cards, but I will work on it.  Hope you can use these coloring ideas and enjoy my cards.