I followed the crowd and ended up at Tescos

On of my favourite lines from Max Boyce that.
I share it because this week a few of the Daring Cardmakers shared some cards. So I produced mine for the dare - only at the last minute to discover those cards were for NEXT week. Ah, we all know what assume makes don't we?

Its been a bit of a week though. Phil is on his trip motorbiking round Britain and the house feels strange without him. Also my computer died :( A new one is coming next week and I suppose the upside of Pip being away  is that I get to use his computer.... But nothing is quite the same so everything takes forever (Moan moan)

I'm actually behind as well on last weeks dare (the computer failed last Friday) so will cover that as well in a minute.
This weeks dare was a challenge to use Neon colours - Glowing Neons
I'm not a big fan of neon. Funnily enough as I slaved over my card I thought "the last time I was into neon was when I had that orange t-shirt with "relax" written on it and my lovely friend Cathrinehas just posted a photo of me on Facebook wearing said neon shirt (and fairly bold trousers). I reckon it must be around 1984. I've cropped it so it is just me and her legs :)

It would have taken ages to get my hair that foofy!

Anyway enough nostalgia for the days of neon. Here is the card

 I was initially rather panicked but then decided to borrow some highlighters from my student daughter. (Ulp, I have just realised she is probably exactly the same age now as I was in this photo. I think it was taken in the summer I turned 19, which is where she is now . I can say exactly the same age with confidence as we have the same birthday...)
 I have just bought a new stamp and die set - Doodle  flowers from WPlus9 and some Clean Color (sic) brush pens (never got into copics but I adore these) I stamped the flowers and leaves in black ink. Then I scribbled some neon highlighter onto a perspex block and used a water brush to pick up the colour. It worked really well! I did add some depth and contrast with some of the Clean Color (hate spelling it that way) pens but the highlighters did most of the work. If you look closely at the card, you will see that I used green, orange and yellow as a wash on the background as well. It is more visible to the naked eye than the camera was able to pick up.

I added Wink of Stella clear shimmer over the images, used a black pen to redo the ink sections and added some dots with a white pen. Then I die cut/hand cut the elements out , adding some with foam pads for dimension. The sentiment is from the same set. It was finished off with some sequins and I also raised the panel with foam pads (the thick black line at the top and right hand side is a shadow as it was really sunny when I photographed it)

The week before was an inspiration month and Leo came up with this
 (I would show the pictue here but blogger is mucking me about)
I basically decided to be inspired by the whole thing and had a go painting a face

"Brave effort" I reckon :) I also watercoloured a yellow/grey panel and added paint, stripes and dots to my background patterned paper as well. I raised the Clearly Besotted sentiment onto foam pads and added some sequins. For a change.

I'll quickly share my first outings with those Clean Color pens. They are such fun to use. Here are two cards using Clearly Besotted stamps

and four using the same Woodware stamp, just playing around with colours

If only you could see the Wink of Stella sheen, it is so pretty :)

I'll be back next week - hopefully with my hard drive full of photos of other things I have made.... (back things up? ME who has had two hard drive failures?)