Trying to be open-minded

I have been fairly resistant to the idea of digistamps, which may amuse those of you who know about my digital design work, and others of you who know that I have used clipart on my cards since long before digital stamps were a common item. However, so many of my peers have extolled the virtues digital stamps, I thought I should give them another try.

Paper Popsicles has started a new thing, giving out a free digital stamp every Friday on their company blog, so I thought I would give it a try. It is a very lovely thing for them to do, and I am happy to send you all to their site to check them out. However, I had trouble with the image they sent. Perhaps it is all my fault, because I am cheap, I do not want to run an entire sheet of cardstock through my printer just to snag one image (this is my main complaint with Ten Two Studios, too). I want to be able to print out several at once, resize as necessary, even reverse and combine my digital stamps. Unfortunately, the image files come as PDFs, and I can't do any of that with my software, and I happen to think I have some pretty good software. However, my software will let me do a screen capture, so that is what I was reduced to doing - magnifying the image on my computer and doing a screen capture in order to render it in a format I could manipulate to my desire.

Anyway, once I got it printed out, I colored the image with marker watercoloring, Stargazers for shimmer, a little bit of direct marker coloring for the tiny bits, and highlighting with Stardust pens. The sentiment is handwritten with gold metallic gel pen and highlighted with the Stardust pen.



I chose to make a night sky to comply with the Saturday Spotlight Challenge to use a non-Halloween image to make a Halloween card, and I sparkled it up for the Sunflowers and Dragonflies challenge to Sparkle and Shine. The layout is Card Patterns 35. That makes 4 challenges in one card!