Dahlia Blooms.

Welcome to the March Journey Blog Hop!  I'm so happy you're hoppin' along!  If you arrived here from Ruth Cooper's blog, you're on the right track.  If not, that's ok too!  Just continue the hop and you'll come full circle!

Have you ever gotten a stamp set and then when you sat down to color it, you just didn't know what colors to use or which medium to color with?  Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the choices.  And sometimes I just long to go back to the basics before I had a room full of options.

I was very excited to get the Dahlia Burst stamp set from Fun Stamper's Journey.  And am anxiously awaiting the die set that allows me to layer without having to fussy cut a lot.

Of course, the first thing I did was google the stamp set, but didn't get as many options as I would have liked, so then I googled the real thing, which led me to Pinterest where I had to create y own Pinterest board, because the color combinations that God has created this flower in seem endless!

I pulled out my copics and colored a couple of cards

And then I pulled out the inexpensive Crayola colored pencils that my kids had used in school years ago and colored this one

But I didn't care for the pencil lines that the colored pencils make, so I used a Tortillion and Baby oil.  Most people use Gamilsol or Mineral Spirits to blend colored pencil drawings, but I didn't have those, and the store I went to last night for one or the other didn't have those, and I was able to get Baby Oil and it smells great :)   

Let me show you what the results are after coloring half the flower:

The oil breaks down the wax in the pencil and blends it all together.  It also deepens the color, so it appears darker after adding the oil, which is the opposite affect that I get when using watercolors.

Here's my final card:

Thanks for hopping to my blog.  Please head over to Crissy Salima Rivas' blog to see what he/she has to share.