Lucy's Digi Unicorn Tutorial

Hiya It's Lucy here and it's my turn to share some tips & techniques about how I make things.

I love love love digi stamps & spend most of my time creating with them. I love their flexibility, versatility and the fact that they take up no storage space. 

A few tips I would share right at the beginning with Digi Stamps

1

Store your Digi Stamps in Artist folders on your computer, or add the artist's name to the file name after you've downloaded it. It's soooooo easy to forget where you purchased a digi stamp from & then you waste a lot of time trying to track it down before you share your creations on your blog or Facebook. 

2

If you find images via Google search or Pinterest please please please track them back to the original artist and purchase or download from there. There are far too many images floating round in cyber space that have been shared without the artist's permission. Many artists give away freebies, but the terms & conditions mean they should be downloaded from the artists page. Protect yourself and the artists by getting digis in the right way. 

3

Never ever share digis. You've purchased them for your use and the t's and c's almost always state no sharing.

4

BACK UP YOUR DIGIS. 

It's soul destroying when your wonderful collection of digi stamps vanishes into the ether after a computer malfunction. Get into the habit of backing your digis (and photos & documents etc) up regularly - whether to a physical back up hard drive, or to one of the many cloud storage options. It saves tears if anything goes wrong.

So there we go - enough of the basic information. Here's how I went about creating my Unicorn card.

I use software called Craft Artist 2 to design my cards & add watermarks to the pictures of the finished items. Many other programmes are available, this is just eh one I've found easiest to use.

I start with a blank page & draw two squares the size of my card base & the size of the mat I want to use. I increase the transparency of the inner square so it gives me a guideline for cutting, but isn't too bold if I cut slightly wrong (I know me well :P )

 I then drag & drop the digi's I want on the page

 Then arrange them as I want. I added drop shadows as this helps give dimension. One of the things I love about digis is that you can tweak them as wanted. The rainbow didn't look quite right in it's original form so I stretched it sideways a little until it looked as I wanted.

I printed my design & trimmed it using the grey line as a guideline. 

Here you can see the colour reference I've made for my Copics. I use it as a way of working out which colours I want to use & which will go well together.

 Now for the colouring. I started with the rainbow. I love rainbows & have a crib sheet of the Copic colours I've used in the past in my little notebook. It's so much easier than trying to work it out from scratch again each time!

 I started by laying down the lightest colours. Me being me I wanted all 7 strands of the rainbow in there so I overlapped the lines a little. After mapping out the area I used the rest of the colour range to add depth & shading to the rainbow.

I added some shading to the clouds (C0, C1, C2, C3, B21) & touched the raindrops lightly with the colours of the rainbow as the water would reflect them.

A finishing touch of glossy accents added the watery effect they needed.

Next it was the unicorn. I used Copics V000, V01, V12, V15, V17 & V09 & then coloured his mane & tail with Wink of Stella pen & Sakura Stardust Gel Pen

To create the grass I used Copics G000, G01, G02, G82 & G29.

I tried to create random tufts & build the layers up. My random isn't very random though - I have a friend who always laughs at my attempts at random :p

I coloured the sky in with squiggly movements of B000

Here's some pictures of the finished card.

I hope you like it & hope this tutorial has proved helpful. 

Lucy x