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Monday, October 31, 2011

Sshhh! Baby Sleeping


Today's card is another baby one.  Just love this digi image from Digi Doodle.  I have coloured with a mixture of Promarkers and Spectrum Noir's.  The backing paper is from a Crafter's Companion SWALK cd.


I am entering this into the following challenges;

Digi Doodle Best - Anything Goes
CES  - New Beginnings
Make it Monday - Anything
Chrisma Cardz - Anything Goes
Dream Valley Challenges - Anything Goes

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Задание №7 "Прозрачная Вода" продолжается...

Дорогие наши читатели и участники!
Наше задание "Прозрачная Вода" продолжается...
Мы продлеваем его для опоздываюших еще на 3 денечка и у Вас появляется еще шанс принять участие в задании и получить свой сертификат победителя на покупку товаров в Маркадекор и баннер победителя!
А вот и еще одна работа для вдохновения от нашего дизайнера Екатерины (bestia_cat)

Семья. Семья? Семья! Как много глубокого смысла  в таком маленьком количестве букв? Их всего 5,  а какие они все разные?  
В моей семье нас тоже 5, у нас крепкие корни и многообещающая, задорная и шаловливая крона. Вокруг нас все красиво, гармонично и прекрасно, много света и радости. Но, в жизни все так не предсказуемо, может быть хрупко и прозрачно, как первый осенний лед, или крепко и многогранно, как алмаз!

 Она же на темном фоне:
На акриловой заготовке сделан горячий эмбоссинг золотой пудрой, фоновая бумага приклеена с обратно стороны акриловой заготовки. Это в сочетании с эмбоссингом придает работе глубину. И девево (корни - наше прошлое, крона - наше будущее) тоже присутствует - в виде подвески.
Материалы: акриловая заготовка для альбома, бумага Tim Holtz,  бумага для акварели, кружево, цветылистья,  декоративная булавка,  акриловые цветы и бабочка, тычинки, гипсовое украшение от Melissa Frances, штамп "Французский текст",  стразы и завитки из страз, чипборд, металлическая подвеска, золотая пудра для эмбоссингаподушечка для эмбоссингафен для эмбоссинга, цепочка

Творить,мечтать,вдохновлятся. Каждый день с МаркаДекор!

Степашка

Степаша ростом 15 см. Материалом мохер :)
Синтепух, стальной гранулят, миништоф, мордочка приваляна.








Маму себе уже нашел.

Writing Advice 19 — Combining the Real and the Unreal





Novels are by definition fiction, and fiction is made up stuff. It doesn’t matter if you write gritty police/courtroom procedural stories, or invented world fantasies, it’s the same. None of it really happened. An argument can be made that even if you were writing a non-fictional account of something that really did happen, your description would only form one perspective and would be seen by others with firsthand knowledge as “fiction.” Still, no one writes in a vacuum. No matter how fictional something is, it is always based on reality.

I write fantasy. The first books I’ve published are invented-world-fantasy, which is just about as out-there as you can get. I created a whole new world, which means I can make anything, anyway I want. I could implement Hollywood-Gravity if I liked. Magic can exist. Gods can recognizably walk among people. People don’t even have to be people, they can be something else entirely. Time doesn’t have to work the same as we perceive in our reality. There could be more colors, a seventh and eighth sense,  whatever I want. Given all this freedom one might expect far more creativity in the genre, and yet oddly, so many invented-world-fantasies take place in very similar settings most drawn from our own history.

There are a number of reasons for that. Authors are trying to replicate what they love to read; it is easier to write about something familiar; it is easier than trying to invent something completely new. All of these are writer-centric, but I feel there is another reason that is actually reader-based that holds more legitimacy—it is easier for a reader to understand. If your setting was too strange you’d either have to stop constantly and explain how everything works, or just accept that the reader won’t have a chance to grasp what is going on. To educate the reader well enough to understand the story, would be prohibitive to the timely telling of the tale. This would be a situation where the art destroys the entertainment.

There are dozens of reasons I choose to write my books in a medieval setting. Swords and arrows allow for more drama and greater flexibility than guns and bombs. Cell phones and the Internet are two of the worst inventions in the world for writers. Just a few years ago, it was so easy to build a story out of a person’s quest to find something or speak to someone. Now to do that you need to explain why they just can’t look it up on Google or call them on a cell. If your heroine discovers something crucial, she’ll be an idiot if she doesn’t just call your hero on the phone to let him know. Doing so will destroy the plot of course, but not doing so is obviously contrived and unrealistic. So historical settings make building plots so much easier. The age of knights, castles and dragons is also grandiose to the point of caricature. Billowing cloaks, towers, long gowns, primal forests, it has great built-in visuals and a wealth of pre-established forms that can be utilized to create any plot. I think only the Western can really compare in its open-source form that is both infinite in possible complexity and yet simple in essence. Between the two, I just think medieval setting are richer because it draws on a larger swath of history from more than one country.     

To get around the problem of repetition, of being seen as using the same tired setting, some writers just change the names. Knights, castles, elves and swords are just called something else. The readers is confused, but only for a little while and then they catch on, substituting in their heads what they know for the new terms. For those sensitive to traditional terms this apparently has a soothing effect, but for most everyone else it is just an unnecessary road block to understanding.

Some go through great effort to break with reality, to invent a new world so different it can be perceived as original. The problem with this, as I see it, is that readers find the greatest rewards from a connection to the story, not from a distance. Familiarity is what touches us. Witnessing an alien world, or individual can be interesting, but it often fails to move emotions. People like to make connections between themselves and what they read. When they do, it becomes personal and when that happens a wall drops, and that’s when you can get at their heart. That’s when you can make them laugh, cry, or scare the crap out of them.

This doesn’t just apply to invented-world-fantasy either. No matter what you write the more you can reflect a reader’s personal experiences, the deeper you can touch them. The obvious question is how can you do that to someone you’ve never met? How can you do that to more than one person when everyone has such different experiences? This is where what I call true magic comes in.

People are surprisingly similar. No two are exactly alike, but a lot of us share common feelings, and the deeper the feeling the more common it is. The way to tap those feelings is to be honest. To depict reality as it really is—even if that is in a fictional world.

In Stephen King’s It, and in his novella The Body (later made into the movie Stand By Me) he did a wonderful job of depicting the life of childhood. It did not matter that his setting was the fifties, the dynamic are universal and reminded me of my own youth. And it is this capturing of familiarities that has the power and magic to take the fantastical and breathe real life into it. I’m sure Mr. King was drawing on personal experience as it just rang too true to be wholly invented, and this very same thing can be done in any genre.

When I started art school my goal was to practice painting reality until I could do it so well, that I could then paint images that did not exist and make them look just as real. I don’t paint so much anymore, or rather I don’t paint with brushes much anymore. Paint has become words—so much faster and far less to clean up. Still the idea is the same. When I create a fantasy world I try to make it accessible to the reader by making it similar to what they might know rather than different. In paint I might depict a castle floating on a cloud, when both the castle and the cloud are perfectly believable the illusion is stirring, captivating. In words, if I relate the heartbreak of a dragon for the loss of its son, the feeling is what’s real, it’s what resonates. The more connections to reality the more real the writing becomes.

In real life there is copious amounts of humor, it is how many people deal with stress, how people hide, how they defend themselves, and how we enjoy ourselves, and yet I find there is almost no humor in non-comedic fiction. There is often a perceived dividing line—if it is funny it can’t have drama and vice versa. So all the effort to create gritty realism is lost because the tale feels artificial due to its own weight. In real life people have hopes and fear, goals and aspirations that often have nothing to do with what’s happening, but not always in stories. In real life people have good days and bad days, happy memories and tragedies, and even horrible places can seems beautiful at times. Yet a single-minded approach to characters and settings tell only half the story, that just doesn’t feel complete. The suspension of disbelief is hindered by the absolutism drawn by the writer trying to hype the sympathy, the fear, or the misery. This lack of combining the real and the unreal in an honest uncontrived manner, this distance between the two, can create a disconnect leaving stories interesting, but not moving, creative, but not believable.

To this end, I have often found that learning how to paint the real world well enough to be convincing, is a huge benefit. This is one of the reasons why I would advocate reading outside of your favorite genre, and even writing outside of it. If you write in fantastical worlds, learning how to write a realistic story will help lend that needed credibility. If you write in a realistic world, learning how to transpose real into the unreal results in the benefit of causing you to focus on the details that, in the real world, are often ignored, but in a fantasy world need to be accounted for.

I think it is when a writer invents a very different world that is surprisingly similar to our own, populated by people that remind us of ourselves, that fiction of any kind stops being fiction, and can truly tell us about ourselves, reminding us of something worth remembering.

 

Поздравляем!!!

Наши стипендиаты на 2011-2012 учебный год





Оксана








Таня

Полина
Катюша

Катюша









Так держать, девчонки!!!






O happy day...

Here is the scripture that, my stampin' sister in Christ, Lisa picked for this week:




Isaiah 1:18 "'Come now, and let us reason together,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’”



Yesterday, we helped our new youth pastors move into their new home. They came from Texas to Iowa. I am sure that it will be a big change for them. They left family to come to our little town. There was a big group from our Church there to unload the truck. The ladies took the small things, like clothes and small boxes, while the guys took the couches and piano... The ladies had just moved the kitchen chairs in and we were commenting on how new they looked. We laughed and said let them get kids and see how they look. As a mom of 4 kids, I know how easily things can get stained. Something about the color white, seems to just draw stains from ketchup, mustard, grape juice... You can use cleaners to clean the stains, and sometimes it works, but in my experience, there seems to be some stains that just won't completely come clean.

Our lives are like that. We have been stained by our sins. We can try to "clean" our stained lives by going to church,or doing good deeds. But try as we will those things will not make us clean. There is nothing that we can do on our own to become clean. That is why God had to send Jesus to live the perfect life, and die for our sins. He is the only way that our sins can be washed away.

I love this worship song. We sing it a lot with the youth at church. I love the chorus where it says... O happy day when you washed my sin away...



The challenge this week is to use scarlet or fall colors on our card. I used fall colors and a Mark's Finest Papers image of a country church.








Our sponsor this week is Lilyof the Valley. Check out Lisa's devotion here at the Stampin' Sisters in Christ blog. Also check out what my stampin' sisters have created...



Kris Linda Miesje Pegggysue Traci Grace


Saturday, October 29, 2011

С первым снегом!


С первым снегом, как снежинки,
Пусть печали улетают,
Словно маленькие льдинки
Нас коснувшись, вмиг растают.





Golf Birthday Card

I made this Golf Birthday Card card for my girlfriends Dad. Clive is 75 today and I was inspired by my friend Vicki Fraser to make this card after she made my hubby a golf card for his birthday. I’m always happy to take bits and pieces no longer wanted in my circle of crafters and the grass and sky are all wallpapers given to me. I love the texture of the green wallpapers they really add a great effect  for the grass and the sky wallpaper… well I wish I had a whole roll of that! I used my Stampin Up Scallop Edge Border Punch to make the grass.Cards October,2011 009

Challenges this card qualifies for:

Cards October,2011 008

Cards October,2011 010Have a great weekend

Trish Munro

Осенние каникулы

Ребята , поздравляю вас с окончанием  первой учебной четверти в 5 классе! Результаты первой четверти зависели только от вас. Кому - то удалось подтянуться и без троек закончить первую четверть. А кому - то стоит приложить больше усилий для лучших результатов. Желаю вам хорошо отдохнуть на каникулах, набраться сил для работы в следующей четверти. Приятного отдыха!!!

Happy Feet

Today sees the start of a new challenge at Sweet Stampin' and the theme is Anything Goes. This week we are sponsored by Stamping Boutique.  For my DT card I have used one of the digi images from Stamping Boutique.  I have used Promarkers for colouring in and everything else from my stash. Hope you will pop over and see the great cards the team have come up with and join in the challenge.


I am entering this into the following challenges;

Cupcake Inspirations - Cake inspiration
Pollycraft - Spooky goings on
Fab n Funky  - Hubble Bubble Toil and Trouble
Stamping Boutique - Spooky Scary Halloween
Creative Inspirations - Colour Scheme - Purple Black Orange
Paper Variety - Halloween

Friday, October 28, 2011

Layers of Color- Vintage butterfly orb




I was inspired by the Layers of Color ornament blog hop. Laura shared a template for this ornament on her blog. I used dp that made me think of vintage wall paper. I used beads and gold cording to hang my ornament. I took a gold leaf pen and drew on the beads as well as little dots and squiggles on the dp. I then stamped and heat embossed with gold ep several butterflies using Layers of Color Flutterescent Set.

New Baby


Today my card is for a new baby.  The images are digi's from Cuddly Buddly and I have coloured them with Spectrum Noir's for the baby's face and the rest in Derwent pencils.  The backing paper is also from Cuddly Buddly.  The flowers have been spayed with glimmer mist.


 I am entering this into the following challenges;

CES - New Beginnings

Ladybug - Oh Baby

Creative Craft Challenges - Fancy Edges

Charisma Cardz - Anything Goes

The Paper Shelter - Anything Goes


Chllenge #90 Glitter it!

Morning everyone - Caroline here - we had a fab response to our layers challenge last week so thank you for all your wonderful entries.
The lucky winner, chosen by random org is....

Deb x of Craftrocks
Congratulations Deb, please email us so we can sort your prize out
and don't forget to take your winners banner
(on the sidebar).

Just a couple of things, before we get to this week's challenge.
First of all we would like to welcome the very talented
Joey
back to the team - glad to have you back with us hun,
and secondly a big thankyou to everyone who has entered our DT/GDT call.
We will be making an announcement soon. :-))


So, onto this week's challenge and the theme is

Glitter it

We want to see lots of lovely glitter on your cards/projects.
We have 2 amazing sponsors for you this week...

Photobucket

Who have supplied this package of goodies


and


who are offering the winner 4 digi images of their choice.

Here's some fabulous inspiration from our DT.
Just click on their names to go straight to their blogs.
















Thursday, October 27, 2011

Two Little Yorkies

My card today is for the challenge at Cards for Men and also for Shirley (Nannieflash) to say hope little Missy is getting better.

I have used another of the Just Inklined images - I used to have Yorkies and just love these little dogs.  Coloured in my Promarkers, the backing paper is from my stash.


Cards for Men - Animals

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