Have you filed your 2009 personal taxes?

Yes, it's that time of year again for Canadians.  Personal taxes are due April 30!  If you are self-employed, your filing deadline is June 15 BUT your taxes are still due April 30!  So, you might as well file on April 30 too.  It was a fairly full house in the firm today.  I expect it will be less tomorrow, but I'll see because I'll be there again!

Statistics show those who file early are more likely to be getting a refund and those who file later (or late) tend to owe.  Well duh.  If you were claiming a refund you'd be rushing to make your claim too!

Just thought I would pop in a reminder to file on time!!

- Scrapninny

PaperPlay Sketch Challenge for Week 13

One of the blogs I follow called, Colour and Ink, is on the design team for PaperPlay Challenges.  Deidre at Colour and Ink colours her images so superbly and also has a great eye for pairing colours I would never have put together.  I tried a PaperPlay challenge once before (viewed here), but it didn't involve any stamping.  So I decided to try again and attempt to colour in some stamps.


So, this is the sketch we were challenged to use:

And here's how I used it!

Stamping itself is fairly new to me.  I have a small collection of copics, which I used on this cutesy image from High Hopes Rubber Stamps.  I also have some Pantone Tria triple-tipped markers which I've had since highschool (we're talking 10+ years!) that, to my delight, blend perfectly with my copics as if they were copics themselves!  Some of my Pantones dried out, but the majority of them are still good after being unused for 10 years.  Amazing!

I am not very good at blending my markers and I don't even have enough of the right shades to blend together, so I just coloured it solid and then used my colourless blender to remove some colour here and there, and did a second coat in the shadow areas.  (The colourless blender is SO misnamed.  It's not a blender at all.  It behaves as though the coloured ink scatters away from the "blender" ink, the way a raindrop on a watercolour would.)

Ah well.  Lots of practice ahead with stamping!  (But I still prefer die cuts!)

- Scrapninny