CASE of one of Anna Wight's cards

Anna Wight is an artist that I MUCH admire!  I decided to try to case her card with this little chickadee (my favorite bird).  First, I die cut a branch with a small bird sitting on it.  I cut the bird off - since I planned to stamp the Chickadee.  Then I colored both the leaves and branches with my Shin Han alcohol markers.  I will probably turn it over and color both sides next time just to help get all the edges covered.  After it was dry (a minute) I went back over the leaves with a center vein. 

The Chickadee was stamped with Intense Black (hybrid) ink.  I am getting to prefer this one over Momento (can you believe it?!)  After it was dry I used watercolor pencils to add the golden and brown colors to the birdie.  I found one scrap of music paper in a basket (deep!) and used it for the background.  I have beautiful music stamps for backgrounds, but after checking Evernote, I realized that they are in MN.  So, going on, I used saddle brown CTMH ink to age the paper a bit, glued the branch and leaves directly to the design paper and popped the bird up on 3M adhesive foam tape.  The button and twine are "signature" embellishments of Anna's but she is much better than I am at getting the proportions right!  I'm blaming this one on my disabled hand!

The hand story - I've had increasing pain in my left hand.  No biggie, right?  Wrong.  I'm left handed.  So when I finally got fed up with it, I went to the doctor who took x-rays and sent me to Physical Therapy.  They did all sorts of measurements, declared me officially ambidextrous (praise God!) and put my left hand in a splint.  I can do most things, but I found it very hard to tie the little twine into anything!  So, no small bows or knots for me for awhile.  Next steps, joint injection with cortisone, then twice more maybe, then surgery.  (Ugh!)

Don't abuse your hands.  When they are tired, take a break.  Believe me - I totally underestimated how much I use them!