Happy Graduation!

Today I needed to make a couple of graduation cards, both for high school graduates, one for a girl and one for a boy.  I wanted both to be whimsical, but I wanted 2 completely different designs.

Here is the first card that I created:

On this card, I used one of the adorable dogs from Mama Elephant's "Playful Pups" stamp set and colored him with Copic markers.  I topped him off with a mortar board from Papertrey Ink's "For the Graduate" stamp/die set.  What a cutie!

Here is the second card that I created:

For this card, I wanted to use the Simon Says Stamp/Mama Elephant collaboration set, "Super Duo".  It just so happened that I was watching videos from Catherine Pooler's online class, "In The Mood" while I was crafting and it just so happened that I was on "City Scapes", so I paired it up with the die from Mama Elephant's "Central Park" set and the PTI mortar board again and voila!  The sentiment is from Winnie & Walter's "The Big, The Bold and You" set. 

Confession:  I started out trying to use distress inks and my ink blending tool, but as usual, that only resulted in frustration with streaks, etc.  So, I watercolored it using the same inks - Spiced Marmalade and Abandoned Coral.  Some day, I will get the hang of that technique!  haha

I hope you like my cards...

Cheers!

Lin :)