It Was +40 Degrees Celcius Here Last Week (+104F)

Since I did a post in January about the temperature being -45C I felt it only fair to let you all know that we also get very hot here too! It was +34C (+93F) one day last week and it felt more like +40C (+104F) with the humidex.
We took the little girls in to a friend's house to go swimming in their above ground pool. I thought it would be a good dry (wet) run before they started their swimming lessons later this summer. They really had fun and she brought out snacks and treats for them afterwards too. They don't have kids but they do have a VERY active dog that thinks he's still a puppy. He will run off with anything that is not up high enough, chewed on one of the girls towels, and will eat food you're eating right out of your hand whether you are done with it or not, lol. My friend says he has very bad manners around company but that it is good for him to be around little ones. His name is Cooper and he is a Golden/Yellow Lab. So naturally he had to be in the thank-you card! I found this doggie digi at Mo's Digital Pencil Too. The little Wryn Beach Babe digis are from Tiddly Inks. I imported them all into my Silhouette and then replicated one of the Wryn's, flipped her horizontally and resized her smaller. Now I have my Kaylee and my Abby. Placed Cooper at the bottom. Then printed them out on the printer. The pool was a Silhouette file that I cut out of colors to match our friends'. The sentiment was written in white gel pen. I colored my digis and my scene using Prismacolor pencils. To create the grass I used my green Zig marker to make all the grass strokes and then my pencils to color it in. For the sky I used my Frost Blue Copic on the top and some darker pencils on the bottom. Used pencils to shade the clouds. It was cloudy the day we went, which was good because it had been very hot, too hot, earlier in the week. I tried to match the colors for the girls' suits to what they wore that day too. I love my little scene and think it turned out very, very nicely.
My lessons learned: I tried again to blend my pencils using baby oil and again it caused my image lines to run/bleed black onto my yellow dog. I tried to heat set my images, still ran. I tried watercolor paper, still ran. I printed my images out a third time and gave up trying to use baby oil for blending. My Copics (and I only have 2) did help blend the lines a bit, especially on the sky. Otherwise I just used circles when coloring different shades and I think everything blends quite well.

The Originals with Daddy

The Replicas with Cooper ;o)

I would like to share my card at:

Great Impressions your best coloring, closes July 31,

Mo's Challenge Blog in the doghouse, closes August 2,

Pause Dream Enjoy Challenges sports and hobbies (swimming), closes August 2,

Polka Doodle summer, closes August 3,

Dream Valley Challenges summer, closes August 4,

Creative Mondays water, closes August 5,

Creative Craft Challenge summertime, closes August 7