Monday, March 15, 2021

Herd it's your birthday!


My Favorite Things' Sketch Challenge #532 presented a number of difficulties for me.  I opted to follow the figurative sketch pattern posted by Vanessa Menhorn on the MFT site rather than the shape-specific star design since I found her card so attractive and thought it might work with my farm animals. Then, I tried to figure out how to put everything together without doing a bunch of fussy cutting for physical layers. I first considered stamping the animals on acetate and laying that over the background stamp, but once I mastered stamping in StazOn on the ultra smooth surface and got all the animals masked and layered with a bale of hay and feeding trough,  I soon realized how crazy hard it was to color those images smoothly!  So, after what seems like a dozen attempts, I ended up with fewer images stamped on card stock, masked before adding the background stamp and blending the background, then coloring with Copics. I couldn't locate the balloons I wanted, so I used another set (even though these strings were not as long as I really wanted) and then I made the mistake of squirting way too much glossy accents on them. . .  I nearly didn't post this (ideally the chicks should be further down and the hen shouldn't have a speck on her body); but I spent too much of my Saturday to pretend this didn't happen! At least I learned something from the process and now have a card that is perfect for my friend, Sarah which are two things I appreciate about completing the weekly challenges!

Supplies: My Favorite Things The Whole Herd, Happy Birthday background stamp, Sweet Succulent sentiment, Bentley Bear by Adam Pescott (balloons), Ranger glossy Accents, Copic markers, Memento Tuxedo Black and Versamark ink, Neenah Solar white card stock, Stampin' Up! Marina Mist and Tim Holtz Salty Ocean distress ink, and Recollections Snow white embossing powder.