Hitched

For my second card of the day I have made another scene card for the Mojo Monday sketch challenge. It’s also a response to Cupcake Inspiration‘s great outdoors theme and Simon Says Stamp Monday‘s celebrate themed challenge.

My starting point was the little scene panel. I cut the panel down to the size I wanted and put a light pencil line across where I wanted the horizon to be, so that it would be straight when the panel once the panel was stuck to the front of the card. Next I started watercolouring my background. I decided to go for sunset colours as my last two scene cards have had blue skies and I wanted this one to be different.

I put a layer of light lemony yellow first then layered on a darker yellow, and kept layering building to an orange. Each time I applied the colour at the centre of the horizon and drew it out. I continued until I was happy with the colouration of the sky. I then moved on to the grass. I did that with a dark green with a hint of brown to it. I tried to add shading where the caravan would be, as a cast shadow.

Once I was happy with my background I set it aside to dry and started looking into what I would do for the strips on the back panel. Going through my snippets folder I found paper with a birch tree pattern on it. I cut it down into strips and used this for the strips on my card base.

Next I returned to my image panel. I stamped my caravan, from Avery Elle’s Home Sweet Home, onto the background and masked it off. Then I stamped the trees from Lawn Fawn’s Lovable Legends. For the trees I used two inks – I stamped first with a dark olive-green, then added a layer of brown, and then another layer of the green. This way I ensured the stamping had taken fully, and also gave a bit more depth to the colour.

I went on to colour my caravan and realised the mistake I made. (You may have noticed it already!) I’d painted the entire background before stamping on my caravan, which meant I would have to cover the paint to colour the caravan. I gave it a try but in the end decided to restamp the caravan on white paper, fussy cut and colour it, and stick it on top of the one I’d stamped on the image panel. That worked much better!

The last thing I wanted to do was add a silhouetted tree in the foreground. I wanted to use my Oak tree from Stamperia, and I had decided to heat emboss it (despite the difficulty I’ve been having with learning that technique!) I used my MISTI to stamp as I new I’d have a bit of trouble with the edge of the caravan not being completely flush. I double stamped then added the black embossing powder and heated it. I tried a different method and actually managed to get it to work this time! Only problem being that the intricacy of the stamp got lost a bit. The powder was perhaps not suitable for very fine details and it ended up a bit blobby looking in one place…

Rather than focusing on the problem I came up with a solution! I had been planning on putting the banner lower down on the image, hence having left the grass area pretty bare. Instead I decided the banner would go over the messier area of embossing to hide it. Unfortunately that did mean that a good chunk of the caravan got hidden too!

The banner itself is made from white card. The sentiment is from the Home Sweet Home set and I added a little heart from the same set, stamped with red pigment ink. I then decided to add hearts above the caravan too. Initially I was going to just do the outline hearts but I decided they didn’t look right, and went back and stamped them with the solid hearts stamp too.

Finally I just needed to assemble the card. I decided to round the corners of the image panel with my We R Memory Keepers Crop-A-Dile Corner Chomper, then cut and chomped a brown panel to mount it on. I used my tape runner to adhere the tree patterned paper to the card base, then used my Tombow Multi Mono Liquid glue to attach the image panel. I weighted it down with my acrylic block whilst I put foam squares on the back of the banner, and then I removed the weight and adhered the banner, hiding the worst of the embossing.

Despite the trouble with embossing I am really happy with how this card turned out. The theme is clear, the colours work nicely, and I think it’s a sweet card. If only I had someone to send it to!

Love,

Lady Joyful