Gift Owl

This cute Christmas card could probably work as a birthday card, given the lack of a sentiment! I again used the layout from Mojo Monday. The themes of Christmas gifts and non-traditional Christmas cards come from Simon Says Stamp Monday and Pink and Main respectively.

I started by finding the papers for the back panels. I knew I would want to try to coordinate the colours in my image to match them. The present patterned paper seemed a perfect choice and I went with a coordinating red for the smaller panel. The orange-yellow stars prompted the colour for the strip to go below the image panel.

Once I had my papers picked out and trimmed to size I got started on my focal panel. I picked out the owl with gifts from Pink and Main’s hOWLidays stamp set. I stamped it with MFT black licorice hybrid ink onto a snippet of white card and coloured with watercolour pencils. Usually I colour an image completely, shading as I go, before blending the watercolour out. This time I decided to shade by adding my colour only to the dark areas and then blending it out (with Wink of Stella) into the areas I’d left blank to create the highlights. It worked pretty well! I did find that the reds I’d chosen became a bit too pink once blended out, so I went back over them with a more orange-red to bring the colour to a more appropriate shade.

Next I added a pattern to the orange strip. I took the small bow stamp from the hOWLidays set and stamped it randomly across the strip using Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink.

The final touch was to assemble the card. I used my tape runner for all the layers. I chose to round off the corners of the image panel before adhering it in place.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, though of course the owl and presents are just kind of floating in space because I didn’t give any kind of background or grounding… Even so, I think it turned out nicely! And I love the versatility of this particular stamp to be usable for non-Christmas cards too.