Thank Ewe

When I received Clearly Besotted’s Feeling Sheepish stamp set as a Christmas present from my brother and his fiance I knew I had to make them a thank you card using it! This is what I came up with. It’s one of those cards that, thankfully, came together pretty much how I’d planned it in my mind, which is always a nice thing to happen.

I started by stamping out one of the sheep from the stamp set onto a snippet of white card using MFT Black Licorice Hybrid Ink. Then I coloured it in with watercolour pencils and used my new water brush to blend out the colour. I think I overfilled the brush because it went a little bit blobby with too much water… I dabbed it up and added more colour once it was dry, and it all worked out well enough. I decided to give the sheep black features with white wool, and added some pink to the insides of the ears and the cheeks. Once the painting was all done and had dried I fussy cut the sheep and set it to one side.

Next I worked on my wall. I took another snippet of white and drew in my bricks free hand. I used three different shades of reddish-orange watercolour pencils and tried to make my bricks fairly uneven. I added a little brown to some of them too. I blended the colour out and let it dry before adding a soft yellow-brown for the mortar between the bricks. I then trimmed the panel along the line of the bricks at the top whilst leaving the other sides straight.

I wanted to add a tree in the background. I worked out roughly where to place it, with the help of my MISTI, stamped it onto my card front. The stamp is Oak by Stamperia. I used a soft green pigment ink as well as a soft brown along the trunk and some of the branchy areas. I then added clear embossing powder and heat embossed the tree.

The sentiment comes from the Feeling Sheepish stamp set and I stamped it directly onto the wall once I was sure it was completely dry. I used embossing ink and black embossing powder. I’m not sure why I did that – I should have used black ink and clear embossing powder. I always find that black embossing powder ends up making a terrible mess, and yet every time I think it won’t be as bad as I remembered… I’ll just tell myself it adds to the weathered look of the wall!

I assembled the card by first adhering the sheep to the wall using some liquid glue. I then added foam adhesive to the back of the wall and the sheep before adhering them in place on top of the background tree. And that was the card completed!

I’m very pleased with how this card turned out. As I said, it’s pretty much exactly how I imagined it would be! I don’t often freehand elements for my card but the brick wall turned out surprisingly well. If I were to change something I would, as discussed, not use black embossing powder… It never works for me, not matter how well I prepare my paper and brush the stray bits away! Ah well. I also wonder if I should have trimmed the top of the card as there seems to be perhaps too much empty space up top… Or I suppose I could have just positioned all the elements higher to even it out a bit.

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

Global Design Project – trees

Allsorts Challenge – something new

Less is More – dimension

 

PS, as you can perhaps tell, I’m changing the format of these posts slightly. From now on I will list my challenges at the bottom of the post rather than having them in the first paragraph.

If you’re looking for my photo-a-day series, it has now been moved over to The Joyful Soul. I do hope you’ll follow me there if you don’t already!