Christmas Walrus

Sometimes I entertain myself during card making by imagining stories behind the scenes. In this case I couldn’t quite decided what the walrus’s story is. I’m not sure if the presents are for him, from him, or perhaps he’s a bit of a grinch and stole them! Whatever the story is he certainly has a whole lot of presents!

I started by stamping out the piles of presents from The Cat’s Pajamas Polar Holiday stamp set onto a snippet of watercolour paper. I used my MISTI so that I could restamp if necessary. I did consider masking off but decided it was too fiddly to cut out a mask. Instead I just carefully positioned the stamps so that they wouldn’t overlap too obviously. For a slightly different look I raised my middle column of presents and only inked up the bottom few so that it wouldn’t be an identical pile to the others.

Once I’d finished stamping out the columns I decided I wanted some other presents too. I looked through my other stamp sets and found a few with presents. I stamped the tiny present from Pink and Main’s Dinomite set into a few of the gaps in the piles. I also stamped the large presents from their hOWLidays set off to the side, as well as a medium sized present from Simon Says Stamp’s Christmas Cats – I added some extra detail to this present with my black sharpie.

Whilst I was stamping I went ahead and stamped out my walrus. The walrus is from Paper Smooches’ Chilly Chums. I decided to also give him the hat which the penguin in the Polar Holiday set is wearing. It suits him quite well!

With all the stamping done I started on the colouring. I used watercolour pencils for all my colouring and blended it out with an old Wink of Stella – there’s not much shimmer left in it but it works nicely as a waterbrush. I used a light shade of brown for the main area of the walrus’s body, concentrating the colour as though the light is coming from the top right. I then used a darker shade of brown for his muzzle and eyelids, and a light yellow-brown for his tusks. The hat didn’t need a lot of colours. I put a little grey to add some shading to the band on it, then coloured the holly green and the berries red.

For the presents I decided to go with rainbow colours. In hindsight that may have come across more clearly if I had grouped the colours, but never mind. The red and green I used are the same ones I used on the holly and berries, and I also brought in orange, yellow, blue and purple.

Once all the colouring was done I started cutting things out. I used one of the Studio Square Layers Memory Box dies to cut out the main area with the stacks of presents. The other presents were cut out with their coordinating dies, though I later decided to fussy cut them to remove the white borders. I don’t have the dies for Chilly Chums so I fussy cut the walrus.

I spent a little while fiddling around with where I wanted to place the extra presents until I was happy with how they looked. I adhered some of them down with double sided tape and some with foam tape, then used more foam tape to adhere the walrus to be in front of everything else.

With the focal panel completed I moved on to my card base. It took me a little while to decided what cardbase to use. I felt something neutral would be best because the focal panel is already so colourful. White didn’t seem a good choice though as the white of the watercolour paper I’d used didn’t match the white of the card base. In the end I settled on kraft.

I decided to add some interest with some gold heat embossing. I used a ruler and my glue pen to add some lines behind where the focal panel would be, then poured the embossing powder over the glue. I then heated it with my heat tool to melt the powder. I’ve not tried heat embossing using glue before but it turned out really well!

I then added my sentiment which is from Lawn Fawn’s Merry Messages. I heat embossed that in gold, positioning it so that it would be just below the walrus once the card was assembled.

The last thing to do was adhering the focal panel. I used foam tape for some more dimension, and then the card was done.

I am happy with this card. It’s completely different to what I had intended to make when I sat down to start crafting. The only resemblance to my initial idea is that it is a Christmas card with a lot of colour to it. Regardless I had a lot of fun with making it.

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

Addicted to Stamps and More – Anything Goes

CAS-ual Fridays – Christmas in July

Christmas Card Throwdown – Christmas and Rainbow Colours

Christmas Cards All Year ‘Round – Anything Goes

City Crafter – Kraft

Craftyhazelnut’s Christmas Challenge Extra – Anything Christmas

HLS Christmas Challenge – Anything Christmas and Optional: Die Cuts

Paper Smooches – Anything Goes

TCP Tuesday – Christmas In July