Forest Friends

Those of you who follow my Facebook page will have already seen a sneak peek of this card. I did most of the colouring during my break at work, but then ended up getting delayed finishing it once I was home. Hence the glare and subpar lighting in the final photographs… Also I’m not sure what the strange yellow tone on the left hand side of the fox’s face is in the photo – it’s not visible when looking at the card… But anyway.

I started this card by folding myself a top fold card base from my go-to white stamping card, which is alcohol marker friendly. I then worked out my layout for my stamps. Once I had a plan in mind I started on the stamping. With the help of my MISTI I stamped the bird and fox from The Greeting Farm’s Cuddly Thanks, and the word “friend” from Altenew’s Super Script. I stamped a couple of times to get a nice dark impression.

Next I cut stamped the bottom of the fox onto some post it tape and created a mask. I masked off the fox’s lower half and, after removing the bird and fox stamps from the MISTI, I stamped the tree stump and branch, as well as restamping the sentiment another time.

With all the stamping done my next job was the colouring. I used my Yosoo alcohol markers. I had coloured the fox once before when testing my markers, using the reds and some browns. The result was fine but a little too brown for my taste. This time I decided to use my orange for the lightest areas of the fox, to give a more fox-like colouration. The only problem being that there is only one orange in my marker set, and it is quite far removed from the other colours. It took a lot of work to get the colours blended, and even then I’m not entirely happy with it… But we can pretend the unevenness is just because of how the fur is laying!

I used a variety of brown markers to colour the tree stump, using lighter shades for the flat surface that the fox is laying on. I then moved on to colouring my bird. After some consideration I decided to use a few different green shades for the main body of the bird, and yellow for its chest and beak.

Returning to my fox I went over some of the areas where the orange/red had bled with my white gel pen to neaten it up. I then used my palest yellow-grey (which is my palest any-kind-of-grey!) to add some shading to the white areas of the fox. I used cool greys to colour the nose.

As a final touch to complete the scene and help ground the image I added flicks of green around the tree stump to give the appearance of grass. I tried to make the shape mimic the shape of the tree trunk. I used three different shades of green for the grass, keeping the darkest ones closes to the base of the stump.

I then took a stamp from Happy Little Stampers‘ Bold Birthday Sentiments to round out my sentiment, and that finished the card.

I really like how this card turned out. The little fox curled up on his tree stump is really cute, and I’m very pleased with how the grass ended up looking. I do wish the blending on the fox hadn’t been so tricky, but I’ve known pretty much since I got my markers that I have some big gaps in the colours. Anyway. One other thing that I’m not too pleased with on the card is the position of the sentiment. It’s a little too towards the right. But that’s really a minor quibble. Overall I’m very happy.

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

Allsorts Challenge – Forest Friends