Christmas Joy (With Video) – MM 255

I am very excited to be able to announce that I am joining the Merry Monday Design Team as a Guest Designer for the rest of the year! I’m really looking forward to working alongside the wonderfully talented cardmakers that are on the DT. Given the name of my blog and my blogging name this first prompt seemed very appropriate. This week’s Christmas card must have the word “joy” somewhere on it.

I actually came up with a couple of different ideas for this card. My favourite idea would have required buying some new crafting goodies, and as much as I wanted to I’d already used up my August crafting budget and had nothing left to spend. I considered getting it anyway, but decided to be good and see what I could come up with using goodies I already had available to me.

I ended up creating a one layer card, and I pulled out my Art Impressions Merriest Christmas stamp set, which I absolutely love! I used my MISTI to line up the Father Christmas from the stamp set along with the “joy” based sentiment from Lawn Fawn’s Merry Messages and stamped them with MFT Black Licorice Hybrid Ink. I then pulled out Panduro Hobby A6 frames to add a bit more joy to the card! Two of the wreaths in the set are rings of the words “Joyful Christmas” I stamped those randomly over the background of the card (masking so that they wouldn’t go on my Father Christmas image) and heat embossed with Wow! Cloud 9 embossing powder which has some fun glitter to it. The words aren’t all perfectly legible, but I wanted them more as an accent so I didn’t think it mattered too much.

With all the stamping finished all I needed to do was colour in the card. I used the example image on the stamp package as a guideline for where to put my shadows, and started work. I began with the red areas of his outfit, marking in where the shadow areas would be and filling them in, before moving on to the highlighted areas. I worked lightest to darkest, then back to lightest to get a good blend. I only have a couple of red markers, so I used a touch of green to help darken up my shadow areas. I also coloured the candy canes’ stripes and the ribbon on the sack of presents.

Next I pulled out my E markers to colour the sack and his gloves. Again I don’t have a large selection of colours, so I had to be careful to make sure the gloves didn’t disappear into the sack by being too close in colouring. I also had to consider that when I coloured his face, as I was again having to use the same selection of markers. I considered using E markers for his boots too, but then decided to use cool greys instead.

For the presents I bought in some blue-green and blue pens. These are the ones I have the most colours of, so it gave me a bit more to work with. I coloured the presents so that their bows were a similar but slightly darker colour to that of the presents themselves.

Before colouring my white I tried to use a white gel pen to go over the areas where my colouring had bled. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped… At that point I didn’t have a colourless blender to use to push the bleeds back. I have since bought one though, so hopefully won’t have the same problem in future! I then used my lightest grey to add shadows to all the white areas, as well as a cast shadow beneath where he is standing in order to ground him.

I’m quite pleased with this card. I really like the image though my colouring still needs some work, but I do think I am improving! I just need to keep practicing. The glitter accents are a fun touch too. I may go back and add a liner to the card, because being a one layer card coloured with alcohol markers, there is some ink showing through on the inside from all the colouring I did.

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

Addicted to Stamps and More – Make Your Mark

CAS On Friday – One Layer Wonder

Craftyhazelnut’s Christmas Challenge – Anything Christmas and Optional: Add Some Sparkle

Craftyhazelnut’s Christmas Challenge Extra – Anything Christmas

Merry Monday – Christmas and the word Joy

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday – Anything Goes

Simon Says Stamp Work It Wednesday – Favorite Stamps (This Art Impressions stamp set is definitely one of my favourites!)

Sweet Stampin’ – Heat Embossing

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Check out what the rest of the DT made:

Charlotte (that’s me!)

Colleen

Deanne

Debbie

Felicita

JoAnn

Kelly

Kim

Kimberly

Linda S

Linda W

Lori

Marcia

Nina

Sue