CIC 451 | Reach For The Stars | Back to School Theme

The Cupcake Inspiration Challenge is back! Did you miss us? We took a couple of weeks off for the summer, but now we’ve returned and have a new challenge starting. We have a theme for this challenge, and it’s ideal for this time of year – back to school! Newton’s Nook is sponsoring us, and offering a $25 gift certificate to a lucky random winner. It’s definitely worth playing along for a chance at the prize!

I was trying to think outside the box with my card. I don’t really have a use for back to school cards at the moment, so I wanted something that could meet the theme but also could be used for other purposes too. I thought that a card encouraging someone to do their best would be ideal, so that’s what I went with.

This was originally meant to be a one layer card. I stamped the stargazing cat from Cosmic Newton onto some watercolour paper, then spent probably a good 15 minutes fighting with my masking pen trying to get it to work so that I could mask of the image as well as the space around where my galaxy painting would be. I’m not sure if my masking pen is drying up or if it’s to do with the weather, but it was not cooperating at all. It took quite a while to get any kind of flow, and even then it seemed like what was coming out was drying so quickly that as I tried to get a good coating of masking fluid the nib of the pen was just lifting the mask back up.

Once I thought I had everything masked I let the fluid dry before starting on my painting. I used my Gansai Tambi watercolours to paint the galaxy background. I started by laying in some blues, purple, green and red. The red ended up disappearing in the end. I let that layer dry and added some black over the top. Once the black layer dried I felt I had lost too much colour so I repeated the process – I added more of each colour, let it dry, then more black. Once that had dried I added splatters of white to give the look of stars.

I used my Xyron Adhesive Eraser to remove all the masking fluid once my image was completely dry. At this point I discovered that there had been a number of places where the mask hadn’t properly covered so the background was not clean. It was a kind of interesting look so I was initially just going to roll with it.

I then moved on to doing some more painting. I mixed together a little black with some white gold to make a silvery colour which I used for the telescope. I then used some brown for the cat itself. Initially I was going to leave the cat just flat in colour, but I decided to mix a little gold into the leftover brown and use it to make some tabby stripes.

Having finished all my painting and again let everything dry I decided that actually the background, which was supposed to be white, was looking too messy where the masking hadn’t worked. I decided to fussy cut out the entire image. It was fairly easy to cut around. The fiddliest part was around the legs of the telescope, for which I used my craft knife.

In order to hide the white edges from the core of the paper I took a black brush tip marker and ran it across all the edges of my fussy cut image, which gave it a more finished look.

I decided to use a black card base. I placed the image onto it to check the alignment, then added my sentiment. The sentiment comes from the same Cosmic Newton stamp set, and I heat embossed it using the Silver Dollar embossing powder from Love From Lizi which I got in the August card kit. I then added black foam squares behind my image to pop it up before adhering it to my card base.

I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out in the end. I think I actually prefer the black background to the white I’d originally planned. The galaxy flowing out of the telescope was somewhat inspired by another card I made a while ago. This card is definitely very different from what the rest of the team made. Hopefully my inspiration from the theme is clear enough.

Love,

Lady Joyful

*Affiliate links may have been used in this post. For more details on affiliate links as well as other ways to support me, visit this page.*

Challenges included:

Cupcake Inspiration Challenge – Back To School

Digi Choosday – Anything Goes

Less Is More – Pets

Simon Says Stamp Work It Wednesday – WatercolourThe Paper Shelter – Anything Goes

…………………………………………………………

Check out what the rest of the DT made:

Charlotte (that’s me!)

Danijela

Debbie

EK

Ishani

Sandy

Wendy