Happy Halloween!

This is my second card for the "Cute Fall/Halloween Card 4 Kids" challenge at the Send a Smile 4 Kids blog. You can check out my first one here. I don't normally do Halloween cards, mostly because I don't really send them to people. While I by no means object to celebrating Halloween, it just isn't a major holiday in our family. But since Send a Smile 4 Kids has a use, I decided to make at least a couple.

I based my design on Sketch #232 by Operation Write Home:

I liked the Polaroid-style look of the main panel in this sketch, and thought it would be perfect to feature my chosen image & a greeting. For once, I stuck to the sketch exactly! :)

I found this cute digital image at Jane's Doodles, & with this project in mind, couldn't resist getting it. So, after downloading it, I sized & printed it onto a piece of watercolor paper that I'd cut to 2.5x3". I colored it with Inktense pencils, blending with a damp paintbrush. I laid down a light wash of Pumice Stone Distress to ground the kitty & pumpkins, and painted the sky area with Tumbled Glass Distress ink.

I used the Blockhead font from Creating Keepsakes to type out my greeting. I printed that at the bottom of the piece of white cardstock that would serve as the mat for the focal image. I used orange & terra cotta colored pencils to color in the letters, blending the colors out with Gamsol and a paper stump. I tried to get a slight gradient from lighter orange at the top of each letter to the darker, terra cotta/orange color at the bottom.

For the background, I pulled a couple of pieces from my scrap stash. The woodgrain pattern I had stamped with Hero Arts' "Designer Woodgrain" background stamp, using Walnut Stain Distress ink on kraft cardstock. That had actually been intended for another project, but at the time I didn't like how it turned out. I saved it anyway, figuring it might come in useful sometime. Well, this was that time! I also used a scrap of orange patterned paper cut to 2.5x4" for the part behind the focal panel. I matted both my focal panel and its "frame" with black paper, cut to 1/16" on each side of both pieces, to help them "pop" a bit more. I adhered the orange panel to the kraft woodgrain piece, and attached 3 pieces of ribbon on the right side, using my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher to staple them in place. Finally, I popped the main panel onto the background with foam squares, matted the background with more black paper, and adhered the completed card front to an A2-size card base.