Merry Christmas/Snowballs - 25 Cents

Challenge #6 for Bugaboo's 2nd Annual "Holiday Chaos" series is to make a card with one or more Christmas critters on it. I recently got this image from them, and felt it would be perfect for this challenge--and a cute Christmas card to boot!

I began by working up a design in Photoshop. Originally, I had the greeting, from this Doodle Pantry set, below the image, and it worked. But when I was going back to our craft room to cut the focal panel, I thought I'd use the stitched rectangle die from the "Femme Frames" set by Mama Elephant. That decision threw a bit of a monkey wrench into my design, because with the size of the die cut, the greeting no longer fit under the image. And if I shrank the image to make the greeting fit, the whole design just didn't look right. So I ended up moving the greeting above the penguins, and cutting off the lower words on the greeting. But it works! So after these digital acrobatics, I finally printed the image out onto my die cut watercolor paper.

After masking around the edges of the stitched rectangle with painter's tape, I colored in the penguins with Inktense pencils and a damp paintbrush. I also added some light shading to the snowballs, just to make them look a little more 3-dimensional. When my coloring had dried, I applied clear water over the sky area, and washed in a light blue watercolor. I purposely left the wash just a bit blotchy, to add additional interest. Finally, I went over the penguins' eyes and the greeting with a black gel pen, so they would stand out a bit more.

I decided to mat the focal panel in black, so I cut a piece of paper with the scalloped "Femme Frames" die, and glued the watercolor panel to that. I printed a sentiment on the inside of an A2 card base. I accidentally tore a bit of the top layer off on one edge of the cardstock on my base (oops!). It wasn't bad enough that I couldn't cover it up though, so I die cut a piece of pale blue cardstock with the Avery Elle "Custom Panels" A2 die. I adhered my matted focal panel to that, and adhered that to my card base. To add a bit of sparkle, I glued some small silver sequins to the front with Ranger Multi Medium Matte. And that finished this card. Despite my creative twists and turns, I think it turned out quite well!

I'm also entering this card in Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday "Bling It On" challenge.