Hey!

Send a Smile 4 Kids' current challenge theme is "Punches and/or Die Cuts 4 Kids."  I've had this image from Jane's Doodles for some time now, and never used it. When I was thinking about this challenge theme, the idea of the dinosaur peeking in through a window occurred to me. I decided to pair that image with the "Stitched Duo 1" die set by Pretty Pink Posh.

I started by die cutting my tag "window" from a piece of kraft cardstock. I also die cut a tag without the openings from a piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper. After lightly penciling the positions of the openings from the kraft tag onto the watercolor paper piece, I scanned that into my computer. I opened that image and the dinosaur in Photoshop, and positioned/sized the dino on the background "canvas." Then I printed the dinosaur image directly on the watercolor tag. I erased my pencil lines, except for just around his nose. For that, I took my craft knife and carefully cut around his nose, so I could lift it up over the cross-piece in the window tag. (Then I erased that line.) Finally, I used watercolors to color the image and background. When that dried, I used a black gel pen to go over his eyes, just to accent them a bit more.

I glued the kraft tag to the watercolor piece, positioning the dinosaur's nose so he looked like he was peeking in. At that point, I kind of froze. I had completed this part of my vision, but had no clue where to go from there. So I just left it.

I came back the next day, and started looking through my sentiment stamp sets, trying to find one with a greeting that would work. I came across Simon Says Stamp's "All Boy" set, and thought the "Hey!" would work perfectly. I kind of wanted to use the "Dude" stamp from that set, too, but it wouldn't fit, so I nixed that idea. I cut a piece of a yellow tone-on-tone patterned paper (from my scrap stash) to 4x5.25", and made light pencil marks where the tag would go. I used those as a guide for where to place the greeting, and stamped it in Hero Arts' Cup o' Joe ink. Finally, I erased my pencil marks, and glued the tag in place. All that was left was to adhere that panel to a piece of kraft cut to a standard A2 size, and mount that on a white card base. I will be sending this on to Send a Smile 4 Kids, to hopefully brighten the day of a hospitalized child.

I'm also entering this card in the following challenges:

Simon Says Stamp's Monday "No Rules"
Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday "Anything Goes"