Thinking of You

a2zScrapbooking's challenge theme for April is "Getting to Know You." The idea is to take your favorite Hero Arts product and create a project. One of my favorite stamp sets is "Year Round Sentiments." This set was originally created with Operation Write Home in mind, but it has several greetings that are still useful for general card making. I combined that with one of the dragonflies from "Winged Friends," which I don't think I've used before.

I began by creating a blank, portrait-oriented A2-size canvas in Photoshop. I created a white rectangle shape layer 1/4" shorter & narrower than my canvas, and centered it, giving me a 1/8" border on all sides. Then I opened the dragonfly image file, copied it to my canvas, and made it (much) smaller. I positioned the first dragonfly within the rectangle layer, and clipped it to that shape so my 1/8" border would be preserved. I then duplicated the dragonfly layer, and positioned the duplicated image in another area, also clipping it to my rectangle layer. I continued in this manner until my background was full of dragonflies. Because they were all clipped to the smaller rectangle shape, none of them extended into my border area.

I created another 4x6" blank canvas in Photoshop, and copied one of the dragonflies to that. I printed my background design onto a 4.25x5.5" piece of white cardstock, and printed my separate dragonfly onto a piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper that I'd cut to 4x6". (This just made it easier to print the single dragonfly, without my having to adhere my watercolor paper to a letter-size piece of copy paper to run it through my printer.)

Not knowing what colors dragonflies come in, I googled dragonfly images. I was surprised to see just how colorful they can be! I chose one image, and used that as a guide to paint my dragonfly. I colored it with my Inktense pencils, using my preferred method of applying color, by picking it from the pencil with a damp paintbrush & applying it to my paper. When I had finished with that, I set my image aside to dry.

To give a more finished appearance to my background, I drew around the edges with a grey marker & ruler. I didn't really like how that looked, so I went over it with a fine-tip black marker. I like the way the grey acts as a sort of "shadow" for the black lines better.

For my greeting, I chose the "Thinking of you" from "Year Round Sentiments." I stamped it on a piece of white cardstock, with Hero Arts Navy ink. I cut it into a banner, and dragged the edges across my Navy ink pad. Then I adhered it to my card front panel. I fussy cut the dragonfly I'd colored, and ran a grey Tombow marker around the edges, to camouflage the white core of the paper. I used Perfect Paper Adhesive to glue it in place, overlapping the greeting banner slightly. After using my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher to staple the end of the banner, I adhered my card front to a white A2 card base. Finally, I added some shimmer to the dragonfly's wings with my Clear Wink of Stella pen.

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

A Blog Named Hero "Anything Goes"
Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday "Anything Goes"
Through the Craft Room Door "Anything Goes"