Birthday card: Monster TV

What:

My first easel card. A birthday card for our neighbour, only four days after his wife’s. He was amused by the googly eyes on the shiny bunny card I made for her, so I took that as my starting point. Unfortunately he’s not a big fan of animals, cute or otherwise, which limited my options; luckily I have these monsters from Lawn Fawn…

How:

I’ve coloured these monsters with Copics before, so I decided to watercolour them this time using the Zig Clean Color Real Brush pens. I stamped the images in archival ink on watercolour paper, apart from the balloon, which was stamped with a dye ink. The leftmost monster was mirror-stamped using a flat stamp as the intermediate surface and then drawn over using a waterproof pen. I also added in a baseline to ground the image. Then I coloured it with the Zig real brush pens: some of it was blended out just with water, some was blended with two colours.

The card base was cut to size (27cm x 13.5cm) and scored at the quarter and half-way marks. The resting point for the easel was created by partial die-cutting with a small circle die. If I had realised that I was going to want to add some patterned paper to the inside of the card I would have done it before doing the die-cutting; doing it afterwards meant I had to die-cut the patterned paper separately and do some fiddly lining up of pieces.

I cut another piece of patterned paper and one of black paper to mat the main panel. Once those were layered together, I attached it to one half of the front of the card base. The final touch was to add the googly eyes onto the monsters.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Lawn Fawn – monster mash
  Paper Smooches – boob tubes
  Paper Smooches – babe block (for mirror stamping)
  Hero Arts – it’s your day
  WPlus9 – whole lotta happy
• dies:
  Lawn Fawn – small stitched squares
  Sizzix – framelits – circles 2
• inks:
  Ranger – archival ink – jet black
  Versafine – onyx black (sentiment)
• pens:
  Staedtler – fineliner 0.5
• colour:
  Hero Arts – shadow ink – red royal
  Zig Clean Color Real Brush pens
• embossing:
  Hero Arts – embossing powder – ultrafine clear
• embellishments:
  googly eyes
• paper and card:
  Centura Pearl – gold
  Bo Bunny – paper pad – very vintage double dot designs
  Derwent – black drawing paper