Easter: Bunny with carrot

Another month, another cute digi stamp from Gerda Steiner to play with.

I can’t believe that it took so long for it to dawn on me that making a whole row of small frilly-topped carrots might just be a little fiddly to colour. Or that fussy cutting several individual carrots might also be more, well… fussy. But once I had the idea for the card I wasn’t about to discard it and start again from scratch.

How:

The work started on the computer. As well as using it to correctly size and print out the bunny, I also copied the carrot to create both the standalone carrots and the row.

The Copic colouring was pretty straightforward apart from the extra care needed colouring the row of carrots — I knew I was going to fussy cut out all the other elements so it wouldn’t matter if I went over the lines there, but the row was going to be right across the middle of the background so I couldn’t afford to slip.

I coloured the bunny with warm greys to create the shadows and then overlaid it with some light browns. I wanted to keep him quite light for this card, but I will probably take the greys darker next time I try this technique.

I die-cut the background panel out with the dotted elle-ment frame and created a card base just slightly larger than it from some bright orange card, to match the carrots. After fussy cutting out everything else I spent some time finding an arrangement I liked and soon realised that I needed a vellum layer over the background to tone it down so it wasn’t fighting with the bunny. I stamped and heat embossed the sentiment on the vellum.

Then I started assembling the card by popping the bunny up on thin foam tape, gluing the carrots flat to the vellum and adding some sequins in the corners. All of these elements provided places to hide glue when attaching the vellum to the background panel (once I’d glued that to the card base). The final touch was to add some glossy accents to the carrot he’s holding and some Wink of Stella to the carrot tops and his nose.

Challenges:

Gerda Steiner Designs progressive challenge – March

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Clearly Besotted – fresh flowers (sentiment)
• digital stamps:
  Gerda Steiner Designs – carrot bunny
• dies:
  Avery Elle – dotted elle-ments
• inks:
  Versafine – onyx black
  Versamark
• embossing powder:
  Wow! – super fine – clear gloss
• Copic markers:
  bunny – W00, W1, W3, E30, E31, RV00
  carrot – YR12, YR15, YR18
  carrot tops – YG25, YG17, YG67
  soil – E51, E53, E55, E57
• embellishments:
  Doodlebug – sequins – tangerine
  Wink of Stella – clear
  Ranger – glossy accents
• paper and card:
  Neenah – solar white – 216gsm
  Dovecraft – premium vellum
  Papermill Direct – plain – bright orange