Thinking of you: Monkey

Some months I am inspired and organised early on, some months it’s a last-minute dash to come up with an idea and get a card created, and then there are months like this one where I had a pretty good idea what I was going to do soon after getting the new challenge image, but other things conspired to prevent me from making it until now.

After creating some quite time-consuming cards for the challenge over the last few months, I wanted to keep it a bit simpler this time. I have to be honest, monkeys are not my favourite critter, but this one is surprisingly cute once it’s been coloured.

How:

I knew I wanted to use a stitched square as the base, so I started by choosing the size I wanted and printing the monkey to fit. I coloured him with Copic markers and fussy cut him out, using my craft knife to remove the enclosed white areas. The edges were tidied up by running a black brush marker along them, hiding the white edge of the card and disguising a couple of places where I didn’t cut quite close enough to the black outline. When I added a tiny touch of glossy accents to his nose it came out a bit bubbly so I covered that up (once it was completely dry) with a dab of black Sharpie marker.

I drew around the square die I’d chosen to give myself a guide for stamping the leaves. As it was a new stamp, I tested it on a bit of scrap Neenah before using it on the Distress specialty stamping paper. The difference in the impressions is huge: even though the Lawn Fawn inks do smooth out over time on the Neenah, the colours are way more intense on the other. (Adds ink/paper comparisons to my ever-growing to-do list.)

Once the leaves were dry I die-cut the background with the stitched square. I also die-cut a matching piece of vellum and double-sided sticky foam sheet and layered them all together. I would have used spray glue to fix the vellum in place, but I only have repositionable spray in my stash at the moment. Instead, I used some vellum tape runner, which isn’t perfect, but is good enough. (And, interestingly, is not included in the list of ways to attach vellum given in the OCC class.)

All that remained was to stamp a sentiment on the card base, glue the monkey to the panel and stick the panel to the card base.

This is one of those rare cards that turn out just the way I had originally envisaged them and didn’t go off in another direction half way through the process. I’m really pleased with this simpler, cleaner take on a progressive challenge image — even if it is a monkey 🙂

Challenges:

Gerda Steiner Designs progressive challenge – April

Class:

Online Card Classes – Clear and Sheer

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Create A Smile – aloha spirit (leaves)
  Create A Smile – doctor’s helpers (sentiment)
• digital stamps:
  Gerda Steiner Designs – hang in there monkey
• dies:
  Lawn Fawn – stitched squares
• inks:
  Lawn Fawn – freshly cut grass, celery stick
• pens:
  Memento dual marker – tuxedo black
• Copic markers:
  monkey – E30, E31, E33, E35, E37, E39, R20, W7
  tree branch – E53, D55, E57, E59
  leaves – YG17, YG67
• paper and card:
  Papermill Direct – hammered – white
  Neenah – solar white – 216gsm
  Distress specialty stamping paper
  Anita’s – white vellum
• miscellaneous:
  Plus permanent vellum glue tape