Celebrate: Surfing ducky

Gerda Steiner decided to host a Surf Challenge over on Instagram and created this cute surfing duck for it. I thought I’d keep my entry simple and just add him to a sea/sky background, but I changed it up a bit by breaking out my alcohol inks and some Yupo.

How:

The duck was simple: print him out, colour him with Copics, add a bit of glossy accents for his sunglasses and fussy cut him out (after waiting for the glossy accents to dry).

The background was a bit more trial and error. I took an A4 piece of Yupo (lightweight synthetic paper), cut it into four and started to play. I kept the ink choice simple: one blue for the sky, one blue-green for the sea, and a yellow for the sun. I also grabbed some alcohol blending solution and a blending tool and felt pads. And some nitrile gloves — the alcohol ink stains…

One background piece was made by swiping with the blending tool to give a more uniform, lightly striped look, which definitely goes in the backgrounds box to be used later. The other two were similar to the one I ended up using, but didn’t work as well; even so, they can still be used for die-cutting from.

This background was made by dripping some ink and blending solution onto the Yupo and then using a fingertip to swipe it back and forth until I had the coverage I was happy with. I did this for the two colours separately, allowing the sky to dry before creating the sea. I flicked a bit of the blending solution over it to add some dots and dripped a couple of drops of yellow on to create the sun.

I die cut a wave from the same card as the card base, curved the sentiment stamp to fit, and stamped it in Versafine ink. Everything was mounted flat except for the duck, which was popped up on some thin foam tape.

Challenges:

Gerda Steiner Designs – Surf Challenge (entries on Instagram)

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Clearly Besotted – sentimental type
• digital stamps:
  Gerda Steiner Designs – surfing duck
• dies:
  Reverse Confetti – doin’ the wave
• inks:
  Versafine – onyx black
• pens:
  Sharpie – extra fine paint marker – white
• colour:
  Ranger – Adirondack alcohol ink – stream, sailboat blue, sunshine yellow
• Copic markers:
  duck body – Y11, Y13, Y15, Y17, BV00
  duck feet and bill – YR04, YR07, YR09
  glasses frame – BV23, BV25, BV29
  glasses lenses – W1, W3, W5
  surfboard – C00, C1, C3
• embellishments:
  glossy accents
• paper and card:
  Papermill Direct – plain – ocean blue
  Yupo – white – 110gsm
  Neenah – solar white – 216gsm