Birthday: WOW!

Yet another masculine birthday card; this time for my younger nephew. One of his passions is football, but that leaves me cold, so comic book style it is 🙂

I did start out by looking for suitable lettering and graphics online — and there are a lot of comic book resources out there — but then I realised how long it was taking me to find something that was just right, so I decided to have a go at drawing my own instead.

I’ve done a couple of hand-drawn elements on cards recently and am slowly developing a method that works for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any drawing and there is no way that I’d get it right first time, so what I do is start out by creating a scribbly sketch with lots of lines that end up approximating what I actually want it to look like. Then I break out my trusty lightpad and, if I’m feeling confident, I’ll trace the final shapes with a multiliner, otherwise I’ll do another pencil version first.

The colouring on this card was about as simple as it gets. Apart from the slight gradient on the blue background, it was all flat coloured with no shading. Then, in keeping with the comic book style, I created a faux halftone effect by adding dots — lots of dots from large to small — in a slightly darker colour than the area they were on.

The hardest part was leaving the WOW! alone and untouched for long enough for the glossy accents to dry completely 🙂

The sentiment was heat embossed in white on black card and popped up on thin foam tape and the WOW! was popped up using thicker foam tape.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Lawn Fawn – Smitty’s ABCs
• inks:
  Versamark
• pens:
  Copic multiliner – black – 0.5
• embossing powder:
  Wow! – super fine – bright white
• Copic markers:
  background – B00, B02, B04, B06
  splat – R46, YR14, YR16
  wow! – FYG1, 110
• embellishments:
  Ranger – glossy accents
• paper and card:
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Papermill Direct – plain – black
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable – cotton white

Challenges:

The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge