Hello tortoise!

I don’t care if the digi stamp is called “hello friend turtle”, it has feet not flippers so it must be land-dwelling, therefore it’s a tortoise (checks… okay, technically all tortoises are turtles but still…). Now I’ve got that out of my system, on to the card 🙂

It’s been a while since I took part in Gerda’s progressive challenge — I missed out on adding my entry for the November challenge and, what with one thing and another, I hadn’t got around to rejoining — but I’m still on the mailing list and when I saw this month’s image, I thought I’d pick it up in the store and start up again.

I resized and flipped the tortoise and used that to create a light grey repeating pattern for the background panel. I did briefly regret my decision to colour them in — there are a lot of tortoises on that panel and all the areas are rather small — but once I’d started I had to carry on and I do rather like the end result; at least I didn’t try to do any blending on them! The finished panel was mounted flush on a card base.

For the large tortoise I didn’t worry too much about perfectly blending my Copics either. I added dot shading to the shell which hides any iffy blending (it feels like it’s been ages since I last got my Copics out so this was a bit of a warm-up piece really). And I deliberately left the skin a bit uneven to give it some texture as I didn’t want to go overboard and add stippling everywhere. I fussy cut him out and mounted him over the background using a piece of fun foam.

The sentiment was die-cut from a background piece I made the other day — Brusho onto damp kitchen roll, allowed to dry, split into layers and then glued onto thin card — it was a bit bright compared to the rest of the card though, so I dabbed grey ink lightly over it to tone it down.

For some finishing sparkle, I added Wink of Stella to the butterfly, glossy accents to the tortoise’s eye and a scattering of sequins across the background.

Challenges:

Gerda Steiner Designs progressive challenge – June

Supplies:

• digital stamps:
  Gerda Steiner Designs – hello friend turtle
• dies:
  My Favorite Things – hello
• Copic markers:
  background – G000, YG0000, YG61, Y11, E70, W0
  tortoise body – BG90, BG93, BG96, BG99
  tortoise shell – Y11, Y13, Y21, G20, YG61, YG63, YG67
  butterfly – Y11, Y19, E70, W5
• embellishments:
  Neat & Tangled – 6mm sequins – crystal clear
  Pretty Pink Posh – 4mm sequins – lime sorbet
  Wink of Stella – clear
  Ranger – glossy accents
• paper and card:
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable pearly shimmer
• miscellaneous:
  fun foam