Autumn sheep

It’s time to make a birthday card for my brother again and every year it gets trickier to find suitable images without repeating myself. I had a browse through my collection of digi stamps and came across this happy-grumpy pair of sheep.

I wanted to work on the texture for the sheep so I started by covering them with lots of little spirally circles, using three different shades of grey. That gave a lot of texture, but not much coherent shading, so I added a light layer of regular blended shading. That was better, but still not great. Next up, I grabbed a piece of kitchen roll, dampened it lightly with some 0 Various Ink Copic refill, and patted gently all over the wool. By this time the original swirls were not very obvious, so I redid them lightly over the top. And then left well alone.

I’d been pondering whether to sign up for Sandy Allnock’s new mini Copic course – Autumn Scenes – over at ArtClasses.com when it occurred to me that a nice autumnal tree would make a good background for this pair. And her Copic courses are on sale at the moment so I went for it. I watched the video for the first lesson, made a note of the colours she used and then we lost our internet.

Luckily, this is a simple technique. Once you’ve seen how it is done — and with a reference tree image (I never seem to be able to make branches look right if I do it totally from imagination) — it is quite straightforward to recreate it. Basically, it’s just lots of layers of lots of dots in the shape of a tree.

The hardest part was avoiding turning the edges of my sheep orange!

I trimmed the panel down to size, taking just enough off the edges to give a thin border. Then I die cut some stitched lines along the top and bottom edges.

By happy coincidence, I’d printed the sheep out at just the right size to fit the banner in the white sheep’s hands. I added some glitter around the edge of it and put a single foam dot in the middle to give a bit of a curve to the banner once it was glued in place.

The only thing left to do was add a bit of glossy accents to their eyes.

Classes:

• Sandy Allnock – Mini Copic Course: Autumn Scenes

Challenges:

• The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Avery Elle – hanging banners
• digital stamps:
  Just Inklined – black and white sheep
• dies:
  Avery Elle – hanging banners
  Paper Smooches – dots and dashes
• inks:
  Versafine – onyx black
• pens:
  EK Tools – elegant calligraphy pen
• Copic markers:
  white sheep – W00, W0, W1, W2, W4
  black sheep – W00, W1, W4, W5, W6, W7, W9
  eyes – BV31, BV0000, 0
  background – a selection of Y, YR, R and E markers
• embellishments:
  Imagination Crafts – detail sparkle – silver gilt
  Ranger – glossy accents
• paper and card:
  Neenah Solar White 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable – black