Caped cuties

I seem to be doing the “last minute inspiration” thing with cards at the moment. My card stash is large enough that I’m only making new ones if I don’t have something suitable — this basically means that I am stuck making mostly masculine cards so far this year…

This design gave me the opportunity to move two more stamp sets from the never-used pile. I’ve had the caped cuties for a couple of years(!), but the other one was a much more recent acquisition when the price dropped on Amazon…

Tip: If you buy from Amazon and haven’t come across CamelCamelCamel, you might want to take a look. It tracks Amazon prices and lets you know when they drop, which is really handy for those things you’d like to get but don’t need right now.

There was a lot of fussy cutting for this card. For a start, I had to make masks for most of the crazy thoughts so that I could stamp a cloud of them. Then I cut the cloud out after adding a bit of shading using the different sets of Copic greys and emphasising the overlapped edges with black.

Next, I stamped and coloured the two flying superheroes. I’d already used greys for the background and knew I wanted to use red for the accent colour, so I needed something fairly neutral for their bodies. Cue a matching brown bear and bunny with red outfits, which I then fussy cut.

I used the same red to colour a piece of card for the sentiment banner and heat embossed it in silver. It’s a good job I like the recipient because even a small amount of heat embossing in 30° temperatures is not something I’d do otherwise!

When I came to put it all together I realised that the pops and bangs were too contrasty and the little caped cuties were getting lost. I needed to tone down the background without losing the impact. I pondered adding a layer of grey over the top or even doing something with vellum, but then it occurred to me, I could do the inky equivalent of what I do with art journal pages and add white over it. I would just use the picket fence Distress ink pad instead of gesso to knock back the intensity. And it worked a treat. The only, very minor, downside is that you can’t really tell that I used different greys to colour the sound effects bubbles.

I wanted a bit of dimension, but not too much — this has to go through the post — so I used some thin foam tape to mount the background on a bright yellow card base. I put foam dots behind the cuties’ heads and tucked their feet into the holes in the background; that way it looks like they’re flying out of the cloud. And to finish it off, I trimmed the sentiment into a banner and popped it up on another bit of foam tape.

Copic markers:

crazy thoughts – various greys with 100 outlines
bunny and bear – E51, E55, E57, R24, R27, RV29
sentiment banner – R27

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Tim Holtz – crazy thoughts
  Clearly Besotted – caped cuties
• colour:
  Distress ink pad – picket fence
• inks:
  My Favorite Things – hybrid – black licorice
• pens:
  Memento dual marker – tuxedo black
• embossing powder:
  Hero Arts – silver
• paper and card:
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable pearly shimmer