Snowman on kraft

And this is my absolute favourite of all the Christmas cards I’ve made so far this year. Another thing that nearly went in the bin but ended up working out really nicely.

I thought I’d have a go at doing a snowman on kraft card, after all, white stands out on kraft, whereas on white card you really need to create a background to set it off, especially when you’re using a stencil. So I carefully dabbed red, white, brown and green ink through the different sections of the stencil (it was obvious at this point that I wasn’t going to be making a batch of these, it was just too fiddly).

I let the ink dry and, well, it was unimpressive. The colours were a bit insipid and the stencilling just looked disjointed. I had other designs to work on so I put it to one side (very little ever goes straight in the bin).

When it was the last design left on my craft desk I decided to have a play and I got out a charcoal pencil. I started by outlining everything and joining up the individual areas of the stencil. Then I added some shading and suddenly, especially with the addition of the eyes and buttons, I had an adorable, softly illustrated snowman. All I needed to do to finish it off was to stamp a simple sentiment and give it a coat of Distress glaze to stop the charcoal smudging.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Clearly Besotted – sentimental type
• stencils:
  Polkadoodles – snowman sentiments
• inks:
  Distress ink pad – picket fence
  Distress oxide – candied apple, peeled paint
  Versafine – smokey gray
• pens & pencils:
  charcoal pencil
  Sakura glaze – black
• paper and card:
  Neenah desert storm 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable
• miscellaneous:
  Distress micro glaze