Dino birthday

Another birthday card and once again my inspiration for card-making has deserted me. And it’s for a guy so, of course, absolutely nothing in my stash is suitable. Luckily I have my secondary stash of coloured images to fall back on. A quick sort through and I settled on this cute dinosaur and his stack of presents — I was (and still am) really pleased with how the colouring turned out on this image.

So all I had to do was come up with an idea for a card to put him on. Much as I like clean and simple when other people do it, it rarely satisfies me when I try.

I had the idea to fill the background with “happy birthday” in block letters and set about sketching it out. When I was happy with it I traced it onto a watercolour paper card base because I had decided to combine making the card with testing out my new acrylic gouache paints: sixteen letters meant that I could conveniently test all the colours in the set apart from the black and white.

I filled the background in with a silver Posca paint pen and outlined the letters with a black one. If I had tried to put the dinosaur directly over the top he would have got lost in all that colour, but a piece of vellum taped on one edge solved that problem.

I’ve got another three birthdays in the next three weeks so I have to get my mojo in gear. I might be able to sort one from my stash, and I have a couple of suitable coloured images for another, but my brother has a big birthday coming up so that one will definitely have to be made from scratch…

Copic markers:

dinosaur – YG99, YG97, YG95, YG93
dino toes – YG91, YG93
dino spots – BG49
dino eyes – BG000, YG91, 0
balloon – V12, V15, V17
present 1 – N0, N2, N4 V12, V17
present 2 – N0, N2, N4 BG49, BG57
bow – BG45, BG07, BG49

Supplies:

• digital stamps:
  DigiStamp Boutique – birthday dino (retired)
• colour:
  Holbein Acryla gouache
• pens:
  Posca PC1-MR black, silver
• embellishments:
  Ranger – glossy accents (eyes)
  Irresistible pico embellisher – shimmer (balloon)
• paper and card:
  Dovecraft premium vellum
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Daler-Rowney Langton hot pressed 300gsm watercolour paper

The dinosaur was coloured on 16th January 2018; day 2 of The Daily Marker 30 Day Colouring Challenge