Happy Bearthday!

This September, my nephew celebrated his 7th birthday. As I've mentioned before, I have a difficult time coming up with cards for males of all ages. Lucky for me, the month of October gives me the chance to practice! LOL I have no less than four birthdays, all male, to create cards for this month. Oh the stress! LOL

Fortunately, I have this new Build-a-Bear stamp set, which works perfectly (well for the boys in my family, anyway)! I love this little guy! The best part about him, is he has a "better half"! LOL A girl bear comes with this set, too, so any card I can think of for a girl, I can now create for a boy, and vice versa.

So for my nephew's card, rather than try to stamp a background, I punched out 3/4" circles in colours that matched his clothes, party hat and balloon, and adhered them to the main card. In this replica of my nephew's card, however, I had a bit more time (what, me wait to the last minute to make a card? never! Ok, maybe sometimes...) so I cut out his clothes and party hat. I just couldn't mask his head and party hat to make it look right. It either looked like he was wearing his hat on his forehead, or it was floating above him!

This picture shows how his clothes and shoes are raised above the bear image. To make the circles stand out, I followed my oldest daughter, Kaitlyn's advice, and inked around the outer edges so you could see the Green Galore circles on the same coloured background.

For the balloon, I punched a 3/4" circle of Real Red, raised it with a Stampin' Dimensional, put a couple of white gel pen lines on it to make it look like it was shiny, and then added more shine with Crystal Effects. I love using Crystal Effects on a card because of the kind of extra dimension it adds, especially to a balloon! It helps make the card more fun, don't you think?

I think I've mentioned before, that I love to colour, I find it calming somehow. Must be a throwback to my little girl days. So you can imagine how happy I was to pull out the watercolour crayons to colour this little guy and his party hat! I don't use my crayons enough, and there are so many different ways to colour with them. For this card, I coloured on the paper, then used my aqua painter to spread the colour around. When I wanted to highlight, I squeezed out the excess water from the bristles, and picked up colour directly from the crayon, and then painted it on the image.

Tomorrow, I am going to show you a cute little project for Hallowe'en that I've seen and finally tried!

Until then, have a great day!

Donna