February 20, 2021 – Papirmølla

Hi, again! Two posts in one day doesn’t happen very often, but I have a baby card to share, featuring Baby Cloud from Lili of the Valley. Baby sitting on a cloud, what’s not to love?

I had the beginnings of a plan before I started coloring this cutie, and knew that I wanted a window of sorts for the image to be sitting in. I traced a square die onto my panel before I started coloring, so I knew how large of an area I needed to fill in beyond the baby and the cloud.

Using the Star turnabout stamp from Concord & 9th along with Misty Morning and Cloudy Sky Ink from Altenew, I was able to create a quick panel of scattered stars in colors that matched my colored image. Using dies from two die sets from My Favorite Things, I turned my panel into one with a window and nice faux stitching along the edges. I really like the look of the faux stitch lines that many of the MFT dies have. Other companies have faux stitching dies too, but there’s something about the length of the stitches, the distance between them and the adjacency to the edge of the MFT ones that make them a favorite of mine. I put foam tape on the back of my stamped star panel, making sure to center my image in the window.

I didn’t have any card stock colors that fit my stamping and coloring perfectly, so I went direct to paper using the Cloudy Sky ink from Altenew onto a quarter piece of white lettersize card stock. I adhered that to a white top folding card base made out of Stamper’s Select White card stock from Papertrey Ink, which is the same card stock that I use throughout (except for the colored image, which is on X-Press It blending card, the only paper I use for Copic coloring). Using another die set from MFT, I die cut tiny little stars and stacked some scattered around on the stamped star panel. I stamped and white heat embossed a Norsk Stempelblad AS sentiment onto a scrap piece of my dyed card stock, before using a couple of additional dies from MFT to turn it into a banner. I love my MFT dies!

Limited color palette. For the sky, in addition to B21, I used B20, which is a color I’ve made myself. I also used BG71, another color I’ve made, for the clothing on the baby.

Hi, everyone! As you may know, I’m a huge fan of no line coloring. I’m an even bigger fan of no line coloring when it comes to coloring snow. There’s something about the lack of lines that makes the snow look softer and more real. Not that a fox and bear building a snowman is very realistic.

For today’s card I really wanted to include both Rupert the fox and Wilson the bear, both from the Snow Day! collection illustrated by Stacey Yacula for Purple Onion Designs. I wanted a portrait oriented card, and putting the two side by side made the image too wide for a standard A2 size card, so I decided to go bigger and create a 5 x 7″ card instead. I don’t usually make cards this size. As much as I love white space, I often find it difficult to find the right balance with a larger card. I think it worked out on this one, though.

I stamped the bear using fadeout ink from Inkon3 and masked him, before stamping the fox in the same ink. While I still had the stamps in my MISTI, I stamped their eyes, mouths and noses using Memento Espresso Truffle ink. This saved me from having to draw the details back in after my coloring, which could have potentially ruined the entire scene. I used my Copics to color everything, and trimmed the panel down slightly. I used one of the greens from the image on the edges of a 5×7″ piece of X-Press It blending card to make the card front match the image, as I didn’t have any card stock in the right shade of green. For the die cut HURRA (die from Kort & Godt), I scribbled one of the green Copics onto a scrap piece of X-Press It before die cutting. I added another three white die cuts behind it for dimension, and used foam tape on the back of the colored panel to give it a little lift up from the card base.