A certain someone nudged me to play along with this week’s sketch at My Favorite Things. Little challenges like that really drive me, and using a stamp set from the July release, which came out earlier this week, I made a colorful birthday card with a party penguin!

I wanted the focus to be on the party penguin carrying the balloon, and colored him before turning him into a stacked die cut (3 layers behind the colored one). I stamped and die cut the bunting from another stamp in the stamp set, but only added one layer behind each of these, they’re in the background, after all. On a piece of white cardstock, I stamped the Scattered Triangles background stamp using Picked Raspberry and Squeezed Lemonade distress inks. I thought the triangles went well with the bunting, and wanted an ombré effect from the hot pink up to the yellow. I’ve come up with a great trick for achieving this: ink blending on the stamp. By using blender brushes and ink blending onto the actual stamp, I get a really nice gradient in my stamping. It’s a little tough on my blender brushes, and a couple of the bristles have fallen off, but I don’t mind, I don’t normally ink blend that much anyway, a missing bristle or five is a nice trade off for the effect I get – I’ll take it.

I die cut the background using the largest die in the A2 Stitched Rectangles STAX 2 set and adhered it directly to a top fold card base made out of Ripe Raspberry cardstock. I die cut a stitched circle from the same color cardstock for the penguin to stand on, and mounted it using foam tape in the center of the card. I added a white heat embossed sentiment strip below, with lots of extra strips of cardstock behind it, so it would be flush with the penguin. I finished off the card by adding Glossy Accents to the balloon and a few Sparkling Clear sequins from Pretty Pink Posh, and glued what was left of the bunting on the inside of the card for added detail.

Not a whole heap of Copics for such a small image.