Hi, crafty friends. I’m back with another card I created using images from the new A Little Christmas Magic! collection from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Stacey Yacula.

Whenever the design team members get a glimpse of the new collection, I start my planning process. I sketch out very rough card ideas using the stamps I’d like to work with, send my stamp wish list off to Michele, the owner of Purple Onion Designs, and then wait patiently for the stamps to arrive.

Whenever there’s a new collection I like to create scenes to show off as many of the cute images as possible (without overcrowding the card), and for this card I stamped Cider (elf bunny in gift box), masked him, stamped Tristan (penguin soldier) and Graham (bear soldier), masked them, stamped the Holiday Arch, masked that, and finally stamped the Nordic Road background stamp. For the background, I used second generation stamping with Memento Espresso Truffle ink, the rest of the images are stamped using Extreme Black ink from My Favorite Things.

I always start by coloring the sky, and for this collection, I wanted each of my cards to have a different sky. I tend to go for all blues, but winter sunsets are explosions of color, so I was very conscious of that when I created my card. Once the sky was done, I colored the snow, followed by the trees and that cute fence, before starting with the rest of the scene.

I colored the critters, then the arch and finally all the red. I always leave the red details to the very end. It eliminates the chance of smearing and getting red ink where you don’t want it when you go in with another color right next to it. I wrote Happy Holidays with a black 0.35 Copic pen before coloring, but once the red was colored, you could hardly see the lettering, so I went back over with a white 05 Gelly Roll pen, and the text is much more visible now. My Ps are a little further apart than I’d like, and they’re also leaning a tiny bit to the right, but it’s a homemade card, it’s not supposed to be perfect, right?

Whenever I create these scene cards with Purple Onion images, I always let the stamping and the scene itself dictate the size of the finished card. This one wound up at 5 1/4 x 5 1/4″, which seemed pretty perfect. I haven’t made a square card in a while, so this was fun.

I used an obscene amount of Copics for this card.