Warm & Friendly Greetings

Day 5's theme in the 2nd Annual Holiday Chaos challenge series by Bugaboo Stamps is to make a humorous card. I don't have any Bugaboo images that seemed to fit the bill, but thankfully, they allow you to use other images. I found this one on the Dearie Dolls Digi Stamps blog. Being in East Texas, where we don't get much snow at all--much less at Christmas--it seemed to me like a perfect image for a holiday card. I found the greeting on this blog post, which I thought went perfectly with the image. Kind of an ironic humor!

I chose this sketch from Operation Write Home to base my design on:

I keep all my OWH sketches in a binder. This one is actually rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise on the page, so it really didn't occur to me not to use it in that orientation. Yes, I'm getting a bit dotty with all the card making I've been doing these past few weeks! LOL

After printing my image onto a piece of Strathmore Mixed Media Paper, I colored it with Inktense pencils and a damp paintbrush. I also used Distress inks as watercolors: Tumbled Glass for the sky, and Pumice Stone and Mowed Lawn for the ground. I accidentally got a bit of color onto the white portions of the "snowman" and the little boy's shirt, so I went over those with my Uniball Signo Broad white gel pen. I ended up having to color all the white areas on the cardboard boxes, so the penwork wouldn't stand out so much. I think it ended up giving it a nice, subtle bit of texture--kind of like brushstrokes from the boy's paintbrush.

For the background, I chose two patterned papers from my stash of holiday scraps. I adhered the green snowflake paper to the bottom of the other, and matted them with a dark blue, which I felt played off the blue in the sky and the boy's jeans. Even though it was not indicated in the sketch, I also added a narrow blue mat to the focal panel, to help it stand out from the background, before adhering it to the card front.

I formatted the greeting in Photoshop, and printed it onto a strip of white cardstock. I cut one end into a fishtail, and glued it in place below the focal panel. After adhering the front to my card base, I threaded 3 white buttons from my stash with red embroidery floss, and glued them down with Ranger Multi Medium Matte. Another card done!