Wintery cards

A little late for Christmas I know, but these were last minute Christmas cards and I didn't get time to do a post on them before Christmas.  The good news is I have given you plenty of time to recreate cards like this for next Christmas.

I used one of the  new foxes from Lavinia stamps, along with the fern branch set and a tiny little twig stamp also from Lavinia stamps to create this card. The tiny conifer I think I bought from Inkylicious stamps a long time ago, but I think the set is still available.

 I punched out a circle from the sticky edge of a post it note to mask off the moon area and blended in the sky using yellow and grey ink on this one.

Once the sky was inked, I added a couple of clouds by placing a piece of torn paper over the moon and brushing a little ink over the edge of the paper. to make the moon look spherical I brushed a little grey ink around the edges, leaving the centre white.

I added snow drifts using the same technique I used for the clouds going over the moon. You may notice I am using different  backgrounds for this post as I forgot to take photos of each step when working on the yellow and grey version. You may also notice I don't always work in the same order.

Now the  blending work has been completed it's time to do the stamping. Sometimes I'll start by stamping the background trees and sometimes I'll start with the foreground.

 It's a good idea to map out where your focal point is going to be before stamping anything. It's easy to get carried away stamping the trees and then find your animals head gets lost in the background.

You could stamp your animal first if  you are unsure about where to place your trees and foliage.

I stamped the fox in Versafine Clare ink, it's a lovely intense black ink so no need to keep stamping over it to get good coverage. I think, I stamped it twice.  Using  my Stamparatus. (that's a stamping platform for those that don't know, and  it's a tool I wouldn't be without now.) 

When the animal is dry you'll need to ground it. This is easily done by just brushing a little ink underneath the animal. I did this last which is why it doesn't show in the photos. You'll have to go to the last photo to see the light shading beneath the animals. 

 

I used  Posca pens in  brown and yellow and just dotted clusters of three dots on the twiggy bits then added one dot of yellow in the centre of each cluster. Occasionally I did a single dot.

The over hanging branches  are  Lavinia stamps branches. Fern branch on the card above and the header picture.

The branch below is another Lavinia stamp as is the crow and  Pippin the  rabbit.

 I stamped the branches in grey

 Then used a white Posca pen and drew snow on top of each of the branches.

Using the same pen I held it over the work and basically beat the barrel of the pen with the handle of a big paint brush to get it to splatter white paint over the whole piece of work to give the impression of snow.