You Are So Cool!

Happy Friday, I hope you had a great week!  I’m late with today’s post because I’ve had a wonderful couple of days off from work filled with crafting.  Today I had the opportunity to drive down to Scrapbook Island’s Creative Escape in Los Gatos, CA to craft with a friend I met at last week’s The Coloring Roadtrip Challenge, and one of her lifelong friends.  It was a lot of driving for me, but totally worth the trip!

Today’s card features the sweet hippos from Clearly Besotted’s Cooling Off stamp set, and a sentiment from Simon Says Stamp’s So Cool stamp set.

I started by stamping the hippos in Copic-friendly Gina K. Designs Amalgam black ink onto Neenah Solar White #80 Classic Crest cardstock and then I got down to coloring.  I did some simple shading on the hippos and then finished them by adding a few drops of Copic Blending Solution onto a rag and dabbing it over the hippos to create the spotted/mottled effect.  When I finished coloring the tasty treats, I cut the images out with a Brother ScanNCut2 and set them aside.

The background is an A2-sized piece of Canson Bristol Smooth cardstock.  I used B15 and B18 to create a ground for the hippos to stand on.  I actually struggled with color choice, thinking that teal wasn’t very realistic.  But then I did a mental check and reminded myself that a hippo eating a hippo-sized ice cream cone did not need a realistic ground to stand on 😉

I added the lighter teal first and then added the darker teal towards the bottom of the card.  In the beginning, things were looking very streaky, but as I went back and forth adding more ink, the colors smoothed out nicely.

I used the My Favorite Things Cloud stencil and Mustard Seed Distress Ink to blend on clouds with a foam blending tool.  Then I added foam tape to the back of the hippos and, right before I stuck them onto the background, I added a bit of W5 to create a little bit of shadow beneath where they would sit.

The sentiment is stamped in Versafine Onyx Black ink onto a scrap piece of cardstock and adhered with foam tape.  To finish, I adhered the entire cardfront to an A2-sized card base.

Thanks so much for swinging by!