Mr Snowman

This week on Cute Card Thursday we have a sketch for you to follow, a nice easy one so don't panic! I've stamped my LOTV snowman with London Fog Momento ink onto my old favourite paper from Rymans. I did order a pack of X-Press It ultra smooth blending card as recomended by Copic - but I don't like it. For starters, it's not a bright white, well not as white as the Rymans card. It is thicker at 250gsm, but as I mostly mat my images I'm not too worried about sticking with the Rymans smooth bright white coated at 200gsm. But, the bigest let down for me was the blending - I am so used to keeping my inks wet and blending the shades together, even mixing colours on the image to get what I want, and the X-Press just wouldn't perform. The colours absorbed far to quickly and when I tried blending/shading I was very disappointed and ended up throwing my effort in the bin. Back to the Rymans and I was happy, especially when blending the B0000 and B000 around for the background. The blues are B21, B23 and B45, his hat is cool greys C1, C3 and C5, and I used C0 for snow shadow. The pressie and twigs are coloured with E41, E42 and E43, then the golden yellow touches are Y13, Y15 and Y17.

And here's the card. I do like this snowman for quick Christmas cards as you can get away with very little colouring, if you like. I've added Stardust Stickles for the snowy ground, inked the edges with a blue chalk ink and used my white Wacco pearl maker pen to make the falling snowflakes. The background paper is a digi scrap from my stash with a white punched and embossed layer as per the sketch. To embellish I've diecut various Marianne snowflakes from Coredinations classic and whitewash card then sanded and layered them up.

The Totally Papercrafts challenge is for lots of layers, I have quite a few on this card with the image and the layered snowflakes. The Secret Crafter Saturday theme is wrap up warm - Mr Snowman is wrapped up with his hat and scarf against that falling snow!