Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Inspiration Challenge #22: Green with Envy


I went digging online again for this week's inspiration piece. After seeing an ad for a local furniture chain in the newspaper, I went to their web site and found this fun room that seems to have lots of possibilities. You can view the original here. I also want to say that I've realized how often I choose inspiration pieces with flowers - and it's really hard to find something without them that speaks to me. I guess we all love our flower stamps, so maybe it's not a bad thing, but I just wanted to add that I'm always on the lookout for different sources of inspiration to get you thinking in new ways. And yes, I know there are flowers on the table, LOL! But at least they are not the focal point... although they did make it onto my card!

The colors I chose for my card are ruby red, river rock, so saffron, and blue bayou, with a little bit of chocolate chip. I liked the arch shape on the hutch and the dots on the picture frame and green cups. I also tried to match the feel of the room with my card. The layout uses today's SCS sketch challenge - it coordinated really well with the inspiration piece, I thought. I didn't intentionally turn the sketch - I was remembering it horizontal and by the time I realized, it didn't work vertically, so I kept it this way.

The arched window was kind of tricky to achieve - I traced around my desk tape dispenser and then cut the straight sides with my trimmer, and then used scissors to even everything out until I liked how it looked. Then I added a strip across the bottom to make a frame, traced the window onto river rock cardstock and cut it out with a craft knife. To make it look like a distressed window frame, I stamped the speckles from Itty Bitty Backgrounds in chocolate chip (stamped off once first) and then sponged the edges.

I stamped the flower image (Lockhart) with jet black Stazon on watercolor paper, then colored in with ruby red, chocolate chip and saffron watercolor crayons and river rock and blue bayou reinkers. To color the image I decided to use tiny paintbrushes so that I could capture all the detail. The watering can and leaves are all river rock, but to make the watering can lighter I used a very wet brush. For the background I dabbed the Aqua Painter onto the chocolate chip crayon with the brush quite dry and tapped against my finger to get the dots. Then I got the brush fairly wet and smoothed over the dots to lighten them, and also putting some shading under the watering can. This may be hard to see in the photo!

The green seemed very prominent in the room, so for the main background panel I chose river rock striped paper and layered it onto ruby red cardstock. The ruby red paper with river rock dots comes from the Ginger Blossom pack - how perfect is that for this card? I layered the side panels and the window with blue bayou cardstock. The card base is saffron, and I don't think I've ever made a card that opens this way - the fold is on the short side, if you can't tell from the photo - but the only piece of saffron cardstock I could find didn't have enough left to cut it the traditional way.

To finish off I added blue bayou ribbon, weaving it under the left red panel and the window but over the right red panel. I positioned the ribbon and then attached all three panels with foam tape. The sentiment from Short & Sweet is also mounted on foam tape.

I'd love to see what you do with today's challenge! If you play along don't forget to leave a comment here with a link to your card so everyone can see, and the SCS keyword for this week's challenge is DSIC22. Have a great day!

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