June Dirty Dozen Christmas card

 Hello & Welcome back. It's that time of the month when the Dirty Dozen Christmas card prompt is revealed for everyone working to have a stash of Christmas cards done early gets released for the new month. You can read all the details here in the special forums set aside for Fan Club members at SCS.

I decided to open the drawers and just look at my Christmas stamps and pick something that had not been inked in a long time and out came this one from Stamps Happen designed by Carolyn Shores Wright. I love her bird stamps and I have almost all of them so, they fill a couple of bisley drawers in my space. 

I stamped this one on some Arches cold press paper even with all those details using some Versafine Morning Mist ink, planning to fill in any not stamped well spaces with watercolor paints. The sentiment was a little faint and not as easy to read as I was hoping so, I decided that the sentiment would probably end up in that space. 

 

These are first layers of paints, I just kept moving from space to space in the image so that the other spots had a chance to dry and the colors did not bleed. 

 I did not try to get all the things painted in the first round, this was more like adding background to the foliage and trying for some deeper shadows along the edges of the bird to help it POP over that sky and such. 

 I added more paint off and on every time I walked by this for a handful of days thinking that maybe I'd do some kind of snowfall for the rest of the space along the edges as I was painting.

And I remembered about how we had a challenge maybe last year in the Watercoloring tutorials thread where Candy Canes were painted like the way you see the colors here on this scarf where the edges are a little darker to give it a little curve and I did do that here as well.

 

I did do a few rounds of White Gouache on the snow fall spots but, they continued to dry flat as time went on so, I did eventually put some blue-ish shadows under those spaces trying to give them some depth and texture.

 And eventually I just decided to add some stickles glitter glue over those white gouache falling snow spaces. I liked the sparkle but, this also dried pretty flat. 

So I ended up adding another layer of glitter glue trying for some depth to it. 

 

And I realized if I were to put this panel into a die it would all smoosh flat being cut into a shape so, I ended up finding a thin piece of green cardstock and stacking and gluing it to it self at slightly under A7 in real life and running that through the big shot twice, first cutting the window in the center with an Memory box curved cap pinpoint die and then the second time inside a Spellbinders Evergreen folder.

I found this sentiment in the already stamped and diecut folder in the drawer. ( I think its from the Memory box line) and inked the edges of that with some Rustic Wilderness DOX and used some foam pop dots under the top half of it and just a big glue dot to connect to the wrapped ribbon. That ribbon sparkles in real life but, I have such a hard time shooting and processing red colors digitally that its a little off here. That's about it from me, I probably could have kept adding more paint to this for days but, the deadline came and I had to call it. I am pretty tickled with how this turned out. I hope you are doing well & thanks for stopping by.