Hello! Carolyn Peeler with you today to walk you through a fun interactive card that is perfect for the little boys in your life! Today's card features dies and the adorable "Out of this World" stamp set by "My Favorite Things". So, let's get started.
First, we will make the outer space background. To do so, first cut a piece of heavyweight Solar White cardstock 8.5" x 5.5" - Don't fold it in half yet! (Very important or the ink will end up darker on the fold.) Next, gather a Ranger Ink Blending tool and Ranger Blueprint sketch inkpad and gently apply the ink to the entire piece of your white cardstock.
Now that we've put down a base color, it's time to add a deeper, darker blue shade around the border of the piece. This adds a beautiful depth and will frame your interactive elements. As you can see, I only applied this darker color to the upper half of the card interior. This is so because I will want to add a handwritten greeting to the bottom portion of the card, so I do not want a super dark ink color down there which could make the greeting unreadable.
One of the amazing properties of Distress ink is the way it reacts to water. So after applying the inks, I took some water and flicked it onto the card background in order to create faux stars.
You can set the card to the side for now, and now take the "Out of this world" stamp set and, using Ranger Jet Black archival ink, stamp an assortment of your favorite space ship designs onto a piece of Ranger watercolor paper.
For my first spaceship I watercolored it using the Zig watercolor Detailer brush and Distress inks in the following colors: Pumice Stone (this will be the base color for all the spaceships) and Cracked Pistachio. I used the Ranger Craft Sheet as my palette to blend the ink colors and water.
After the first go round of color, it looked like this (below), and I decided that I wanted to add a second, brighter green as I found this look a bit too soft and pretty for the end look I was going for.
Here is the same ship once I added the Mowed Lawn watercolor to brighten it up. Much better!
The finishing touch to this ship was a small touch of Broken China to the interior of the window.
Onto the next ship. This one was colored with Pumice Stone and Dried Marigold. The photo below shows the first coloring with the Dried Marigold.
On this photo, you will see that in addition to coloring the little alien with Barn Door ink, that once the first coat of color dried, I came back with more of each color to darken the left and right sides of the ship in order to give the illusion that it has a cylindrical shape.
The final spaceship was watercolored with Pumice Stone and Barn Door.
Once all the spaceships are painted, you'll want to cut them out using the matching "Out of this World" die from My Favorite Things. I like to hold the dies in place using some spare washi, or other low tack tape. Once you have everything in place, run it through your favorite die cutting machine.
Now we're going to need to prep our card for the pop up elements that will be inside the card. I used the My Favorite Things "Pop up Elements Narrow". First, fold the piece of cardstock that we colored with the blue inks in half to make a card. Then lay it open again. You will want to lay the die pieces that you'd like to use on the uncolored side of the card and align the center of each die piece with the fold of your card. Once you run it through your die cut machine, it will look something like this:
Next you'll want to open the card and glue the two larger spaceships onto these little interactive strips. (This photo was taken looking down onto the card from above when the card is opened.)
Now, using 3D Foam squares, adhere the smallest spaceship to the upper portion of the card so that it looks like it's flying above the other two ships. Then, stamp the card greeting onto white cardstock and glue that strip to the immediate right of this spaceship.
We're almost finished! We just need to prep the front of the card, so gather a piece of Bazzil Whirlypop cardstock (which is a PREFECT match to the distress inks that we used) and cut it to the same size as your card front and glue it in place (being sure to not put adhesive over the areas that have been cut out for the interactive elements).
Finally, I had watercolored a lot of extra spaceships so I glued those randomly onto the front of the card.
And there you have it! A fun card ready to be given to a little boy in my life for his birthday. Thank you for joining me today, and be sure to let me know if you have any questions.
As I sign off, here's a final look at the project:
And here are the direct links to the products used in today's tutorial in the Ellen Hutson shop:
