The Spanish Reveal

Good evening all,

Tonight I bring you a card I made for one of my colleagues at work.  He had very secretly arranged and bought tickets to Spain and organised Spanish language lessons as a present for his wife's birthday, and he asked me if I was able to make a Spanish themed card to go along with the surprise.

The gorgeous little Tilda Learning to Dance from the Turning Leaves collection was absolutely perfect for this.  To sort of tie in with the theme I also used the background Vienna Magnolia stamp from their With Love collection, not Spanish but this Vienna stamp was as close to Spain as I could get.

I took quite a few pictures this time so I could keep my mate updated on the progress of this special project.

Firstly the two images masked and stamped together.

Apologies for the next photo - a lot fuzzier on the computer than it looked on the camera screen.  The first thing I do when colouring with bold red is paint Tilda's skin, otherwise I risk pulling in the red when trying to blend around the edges.  When doing a bold red I firstly paint a thick layer of barn door, and then leave it overnight to make sure it is completely dry before blending over with a darker colour.  

Normally I would use Black Soot to add the shading on the red, however as I have stamped my image in Coffee Archival Ink I thought I might try this technique using Walnut Stain instead, and I really like it!! Then as you can see in the following photos I slowly painted the background in.  This is one of those pictures where about halfway through painting I felt like I had 'bitten off more than I could chew', all up it was about 5 hours work to get the picture completely coloured!!  and people say I have no patience ;o)

 I asked my friend what his wife's favourite colour was, which is blue, thinking that I could use that for my background paper colour.  I spent about an hour trying all the different blue papers I had.... I just could not make it work and kept coming back to this gorgeous Kaisercraft paper called Recollect from an old collection called Reminiscing.  The Much Love stamp is from my new Lili of the Valley Just for you circular Sentiments set.  Such fantastic stamps, great quality and even better free postage :o)   Finally to finish up a picture of the finished card..

Thanks for looking

xx