Steampunk Birthday Card

I’m fighting off some sort of a bug so I’m a bit under the weather. How I managed to get a bug when I haven’t been out of the house since Sunday and the only visitor we’ve had this week was the plumber - and I sure didn’t have much contact with him as that’s Joe’s department. Oh well, this too shall pass.

So after making and rejecting three cards for my son-in-law I finally made a card I liked. This is my first steampunk card. Hope he likes it. He’s away on business right now so he hasn’t seen it yet.

 

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I just Googled free steampunk images and saved the ones I liked. I then opened up Word and inserted four on the page, sized them to how big I wanted them, without making them fuzzy, and printed them out on white cardstock. This time I used Georgia-Pacific cardstock that I bought at Wal-Mart in Michigan last year. I can use it for just colouring or for colouring and blending with gamsol when I stamp with Archival ink. Be careful of blending with gamsol or even water using an ink jet printer as some will bleed.

This son-on-law loves crows and ravens so I had to use this raven steampunk image. It was one that I could not make any larger. These were all coloured with Prismacolor pencils and blended just a wee bit with gamsol in places where it needed. The trouble with downloading free images is that they are not cropped close to the image so it’s hard to layer them in Photoshop. I got around that by just cutting them out and attaching them with dimensional glue dots. The gears are my own cut from a Tim Holtz die and painted and splattered to look old. It’s hard to see in the photo but the pointing finger is holding the gears with wire. I added the peel-and-stick gold Happy Birthday to one gear. The background was a card base I bought a package of from Paper Wishes and really didn’t like them all that much – various brown swirls. However, when I ran it through the Tim Holtz gears embossing folder and then inked walnut Distress ink over the embossed bits, it added some depth to the card.

I had so much fun making this card, I coloured up several more images while watching hockey on television. My granddaughter is getting one too – totally different but I think she will like it.

Cheers

Violet