Astronautical Birthday!

I'm back on the Seven Hills Crafts blog today with another challenge: a masculine birthday card. Like many, I struggle with not reaching for the cute critters and bright rainbow colours. So I went back to my comfort zone and created a scene I could colour in! I used the Avery Elle Astronauts stamp set to create this celebratory space scene to colour in with my alcohol markers.

I started out by stamping the moon and two astronauts from the Avery Elle Astronauts stamp set onto some blending cardstock with some alcohol marker friendly ink. I masked off the hand of the astronaut on the right with a bit of washi tape and stamped the rocket balloon over his hand. I left stamping the sentiment until later as I sometimes find using lots of layers of the lighter colours can cause the ink to bleed.

I used my Copic markers to colour in the scene, starting with the background. Lots of layers, soaking the cardstock will help to get a smoother blend. I coloured in the moon, using blots or dabs of colour to give the impression of texture. For the astronauts, I wanted to give the impression of high shine on their metal suits, so I used a whole range of cool greys to give deep shadows and bright highlights.

I think this is one time outside the Christmas season that I got to go crazy with the white gel pen! I added lots of stars of different sizes to give the impression of dimension, adding some tails onto some of them to simulate shooting stars.

After it was completed, I stamped out the simple sentiment from the set in some black ink, trimmed the card stock and mounted it to a black top-folding A6 card base.

Suitable for any space lover!

Thanks for reading, catch you in a couple of weeks.

Tallie