Polar bear and Penguin

 

Rosi is hosting the 52 Christmas Card Throwdown this month. For her theme, she's chosen polar bears and/or penguins.

I don't have that many character stamps, but do have dies of a polar bear and a penguin. So I decided to use these, against a mixed media background.

I started by going through my stash of backgrounds and pulling out some in blue/frosty colours. I tore these up and added to card that I'd cut to size for a 5x7 card. I also added parts of a page from an old dictionary - if you look carefully you can see definitions for polar and polar bear.

To pull the background together, I stencilled over with a dots stencil and white paint.

I wanted to unify it a bit more, so added a watercolour wash of blue. I used chipped sapphire distress ink, but it didn't go according to plan - I ended up dying the white areas pink!

This wasn't what I wanted at all!

Serendipity, or good timing, took a hand here. I have signed up for Wanderlust 2021, and was watching a bonus/pre-course video on backgrounds. One of the teachers showed a glazing technique using gel medium and acrylic paint. Which is what I used to rescue this. I mixed a very little bit of paint with medium, and applied over the pink areas, and elsewhere. Unlike glaxing medium, the gel doesn't self level, and I made a positive of this, creating texture with the palette knife.

I sponged the edge with midnight blue stazon ink.

I die cut the polar bear, penguin, some trees and a sentiment from white card. I also got out my stash of precut die cuts, and arranged on the card until I was happy with the layout, then glued.

I had a lot of fun building this one up. I like the collage part, I'm seeing that a lot at the moment, and tried a new technique with the glazing, which is always good. The contrast between the grungy background and crisp die cuts is pleasing to me.

 

 

 

To play along with the 52CCT this week, visit our blog. This challenge is open until Friday 25th September.