Bear Hugs

Distractions abound. This morning I watched the latest OWHtv video and my brain registered the request for general cards that deployed soldiers can send to their kids back home. Then I went to Pinterest to look for some ideas - something that might give me some mojo, and you know what? If you search Pinterest for "kids cards" or "cards for kids" or "cards for boys" or "cards for girls" or "cards for children" all you find is baby cards or cards BY children, or card kits for children. I came up pretty empty.

So then I watched the OWH Interactive Card Project (ICP) and led myself down the path to:

Love cards for kids with a monster theme. I have several monstah sets, so I wandered into The Captain's Quarters and started thumbing through my stamp sets, when I happened upon my Paper Smooches Chubby Chum Pals set and remembered I'd found my missing "bear hugs" stamp, and bears would work for either a boy or a girl, and hugs are good, and I could play with my colored pencils ... yeah, this could work.

I stamped six of the bears onto a piece of Neenah Solar White card stock and colored one with my Derwent Inktense pencils and then blended with water. I hated intensely disliked it. I colored another one by picking up the ink from the pencils with a wet brush and painting the image. I liked it better, but not much.  So I broke out my Copics and colored one I could live with. Then I realized I'd splashed brown water on the three remaining images, so yeah, I got one image out of the six I started. Sigh.

Sketch. I needed a sketch. I decided to use this one from Try Stamping On Tuesday:

instead of the OWH sketch, and this is what came out:

Don't be impressed with that torn paper on the left ... the paper came like that. I only added the strips of green and orange on the right. Also, his eyeballs are very white because I slopped some brown marker into the whites of his eyes and my Copic Blender pen made it worse, so I was forced to re-whiten his eyeballs. And yes, his muzzle is fuzzy with flock.

One card. After all that I made one card. THIS, people, is why stamping is hard. HARD, I tell you.  I will not be mass-producing this card. Hmmm, I wonder if I could stamp the bear on some brown patterned paper and cut him out. I'll have to try that.

In other news, I'm changing (again) how I link to things I've used on my projects. Inlinkz has changed their product pricing starting the first of the year, so I'm going to try just use text descriptions with links to a store or two, the better to enable you. :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Products used:
Basic Grey Clippings 6x6 pad (SSS | EH)
Paper Smooches Chubby Chum Pals stamp set (SSS | EH)
Hero Hues black ink (EH)
Memento black ink (SSS | EH)
Memento black marker  (SSS | EH)
Tonic scissors (SSS | EH)
Spellbinders Circle dies Large (SSS) and Small (SSS)
Stampin' Up! brown flocking (retired)
Martha Stewart glue pen 
Copic markers E25, E27, 0 and W1
Neenah Solar White card stock 25 sheets (SSS | EH) ream (SSS | EH)
Teflon bone folder (SSS | EH)
Signo white gel pen (SSS | EH)
Fiskars paper trimmer (SSS | EH)
Corner Chomper 1/4" & 1/2" (SSS | EH)