Around the World on Wednesday: Sketch Challenge

It’s Around the World on Wednesday time again. This month our theme is a sketch and I’m the featured team member.

The idea is to use a sketch and maybe other inspiration from my work. One of the sketches I’ve used quite a bit over the past few years is one that I first came up with while playing around with the retired set, Daisy Lane. I actually played with it a while before I figured out that the daisy in the lower right needed to go off the card.

Even though I started the second card first, the first card I finished was for a color challenge calling for Flirty Flamingo over at Splitcoaststampers, where I had recently begun participating on the design team. Once I got the partial daisy figured out the finishing up the second was pretty quick!

Since I did those back in 2019, I’ve done them with leaves, other daisies and even snowflakes. I thought since I was using a sketch I was already familiar with I should try it in a theme that stretched me a little so I decided to see what would happen if I tried it with Silly Safari:

It was pretty easy to decide which animals to use since I wanted them to face the center/greeting. These worked out perfectly to get the kind of weighted balance I previously achieved with the large and small daisies. The animals are all colored with blends, plus a little Cajun Craze watercolor pencil on the giraffe’s spots since I was afraid the blends would be TOO dark. I also toned down the white contrast on the cut edge by outlining them with Light Crumb Cake Blends, a trick I use even if I’m not cutting them out.

I initially planned to fussy cut the leaves too and researched safari sunsets and sunrises to see what kind of colors I might blend up for my background layer. Alas, they just weren’t playing well with the colors I used on the animals so I opted for a green stamped jungle and added some Pecan Pie accent stamps from the set and a little extra ink on the edges with a blending brush. Possibly simpler and oh, so much more fun. I can get a little lost in the ink blending. I really find it relaxing.

Usually I use a white or plain left border but this time I changed it up with a piece of DSP from the Need for Tweed Designer Series Papers.

Now for the best part. I can’t wait to continue on the hop and see what the others have created. Next up is Bree Renwick:

Leonie Stuart – AU
Rochelle Laird-Smith – AU
Cheryll Miller – AU
Marga Bultena – NL
Aurélie Fabre – FR
Annette Ball – CA
Kelly Taranto – US
Chris Smith – US
Bree Renwick – US
Lori Willcox – CA
Teri West – US
Cheryl Hamilton – US

Thanks so much for stopping by!