Week 3 of guest designing for Vera Lane Studio

Hi everyone! This post marks the third one in my 4 week stint as a guest designer for Vera Lane Studio. I have certainly been enjoying myself. This week, I chose to play with two of the images from the Warm and Cozy image & sentiment set. Not only do I love the fact that these two are all dressed up for winter weather (of which we have had more than our share) but their expressions were ideal for the sentiment I had in mind. Besides that, they are just plain cute!

I coloured them with a mix of Prismacolor and Polychromos pencils, highlighted with a white Posca Pen, and used a black Pitt pen to re-trace the linework where the coloured pencils dulled it. They were then fussy cut leaving my usual narrow white border, matted with black cardstock, and fussy cut leaving a narrow black border. Foam tape was placed on the back of each image to pop them up, creating a natural shadow.

The background began as a gel print from a while ago. Liquitex Basics Light Blue Permanent and Brilliant Yellow Green acrylic paints were applied to the plate and then I used a plastic canvas shape to make marks by removing paint before pulling the print. Prism Violet was used to stencil TCW Tile Mania template in a few places. To add a little more green to the white spaces, Twisted Citron Distress Oxide was applied to a Viva Las Vegas circle text stamp. More texture was added with a numbers stamp from VLV using Forget-Me-Not Archival Ink. Deep Purple Archival Ink was used to add a Crafty Individuals text stamp here and there, and Jet Black Archival Ink to add the stitching from 49 and Market Captured Adventures stamp set.

I had this idea to add a sidewalk to the bottom of the gel print to give the girls a place to stand. I wanted it to have texture so first I printed the word sidewalk over and over on white cardstock and then spritzed the strip with Lindy's Down the Rabbit Hole Starburst Spray to add gray tones. The strip was edged on all sides with Watering Can Archival Ink and matted to black cardstock. Thin pieces of the same cardstock were used at an angle to mark where the sidewalk lines were. Once the sidewalk was adhered, gray Neocolor II was applied along the top edge with a waterbrush to create dimension.

Because I loved this look of the text so much, I did the same thing for the cloud, printing cloud over and over onto white cardstock. I then fed this back through the computer and printed one of the Vera Lane Studio clouds from the Polka Dot Fairy set. It was fussy cut and the bottom was edged with Aquamarine Archival ink.

The sentiment was printed onto white cardstock, cut into sections, and matted with black. Foam tape was used to pop up the words and a doodled border was added to the outside edge of the page to frame it. At that point, there still seemed to be something missing from the design so I applied Deep Purple Archival Ink directly to white cardstock, and punched .25 inch circles. These were then scattered around the sky area and adhered with Scotch Quick Dry glue. The edge of the page was inked with Black Big Brush pen before it was matted with black cardstock, again to frame it and keep the eye from drifting off the page.

Thanks for joining the Warm and Cozy Girls and me today. We are delighted you popped by. To check out the huge selection of Vera Lane studio images, hop over to the VLS Etsy shop where you will find inspiration galore. Speaking of inspiration, remember to stop by the Vera Lane Studio Facebook group where you will see fabulous makes created by the Design Team and the VLS community. It's a great place to hang out and find out about the newest releases.

Life is good; so is art
Bonnie