Doggone Cute! - New Sami Stamps Release!

Happy Friday!
Any fun plans for this weekend?  The sun will be shining here so it will be nice and warm!  Hoping to get a little yard work done with Matthew...but I foresee a lot of just relaxing :)

So today is another super cute release from Sami Stamps!  This one is called Man's Best Friend and is full of super sweet little puppy images!  I'm always a sucker for Sami's kitty images, but her pups are just as adorable!

For my card, I chose to use Moving:

We're also starting a new challenge for this month.  We want to see some stripes on your projects!

Now I'm sure most of you have seen the fabulous video by Jennifer McQuire on how she makes multiple colored stripes on a card base.  I adored that technique!  It's one I've done in the past several times, but it does take a lot of work moving masks around and trying not to mess up your design.  I thought it would go perfect with this image and challenge, so I gave it another shot today.

And wouldn't you know, I totally screwed up my first attempt.  Had the whole panel nearly done when I tore right down the middle of it removing some masking tape....fortunately I had planned on that happening and had another card front ready to go to start right in on.  The second time worked better, but I did tear it a little.  Fortunately it was in a place I knew would be covered by the image so I didn't mind :)

I think the key with making this background is to remove some of the stickiness from your tape.  This makes sure that it doesn't adhere too strongly to your paper.

The second key thing to keep in mind is that wet paper will tear easier.  So if you want to completely prevent that, dry your paper between each color.  I didn't dry it until I had the whole first layer down, but removing some of the stickiness helped keep everything from ripping too much for me.

Once the stripes were done, I went back over top of the design with a really thin striped stencil and added embossing paste.  This helped give it great texture and sort of muted a lot of the colors.  So even though I only used 4 colors on the background, it looks like there are a lot of different shades.  Love it!

While the embossing paste dried, I worked on getting my image colored up.  I started by adding a solid coat of marker to each part of the image.  Then went back over top with my pencils to add all the shading and details.  I absolutely love this technique!  I have so much more control with pencils but having the base of color from the marker means the image will be a solid color even if my pencil lines are a bit streaky.

I wrapped everything up with a little vellum panel and a sentiment from Create with TLC!  Oh and a few fun black glittery stars :)

Hope you will stop by Sami Stamps to see this fun release, and then join in our challenge!
And give yourself a gold star if you made it to the end!  That is one giant wall of text here...but I wanted to explain everything I did so that you can give this fun technique a try!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Crafting When We Can #120-Add Stars
    Incy Wincy Designs-Touchy Feely
    Paper Play Sketches #9
    Simon Says Stamp Wednesday-Mask It (I masked off each stripe for the background)
    The Crazy Challenge #223-Your Fav Color (blue!)

Thanks for visiting! <3