This is one of the Christmas gift projects which I actually managed to get pictures of, not having a blog yet when I was working on them. Actually, I only took them after my then 7-month old lab puppy ate part of the wrappings... fortunately she only stole the ribbon and ripped the paper but didn't damage anything. I still had all my work gifts at home and was planning to play slightly-post-Christmas Elf on my week off. (Something about going in to work dressed in your comfy sweatshirt and favorite jeans and knowing you're there but they can't make you work feels kinda deliciously bad. It's not something that happens often as I don't really take a lot of time off, so I enjoy it when I can. heh)
I made this one and another one I'll show later for two of my coworkers who 'live' in fabric-wall cubicles and both have kids and lots of photos. I wanted something they could use either on the cube wall as is or to put in a frame later, so both projects are 8x10.
Easton is a 6-year-old soccer player...
I used a Tiddly Inks digital image that I sized up and printed on basic GP white cardstock. It was colored with my Grumbacher translucent watercolors (I got two pan sets in December, one opaque and one translucent). I left the legs white and just shaded them with the lightest hint of gray as socks instead of legs since I loved the blue and red accent on the sneaker and didn't want to mess it up with lousy skincoloring. LOL Unfortunately this is a scan and not a photograph, and I lost some of the lighter gray shading, but I don't feel too awful about this one. This was actually my second project teaching myself to paint with watercolors. It looks pretty striking in person against that dark blue mat, which helps gloss over any of the holy-hannah-where-did-she-NOT-learn-to-paint issues. LOL Having seen a gazillion cards and coloring examples on blogs since then, I can see some of my, um, missed opportunities. Room to grow. =) He also looked better after a light coating of matte finishing spray.
Here's a closer look at my soccer kid:
I then cut him out and focused on the frame piece. I got a precut white 5x7 double mat for a 4x6 photo at Walmart. I took what was the outer narrower mat layer, cut one end off by making diagonal cuts (so from the side you don't see a gap in the mats) and cut it a little wider to just fit a 4x6 photo, then adhered the mats together with that on the back. I stamped and embossed the stars using Stampendous embossing powder in marcasite. Not happy with where that top one is next to Easton's name, but I had to put it there to cover a stray mark I got on it during the process. And the larger star on the bottom... oh, that was as much fun as pulling splinters. I bought shrink film, thinking from what I had read that it would shrink to about 45% of original size. But what I actually got was film that shrinks to about 25% of the size. I didn't have a big enough star shape to begin with to get what I really wanted as an end product, but, again, lesson learned. No interesting new things the week before Christmas. LOL I shrunk it down, then coated it with embossing ink and the marcasite powder twice. I bent it a little the second go-round while it was warm from the heating tool to at least try to give it a little oomph since it wasn't as big as I wanted. The Easton was made on the PC with one of the 3000 fonts I have (I was newsletter queen at my last job and I LOVE fonts!), printed on cardstock and trimmed up. (Looking at it now, I'm not sure whether I'd like to be a little bigger, but it worked for me then, obviously. LOL) I pop-dotted that on the frame and laid that aside.
I used a black Sharpie to go around the edges of the dark blue background mat to finish it up a bit and put a couple of strips of industrial strength velcro on the back. Then I laid out the white mat "frame" with the Easton and the opening for sliding in the picture at the top and my painted soccer kid image until I got them where I liked them. I used a Stampamajig to make sure I got the frame back on exactly where I measured it to be and stuck that on with strong adhesive. Then I pop-dotted my soccer boy on.
All in all, I liked it... mostly because I love how his name in red really pops, the stars are nice and glittery in person, and for one of my first paintings ever, I'm more than okay with my soccer kid. =)
So there's project one for your perusal. On to the next!
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