Its been a blustery, cold few winter days here in Vermont, so its a perfect time to sit down and color! Since I'm a card maker and sending snail mail is kind-of my jam, I've been wanting to create some fun Dramatic Play props for the Post Office play area in my son, David's, Pre-K classroom.
I decided to make a trio of fun postcards that the kids could pretend to send to each other, as well as a couple of traditional folded cards in heavy weight cardstock envelopes, for my White Rose Crafts design team project this week. I also put together some DIY art projects for the class to do, too, that I'll share at the end of the post.
I started with 5 panels of 110# white cardstock and a selection of stamp sets from White Rose Crafts.
I picked Hot Cocoa Hugs from Your Next Stamp for the first of the folded cards, and did some simple Copic coloring. I don't know about you, but I often forget that my coloring doesn't have to be super intricate or take a long time to be beautiful. This time, I decided to just do simple shading on the hot cocoa itself, leaving the mice more simple. I drew a gingham table cloth beneath the image and added the "Hot cocoa hugs" sentiment with Nocturne ink by Versafine Clair. I grabbed a scrap of patterned cardstock from my scraps box and trimmed it to 4 1/8 x 5 3/8 inches, before adhering it to the center of a top folding, landscape, A2 white card base. I cut my colored panel down to 3 3/4 x 5 inches and popped it up on Woodware 1mm foam mounting tape, for a touch of dimension.
For the second folded card, I wanted some mail related imagery, so I knew I had to include Bella With Flowers From Wild Rose Studio. I again went with some simple Copic coloring, concentrating the shading on Bella herself and her oversized letter. Since this was a single stamp that doesn't come with a sentiment, I decided to mix and match a bit, grabbing this big, bold script sentiment by Dovecraft, called If Friends Were Flowers and stamped it first with Versafine Clair Charming Pink ink, then offset the stamp a bit before stamping again in Nocturne. I love that this technique gives the sentiment a pretty, colored shadow.
For my first postcard, I chose all of the ice skating images from Good Glidings, Fleece Navidad, & Holiday Mice, from Your Next Stamp and stamped them on the lower third of one of my white panels using Memento Tuxedo Black ink. I used a black pen to draw a basic pond shape and snowy hill in the back ground & stamped that cute, stacked "Warm Winter Wishes" sentiment from Fleece Navidad, using Versafine Clair Paradise ink. Since I wanted this to be a postcard, I knew I didn't want the color to bleed through to the back, so I decided to pull out my Prismacolor pencils (not sold at WRC) for this scene, as well as the other two Postcards.
Next, I pulled out one of my new favorite stamp sets, Piles of Smiles by Little Acres Creations (a product line exclusive to White Rose Crafts), because its images of woodland critters working together to mail a letter are too perfect not to use for this set of projects! I really didn't want to do any difficult masking today, so I stamped the images far enough apart that I only needed to mask the letter itself. That was easy peasy because its just a rounded rectangle. I used my T square ruler to draw a horizon line. I performed some simple stamp surgery so I could stack "Sending you piles of smiles" and stamped that sentiment, as well as "Great friends lift you up" in Versafine Clair Nocturne ink before, again, coloring my scene with Prismacolor pencils.
For the final postcard, I used an older Stampendous set called Snowman Flurry, which is now sold out, but you can get a similar look by using Winter Penguins, also colored with Prismacolor pencils. The cute and punny, 2 part sentiment is stamped in Distress Oxide Salty Ocean.
I used an old, retired My Creative Time stamp set from my stash to build the back of all three of my postcards, adding that adorable little Mama Elephant Snowman Agenda image (not sold at WRC) as the postage stamp. I wrote a cute message on each one and addressed them to David's class, before putting them through my Xyron Laminator to protect them from little hands.
As a bonus, I also decided to pull out the Heffy Doodle Warm Hugs stamp set and stamp enough blank post cards for David's classmates to color, take home and mail out with their families, and die cut large, stitched postage stamp edged rectangles, using a die from my stash, out of the same 110# white cardstock for the kids to draw their own stamps as a classroom art project (not pictured).
Gotta get the next generation of cardmakers started early,
am I right?
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Thank you so much for visiting the blog today. I hope you found some inspiration in my projects today. I really had fun creating these. It was nice to not stress about the coloring (which I definitely do, sometimes) and just have some fun!
Come Back Soon,
Happy Crafting!
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