Hello! It’s my turn in Kitty Bee Designs’ Spotlight and this month I chose to make another Christmas card, this time with Kitty Bee Designs’ Pleasantly Surprised Bear. While this gorgeously cute bear could be used at any time of the year, I wanted to use it with some traditional Christmas colors and patterns, to give it a really traditional Christmas feel.
This is yet another card I’ve created with some digital manipulation. I started by making the background of the Pleasantly Surprised Bear image transparent in my photo editing software. I loaded in the poinsettia patterned paper, from the Cosy Christmas Paper pack, cropped it and resized it to 5″×7″. I then overlaid the bear image and saved it as a jpeg file. I also sampled and recorded their RGB parameters for each of the colors from the poinsettia paper to use later in Avery Design and Print Software.
I also wanted to use another patterned paper from the same Cosy Christmas paper pack, this time as a matting layer. I chose the fawn snowflake paper and again cropped and resized it to 5″×7″, as well as sampling the RGB parameters of the fawn color.
Once I had the photo editing completed, I loaded the elements into Avery Design and Print, sizing the feature and background panels as I went. I decided to add a border to the feature panel and, after trying all three colors I had sampled, I went with the red for a little more balance. I added the border by simply adjusting the feature panel’s settings to include a frame.
I then created a piece of plain Fawn paper to cut my sentiment from. I did this by simply creating a box on the screen and filling it with the sampled fawn color from the patterned paper. This gave a solid colored piece of card the exact same color as the fawn snowflake paper, in the size I needed, ready to die cut my sentiment from. I printed the three separate elements onto Neenah Classic Crest Solar White cardstock.
I colored the bear with my Chameleon Pens and trimmed the panel down to the edge of the printed region and inked the edges with a Rhubarb Stalk Memento marker. I also trimmed the fawn snowflake patterned paper to be only slightly smaller than the card base and die cut the sentiment, using Memory Box’s Make Merry and We Wish You sets, from the plain Fawn card I had created myself.
After gluing the two panels to my 5″×7″ card base, I placed the sentiment onto the card to work out its best placement and glued it into place with Ranger Multi Medium Matte Adhesive.
There are quite a few things I could have added to give some dimension but, as I wanted to post this card, I decided to leave things flat as they were. The busy poinsettia patterned paper is also quite enough for the eye to handle as it is.
I hope this inspires you to incorporate Kitty Bee Designs’ Pleasantly Surprised Bear into your Christmas crafting and to check out all the other great images at the Kitty Bee Designs Etsy Store.
Thanks so much for spending time with me today. I look forward to next time…😊
Constantly Carding 