So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away

One of my newest discoveries is Tiddly Inks digi stamps (and their great blogs); I've been eying their work for a while now on cards around the craftosphere, but I could never find where the images were from. So once I discovered them, I bought four sets of stamps! I simply couldn't pass up their adorable doggy-balloon set, because it reminds me of my own dogs, Allen and Walt (left to right in this photo).

Then I decided that I wanted to use the image for this week's Tiddly Inks Challenge, and since their theme is Monochromatic, I found myself using a palette of black and white / gray and silver, to match my puppies. I just couldn't help myself! I'm not sure if it meets the challenge exactly, but I'm totally tickled with the result!

I started by pulling out my three gray copic markers for the Walt/black dog and the balloons. I used the blender to remove a shine mark on the balloons; I need a lot more practice, but they came out okay. I decided that silver was just like gray, so I added glitter with gel pens to make the balloons more fun. I went ahead and cheated just a little bit more on the color theme by blending in a bit of pink to the dogs' noses.

For the Allen/white dog, I simply used a Marvy snow pen; I painted on two thick layers before puffing it up with my heat tool. (There's no way my 35lb Allen could get airborne, but he is this adorable!)

I was very excited to have an excuse to use some of my Black Magic Core'dinations cardstock, but the project almost ended tragically when I realized I didn't have a good emery board to use for sanding...But then I discovered a 1000Flowers.org "Shape the Oval Office" emery board in my makeup bag. Can you believe it's been waiting for this moment since 2004‽​ At least I got something good out of that election...

I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to use the Party Balloons font I had downloaded ages ago. I printed the wordart on Recollections silver paper, added some detail with silver and glitter gel pens, and tied a strip of black-glitter ribbon to the balloon shape. I broke out my SCAL software to create the frame (using "basic borders.svg", an online freebie set, but I can't find the link now...) and the clouds. I may have obsessed a bit about the clouds...I finally ended up using the Talk Bubble 7 shape that comes in SCAL2 because it gave me three shapes. I cut the clouds onto a linen-textured white paper, and then created a shadow layer in silver.

For the background paper, I stamped a curly design in silver onto white cardstock, and heat-embossed it in white. Like little, silver-lined clouds....

Have a great day everybody!


Digi stamp set: Whaz'Up....or Down? by Tiddly Inks
Font: Party Balloons by pizzadude

Inspiration:
Sketch: Card Positioning Systems #206
Color/Theme: Tiddly Inks Challenge #38: Monochromatic

Supplies: DCWV, Core'dinations, Hammermill, and Recollections cardstocks, emery board, HP printer & ink, Adobe InDesign, Cricut & SCAL, ColorBox silver ink, silicon stamp by the Paper Studio, Stampendous! white embossing powder, Marvy snow paint pen and heat tool, Offray ribbon
Copic Ciao markers: E04, RV21, C-1, 0, C-5, E50, C-7

Blog title from the Paul Simon song