monster birthday

I had a lot of fun yesterday morning making an inky painty background for this card. The monster stamp is from Stampotique. I had seen these stamps used by Kate Crane in Craft Stamper and loved them. They are cute but quirky with it and not overly sweet. However, I could not find a stockist in the UK so was then thrilled to find the stamp attic which you can find here stock them. On Kates blog which you can find here she has a card which uses this stamp made for her nephews birthday. Well, it is my nephews birthday today, so I took inspiration from that to make my own version. I used a crafters workshop template with distress inks for my background. I only used part of the template. I then found some more plastic stencils which I`d forgotten I even had and used that to stipple paint through for the swirls. I also used the edge of a credit card to make lines and a bottle top for some more circles. It was such fun to just go with the flow and see how things progressed with no aim in mind. The monster is coloured in with copics and I stamped happy birthday onto his sign. The sign is blank on the stamp which is really useful as you could stamp any message in there. I found an old piece of dictionary paper for my `mountain` which he is standing on. That was that, I mounted the whole thing onto a turquoise card blank which I felt matched my blue monster and made the orange background stand out. I will definately be making more cards like this again and big thanks to Kate for the inspiration. x Lavinia