Hobby Art's Daryl the Quirky Turkey Leads a Revolt!

Good morning all! Amazing weather for September isn't it? Time flies so fast and the nights are really starting to come in now; it always amazes me how quick the year seems to pass. It could be just me, but it seems that when you're a child, you wish your life away counting down to the next school year, birthday and Christmas, but when you hit 25 and onwards (at least for me) you spend your time trying to find a pause button! Are you like that?

Despite the sunshine, apologies in advance, I am talking about Christmas cards all month...! Carrying on from last week, I'm again playing with the lovable 'Daryl the Quirky Turkey' from Hobby Art.

When I first saw the set with the facial expressions and the signs, I immediately imagined a picket line or protest march full of turkeys; thus came my idea for this week's card...

My first step was to create a strip across my card with a view to framing a scene showing loads of turkeys protesting. I wanted a couple of them to protrude out of the main image, so I had to stamp these first. Knowing that I was planning to use Promarkers, my ink of choice this time was Momento Tuxedo Black. I also decided to stamp the sentiment from the set at the same time, just in case I fudged it later when I had spent ages on the rest of the card (of course that's NEVER happened to me before...!!!)

The next step was to create some masks for the faces. I stamped the image onto the side of a sticky note and then cut through several masks at once. I placed masks over the faces and then placed two lengths of Low Tack Masking Tape in a horizontal line across the layer (creating a strip a bit narrower than my turkeys). Tip: use the lines on a craft mat to make sure you make level lines otherwise it can took a bit tipsy when you remove the tape later (again, that has obviously never happened to me...!)

Right, here is where I did originally make a boo boo. My plan was just to stamp loads of turkeys into the background filling in all the space. Can you see what's going to go wrong? No? Good. That means I'm not totally clueless! What I soon realised is that I would have overstamping across some of the turkeys if I did not mask as I went along. The trick was to stamp one, add a mask to that and keep going until you have moved well away from the first image. You can then remove the first mask and move it along the strip as you go. That way you are creating loads of turkeys all behind and next to a each other without messy overstamping; as they say my friends: it's all in the preparation!

Remove the tape...voila!

I knew that it would look very overpowering if I coloured all the turkeys in, so I decided to only colour the three front ones (I used Promarkers). I also 'framed' the strip to make it 'pop' a little, drawing a line, freehand, with a black fine liner. 

To complete my turkey 'revolt' scene, I wanted to use the little signs and words to make placards and give them all 'voices'. There are a choice of wordings on the set, so I picked two that I liked. Hold fire: here's where I went wrong AGAIN!!! Can you see the problem here?

Yes, you're right, the placards are all dis-jointed and floating along the top randomly. Oh dear. Not a problem though, just need to adapt a little... I stamped my placards onto some card and masked the plank section to add the handle on at the bottom. I then coloured these in and cut them out.

I also stamped the holly from the set a few times, coloured these and cut them out to bring some more colour into the card and add interest.

Now to actually put the placards in place properly! To make it look more realistic, I looked at the placement of the turkeys and made four slits along the black outlines where I wanted to insert the signs (as if they were being held by the turkeys). The advantage of this is that you can play and arrange the signs as you want them. A bit of matting and layering (picking out the red from my colouring earlier) along with some googly eyes (essential) and we're done!

Oh, I nearly forgot... I did add an insert to this one as well to carry the message through into the card!

There you have it. Mistakes were made, lessons learnt, but hey: it's all about the journey sometimes!

I hope you like it; until next week, it's goodbye from Daryl and I!

Martina

xxx