Make Your Mark at Cardz 4 Guyz

This week's Cardz 4 Guyz challenge is "Make your mark". That doesn't necessarily mean you have to use marker pens, but that YOU should make the marks on the paper - whether it is with pens, pencils, inks, paints or stitching. We don't want to see any pre-printed designs,  pre-coloured digis or CD printouts. And as always, your creation must be suitable for a male.

I've combined several marking techniques in this scene, made using a set of Debbie Moore stamps. First of all I stamped and embossed the teddy and elephant. I wouldn't usually emboss when I was planning to colour in the image with Promarkers, I would stamp with Memento ink, but I didn't think that would stand up to the watercolouring I planned to do.

After embossing, I stamped masks of the two images onto Post-it notes and covered the images. Then I arranged more Post-its across the upper half of the card, to block off the sky area. Then I took a selection of water-soluble wax crayons in shades of earth and brown and scribbled lightly over the remaining space, adding a little green towards the lower edge, and blended it with a water brush.

I punched a  Post-it circle for the sun then, when the lower half was dry,removed the Post-its from the top and replaced them at the bottom, used the circle to mask off an area for the rising (or setting) sun and repeated the watercolouring with blues and sunset (or is that sunrise?) shades.

Leaving the teddy and elephant masked, I removed all the other masking and used one of the crayons, dry, to colour in the semi circle left blank for the sun. Then I stamped the trees along the sky line using black Staz-on ink. I'm not sure any other ink would have "taken" on the wax crayon background.

At last I could remove the masks from my characters, who I coloured in with Promarkers, filling in the binocular lenses and the elephant's eyes and toenails with Glossy Accents.

To finish off, I stamped and embossed the sentiment and lightly inked the edges. To mount it onto the base card, I used lots of ultra-strong tape criss-crossed on the back of the design, as all the different processes the card had gone through made it quite buckled.