CAS Christmas Challenge Oct 2020 Guest Designer

Hello CAS friends and welcome to my Guest Designer post for CAS Christmas October 2020: Christmas Birds!

I won the CAS Christmas Challenge for August 2020 with my 3 French Hens card:

and was graciously invited to be the Guest Designer for October! For the Christmas Birds theme, I thought I use a stamp in my stash from Stampendous called Winter Chickadee. I have been a Decorative Painter for many years and recently took a zoom class from Chris Haughey at Cupboard Distributing. Here it is:

We used the Winter Chickadee stamp for this acrylic painting. Fun to combine stamps and painting. Here is a large image of the stamp set:

To keep a card Clean and Simple here are the rules from the challenge:

CAS Definition

- clean (uncluttered) cohesive design

- must include white "or open" space (no pattern)

- minimal layers and embellishments

Sometimes this is harder than you would think. My tendency is to add several layers and embellishments, so I have to pull back when making a CAS card.

I wasn't sure what color a Winter Bird is...so through the magic of Google, I found this image and went with these colors. I like a picture for a jumping off place to start coloring.

To create this card, I stamped the image onto Ranger Inkssential Watercolor Paper with Altenew Obsidian Black Ink and sprinkled Altenew's Crystal Clear Embossing Powder over it and heat set. The watercoloring was done using Altenew's 36 Pan Set of Watercolors - there is a nice selection of colors in this set.

There wasn't much to painting this image. Several layers of golds and browns for the chest and a few blues for the rest. Because I embossed the outline, it kept the watercolor contained and did not migrate into other sections of the bird. Once dry, I die cut the image with one of Spellbinder's Gilded Nested Rectangle Dies. I like the elegant feel it gives to the card. The die cut was popped up with a good layer of 3M foam tape on a white case base from Neenah Solar Classic Crest 110lb. card stock.

The sentiment comes from Taylored Expressions' (TE) Simple Strips Christmas and matching die. This set is great because you created multiple sentiments at one time and TE also offers a storage solution for them! I already had this sentiment made and in my Simple Strips container.

The inside sentiment is from my much loved Scrapbook.com Holly Jolly Sentiments set. There is every type of Christmas sentiment in this set! This is a large stamp set 6" X 8".

I even love the little reindeer head at the top of the set. I kept it nice and simple for the inside, too.

Thank you for visiting my blog today and I hope you have the opportunity to play along with CAS Christmas Challenges. It's a good way to get your cards done all throughout the year and then no pressure at Christmas!

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