Challenge Birthday Card

Well it has been a while since I have had time to blog anything unfortunately.  Mainly due to being so tied up last year with getting married and all the fun organisation around that. 

I am hoping to have a bit more of a peaceful year this year although we are having our honeymoon in America for the whole of September - cant wait! Whilst we are over in the states we are also going to my best mates wedding which will be great! 

Well lets hope with it being a bit more of a relaxed year I will have time to blog a bit more and undertake more challenges than I managed last year.  This isnt the first card I have made this year... I have already had a few birthdays in early Jan but this is the first challenge card I have made this year!  Its a card for my best mates birthday on 2nd Feb... this is the same friend whose wedding we are going to so all very exciting.  I do find that it can be a struggle some times doing masculine cards but I did really enjoy creating this card which was also inspired by one of my favourite films - Monsters Inc.

I used some digi-stamps that I have had for some time back when Pollycraft was closing.  I coloured the stamp using my faithful Pro-Markers. I didn't have quite the right colours I needed for the body but managed to achieve a reasonable colour using the Cool Aqua and Pastel Green colours blended.  I wanted to keep the card quite masculine so used shades of green for the socks.  I used some blues card stock to also give a nice masculine matt to the card.  I used some brown card stock to create a strip across the card and used some Do-Craft birthday 12x12 paperstock to create a bright and fun strip.  I accentuated this strip with 2 lengths of twine crossed over to the right of the strip and finished it with a "Happy Birthday" tag.

For this card I used the following challenges for inspiration:

• Daring Card Makers Earning your Stripes Challenge I did this using the striped birthday papers as a strip across the card.
• Passion for Promarkers Week 232 Challenge - This challenge was an anything goes challenge.  I coloured my Monsters Inc inspired monster using my well used Pro-Markers.
• Simon Says Anything Goes Challenge with Twine or String Challenge 
• Totally Papercrafts - One for the boys challenge 
• Simply Less is More Week 156 challenge using the sketch below:

So after those materials and inspiration here is the finished product I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it:

So the presents are in the post to him, and this card also will be tomorrow! Hopefully he has a great birthday on Sunday.

I look forward to creating many more challenge cards / designs in the up and coming weeks and months.