3 hour card

So the boss is turning 40. And for his birthday he is being flooded with cards. I knew about this 2 weeks ago and tonight just got around to making it. Two or three days ago I knew what I wanted to do and have been working out in my head how this was going to happen. And I almost knew the colors. The boss is male so I wanted to keep to boyish kinds of colors. And I did a "boyish" kind of theme because he is so dang young looking. He is always smiling and is super Uber friendly... in the hospitality business you have to be. So here we go:

Birthday Cupcake
brown "chocolate sprinkles",
sculpted paper "gum paste
flower" & striped "paper liner".

I started with a sketch after looking at cupcake photos on line. You'd think that a cupcake would be a simple thing to whip out. But like so many simple things in life... you really have to look at what is in front of you to truly see it. Cupcakes are just one of those things. So I cut my first pieces from the sketch paper, laid it out on the printed paper and cut.

It was after I started laying the pieces out to add some chalk ink shadows that I realized my stripes were not vertical which made the whole thing look tippy... and someohow the frosting got sloppy and looked like a Cupcake Wars reject. So I cut again.

Did I mention that I did not even start on this until 12:30 a.m.? 

When I had the cupcake bottom & frosting cut out and proportioned to fill most of the card plane, I used chalk inks and the direct to paper method to create shading. The blues and greens on the frosting did not show up in the photo... the fault of my camera skills. Next I cut a strip from a floral pattern and edged it with a redish chalk ink. Then using a ribbon punch form ek Sucess, I punched across a green paper, edged it in brown and hit it in places with the same redish ink. Chalk inks dry faster than pigment inks, but not so fast that you can handle it right away. So while those pieces dried I sculpted a 3D embellishment.

K&Comapny's Julienne pad has a beautiful magnolia paper. They were perfect to be my gum paste flower embellishment. Um... did I mention that I had the Food Network on while I was crafting? So yeah.... The magnolia is constructed from two layers. The main layer is sculpted with a stylus and cut along some lines so that I could make some of the petals pop up without adding bulk since this will be mailed. The second layed uses only the center portion of a second large flower. After those three petals were also sculpted with a stylus they were mounted with foam dots. I added a little rosey red to the petals to pull another color from the floral paper into the cupcake design.

Once I decided how it would sit on the frosting I eyeballed where the sprinkles would go. I used mono glue and a fine reddish brown glitter to finish it off. Next it was time to assemble the card. And it was hideous. I had chosen the black and white damask paper for the card instead of plain white because it would be more dynamic. But there was so much going on with the card that it got too busy. So I added that green panel edged with the brown chalk ink. Then I ran a black micron pen around the green panel to frame it a bit. Once I got it assembled I liked it a lot better.

The last thing to do was stamp the bosses name in white on the cupcake to tie all the colors together.