Gallery Idol Round 2!

I'm thrilled to have been chosen as one of the Top 20 finalists for this year's Gallery Idol competition.  If you're not familiar with the competition it's like American Idol for cards.  There's a challenge each week that is issued on Friday morning, the contestants have the weekend to create a card that meets the challenge, and then the public gets to vote on them.  Each Friday the field is narrowed by five until the ultimate winner is chosen.

The theme for this round was die cutting, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.  My card is a die cutting version of spotlight stamping.

I started from the inside and worked out.  First, I created a watercolor sky background using Inktense pencils, and then die cut the pennant shape.  Then I placed the skyline die over the bottom of the pennant and ran it through my machine which leaves the empty negative space.  I had previously cut the skyline in dark gray cardstock.  I adhered some scratch printer paper to the bottom of the pennant, placed the skyline in like a puzzle, added the pennant die over top of that and die cut again to remove the excess skyline portions.  This process was repeated for each of the inlaid elements on the tag.

It would definitely be easier to build the whole scene at one time and cut the pennant once, but my creative process is not so organized as that.

Once I had the pennant done, I started working on the card base.  I first die cut and inlaid the skyline on the base.  Then I used that to line up the pennant to place the clouds.  This is a little tricky, but you use the grooves to make sure your die is in the right place, and then hold it down on the base part of the card and slide the pennant out and die cut.

The overlapping clouds required an extra die cut on both the pennant and base, but it's worth it.  Incidentally if you have the Lil Inker cloud dies that I used, you might be wondering how I did this because the clouds are actually fully attached.....I have some heavy duty kitchen scissors that I used to cut them apart.

At this point I had most of the card done.  I embossed the sentiment, from my Neat & Tangled Clouds set, on the sentiment piece, and added some rays using a Crafter's Workshop stencil, distress marker and waterbrush, and finished it with a little die cut heart as an accent.



Both the pennant and sentiment panel are popped out with foam tape for some dimension as is the little heart.

Sorry this is so wordy, but it was a bit complicated to put together, so I wanted to make sure to explain as best as possible.

Be sure to check out all the cards in the gallery, this is on talented group and I know you will be wowed, and of course, I'd love it if you would vote for my card!

Supplies Used
Paper/Cardstock:  Avery Elle - White, Fog, and Cherry Cardstock; MFT - Steel Grey cardstock; CTMH - White Daisy Cardstock
Stamps:  Neat & Tangled - Clouds
Ink:  Versamark
Other:  Paper Smooches - Super 2 and Hearts dies; MFT - Die-namics Jumbo Fishtail Banner STAX; Lil Inker Designs - Rainbows and Clouds Die Set; The Crafter's Workshop - Mini Stripes Explosion Stencil; Derwent - Inktense pencils; Ranger - Squeezed Lemonade Distress Marker and Waterbrush; Stampendous - White Embossing Powder; CTMH - Dimensional Foam Tape; Tombow - Stamp Runner; Kuretake - Glue Pen