Raise the Bar GD Challenge

I've been spending more time with the grandkids lately since school will be starting soon.  It's hard to believe that summer will be over soon.  I know I'm not looking forward to winter, but with all of the 100 degree temperatures that we've had this summer it will be a nice to have some cooler weather!

I recently was one of the Top Three over at Raise the  Bar challenge blog which gives me a guest designer spot this week.  This card takes me back to my card making roots that I've been missing lately.  The challenge is an ABC challenge; include an Animal, the color Brown and be a Clean & Simple card.  Talk about hitting the trifecta here!  I love all three of these items!  Since I make cards for Operation Write Home whenever I can, this is one challenge card that will fit perfectly in the box heading for the soldiers serving overseas.

I've always loved this beautiful moose stamp from Coronado Island stamps.  I usually try to use it with my Stampscapes scenes to really show it off even more, but since this is supposed to be a CAS card,  I stamped it alone with Tuxedo Black Memento ink.  My most satisfying way to add color is still using colored pencils, so that's what I used here with some help from the blending stumps dipped into baby oil.  Since this is a sunset scene, I had to get out the Sakura white gel pen and add some highlights and stars.  The black cardstock matting is from an ebay seller.  A stamper from our Stampscapes II yahoo group told us to use black to frame your scenic stamping to help make the image pop.  Don't you just love how helpful other stampers are?  Thanks to all of you for your great advice!

I took a bit of artistic liberty on this moose to highlight the color brown a bit more instead of their fairly disgusting mangy-looking fur!  My colors aren't the greatest and the glare is horrible since I had to take the picture inside because it was storming outside.  One of these days I'll try to put together some kind of light box!

The rest of the card was really simple which is what CAS is all about!  Instead of filling up all of the white space for once, it sure is nice to put the spotlight back on the central image!  This was going to be an obvious masculine card, so I decided to use kraft cardstock from Hobby Lobby as a base.  No frilly flowers for this card, so I took out the Magic Mesh and placed it in the background to dress it up a little.  I don't usually put the sentiment on the outside unless I have a specific occasion for the card, but I knew this would be used for OWH.  The sentiment is a rubon from American Crafts that I outlined with a Zig Millennium black pen and then added another rubon from Heidi Grace.  The finishing touch was a few pearls from Michael's.  

Well, tomorrow is another grandma day, so hopefully I can get some crafting time this weekend!  I made some flowers that I'm itching to use!

~~  Lee  ~~