Full Steampunk Ahead

This month’s challenge over at the SBS Fan Page was to use this fabulous image, Steampunk Rio, and take inspiration from an awesome card made by Corinne of the SBS DT.

Copic colours:

Skin E000, E00, E02, E11, (cheeks E95, lips R22, R24, R59)

Eyes B93, B95, B97

HairE21, E23, E27, E29

Clothing R22, R24, R29, R59, R89, 100, C-3, C-5, C-7

Feather and jewelry E08, RV14, Spica Sand, Chocolate & Gold

I coloured Rio up first, I’ve seen a lot of images with red/black combinations that looked really good, hence my colour choices for her.  I tend to be a bit cheap and lazy when it comes to printing my digis and just filling an A4 sheet.  The result is that I can’t use a die to cut around the digi to give a nice shaped background, that’s what happened here.  Steampunk Rio shared a page with some of the new Jude and the Rocker’s Valentine images from Simply Betty Stamps.  I would normally have fussy cut Rio but after I made up the card she just wouldn’t have looked right with a white outline so I cut right on the line.  For a woman who says she doesn’t like fussy cutting Betty sure does make her images awfully intricate and hard to cut round!

Corinne’s card had a striped background, hers was in muted blues and greys but going through my stash this was the best I could find.  I liked the distressed look of this paper and the mottled green I used to mount Rio on was from the same stack so matched perfectly.  They are both actually Christmas papers from the Glitz Joyeux Noel but I think they work really well for steampunk.

The embossed paper is just a bit of cardstock, it started out a greeny/grey colour that I ran through my Cuttlebug with a fantastic embossing folder from Docrafts, called Chronology Clocks.  It’s a tri-boss folder that means it has multiple layers to the embossing and really looks amazing.  Some British ladies on the Fan Page mentioned the Chronology line and posted some pictures so I tracked down a seller willing to ship to Australia (could only find bits of the line here, typical of our limited selection!) and bought almost the whole line.  I am loving the embossing folders!  I also bought a Docraft Creativity magazine featuring the line and there was tip in there about embossing then running an ink pad over the embossed surface and using heat set clear embossing powder to give a metallic effect.  So I tried it with my Encore! Bronze metallic ink pad and Ranger clear embossing powder and wowee – once I turned the heat up on my heat gun enough to melt the embossing powder it turned out amazing!  Although I think I probably still should have heated it a bit more as it is somewhat dimply but I actually think that adds to the vintage feel, a bit like the metal deteriorating.

I mounted my top sheets on black backing board, which is something Corinne also did; I love how it frames everything.  I wanted my embellies to match Rio’s so I went and bought some feathers and layered some sprockets.  I was going to Smooch Spritz the feathers but I didn’t have a brown colour and I wasn’t willing to risk it with my bright gold, if it didn’t suit I wasn’t heading out to the shops for more feathers.  I’m glad I didn’t now as the subdued colours mean Rio stands out even more.  The bronze sprockets are from Jolee’s Steampunk collection, I cut the black ones using a die also from Docraft’s Chronology line.  The largest one wasn’t big enough to see underneath so I offset a couple, I adhered them to the Jolee’s one, which was plastic, with Glossy Accents and deliberately let it go out to the edges to give the bottom layer some shine.  My final embellishment on the outside was some tiny screw brads on the mat for Rio.

In keeping with my aim to have my card insides as nice as the outsides I used the same patterned papers and some embellishments.  This time I used larger screw brads and again layered a die cut sprocket with one from Jolee’s.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at my card, please leave a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts :-)