April Guest Design spot on Smeared and Smudged

As a fairly infrequent stamper and paper player, I was honored to be asked to host the Guest Design spot on Smeared and Smudged's Challenger group for April. I was pretty intimidated by the two designers from January and February, Julia Vazquez and Leigh Snaith-Brunton, who both created just amazing projects and challenges. And seriously, I thought to myself that the only way they could make it more intimidating was to have Mark Gould go right before me. On March 1, I had quite a laugh as that was exactly what happened.

My project is a tunnel book that I'm calling "Into the Woods." I used three of the SnS Goth Fairies Set as the characters and altered them to fit the plan. Precious got a red hood, Cornelius got a wolf's head and Jenna got an axe. I had worked on the layers previously and had to rework them to  make them fit together as when I had used them before, they opened inside a book so they were all different sizes and contained other characters that had to be removed.

It was all colored in Photoshop with a little twist; for the flowers and some of the trees, I put real flowers and trees behind the top layer and then erased those sections so the real stuff showed through.

There are four layers, including the background layer. I tried to create additional depth by using pop dots to hold the characters off of their layers. Red Riding Hood had to be supported by a dowel that connects to the back layer. My basic plan was to make a cohesive scene (the path, rolling grass and background) and then add additional elements to each layer as the viewing holes got smaller. Since each layer needed to be able to support itself and I was printing onto photo paper, I adhered each layer to heavy black card stock and used 1/2" x 1/2" wood pieces cut to length to hold the layers apart.