Did somebody say "Luau"?

First of all, if you are my friend, Dorothy - back away from this post! You can come back AFTER your birthday party. I'm serious! I'll know if you are pretending to be surprised when you get this card! I will!


Okay, now that the house-keeping is done (Dorothy if that's you....I really meant it!) on with the details for this card. Ah yes -- the Divine Details if you will. Verve Stamps Project Parade day 1 poses the question: How do you come up with your design?

Well, for me it is always a combination of things

• first: the occasion. For this card, it is all about the birthday party theme.
• second: the papers. I got my July PaperCard Kit from PaperWorksCo on Monday and I thought the Banana Float and Katawba flip papers would be perfect for a Hawaiian themed card.
• third: the stamps. I happen to have picked up the Doodlefactory Tropics stamps from StarvingArtistamps a while back and turns out they were perfect for this card!
• finally: the sketch. Sometimes it is one of my own and sometimes it is a sketch from one of the many blogs I follow. This time it is from The Next Level . And it has a twist - the image is to be 3D (decoupaged).

So, what did Miss Long-Winded come up with this time? Well.....here it is....



Busy, huh? A couple of things of note about the stamped images:

• the little hula guy has his head and skirt popped up on dimensionals. And I curled up the bottom edges of the top layer of his grass skirt.
  
• for the palm trees if you are familiar with the stamp set you know that the two trees don't face in the same direction. The larger of the two trees faces in the opposite direction from the one shown here! How did I do that? Simple enough - ink up the stamp, roll over it with a brayer and then roll the brayer onto card stock. Proceed as usual to colour. Note that the image DOES turn out lighter than if you had stamped it directly so you may need to use a darker ink or tweak the outline before/after colouring.
  

The specifics of the card are below for those who might be interested:

card dimensions: 5 x 5 inches

Paper: PaperworksCo July PaperCard Kit
Banana Frost(edit:yeah I had this wrong, fixed now): 4.75 x 4.75 inches
Katawba Flip: 3 x 3 inches cut with 3rd largest of the small circle nestabilities
Yellow Bazzill cardstock: 3.5 x 3.5 inches cut with the 2nd largest of the large reverse scallop circle nestabilities, 1.5 x 2.25 inches cut with Cuttlebug Oval Slider Die Cut
Green Bling Bazzill cardstock (I used the non-bling side): 3.5 x 3.5 inches cut with the 2nd largest of the large reverse scallop circle nestabilities
White cardstock for image panel

embellishments: ribbon and brads from PaperworksCo July PaperCard Kit

Inks:
CTMH: Black, Chocolate, Citrus Leaf
PrismaColor Pencils: 941, 940, 930, 929, 912, 911, 913

Stamps:
StarvingArtistamps: Doodlefactory Tropics
CTMH: alphabet (not sure which one as the envelope doesn't say - I think it was a promo only)


Thanks for stopping by today - and big applause to you if you made it all the way to the end of this post! I appreciate that you took the time to visit!