Are you ready for fall?

Hello everyone,

It's the first day of September and I can feel a nip in the air. Fall is officially here and while I'm hoping for rain to put out the raging fires in Northern California, there's none in sight. Given that's what's on my mind, it won't come as a surprise that I reached for the BB Puddle Jumper stamp set from MFT Stamps.

But instead of going the conventional route and painting an elaborate puddle for this cutie to jump into, I decided to take a more fantastical approach: creating a story book illustration feel with oversized fall leaves, a thicket of woods in the background and some warm autumn colors.

Continuing with my attempts to be more inclusive in the people paintings I make, I decided to color the boy's skin with Gathered Twigs, and used a collection of distress ink reinkers to watercolor his clothes.

For the leaves, I used Tim Holtz's alcohol inks on Yupo Paper and Duralar for varying degrees of translucency again using fall colors. I then used Sizzix Tim Holtz Alterations Collection 3D Impresslits Embossing Folder to cut and emboss maple leaves. I absolutely love the texture it added to my paintings!

I decided to make this a slimline card to give me more real estate to create this fun scene. As I placed the various elements on the card base, I realized I needed some kind of interesting background. I used Speckled Egg to color the entire card panel, added some trees using brown paper and affixed all the leaves first before placing the boy atop.

The last thing I did was add an appropriate sentiment, some sparkly accents and some iridescent dots on the insides of the umbrella.

I am so in love with this mixed media card and I hope you like my interpretation of it as well!

Thanks so much for taking the time to read. I'll see y'all next time!

Mansi.