Have you ever had a card that almost refused to be made, despite the clear image you had in your head for it??? This was one of those for me but I’m so glad I stuck with the original idea cause I am super pleased with the results. Today’s card is my contribution to the 2 Crafty Critter Crazies April challenge post, where its *always* Anything Goes with a Critter. Our sponsor for the month is Sheepski Designs, and I was provided this image to play with. The vision of what I wanted to do with it formed almost immediately but the execution was trickier than I expected as I realized that the image I received was in JPG format and not PNG. (Ugh! Not gonna lie… very frustrating when every other digi company I use provides PNGS. But for the record, when you buy an image from Sheepski Designs, you receive both the JPG and PNG.) See, I design in Silhouette Studios and I really wanted to add this cute little chameleon image called Camouflage onto digital paper. Try as I might, all my tricks for converting JPG to PNG failed. Thankfully, I found a work around, thanks to physical stamps in my stash.

I opted to print this little guy on red cardstock and stamped a background from Impression Obsession called Wooden Planks over it to get the look of an old, red, barn. I used a couple of gray Prismacolor pencils to shade the chameleon so he would pop off the page a bit. The Silhouette was used to create the barn shape, fence (using woodgrain paper) and tree branches. Unfortunately I developed an issue with my blade before I could cut all the leaves, so they are hand cut (a little wonky, but it worked) and inked for a bit of dimension. For the ones that were not glued behind a branch end, I added a vein with a Copic marker so they would match. I also extended the branch the adorable chameleon is on so he wasn’t just floating there, and colored the branch with the same Copic marker to match the die cut branches. I added white gel pen and black glaze pen to bring out the chameleon’s eye. The sky background is digital paper I printed as its own layer. I finished the card off with a die cut sentiment on the front and this computer generated sentiment on the inside:

Fun, right??? A couple of my Teamies used the same image and came up with completely different ideas that you have to see! Head over to the 2CCC April Challenge to see them all. While you are there, enter in your latest critter project for a chance to win a prize from our sponsor, Sheepski Designs! As always, I appreciate when you drop by and say hello! Have a great day and I hope you survive any April Fool’s Day pranks played on you today! 😁