Fantastic Mini Beast!

Challenge #258 has just gone live at Time Out Challenges and we have a brilliant Photo Challenge to inspire you!  

This challenge is generously being sponsored by Lawn Fawn and they are offering our Top Pick as chosen by the design team a $25 voucher to their store.  

Our top pick will also be invited to guest design with us at a future date so I hope you will take some Time Out of your busy schedule and come play cards with us! 

Here's a closeup of our Inspiration Pic - our challenge starts on February 29th and we thought this little guy might be just the thing to jump start any flagging mojos!

  

How does this little guy inspire you?  If nothing springs to mind, you might like to hop over to the Challenge blog and see how my talented team mates were inspired - you're bound to find plenty of inspiration there!  

This challenge we're fortunate to have the extremely talented Vicky Dutcher as our guest designer but we're also a little sad as we're saying goodbye to Gerrina who is hanging up her DT cap after 10 years on the Time Out Team!  

 For me, it was hard to get past those huge bulging red and I knew immediately what die I wanted to use -  this funky insect from Tim Holtz!  After stacking and adding a little DI shading, I added glossy accents to all parts of his body and once they were dry, I assembled him.  Once the "helmet" is on there are eye cavities (at least that's what they look like to me) and I added more glossy accents to just this section because I wanted big bug eyes.  I added glitter while it was still wet and once dried, I added another coat of glossy accents so the eyes really bulged!  

Here's a closeup of my beetle!

I then cut a bunch of monstera leaves using various dies from a light green card stock and blended Mowed Lawn DI to give them some depth and laid them over a panel of black.

I was a bit stumped at this stage, until I remembered that English people refer to bugs as mini beasts and then of course I just had to go with this fantastic die (Verve Amazing Adjectives) as a nod to the Newt Scamander films Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.  I'm also thinking of adding "friends like you are hard to find"!  What do you think, too much??

Well this guy is a little hard to find, despite his red legs and bulging eyes - I did go a little overboard with the monstera leaves didn't I!  I almost binned it, but my lovely team mates suggested I persevere and I'm happier with it after I reworked my beast (lots more glossy accents) and added this fantastically glossy red sentiment! 

There's nothing worse than cutting up a perfectly good card base-sized piece of card stock unnecessarily, so I do keep all small pieces of card stock in bags sorted by colour and they come in handy for projects like this where I need a lot of small die cuts.  I raided the red and green bags for this project so I'd like to enter the Snippets Playground Challenge #474.  Here are some photos of my snippets (I needed a lot more green in the end as I did cut rather a lot of leaves).

I'd also like to enter these fab challenges

Allsorts Week 769 Challenge - Things that fly (pretty sure those wings aren't ornamental);

Shopping Our Stash Challenge #516 - It's Not Easy Being Green;

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Simon Says Anything Goes this week!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you go away a little inspired!  Your visits and comments are always a joy and always appreciated!  And if you leave a comment, I’ll know you were here and how to find you!

Kate