Bookmarks XXIII: Thing That Goes Bump In The Night

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

I didn't just use the "Mustard, Navy, and Orange" color prompt from this week's Stampotique challenge -- I actually took a look at the design team's designs. Wouldn't you know it, those pieces they make for inspiration are inspiring!

In this case, I had no idea what to do with mustard, navy, and orange. I guess it's a great combination for some moldy bread? Presenting Bookmarks #23: Penicillin! But I took inspiration from the trend I saw in the images used by the design team: a little bit odd, a little bit monstrous, and a little bit sketchy.

I hadn't opened it yet, but I did have a stamp set that fit those criteria: the Little Monsters cling rubber set from Recollections (a.k.a. Michaels). It even has a little boo! sentiment, so I decided to make a Halloween-y bookmark.

It's a fairly cute little monster-thing. I first stamped it in mustard and clear-embossed it, but it was pretty hard to see against the orange background. So I took some blue and some black (I don't actually have any navy) ink and smudged them around with my fingers. Fortunately this worked; the heights of the embossed monster caught more color than the underlying cardstock, and now the monster shows up acceptably. I repeated this technique -- stamping in Perfect Medium and clear embossing -- to make a strip of tone-on-tone boo! sentiments. I also then repeated the "oops, smudge ink on it" technique when I realized I wanted something that stood out more than tone-on-tone. An extra benefit of the embossing is that the words are shiny, so they stand out well when you take a picture with the flash on -- as you may have noticed.

This bookmark is also a fairly successful example of using a wide sketch to make a skinny bookmark. I used this week's Sketch Saturday sketch (#225) and turned it on its side, which is my go-to first attempt at using sketches.

I interpreted the skinny strip pretty faithfully. For the wide strip, I stamped the boo! sentiment all the way down the side of the card -- so it is both the strip and the sentiment. I took the liberty of placing the focal element at a bit of an angle, because with this much smudging and fraying going on it felt better that way than straight and square.

I'm entering this bookmark in the following challenges:

• Stampotique Designers Challenge 65: Mustard, Navy, and Orange
• Sketch Saturday #225 (turn the sketch on end and take the strip of 'boo!'s as the wider stripe)
• Creative Inspirations: Inspired by a Sketch
• Bunny Zoe's Challenge 28: Distressing (attacked edges with craft knife)
• Stamping Scrapping Challenge Central: Halloween (used Perfect Medium to stamp the 'boo!'s, which is carried by Stamping Scrapping)
• Willow Sketchie: Sketch or Things with Wings (the thing, whatever it is, definitely has wings)

I'm also linking it up to DL.ART's 1000-post Linky Party.

Supplies: