Cool Dude on a Mower

Today I am playing with my Art Impressions Stamps, specifically my “Lawn Ranger”stamp. I just love his proud smile on his power lawn mower. I live in the country, or as some would say “in the middle of nowhere”. When my nieces would come visit me they would count the number of cornfields they passed in order to get to Aunt Carina’s house. Needless to say there are many of these power lawn mowers in my area with dads driving them around on the weekends. I decided in honor of the Art Impressions Challenge “Animal Print” to “soup” up this dads mower with a tiger stripe print. What dad wouldn’t love to drive this mower?

I started by stamping him on some watercolor paper. I drew in the tiger stripes by hand using a thin point Sharpie marker. I heat set the drawing just to be safe. Then I taped him down and used my arteza brush pens for his skin. I love the sunburn I achieved on him. Then used my Kuratake watercolors for everything else. On the grill and the mower deck I used some metallic silver to give it that extra shine you would expect on a tiger striped mower.

Since I was looking for extra power I drew in a tailpipe with flames shooting from the back. (I was specifically channeling a TV sitcom episode that involved a souped up lawn mower that had a jet engine attached). Again I hit it with metallic paint and a sparkle pen for extra shine.

I originally planned on stamping in some grass, I had a practice sheet that I tried some different techniques on but ultimately decided it pulled the eye away from the mower too much. Instead I went with a simple green wash below and a blue wash for the sky.

I decided on some tiger stripes for the background paper but I didn’t own any tiger stripe paper. Again out came the black sharpie and the hand drawing. I need to be honest, I can’t draw worth beans but discovered that tiger stripes are really just squiggles filled in. once dry, I inked the paper with a mixture of different die inks (Memento and Gina K) to create the variegated orange color here.

To put it all together, I die cut him out using an oval die from Scrapbooking Made Simple with a matching frame in white. I placed him in the center of the tiger striped paper and centered it all on a white 5 x 7 card base with some of the white card base showing.

The last final touches were a sentiment from my Fiskars “Happy day” set, two large orange eyelets to frame the sentiment and some motion lines to let you know he is on the move. Thanks for stopping by. I think he looks very jolly on his “souped” up mower. Let me know if you have any questions.

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