I'm Ready to Take the Next Step

I'm ready to take it to the next level in my craft blogging.  I'm going to enter a design challenge.  I found one I thought I could handle at Digital Tuesday Challenge.  

The challenge is to make a Christmas card using white, kraft, and blue.  The card has to incorporate something digital, whether it be digi paper, a digital image, text or whatever.  My mind immediately went to penguins.  I love penguins in Christmas decor-even though they don't exist anywhere near the north pole.  ;)  

So here's what I came up with:

Isn't he just the cutest thing?!?  I did a google search in images for "Christmas penguin," and this is one of the adorable images that came up.  Then I retrieved it in eCAL as an image and as a trace.  Then I shadowed the trace (kept the shadow but deleted the trace).  I had to tweak the points on his right foot in the shadow, because it wanted to cut a huge chunk out of it (OUCH!), but that wasn't too hard to do zoomed way in.

The paper was a little trickier.  I chose the Whisper White and Brilliant Blue from my Stampin' Up! supply right away and found a piece of Kraft that I got in a Walmart stack a long time ago.  Then what do to.  I had stickled the scarf and eyes of my cute little guy and he just stood out too much from the plain paper.  I decided to tear the white and stickle the edges to look like snow, but that looked odd against the plain blue on the plain kraft.  I tore the blue.  Now I was getting somewhere.  It looked like an iceberg against pretty blue water.  I finally decided to use my Simply Scored diagonal plate to emboss the kraft, and it all came together.  I really love it!  I do think that I'll use Inkscape next time to separate the colors on the penguin and cut them out as layers and piece them together to give him a little more dimension.  I'll try to work on that this week and post him so we can compare the two.  :)

Here's a closeup: