Little Monkeys

Over the last few months, when I have had a teenage boy's card to make, I have asked my teenage son for help with ideas. His stock answer is 'monkeys are always good on cards'. So guess what he has on his birthday card for tomorrow?!

The number 17 filling up the card is taken from a font called Jungle Leaves which is a free download. I used my drawing program to separate the two layers in each number and convert them to a dxf file to take into my Silhouette software to cut out of dark green card stock and the mosaic patterned paper. But they're pretty simple shapes if I'd had to cut them by hand. The edges of the resulting shapes were chalked before gluing together. I glued them flat on the page with pva glue.


I love the little Stampendous Changuito monkeys, so treated myself to three of those stamps to use on his card. The three I used are: Changuito B'day, Changuito Solo and Changuito Swing. Once I had worked out my arrangement, and chalked the edges of the spotted background paper, I used a stamp positioner to stamp the monkeys directly on the backing paper. The hands and feet were densly coloured enough to cover up the backing paper, but the bodies, faces and happy birthday sign were cut out from additional images stamped onto thin white card and coloured in with water colour pencils and a water brush. Then cut out and glued on with pva.
I used a Woodware Monstera leaf punch to make the leaves. Punched out of light green bazzill basics card, with the edges chalked in brown. Then shaped them with a needle tool.