Peace For This Little Mouse Card

Peace and quiet joy for this little adorable mouse from the Penny Black’s Deck The Halls stamp set. This card features a watercolored background and mouse and a starry sky created with gorgeous Viva Decor pearl modeling creme.

To begin, I stamped the mouse on a scrap of watercolor paper with Versafine Onyx Black ink.  The little mouse was then water colored with very watery black, with a tiny bit of brown mixed in.  This watery solution created the gray-taupey colors.  He was then shaded with a little more saturated black.  The Santa’s cap was painted red and purple for the scarf.  After the mouse was dry, I cut him out with detail scissors.

Next, the top panel of this card was colored with watercolors.  To prepare and create the top panel, I taped off all the edges of a rectangular piece of watercolor paper panel using 1 1/2″ wide Frog Tape.  This taping technique serves a double purpose. It keeps the paper flat while water coloring and it also gives a self-framing look to your panel when complete.  Be careful to leave an even border around the panel.  By the way, the yellow Frog Tape is great for this because it doesn’t tear or grap bits of paper up with it when you peel it off.  You can find in most local hardware stores.  For me, it is in the paint section of Home Depot (see supply list below.

Now that the panel is good and  taped down to my work surface, I brushed on clear, clean water to the exposed area and then started added blue watercolor paint to the panel, leaving the area around where the mouse would sit and the main star with a little less blue.  After the blue sky was painted, I added a little dark gray paint where the mouse would stand.

After all was dry, the stars were stenciled on using Pearl White Modeling Creme.  If you haven’t used this modellier creme before, you have to try it.   I LOVE this stuff.  It is so creamy and soft, dries in a snap and leaves a beautiful, shimmery, textured stencil design.

With a palette knife and the Stars Shimmer stencil by Memory Box, I stenciled the stars onto the watercolor with the modeling creme.  Since I wanted only one ‘bright’ star on the panel, I avoided all the big stars, except for one.

After the stars were dry, I painted the main “bright star” with gold paint to give a little more prominence, hand-lettered “Peace” with my oblique pen and McCaffery’s black ink and attached the mouse with dimensional foam tape.

The top panel was then mounted onto a piece of blue card stock and then the whole thing mounted onto a white card base.

Supply List: