Good morning crafty friends! Here we are at Friday again, but the good news is that means new goodies from Clarity Crafts and a new theme at Alphabet Challenge! Barbara & Paul will be on screen at Clarity’s YouTube page at 10am with this fab Retro Family stamp collection and this small chap worked perfectly for Alphabet’s Little People theme.

Starting with a 3.5″ square of premium card, I stamped the boy into place with black Archival ink, and added his boots plus the football from the Sport Framer stamp set. I brushed a little ‘rustic wilderness’ for the ground ad stamped one of the small grassy images from the Tree Canopy Scene set.

Next was to add the colour! The set has infill stamps for the images, which I used for his short (‘fired brick Distress Ink), hair (‘walnut stain’ Distress Oxide) and boots (black Archival). I shaded his socks and skin with Polychromo pencils, adding a red stripe down his shorts and drawing in the top of his socks with a micron pen. I also used the micron pen to fill in sections of the football.

It still needed a little more, so I added a blue sky by brushing ‘tumbled glass’ Distress Oxide over a Clouds mask, followed by one of the Bijou Statement Sentiment stamps. With a mount of green companion paper, the topper fitted perfectly on a 5×5 card blank.

I’ve had lots of fun playing with these Retro Family stamps – more to share with you later and over the coming days!

And we did something very different on our recent travels. Football doesn’t usually feature in my daily life, but one of my friends is a massive fan and organised for us to have a VIP tour of Ajax football stadium whilst we were in Amsterdam (Johan Cruyff was his childhood hero). It was such fun – we even got to sit in the manager’s dugout seats.

But now, I’m off to share this with a couple of other challenges. Addicted to CAS have got a circles theme – this may be a bit left field, but this little chap’s head and ball are definitely round! I’ve also taken a slightly loose take on the layout at Freshly Made Sketches