Anime/Manga cartoon card

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you've all had a brilliant weekend, I'm finally feeling my old self but still have coughing fits (I've just coughed as if demonstrating it lol) four or five times a day so I'm not 100% quite yet. Please excuse if there are any extra letters etc in this post, the keyboard is playing silly beggars and keeps adding extra ones for some reason.

I'd like to share the card I made for my nephew Liam. He celebrated his 13th birthday yesterday. A couple of months ago I asked my sister what he was into as last year he was really into Friday Night at Freddie's. I actually saved extra prints of some of the main characters AND I know where they are so I was kind of hoping he'd want a card similar to last year. But it wasn't to be, he's now really into Anime and Manga. After looking online I can certainly see why they appeal to teenage boys (and let's face it those teens who aged but never grew up!), I was a bit flummoxed to be honest as I knew my drawing abilities were no where near what was required for an anime character (imagine stick figures and me with my tongue out as I concentrate hard to make the figures straight - you get the idea!), I didn't want to copy and print from something online as for a start I don't think that's very honest and also not very creative (I'll admit that's what I did for last year's card!) so I put in anime and manga stamps in my search box and finally Flonz Craft came up. Wow what a fantastic site! It's a New Zealand company but don't be put off by that, everything is in NZ dollars but if you click on the £ icon it converts it to our currency and the prices are amazing! I bought four stamps altogether and they only cost £2.10 each, I think the postage was about the same amount. The stamps vary from 2.5" x 3" up to 2.5" x 3.5" so aren't huge but they do sell stamps sets for about £8.99 with bigger images on but I wanted to get the least provocative images I could as without seeming a prude I didn't think some of the images were age appropriate for a 13 year old (I'm not sure Liam would agree though lol). The stamps took a couple of weeks to arrive and I did end up contacting the site in the end as my order status remained in progress for the entire time I was waiting but it was just a site error and my stamps arrived the very next day. I'll be totally honest with you, the packaging isn't great but then for £2.10 per stamp you can't expect it to be, it does come with some detailed instructions for stamp care that I liked and 12% off my next order which I really liked! Liam's favourite colours at the moment are red and black so I coloured the image in those colours and matted and layered the finished panel with black and red card stock. I forgot to take photos of the envelope before I addressed it but added some of the stamps as envelope art. Here are some photos of the finished card featuring "Neko Girl Asking".

I have a small confession to make - this image is supposed to have a tail to go with the cat ears but I slipped when i was colouring the black background so ended up going over it completely. I used a number of dies from different die companies including Sizzix (for the 13 today) and an American Crafts set for the speech bubble etc. I used Flexmarkers for the colouring with a little bit of Real Color Brush marker for the eyes (I've found a website that sells them individually so bought two to try - can't remember what the website is called though!!) I wouldn't say this was my best colouring but I find it easier to colour large images and these stamps are quite small. I am quite pleased with how it's come out and I'm considering purchasing one of the larger sets as I think this style of card may appeal to men - the 12% off  is a great incentive too!

I didn't make anything over the weekend as my husband treated me to the first six books of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Ffordes which arrived on Thursday (lol) I resisted their siren call until after I finally cleaned the oven (it took hours!!!) but I ended up getting "Lost In A Good Book" by reading "Something Rotten", I love the visual puns JF makes with names of people and places (Fay Bentos, Millon De Floss for example) and this book has had me laughing out loud quite a few times, if you've not read any Jasper Ffordes I'd really recommend you trying him.

This has turned out to be a long post so I hope I've not bored you too much! As always if you have any questions or comments then I'd love to hear from you, please leave them in the comment section below. Until next time - keep crafting!