'It's Snowing,' Said the Gryphon: Alice In Winterland

It's Alice in Winterland over at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity! What is that, you ask? It's an art challenge where you enter a piece that uses at least one rubber stamp (from any company) in order to be entered to win a gift certificate for MOAR RUBBER from the fabulous Lost Coast Designs! More details about the challenge are here.

To offer a little visual inspiration on the theme of Alice being in Winterland, I have here this little fantasy project for you:

First I stamped the "Alice and Gryphon" image from the Alice, Dodo, and Griffen set from Lost Coast Designs, then masked it off and stamped the Chessboard from the Chess Set under it. Then I made a mask for the chessboard and added it to the card.

Next I took some snowflakes from the Small Snowflake Set and stamped them in resist ink, which I dried with a heat gun. Then I broke out the Distress inks and chose three shades of blue to start working into the card with a mini ink blending tool. Below you can see the first snowflake start to emerge from the "sky"...

...And here I'm adding the second shade of blue to bring out the next snowflake from the resist. You see that I am inking right on top of the masks I made to cover the central images.

At this point, with the masks still on, I broke out some ink sprays and added blue and silver shimmer to the card. Alas, the shimmer really does not photograph, but it gave a nice frosty look to the piece in real life. I left a little "halo" of uncolored paper around one of the snowflakes for a bit of light effect.

With white and silver gel pens, I added some background dots and tiny snowflakes. I also stamped a few more snowflakes with the Snowflake Set and embossed them with glittery white embossing powder. (The glitter doesn't show up very well here either...you can see it mostly on the snowflake at the lower right.) Then I was ready to remove the masks to let the figures stand out from the wintry background...

Here is the piece with the masks removed, photographed at another angle, attempting to show more of the glitter and shimmer:

Lastly, in InDesign I composed a sentiment (taken very nearly as a quote from Alice in Wonderland!) and inserted it into a frame. I printed this out and mounted the art atop it. Et voila!

Can't wait to see what you make for the Alice in Winterland challenge! You have until midnight on January 31 to enter.  :)