Copic Creations Challenge: Light Source

The latest Copic Creations Challenge focuses on attention to a light source.  Placement of an imaginary light source is a particularly useful technique that helps images look more realistic by providing a guide for adding shading and shadows.  Whimsy Stamps is sponsoring this challenge and offering a $15 gift certificate and 5 free digital stamps for two (2) random winners.  Find out more about this challenge and Whimsy Stamps here.  I'm thrilled to use a Whimsy Stamp for my entry in this challenge.

(The latest iCopic Color Challenge is to use dark blue, light blue and white colors.  Although I've added some browns for the walrus, a significant part of this image focuses on the ice and calm water so I think it meets the color criteria for blues with white.  iCopic is offering 6 Ciao markers and 2 sets of Christmas Washi tapes to a random winner of this challenge.  Find out more about the iCopic challenge here.)

I'm really excited about how the front of this card turned out.  I first prepared this image as a part of my class sample for an upcoming Colors of Copics - Reflections class.  When I saw what I had done with this walrus on the class sample, I could hardly believe that I made it myself!  LOL!!!  I kept looking at it and wondered if I'd ever be able to do it so nicely again.  So, I challenged myself to a re-do.  Here's the results of my self-challenge and a peek at part of my Copics Reflections class.

This adorable Whimsy Stamps Walrus is perfect for filling with Copics as it's a great big open image with lots of room for shading and highlighting.

I wanted this fellow to appear to be floating on a piece of ice so I used cardstock and scissors to freehand cut an imperfect block of ice.  I used temporary adhesive to place the block of ice over the stamped image of the walrus.  Using a pencil, I lightly traced around the mask, leaving the spaces through the walrus unmarked.  (This image shows lines through the walrus - don't do that!  LOL!!!)

I want to show a reflection of the walrus over calm water and that means the block of ice will be reflected too, so I flipped the hand cut block of ice and using a pencil, lightly traced around the entire piece, to create the reflection of the block of ice.

My walrus has some added height over its reflection due to the block of ice it sits on.  Much of the walrus reflection is hidden by the ice.  I had to place a thin mask (cardstock is too thick) over the walrus, ice and ice reflection to protect those areas from ink when I added the walrus reflection in the next step. I stamped the image onto a clear plastic Stamp-a-ma-jig mat in Memento London Fog grey ink and IMMEDIATELY lined up the base of the grey image with the base of the black image (bottoms of walrus’ flippers) and pressed the ink from the plastic mat onto my project.

Cool, huh?  Now I'm ready to use my Copic markers to fill this little guy in with some magnificent color.

A little paper trimming, corner rounding, and embellishing with QuicKutz flourishes and Sizzix 3D flowers left me very happy with this card as an example of how to add a reflection to icy cold but very calm water.

Can you tell that my light source is coming from the upper right hand corner, far above the bow-tied star?
 
Copics used:
Walrus - E31, E35, E47
Top Ice - C3, C1, C0, B000
Bottom Ice - C5, C3, C1, C0, B000
Water - B91
0, Multiliner 0.2 Black