Die Cut Elephant Card

When I am imagining a project, I am often surprised it turns out how I see it in my head because I don't feel that way about my illustrations. When it works, it feels like the planets have aligned and it just feels good. This isn't one of those times. I hope posting this will help others learn from it anyway.

Since I had such success with making my own paper flocking, I wanted to do it again for a birthday card for our nephew. I used a double-sided adhesive sheet. You can see here how I'm peeling away the two sides to access the sticky inner sheet.

After cutting the elephant, I removed the bottom sheet and unwanted sticky areas, then applied to my card background.

Next came the fun flocking making and the start of my disappointment.

Although the adhesive sheet grabbed onto the paper fuzz, it was in such a patchy fashion, it made my elephant appear to have some kind of skin problem. Plus you can see just at his feet there, that it was kind of see-through, which is not what I had wanted.

I also thought I left a great leeway for the letter and saddle details to show through, by keeping it quite simple and large. However, I didn't like how I can't see the serifs and subtle skewing of the letter.

I use Adobe Illustrator to create my designs. Here are the settings I used to skew the letter to make it appear like it was really draping along the saddle. I know it's not that big a deal, but for me, these subtle details make a project sing.

Since I ran out of time and couldn't make another plain paper version, I had to buy a card {gasp!}. Why does my brain only kick into high gear when I have just 2 hours to go? Now that I look back on this project with calm eyes, I could have simply crumpled the blue elephant to mimic the elephant's skin and saved myself time. Oh well, next year!

Has anyone been working with paper flocking?