Toucan Birthday for PP792

Hello friends!  I'm here with my card for the new sketch challenge at the Paper Players.  This week the fabulous Joanne is hosting and has given us a wonderful sketch.

Paper Players

I had recently attended The Weekender Goes Wild retreat and created a card with some of the products.  I did take some liberties with the sketch, but I'll explain that below.

The retreat is all about tropical animals and environments.  This is Tiki Toucan and the branch upon which she is sitting, which extends across the panel and has vines and flowers hanging from it, represents the horizontal strip in the sketch and the larger leaf and flower on the left represents the heart.  Unfortunately, I had to move the sentiment up above so it wouldn't cover up many of the flowers and vines.

I started by die cutting all the parts of Tiki, along with all the other elements, from colored cardstock.  Since I'd already used the toucan twice in the class, putting her together was easy.  I did find a Toucan reference photo on the internet and the one with a similarly colored beak had blue feet!  So, of course I had to use that. ;-)

For the background I used the Tropicana Texture embossing folder. It is sized at 5.5" x 8.5" and creates two different A2 patterns, which is so handy!  I used one half which was layered on a lighter piece of green cardstock, then all the scene elements were added, and I thought I was good.  Somehow, though, it looked unfinished to me, so I ended up layering it on a larger black panel, with the card ending up at 6.75" x 5". The black really made Tiki pop and I had a better place for the sentiment.  I love how this turned out, and I hope you don't mind how I riffed a bit on your sketch, Joanne!!

Thanks so much for visiting and I encourage you to visit the challenge blog to see how my amazing teammates used this sketch.  The challenge will remain open until Friday July 3rd at 3pm EDT.  I hope you'll join us this week!

Stef

• *Items from The Weekender Goes Wild 2026 Craft Kit.  The kit and the retreat (on video) is still available on the Spellbinders website.
• *Tiki Toucan die set
• *Jungle Blooms die set
• *Tropicana Texture embossing folder
• Spellbinders Just Add Cake sentiment set (from the Just Add Cake card kit)