Crafty Short Cuts to a Humerous Tag

This is my third and final contribution to the May prompt over on Country View Challenges: Be Humorous.  It is also a tag, as I love to have plenty to use as bookmarks. I was in a bit of a hurry to create this one, so used some crafty shortcuts to get great results in a short amount of time.

I started with my usual trick for creating a quick background.  I added the top layer of a piece of paper towel that I had used to mop up some sparkle pens to a #8 manilla tag.  It was sealed with matte gel medium, dried and trimmed.

I stamped two of the rats from the Katzelkraft stamp set 'Les rats des villes' onto card and used my Brother Scan N Cut in direct cut mode to cut them out.  I also stamped and heat embossed one of the 'How about Never' sentiments (Dyan Reaveley/Ranger/Dylusions) onto scrap card and cut it out by hand.  Once I had decided on the layout, I glued the sentiment strips in place.

The rats were coloured with two shades of grey Ecoline pens (Royal Talens) and a water brush and added to the tag.  I did have to cut out the section between the body and tail of the bottom rat with a craft knife, but using the Brother Scan N Cut was so much quicker for the rest of the fussy cutting.

Finally, the whole tag was re sealed with matte medium, dried thoroughly, then two Faber Castell Big Brush Markers used to add shading around the images.