FCCB Heat Wave Challenge using Summer Celebrations Cricut Cartridge

This week's challenge at Fantabulous Cricut Challenge Blog is "Heat Wave," which left me with a lot of wiggle room to create a project.  I decided to do something from the Summer Celebrations Cricut cartridge since I had not had an opportunity to use it yet. 

After a lot of page flipping, I decided to do the Pool Party card but instead of doing the single color silhouette layer presented with the card, I elected to use the full primary images from pages 33 and 34 and adhere them on top of the the card cutouts.

 

I used Design Studio to size the boy and girl images to fit perfectly on the card silhouettes.  Since their sizes were customized to fit on the card, I was unable to use the "relative" feature.  This meant that I had to I re-size each of the layers so that the clothes and other elements fit perfectly on the boy and girl base images. This was a little tedious but necessary to make everything line up perfectly.

I had a lot of fun building the color palette for the two figures.  I wanted to give the two characters some personality so I dug deep into my scraps and brought out a few of those 6 x 6" pads that I can't seem to use because they are too pretty. After some hunting, I got the look I was after.  In several cases I cut the same layer multiple times with different paper so I could introduce additional color into the design. 

For example, the little girl's skirt, bathing suit top and glasses came from one layer which I cut twice with both pink and pink polka dotted paper.  This gave her outfit a little variety.

The boy's towel and a portion of his ball were also a single layer which I cut twice with both yellow and blue cardstock.

I don't know why I chose that color for the card - I guess it just spoke to me - but once I had the card cut out I thought "wow, that is a lot of green" so I cut the card + shift in white to offset it a little.  Then, once I had the primary images of both the girl and boy assembled, I adhered them on top of the white trim so that a tiny part of the white was visible. I was still uncomfortable with the amount of green and considered re-cutting the card in a different color altogether, but then I added the sun from the Pack Your Bags Cricut cartridge and it all came together.

So there you have it.  I just love the interest created by the shadows in these images.  The designers did a great job with the Summer celebrations cartridge.

Now I need to find some time and money for a trip to Paris so I can use the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile image on page 31.