Valentine's Artist Trading Coin Featuring Tim Holtz's Crazy Cat

Hello, everyone!  Welcome back!  In today's post, I will show how I made the second of four Valentine's coins.  These are for a swap where four people each had their own theme.  The first coin was a bacon and egg theme, and this coin's theme was a cat, so I chose to use a Crazy Cat from the Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous Mini Crazy Cats and Crazy Dog stamp set.

I do have a video of how I made these coins, so if you are interested in watching that, you can go here or scroll to the end of this post.


Sorry for the poor photo - I just couldn't get good lighting.  Anyhow, I started by punching out 2.5" circles from mixed media paper and bookpages.  I glued the pieces together and then used a wash of white gesso by Liquetex gesso over the bookpage to push the text into the background.  As you can see in the photos above, you don't see much of the bookpages any more.

I stamped the cats from the Tim Holtz stamp set onto the Canson mixed media paper, and colored them using several greys from the Zig Clear Color Real Brush marker set. I then fussy cut them out, which was quite the challenge!  Especially around the tail.  I do have the Sizzix die set for these somewhere, but I didn't want to pull out my Big Shot.


So cute!  I added some extra stamping to the coin (the balls of yarn and the fish bones from the same stamp set), and then I watered down some used "Poodleskirt Pink" by Americana and loosely added it to the coin.  I didn't want to cover up the book text and stamping completely, I just wanted to add some color.  While that was drying, I cut a heart shape from printer paper, then traced that onto the mixed media paper.  I cut that out and painted it a nice, pretty dark red (Dark Scarlet) also by Americana.

I felt the hearts needed something more, so I edged them in black and splattered them with the Golden's Iridescent Gold-Fine fluid acrylic.  Satisfied by that extra bit of shine, I added some black and white washi tape before assembling the coins.


I added the quote: "I Slow Blink You So Much"....you cat lovers will understand that!  I finished these up by adding shading around the cats and the heart using a Derwent Inktense block and my trust Stabilo Marks-All pencil.

Viola!  I hope the recipient likes her coin - it was a lot of fun to make.  Please check out the video below if you are interested in watching how these were made.  Until next time, have a great day!




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