Epic Birthday!

My son is turning 15 on Monday.  {OMG!  How is that possible?!?!  Did I step through a time warp or something?!?!}  While I was thinking of ideas for his birthday card, I found some inspiration on the MFT blog from this post.  The theme of the challenge is monochromatic color schemes, and since Jake's favorite color is blue, that was my jumping off point.

Jake is also obsessed with video games so, naturally, it needed to be a gamer card.  It's a good thing I have the MFT Game Controller Dies!

Now, there's just one problem with the Game Controller dies; they look like XBox controllers.  In and of itself, that isn't an issue.  However, we don't have an X-Box.  And Jake is on the autism spectrum and is EXTREMELY literal and particular about things like that.  So I needed to alter the die cut to make it look more like a PS3 controller.

Here is a picture of the die as it was designed to look:

And here is a close-up of my altered version:

"Camera one, camera two, camera one, camera two" [name that movie]

So first, I took a couple of the circles from the larger controller die-cut and covered up the embossed areas that indicate where the 4 buttons on the right are meant to go and the space on the upper left where the joystick is supposed to be.  Besides hiding the embossing, this also created a foundation for the arrow key and the 4 action buttons.  Next, I put a joystick in the space that was meant to be the arrow keys.  Then, instead of the round buttons that go in the upper center, I cut a small black rectangle for the "select" button and a small triangle for the "start" button.  I also added an extra circle to be the power button.  After all of that, I drew some light sketch lines on the top and bottom of the controller to use as a guide to trim it into a shape that looks more like the PS3 controllers that my son has.  Here are pictures of what the real things look like if you aren't familiar with them:

XBox                                                                                                      PS3

So, any-who, my altered controller looks much more like a PS3 controller now.  Yay, me!  :)  Now I [hopefully] won't get that know-it-all-eye-roll and a lecture about the difference between PS3 and XBox.  Snotty-teenager-moment averted.  You're welcome.

So, about the color pallet.  I looked through my 6x6 paper pads for some fun patterned papers that would coordinate, beginning with the dark blue paper.  The paper at the top looks a lot less green and more aqua in person.  They are all shades in the blue to aqua family.  The sentiment is embossed with white embossing powder.  I chose to stamp the other two sentiments in black to create some balance for the black game controller.

The little crosshair on the top sentiment has a tiny star in the middle, and I just happen to have some tiny star shaped brads in my arsenal of crafty supplies.   [pun intended]  So I thought I'd add that little bid of flair to the image.

By the way, the tiny rating image at the bottom of the card says GK for "GR8KID".  So cute!!  [I'm hoping it doesn't lead to another snotty-teenage-moment of complaining that we don't allow him to play the M rated games that "all the other kids are allowed to play".  "If all the other kids were allowed to jump off of bridges, would you want to do that too?  And what kind of parent lets their 14-year-old play M rated games anyway?!?!"]

Sorry, reliving snotty-teenage-moments-in-history.

So that's it for my monochromatic, XBox-transformed-to-PS3, snotty-teenage-gamer card.  ;)  I hope you have an epic day!  Bye!