Ombre Elephant Shadowbox Frame

Hi Friends!

I'm back into my DIY mojo so I have a few tutorials to share with you! Today it's a gift that I made specifically for my friend, but I think this would make a great gift for anyone - even yourself! You can customize it to fit different personalities.

My friend V loves elephants so I knew that would be the focal point to her gift. She also loves cutesy stuff - we joke she is basically a 12 year old girl - so I also took that into consideration. I decided to make an elephant art piece in a shadowbox. More V influence - flashes of teal and ombre. This project is super easy to make and takes about thirty minutes.

Items Needed:

• Card stock, scrapbook paper, or paint chip samples
• Martha Stewart elephant paper punch, or punch of choice
• Scissors
• Shadowbox frame - I chose 6" x 6"
• Adhesive square foam dots
• Ruler

001. Remove the back board of the frame and cut your background paper to match.

002. If you want to achieve the ombre look for your punch pieces, you'll need 3 different colors of paper that closely resemble each other. At Michael's, they have the scrapbook paper lined up by color and shade. You could also use paint chip samples from your home improvement store (Do people just take a ton of paint chips for DIY projects? Haha!).

For my project I wanted to do 3 rows and 3 columns (9 elefantes) so I used the punch 3 times on 3 different colors to get the ombre effect. A note about this punch: it punches out the ear for you, so if you want the ears to stick out, you'll have to flip your paper over (it's textured on the front so the ears pop out on the correct side.

003. Arrange the cut out pieces on your background paper so they are evenly spaced apart. This is a bit tedious, so having a ruler hand helps a lot!

004. Once you have the cut out pieces where you want them, it's time to adhere them to your paper! To make the elephants "pop," I chose foam adhesive squares.

005. Trying to get the elephants to stay evenly spaced while adding on the adhesive was probably the most frustrating part of the project, but the results ended up fantastic and exactly the way I pictured it. Once you're done, pop the sheet into the frame, put the back board back on, and you're good to go.

And that's it! I'm so happy with how this turned out and I'm glad that my friend loved it! I think the heart background was the perfect complement to the elephants.

Will you make an ombre shadowbox frame? What shape will you use? I bet this would look great with hearts, too!