All At Sea

I've got 3 fun cards to share today all on a sea theme using new products from Hero Arts and Avery Elle - it's a long post so grab a cuppa!

Firstly I couldn't wait to play with the Tentacles stamp from Hero Arts - as soon as I saw it I had loads of ideas for how it could be used  ("I feel your pain",  "Just reaching out",  "Hang in there" etc etc) but I also thought it would make a fun birthday card.

I stamped it onto cartridge paper so I could water colour using the new to store water colour pencils from Prima - you can either wet the pencils and paint directly with them, or use them like a normal pencil and blend with a water brush and that's the approach I took.  I used the Spring & Fall and Vintage Lover sets.  To twist it into a birthday card I drew some simple birthday image (cake, candles, present and a cocktail glass) as if the tentacles were holding them and raising them up out of the sea - they were very simple shapes to draw but you could search your other stamps for smaller images to stamp instead if you didn't want to draw.  I fussy cut it out and mounted it onto a sheet of paper from the Lawn Fawn Watercolor Wishes pad and added a wave using the Mama Elephant's Ocean Waves Trio die.   I wanted strong colour on the wave so I used Prima's water soluable oil pastels - these are great for adding bold colour to large areas and blend really easily with a water brush.   The sentiment comes from MFT's Twice the Wishes stamp set.

For my next card I also twisted things up a little.  The way the narwhal's on Avery Elle's Extraordinary face each other reminded me of a guard of honour at a military wedding so I decided to make an underwater wedding card for a couple of crabs....

I stamped the narwhal's onto post-it tape so I could mask them and cross their horns to form the guard of honour.  I took the shell and hat from the new Manatee Stamp and Die set from Hero Arts and stamped them onto post-it tape again so I could mask them and stamp the crab from Avery Elle's Bubbles set so I could change it into both a bride and a groom.  I added a scribble line to form a veil for the bride.

I coloured all the image with Zig Clean Color Brush markers and a water brush.  I tend to prefer to scribble my colours onto my acrylic block  and pick them up with the water brush as I can blend the colours that way and its a nice soft water colour look.  For the narwhals I used green-grey and turquoise-green - putting them on either side of the block gives you 3 colours from 2 pens.  You can get a bolder colour effect if you blend the pens directly on the paper so they are very versatile.

To put the whole scene under the sea I used the Abstract Wave Stencil from Hero Arts with sno-cone ink (a really soft colour) directly over the top of the whole card - it's quite scary to cover up your careful colouring but a soft colour does work!   The sentiment is from Extraordinary - i just selectively stamped "birthday" to make it just "day"

For my final card I went full on Jaws (well it was on TV last night!) with the new Paper Layering Shark and Killer Messages Stamp Set.  The recipient would need a slightly twisted sense of humour but it made me laugh and was an easy make. 

I die cut the shark from white card and used glossy accents on the teeth.  I used the Rock Collection ink cube set from AlteNew to colour it - using the palest shade all over to create a base colour and then as shark skin feels like sand paper I wanted to add texture to I used a small piece of natural sponge to dab on some dotted colour in the two darker shades.  I used the darkest to blend the inner mouth and then just wiped all the ink off the teeth as the glossy accents resists the ink.  I used a couple of layers of it on the eyes too so they were raised and really shiny.

I used Cool Summer Nights to blend a sea background onto more white card getting darker at the bottom and I trimmed the top so it was just a little shorter than my base card so I could have my swimmer swimming on the surface.   I finished with a sentiment from the Killer Messages set stamped in red for the realistic Jaws feeling!

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• We have the latest couple of releases plus restocks from Paper Smooches in transit and will have them next week (not sure what day yet as Bank Holidays make customs even more unpredictable than usual!)
• We also have MOST of the new release from Lawn Fawn coming back hopefully on Tuesday - we ordered the day after release day but they had already sold out of a few items themselves so we just grabbed what we could.  We'll try again for the other items when we see they have them.
• We have also ordered more from Mama Elephant to try and get the cats back in stock as they sold so quickly but again, we are waiting for it to ship.  Brands can take 2-3 weeks to process our orders which is why we can't always get everything back as quickly as you'd like but we do get everything back eventually so use the out of stock notification system to make sure you don't miss out on items you want when they come back!
• We have the latest release plus masses of restocks from AlteNew on order but are waiting for them to ship.
• We will also have new releases from Newton's Nook, Lil' Inker Designs, Sugar Pea Designs, Neat & Tangled and MFT coming in the first couple of weeks of June - more details of what will be here when will be in future Sunday posts.

Enjoy your bank holiday - catch you next weekend.

Tara