Under the Sea

Today's card was inspired by the sketch from over at the My Favorite Things challenge blog and will also be applied for challenge M2217 "Anything Goes" @ The House that Stamps Built blog, the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge "More Than One Die or Punch", & the Artistic Inspirations challenge #175 "Just for Fun".

This watercolor technique was one I have been wanting to try out for a while now, because I want to share it in my library class in the month of May...so I pulled out all the supplies and got to work. Using the Kaleidacolor Caribbean Sea rainbow ink pad made achieving the color gradation super simple. All I needed then was a mini-mister, an acrylic block and some watercolor paper. I also made good use of some old circle punches I had in my stash, along with a standard office hole puncher. The stamps are retired and from several sets I have left from my days with The Angel Company.

To achieve that beautiful background look, I "closed" the stamp pad to join the colors together and then stamped my acrylic block directly with the ink pad as you can see below. The top sample was my trial run, and then I did it several more times to see the variation that could be gotten-depending on how much water you used vs. how much ink was on the acrylic block.

After inking up the block, I misted it with water from the mini-mister and then stamped it onto my water color paper. Easy-peasy way to get a beautiful Under the Sea background for my fishie.

I sped up the drying process a bit with my heat tool and adhered the water-colored background to the top of the card after I splashed some Silver FSJ Silk across the front of the turquoise card base. I stamped the sand in tan die ink onto a scrap of kraft cardstock, tore along the top for texture and adhered that to the bottom of the background. (the other half will be used inside the card later-see last pic below)

I outlined the punched circles with a Uniball white gel pen to turn them into bubbles, stamped "hi" in the rainbow ink on a white, punched circle and popped it up on to the largest aqua circle with foam dots. I stamped the fish in the rainbow ink also and fussy cut him out so that I could use foam dots to pop him up right above the sand.

To finish everything off, I used the other half of my sand cardstock scrap on the inside of the card and stamped several pieces from the sealife stamp set along with the "You Make Life Fun" sentiment in black ink. I hope the ladies at the May library class enjoy making this one and trying something new with this water-colored background technique.