Aloha, all!
If you read my last blog post, you read about three different projects that I made using the Seaside Notions Stamp Set. That post was part of a blog hop with a demonstrator friend from the neighborhood island of Mauai. Because it was a hop, I didn’t want to get into more detail about any one of the cards than I had to so that I could show off the stamp set we were featuring. But there was one card about which I wanted to write just a teensy bit more.
The reason that I wanted you to look more closely at this card is because of the shading on the shells. I’m just starting to work on this technique, but I think it came out fairly well here. I made the shading using the watercolor pencils in the colors that I featured in the set of cards shown in the previous post: Bermuda Bay and Coastal Cabana. There is a watercolor pencil in Stampin’ Up!’s collection for both of these colors, though they’re in different sets of pencils.
How I used the watercolor pencils is what’s new to me. I lightly sketched in some lines and grids, then “watered” them using only a Blender Pen. While a blender pen doesn’t really have water in it, it nonetheless has a dampness in it that is all those watercolor pencils need to soften their lines. Here’s a closer picture of the shells.
While it’s true that Bermuda Bay does have a set of Stampin’ Blends (Stampin’ Up!’s alcohol marker line), there are no blends yet in the Coastal Cabana color. Even if there were, those colors were going to make these shells quite a bit darker than I wanted them to be. I really wanted something that just showed off the shadow of both of the colors I was using. The watercolor pencils did the job exactly as I wished it.
Now there’s something else that I’d like you to notice. If you look at the two largest shells – one at the far left and one at the bottom right – you may notice that they look like mirror images of each other. In fact, they are! In this year’s Stampin’ Up! Annual Catalog (p. 139), there is a suggestion to use the Silicone Craft Sheet for the first stamping of the image, then place your paper or cardstock over the stamped image to create the mirror image. Their cute suggestion is to use the seahorse in the set. But I thought I’d try it with the cone-shaped shells instead. It worked really well, though I did do a bit of touch up of some of the lines using a Stampin’ Write Marker. But it looked fine without it – it was just my slight obsessiveness checking in!
As I said in my previous post, this is a fun stamp set with which to work. I’ll be doing more of it. I’m already thinking about how to make a Christmas card with it!
Happy Stamping!
