Seahorse Splash

Edited to add:

I'll be teaching this as a class at Heather's Stamping Haven on Saturday, May 9th. Call Heather to register if you're interested in making one of your own. (It won't take two days - I promise!)

Woohoo! New rubber! I've been eyeing this stamp at my LSS lately and resisted for a while. However, this Saturday I taught a class so I had some new stamping funds burning a hole in my pocket so I picked this up. Am I ever glad I did! It's so cute! I really like Outlines stamps in general - they lend themselves to a variety of techniques and styles, from quick and easy cards to more complex ones. This tends towards the latter (took me about two days). It took a couple of hours to emboss and colour in the three layers, and put them together. I used Tombows and blended with a moist brush. The sea grass is accented with Green Apple Smooch (also picked up this Saturday). It's wonderful! I'll definitely be getting a few more colours. It's shimmery like twinklings, but more opaque, and very easy to apply in small or large amounts. The fine applicator can really allow for precision application. I also accented with some stickles, crystal effects, swarovksi crystal, and some acrylic paint. Go big or go home, eh!

I had this wonderful, colourful piece, and then (as usual) didn't know what to do with it. This is what took the second day, was building the card around it. I'm still not 100% satisfied, but I like it well enough. The yellow strips I wound up tinting myself, using Tombows and watercolour paper to get a similar yellow-orange to what's in the main image. I also sponged and edged with chalk ink. The citrine panel has the Sunshine Designs grass stamped in olive pastel chalk ink (from the cherry blossom cube).

So, are you going to try your hand at an Outlines stamp? They come in all sorts of styles and images and they're a lot of fun.

Thanks for stopping by.

Supplies: Stamps: Outlines & Sunshine Designs; Ink: brilliance platinum with silver embossing powder, olive pastel, amber clay chalk inks; paper: watercolour, navy lava paper, citrine (green); Other: Tombow markers (approx 1 doz colours), stickles (crystal, black, orange, night sky, cinnamon), swarovski crystal, crystal effects, seagull edged decorative scissors, denim acrylic paint (Ranger), black Micron pen.