Ocean Friends

Hi and welcome!  It's time for a sketch from the team at Freshly Made Sketches and this week our hostess is the wonderful Amy O'Neill.

I colored up some NBUS from the latest release from MFT Stamps (seriously, I probably should just get my salary put directly into their bank account 😄)

My first task was to stamp and color a whole heap of the fish and plants from the Gill Friends set.  I googled "tropical fish" to get some different colorways and stuck to a predominantly blue, yellow and orange color scheme.  I added the line around the mouth and the stripe on the bottom right fish with a Copic Multiliner pen before coloring him.  Once colored,  I cut them all with my Scan n Cut and put them to one side to work on the "ocean".  

On a piece of Bristol Smooth cardstock, I sponged over the Waves Stencil with Chipped Sapphire, Faded Jeans, Mermaid Lagoon and Broken China ink, darkest at the bottom and working up to the lightest.  I removed the stencil then went back over the whole panel with a light coating of all of the inks before finally adding some Black Soot to the very bottom.  I then die-cut the panel with the Stitched Rectangle Stax 1 die set.

I arranged my fish and plants onto the panel and adhered them in place, making sure I had some off the panel to indicate movement.  In reality, the blue/yellow one at the bottom had to be off the panel because the paper slipped while it was in the Scan n Cut and I got a big cut across his belly before I could pause the machine!  

In keeping with the sketch, I went hunting for something for the bottom layer.  I was going to use some blue cardstock, but decided to stick with neutrals and used some Fog cardstock.  I die-cut this with the next size up Stax die and then shortened it with some partial die-cutting.

Finally, I stamped a sentiment and adhered all the panels onto a white card base, before adding some clear sparkle pen and black gel pen eyes.  Ha!  I thought sticking to a limited color palette would mean less markers - but no - below are all the Copics I used on these images 😄

Thanks so much for visiting!  The design team have created some gorgeous cards with Amy's sketch so I hope you'll head over and check them out.

Products used:

Stamps:  Gill Friends, Beach Buds (MFT)

Ink:  Black Licorice Hybrid, Versafine Onyx Black, Unicorn White (Hero Arts), Black Soot, Chipped Sapphire, Faded Jeans, Mermaid Lagoon, Broken China Distress Inks

Cardstock:  White, Fog (SSS), X-Press It, Bristol Smooth

Dies:  Stitched Rectangle Stax 1, Slanted Sentiment Strips (MFT)

Accessories:  Waves Stencil (Newton's Nook), Copics, Spectrum Noir Clear Sparkle Pen, Black Jelly Roll Glaze Pen

Cheers

Karren