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Bubble Your Troubles Away

Happy Friday everyone.  My project this week allowed me to get messy, happy, painty fingers!  How?  I made several monoprints with my gel plate for the under-the-sea theme of today's card project.  The prints are in a variety of beautiful blues, greens and purples.  Lost Coast Designs has the most awesome background stamp which gave great motion to the "water".  A couple stamps from the Mailbox Muse mermaid kit complete the scene.



Let's start at the beginning.  Grab your favorite colors of paint and add them randomly to the gel plate.  Then grab your brayer and lightly blend them across the entire plate.  Use your favorite texture tools or fingers to make random designs, if you wish.  You can get more than one print each time without having to add more paint. 




Caution: it is addicting!  I made prints for over an hour for this project.


In order to choose which of the prints I wanted to use, I inked up my Lost Coast Designs stamp with Radiant Neon Blue ink and stamped it on my placement tool.  Then I just held it over each of the backgrounds to see what I liked best.  You could use a sheet of acetate or a plastic page protector for this, too.





In the end, I have nine that I thought made beautiful underwater scenes. 


Some of the designs had areas where the bare paper showed through.  I used a water brush and a baby wipe to add color using Gelatos to fill in those spots. 


Once the papers were dry, I stamped each of them with the Neon ink and embossed with clear powder.  The background stamp is a perfect 4 x 5.25 size for a card.  



After determining which edge was going to be the sea bottom, I sponged a little bit of teal ink across the bottom and up the sides just a tad to give it some definition.



Altered Pages sells a beautiful mermaid stamp plate which has seaweed and a shell.  I stamped the seaweed stamp over and over on the bottom of each image with a dark green pigment ink and embossed with the clear powder.  In the photo below you can see how the bubbles still show through since they were embossed first.




Then on to the bathing beauty!  I stamped 9 mermaids with pigment ink and embossed and then colored them with a waterbrush and Gelatos.  



The mermaids were cut out and the edges were darkened with a black marker to hide the edges.  Foam adhesive holds most of the mermaid to the card, but I glued her right arm and tail directly to the card to help show movement.




Add a few seashells and the design is complete.  The shells were once again embossed clear and colored with Gelatos.




I have a lot more mermaid cutting out to do to put the rest of the cards together but I really want you to see how pretty the rest of these backgrounds are.







Products used:
Lost Coast Designs stamp
Gel Press Plate
Brayer
Assorted Acrylic Paints
Texture Tools
Gelatos
Water Brushes
Pigment Inks
Embossing Powder
Dye Ink
Sponges & Baby Wipes
Mailbox Muse Mermaid Stamp Set

Stamp Placer or Acetate
Foam Adhesive Squares & Glue 




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