If you stamp a fish . . . watercolor him!

Watercoloring is my favorite coloring medium, it's true! It's also true when I stamped fish from Under the Sea C1500, I grabbed my Blending Pen 3174 (p. 132 of the catalog) and the coordinating stamp pads and happily colored to my heart's content.

How do you do it, you say? It's so simple, really, I promise.

First, with your chosen stamp pad, lid closed, firmly squeeze, as shown here.

Next, open the stamp pad and presto, notice the ink in the white part of the lid. Plenty of watercolor for you to color your fishies!








With the blending pen, pick up some of the ink (Lagoon shown here) and begin coloring. To achieve a darker inked look of the waves, I used the ink immediately. To create shading, I used scratch paper to remove some of the ink from the marker.

To change colors, simply use the same scratch paper and color until no ink shows. This also uses up the clear fluid, so sometimes it is helpful to have several blending pens for different colors for a project or if doing more than one card. The pens are only $3.95 so buy several!

 My finished fishy card, made using Footloose paper X7151B and Seaside Wooden Shapes Z1693.

Best Fishes to you!!!!

Dress up your patterned paper with a stamp or two!

Pemberly, one of CTMH's newest lines of paper, is by far my favorite so far. The blues and soft yellows colors are balanced perfectly and the flower set that coordinates with it has dozens of tiny words. You can easily spell out just about any saying on the front or inside of your own card or scrapbook page.

My stamp sale last week featured a make and take, pictured here:

The card itself was a breeze to assemble and created an elegant look for that special someone's birthday. Or change the words from the Card Word Puzzle C1494 and make it a Just Because card or Happy Anniversary . . .

One of the special techniques we covered at Saturday's event was the stamping directly on the patterned paper to create your own special look. Here we stamped the rose from the Card Word Puzzle stamp set in black ink directly onto the soft yellow paper from the kit. No need to color the flowers in, it adds just the right amount of pizzazz to your artwork just as it is.

And then to accessorize! I chose the Bouquet Assortment Z1694, page 128 of the new catalog to add a bit of flair to my card. These self stick beauties can be used stand alone as I did on this card, or added to the center of flowers. Very easy and very pretty.

Hope you are having fun with your accessories. Remember that adding some fun to your card can be as easy as a stamp on the paper or a little accessory to your finished product.

Have fun!