Sea Foam Dreams

I really enjoy challenging myself when it comes to making LTC's; but, I often have to back myself into a corner in order to do so.  The best way for me to do that is to list a swap with special instructions to try a new technique or a special set of guidelines in order to push myself and the participants artistically.  I really enjoy working in layers of paper and making my own paper designs starting with plain white paper, so I listed a "White No White Layers" swap where the challenge would be to make a card with at least three layers of paper.  Each layer of paper had to start out as plain white paper and needed to be custom designed so that no white would be showing in the final design.  Sounds easy enough right?  Um, it turns out to be not so easy!  White is a hard color to eliminate completely and I seriously wished I could drop this swap; but, it was my own swap, so I had to power through my frustration and make my card no matter how hard it was. Luckily in the end I was able to design a card that I loved.  Thankfully it was a really small swap because it was a lot of work to make each card.  I never could have pulled this off for a larger swap.  

The brown layer was made by spraying Dylusions ink spray in Melted Chocolate. Next I used a Tim Holtz distress ink in Walnut Stain and a mini blending tool to go over the dried Dylusions spray.  This gave me a really nice kind of bitter sweet chocolate color to use as a frame for my card (mixing the Dylusions ink sprays with Tim Holtz Distress inks is a fantastic way to make custom colors and get more mileage out of your products).

For the blue layer I actually stamped the entire mermaid stamp onto white paper and then I used a Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Peacock Feathers with a mini blending tool to color the whole paper.  To highlight the bubbles I used a darker shade of blue Stickles glitter glue to color in each one.  The difference in shades of blue really provided a nice contrast.  

The last layer was made by stamping my entire image onto white card stock and then I fussy cut the mermaid out.  This took quite a long time as the mermaid had a lot of little edges that needed to be trimmed very carefully.  I used a mix of Copic makers and Tim Holtz Distress markers to color my stamped image in.  To add a little more interest and dimension to the stamp I colored over the pink shells with a Clear Stardust Gelly Roll pen and I dotted the strands of pearls in her hair with gold Ranger Liquid Pearls.  

I carefully aligned the colored mermaid cut out over the double stamped image on the blue layer and glued it down with a glue stick.  Next, I glued those layers to the custom designed brown layer and a card was born!