Sail Away in a Sea of Blue

Ahoy, Mateys!

I'm going nautical today and I hope you'll enjoy relaxing on the blue ocean breezes with me. 

I'm not sure why the hamster and I came up with this background watercolor design, but now that we've done it, it reminds me of an inflatable mattress used for floating in the pool. Mine, of course, would be the one that has a built-in area for my drinkie-poo.

If I had a pool. Which I don't. I'll still take the drinkie-poo, though, thank you.

Let's set sail!

The sailboat is from o.o.b. PSX, stamped onto vellum in ultramarine blue Stazon. The striped and starred paper and flip flops are from my stash. Of course, I had to Wink the clouds behind the sailboat. It's on the sweet flip flops, too, but the photo didn't capture that so much.

Challenges

• Fusion Card Challenge. Below. I am playing in both sides of the fun challenge.
• Pixie's Snippets Playground. I seem to be doing a lot of OLCs (or nearly) of late, but for this one I was finally able to use some of my bushels of snippets.
• Words 2 Scrap By: It's a Man's World.

~~~

Looking very simpilar, here's my second card: 

I cut a circle with my Lil' Inker dies to make a hole for my shaker schtuff. The surf and wave (NBUS) and sediment were brought to you by Paper Smooches "Wicked Nauticool" stamp set. The 3D lighthouse sticker is from the Paper House.

Challenges

• CAS(E) This Sketch. Below. My focus pocus lighthouse is off to the side, but I think I captured the spirit of the sketch.
• The Paper Players: Masculine Card.
• Virginia's View Challenge: Ombre or Monochormatic.

~~~

And here's a photo tutorial sorta:

After taping down my watercolor paper, I drew lines with my marker to guide me. FYI, I also have one of the wide aqua brushes, which was perfect for this design.

Here you can see where I added dark blue along the lines and then just pulled the color to the right. I found it was easier (for this pattern) to work from the right side of the paper to the left so that my hand would stop pulling as it got to the area that was already filled in to the right.

And Jack's your rabbit, there you go!

Isn't that fun how it adds dimensation? I'm thinking other smart peoples have already done/seen this before, but we haven't, so Hammy is quite popping his buttons over how clever he is.

Having said that, you can see in the photos that I did have some leakage (don't we all?) and warping (don't we all?) because I didn't hit them with the heat gun afters. I'm guessing that's why. I'm still new at coloring with water, so I know you'll be kind.

In Other News

Thank you for sharing all your tips about your placement of sequints on cards! I'm not sure how many of you were joshing me, but I'm planning to embrace the same plan that several of you attest to embracing, t'wit: toss a few up in the air and stick 'em down wherever they fall!

We are over the moon that the twins will be arriving early in the morning to spend a long weekend with us! It has been way too long since we've had a sleep-over, what with one thing and another. Now that they are getting older (too fast!), they are into sports and lots of after-school and weekend activities. Summer vacation is here now, yippie kiyay, so we are hoping to be able to see more of them!

~~~

I'm off to clean up the Playhouse for them in case they want to make Dad some Father's Day cards.


Enjoy your weekend! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!*

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower! Please let me know you came by, so I can be sure and return the flavor!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling:

Click CTL + Home. 
Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post.
Click Page Down to reach the end of the post.
Click Comments and the pop-up box opens.
Click Jump to Comment Form; no more car pool tunnel! Mwah!
If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave
me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!