Sea Street Simplicity

*Thrilled to be Top Pick for Hand Stamped Sentiments*

Keeping it simple looks so much easier than it is.  I wanted to keep the design I had in mind on one single stamped sheet and that, of course, meant masking if I was going to manage to have my schools of fish swim behind the octopus from the Sea Street stamp set.  Fussy cutting the octopus turned out to be exactly that:  fussy.  All those tentacles, twisting every which way, made it quite the task.  But in the end the card wound up precisely the way I had imagined it.  That made it all worthwhile.

I kept the colours simple, too.  I wanted to be able to enter the Hand Stamped Sentiments challenge and that was for three colours (as well as a neutral, which, for me, was Whisper White):

I also wanted to enter the card into a sketch challenge so the design had to fall into the general lines provided:

I used the sketch but turned it on its side.  And so I stamped the octopus using the Night of Navy ink right about where you would expect the flower shape to be.  Then I masked the octopus and stamped several schools of fish using the Marina Mist ink, followed by the starfish which I stamped in Hello Honey ink.  For my sentiment I used the Hello Love stamp set and Marina Mist ink.

I used a base of Night of Navy, then a layer of Hello Honey, a layer of Marina Mist and finally the stamped layer of Whisper White.  As a finishing touch, I added the tiniest of the Basic Pearls to the centre of each of the three starfish.

For more cards using this sketch, check out CAS(E) this Sketch!

For more cards using these colours, check out Hand Stamped Sentiments.