Waving Hello Tutorial

Hello! I'm here today with a photo tutorial for how I colored water from an earlier post featuring a Chubby Mermaid.  I had a lot of people across social media asking me how I created the background, so I decided to create a new card with the same technique and photograph the process. Forgive me if the photos are a little dark, I created this card this morning in my craft room and it was pretty overcast here in Utah. I did the best I could, but the weather just wasn't cooperating!

Here's what the card looks like as a finished product:

Looks complicated, right? Wrong! It's actually really easy to create your own project that looks just like this without much effort. I'll walk you through my creative process below...

Here's what I started with. Simple, really. I just stamped my two images on some plain white cardstock and got to coloring.

I started with my mermaid. (If you'd like another tutorial showing you my process for coloring people/creatures, just let me know and I'll do it another day!)

Next up, my fishies. Still looks a little bare, right? Well, we're about to start on that background!

I grabbed a bunch of blues from my copic stash and set them out on the table. I started with my lightest blue to give it a bit of a base to build on. All I did was add stripes of color coming up from and down from the images. Looks pretty choppy. Don't worry, as you add color, the water comes together and starts to actually look like water!

This is after a couple additions of darker blues. Starting to come together, right? I just kept adding stripes of color on top of the lighter colors. I didn't color it in completely, but left spaces so that the lighter colors shine through from behind the darker stripes.

To give my water some dimension, I also added some blue green and blue violet. If you really look at water, it doesn't just look like one color. If you use just one color, it'll look a little flat. By adding in some purple and blue green, it begins to look shimmery like there's light shining through it.

Okay, now it's time for bubbles. This also helps to break up those stripes of color a little bit and make it look more like water. All this is are spots of colorless blender. I varied the size of my dots because bubbles aren't all the same size. I then went in with my darkest blue yet and added a few varied dots with it. Those bubbles look like they're farther behind the images because they're darker.

Time for some white bubbles. I went in with my Signo white gel pen and added just a few dots of white bubbles. Some of them overlap where my other bubbles already are. These are the brightest bubbles, so they're going to appear closer to you.

Now it's time to cut out my panel. I centered the mermaid within the die and then used my Big Shot to cut it out.

Now that everything is cut out and centered, I used my MISTI to stamp my sentiment. This ensures that the sentiment is straight and doesn't stamp incorrectly. It would seriously stink if I went to all that coloring trouble and then ruined it with a crooked sentiment!

Now I went back in with my colorless blender, darkest blue, and gel pen and added just a few more bubbles around the sentiment to tie it in with my images.

Time to bring it all together into a card. I simply used my glue runner to attach my panel to a white card base. I want to keep it flat because it's going to be mailed.

I finished it all off by adding just a touch of clear Wink of Stella to my fish and my mermaid's fin. It adds just a touch of fun detail. I decided that this was all the embellishment this one needed.

That's it! From start to finish! Simple, isn't it? I bet you could create your own underwater card just like mine! Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

I'm entering this card into the current Addicted to CAS challenge - bubbles. It was just perfect timing!

Thanks for stopping by!