Ocean – Stamped Smiles

Hello friends! It’s already closer to the end of our first month for 2025 and I hope you’re staying warm and/or cozy where you are!

Today I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the Alphabet Challenge design team! I’ve been playing along with the challenges for a few years, so this will be a fun one! Please be sure to check out the challenge blog to see how to play as we go through the alphabet letters every-other week (fortnight) for each new challenge.

For this challenge, we are at the letter “U” for Underwater and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Now how cute are these smiling underwater critters?! It was hard to believe that going through my stash that I didn’t have much of any underwater critters besides mermaids, but last year I saw this adorable Doodlebug Sea Life stamp set on sale and decided to add it to my collection. This is the first time I’ve used it.

For the background: I’ve taken my Distress Oxide inks and ink blended the colors Salty Ocean, Mermaid Lagoon and Blueprint sketch over some Bristol Smooth watercolor paper. I sprayed it with water and blotted it up with a paper towel. I used a stitched wave die cut border at the top and another wavy landscape border die for the sand at the bottom with kraft cardstock. I’ve used markers and gel pens to create “dots” for the sand and then attached it to the ink blended panel. Once I had it all attached, I cut out the entire panel with a stitched rectangle die and then attached it to an A2 sized top folding kraft card base.

I stamped several of the images and colored them with Copic markers and die cut them out with each coordinating die. The “seaweed” was part of the coordinating die set that I inked over in green Oxide inks and then attached all of the images to the underwater scene.

Lastly, I white heat embossed a sentiment from the stamp set (it says: “with oceans & oceans of love”) in the top corner of the card base and stamped some blue solid hearts from the set for “bubbles”. I couldn’t resist adding some googly eyes to the crab too.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my card today and hop on over to the challenge blog to play along with us! I look forward to seeing your underwater creations in the gallery!

Thanks so much for dropping in and I’ll see you tomorrow for my monthly Art Journal Page!

Challenges: