Winter in Summer blog candy

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Today is the day you can pick up new Fall and Winter stamp sets from Our Craft Lounge! To celebrate I get to play along in the OCL Blog Hop. Check out a list to find all the other new releases at the new OCL blog.

I get to share a set I drew called "Sea-sons Greetings". This is a fun Christmas set featuring the cute and popular Bubbles the Sea-Turtle who first appeared in the ocean during OCL's Summer release.

Making a muted background

My artwork today needs to be soft and muted since I don't want it to pop out too much, so I am going to be working exclusively with light colors, or colors that end in a 0, 1, 2, or 3.

I stamped my background using the long sea floor from the original Bubbles set, using Memento London Fog ink on Neenah Classic Crest Solar white cardstock. I masked off the area for the Christmas tree so it would fit into the sea floor better, and stamped the little fishes to decorate it.

I am going to be layering this artwork under vellum as a soft background, so I want all my colors to be pale and muted (which is why I used gray ink). I colored the water with BG10 and faded it out with the colorless blender, then I colored the sand with YR31, Y00, and Y000 then faded it out as well. Notice that I wasn't too careful about avoiding the seaweed or stars, since those will be colored later, and the bue and yellow were so pale that even if I colored where I shouldn't it will be easy to clean up with the colorless blender.

You can see from the second step that the green seaweed looks just fine layered over the blue from the water, and when I color the sea-stars they will be orange, so yellow won't mess those up.

Here is my final background. The little fish were colored with YR02 and Y00, then dotted with YR02. Again, I used very light colors because the background is not as important as the main image I'm going to make for the front of the card. I dotted on some E31 to give more life to the sand. I added R22 and faded it out with the colorless blender anywhere that I wanted to give the illusion of red without overpowering you. Then I cropped the background around the seahorse and matted it onto the green paper (I picked my green colors to match this paper).

Here on my final card you can see how the soft background under vellum is very muted and not overpowering, yet it is still easy to see. I was tempted to color my vellum blue to remind you of water, but I really liked the color scheme as it was, so I left it alone.

The green ribbon was originally white, but I colored it with YG63 so it would match my paper and colored areas. I wrote a sentiment on the inside with a 0.1 mm multiliner which reads "sweetest winter fishes...from my pond to yours!"

Tomorrow I'll post a tutorial on coloring the cute little Bubbles the Sea-Turtle that you see on the front. For now, let's move on to the fun part...

Do you think little Bubbles is cute?

Do you wonder how Bubbles came to own such a nice striped scarf and fluffy hat?

Do you have no problem with the improbability of a sea turtle sucking on candy-canes underwater?

Want to win him???

Leave a comment on today's post. Winners will be chosen on Sunday. One lucky person will win this very stamp set, . . and . . . I'll throw in a few of the new Atyou Spica glitter pens to sweeten the deal.

What are you waiting for? Leave a comment and your contact info! Then go visit the other names on the blog hop for Our Craft Lounge. Be sure to come back tomorrow and check out the directions for coloring cute little Bubbles. Good luck winning and have fun coloring!