Back to the beach ;- )

     Sorry, I've been AWOL again. I've had some cluster headache issues and I have gotten my son back to college. I thought I had a great early start on today's card, when I started it last week.  Good thing, because I ended coming down to the wire. This card is for a good friend for whom I volunteered, when my son went to K- 8th grade. She was and is a Lutheran School librarian. I also volunteered for her predecessor, before I was pregnant. Ruth likes lighthouses, so I used the one from Cricut's Life's a Beach cartridge as my main image.  The white is Walmart cardstock and the blue is Core'dinations (like the texture.) The layers didn't cut as I would have expected and the white left spaces, so I re-cut the image a bit bigger and used those white cut outs popped up on the original frame. I used a gem for the light. The waves are a border feature cut of the wave image also from Life's a Beach. I used my Gypsy to set up the cut so that the white stripes would appear at the tops of the waves. The seagulls are the shifted cut from the lighthouse image. I edged them with a sharpie. The sentiment stamp is from the Scrappy Cat set  called Cardmaker's Dream. I hand wrote her name. I think the colors would also work well for a guy card with a less scripty (I know it's not really a word) font for the sentiment.

     The sentiment on the inside was done digitally and the font is Apple Casual. The elements were also cut from Life's a Beach. I edged the bottom layer of the pelican with a grey Copic marker to help him stand out where his head is above the blue. I also popped up his wing. The pier piling was inked with Ranger Tea Dye Ink. The bottom was sponged with Ranger Tumbled Glass and I used the negative of a scalloped oval cut I had to mask the top of the area, moving it around as I sponged, just to give a background for the images, mainly, because the pelican was white. I used a brown sharpie at the bottom of the images to ground them.

     All in all, I was very happy with the way this card turned out. What would I do differently? I might have popped up the seagulls. I debated a bit with myself about that one and then just glued them flat. I might have also given them eyes. I couldn't remember if you can see there eyes at that distance and didn't bother to go and look it up. I'm guessing you probably can. I should have used Swiss Dots on the brown bottom of the front. So, those are some things that could probably make the card better.

Thanks for dropping by and I'll try to be more consistent in my posting. Sept. is a busy card month, so I should have a lot to post. I have been practicing my doodling and drawing ( just cartoons ;- ) but that's creative growth for me, lol. Though these aren't things I would post. Please, leave me a comment, so that  I know that you were here. Have a week of fun and creativity!