I created these cards for an Instagram hop with the subject Watercolor waves. The cards are available in my Etsy store.

Whale

The whale featured on this card is from Spellbinders’ June Large Die of the Month for 2023. It’s still available on the Spellbinders site. You may remember it from this previous card.

I cut out the parts of the whale from inexpensive watercolor paper and colored them with Distress Watercolor pencils following photos of humpback whales. The upper part and tail are colored with Black Soot. For the shadows under the whale I used Hickory Smoke. Then I glued the parts together following the instructions on the packaging. I added a thin layer of foam under the whale for dimension.

Sentiments

For the sentiment I used a stencil and die set from Pinkfresh Studios. The one I used isn’t available any more, but the Brushed sentiment stencils and die sets are.

I used the stencils to outline the letters with pencil. Then I colored them using Black Soot Distress Watercolors Pencils for the tops of the letters and Hickory Smoke for the bottoms, so the sentiment looks similar to the humpback whale. But my sentiments didn’t have the cut-outs for the barnacles on the top of the whale. So I splattered the tops with Dylusions. white mica spray instead. The Dylusions White Linen Spray is great for splatter. It has lots of pigment.

I cut out the sentiments with the coordinating die set and doubled them up for a more substantial feel.

Backgrounds

The backgrounds for this batch of cards all came from my backgrounds box. I selected four blue backgrounds that I had heat-embossed with water-themed Hero Arts background stamps. Hero Arts have a lot of those, probably because they’re located near the water in Richmond, CA. I listed a couple of them below.

To deepen the sense of ocean, I ink blended over the heat embossing with Cracked Pistachio, Salvaged Patina and Tumbled Glass.

Then I cut them down to my go-to size for backgrounds 4” by 5.25”. That leaves an 1/8” border white frame around the focal point of the card. I adhered them to white Ohuhu card bases. Then I adhered the whales and the sentiments on top.