Belated Birthday Wishes

Good morning! Jess here with a slightly irreverent belated birthday card! I don’t know about you but I am horrible about remembering to send birthday cards on time…I think I stock more belated birthday cards than I do regular birthday cards because I realize most of the cards will go out late. Eeek. I always resolve to do better but it’s halfway through the year and I’m still sending out those belated birthday cards. *Sigh*…but, if you have to send a belated birthday card it’s a good idea to make it fun! ;)

I’m a huge fan of ocean monster movies (Jaws, The Shallows, etc.) and when I was younger I loved the cheesy tv mini-series, The Beast, based on a book by Peter Benchley about a killer giant squid. So when I saw the Tentacles stamp I knew I wanted to make a killer squid-inspired card! And the cute Enjoy the Journey set was the perfect complement for my squid!

I started by stamping the bottle from Enjoy the Journey onto Snow layering paper with Intense Black ink and then masked off the bottom before stamping the tentacles. I also stamped tentacles, the speech bubbles, and the ship on another piece of cardstock to fussy cut later. I drew the wave across the bottle and stamped the birds. Then I colored everything with Copic markers. After coloring the squid I followed Sandy Allnock’s technique for coloring water. I added dots of colorless blender and white gel pen to finish the scene and then added a little white acrylic paint and Spectrum Noir clear sparkle to create the illusion of glass.

I colored the ship and two tentacles with Copic markers and then fussy cut the tentacles and used the coordinating dies to die-cut the ship and speech bubbles. I tucked the tentacles around the ship and used a little glue to hold them in place. Then I cut slits at the bottom of the bottle stamp and tucked the end of the tentacles into the slits. I adhered the ship to the panel with a little foam mounting tape which gives the card some fun dimension and makes the scene come to life! I trimmed the panel down and adhered a thin strip of red cardstock to the sides of the panel and then adhered it to a Snow layering paper card base.

Next I stamped the sentiment from Enjoy the Journey onto black cardstock with Versamark and heat-embossed it with white embossing powder. I trimmed it to a fishtail banner and then used my fingers to create a bit of a wave through the banner. I adhered the banner to the card using regular adhesive on the ends and middle of the banner and foam mounting tape in-between to keep the wave in place. Finally I added the speech bubbles to the ship with foam mounting tape. The sentiment can be stamped as singular or plural but I decided to add two speech bubbles and make the sentiment plural so that I could send it to a friend from me and my husband. So that’s my killer squid scene come to life! Now I want to go see if I can find that cheesy movie on Netflix…

And if you want some additional tentacles inspiration check out our instagram feed where we recently shared a clever tentacles watercolor creation from the fabulous Kimberly Wiener! Great minds think alike! ;)

Thanks so much for visiting and have a wonderful day!