Hearts! HHC15 + Zoe's blog candy!!

I've edited this post to include a link to Zoe's blog where she is offering blog candy! Check it out here!
This week over at the High Hopes Blog, the challenge from Janette is to use hearts somewhere on your project. Simple and easy and great because Valentine's is coming up fast! Though my first card is a birthday card, not a Valentine. Don't matter, a heart means love, and that is for anytime and all the time!!
I love making underwater scenes and this one is for a sweet lady I know, and so it had to be all girly pink! I am really into using my watercolors on cards lately, and so I spent a lot of time on this one.
First, I stamped Big Lou Piranha onto my Canson watercolor paper using Versafine Onyx Black ink. Then I stamped the seaweed randomly at the bottom edge of the page. Next I painted over Big Lou and the seaweed, completely covering them in painter's masking fluid. Masking fluid is like this milky liquid that dries to become a film overtop of whatever you paint it on. It keeps the paint from soaking in where ever you don't want paint to go. I also splattered some of the stuff all over so that later after I painted on the water, I would have white spots that would look like oxygen bubbles in the water.
So after the masking fluid was dry enough (roughly fifteen minutes), I mixed up a water color using aquamarine blue and cerulian blue paint. I thoroughly wet the paper and then painted wet into wet all over, until I was happy with it. You have to realize that watercolor paints dry to about fifty percent of the color intensity when wet, so always paint darker than you need. After the blue dried, I used a small round brush dampened with water to remove paint in thin wavy lines all over, to make it look like reflections from the waves above.
I then peeled off the dried masking fluid. I got it going with my fingernail and then just peeled it back. When dry its like a thin film of stretchy plastic!
I painted the fish and seaweed, and then made my card. The pink heart is a sticker I got from a sheet at Dollarama! The netting was from a bag that held garlic! lol, no, it does not reek of garlic! The blue and white "marine rope" was from a spool I got at Michael's.
I also altered the background designer paper by putting Stickles all over it so it really sparkles! (thanks Janette!). The idea for that came from the "Ways To use it Challenge" on SCS. Balloons are watercolored, cut out, and popped up. Balloon strings are drawn in thin permanent liner marker.


I stamped the Kissy Face Frog onto watercolor paper and a second one on a post it note. Cut out the post it note frog and used it as a mask, then stamped mushroom one. I painted the scene with watercolors, then drew a heart shape and cut it out by hand. I drew a second one using the red cs. Of course since it was done by hand and not a die cut, there were a lot of imperfections. I hid those by distressing the edges with my metal ruler! I love how distressing hides flaws!!
The sketch for this card was last week's sketch challenge on SCS, and the color scheme was also their color challenge. I used stamps from the Jeanne Streiff collection on the background panels. I couldn't find a link for them.
Be sure to check out all the samples for this week's challenge over at the High Hopes Blog, and remember that you will have a chance to win two free High Hopes Stamps if you join and link your art on the challenge post!
God bless your day, and thanks for stopping by!