Playful Penguins

August 13, 2019

If you watched my live Facebook video where I unboxed all my new goodies, then you heard me mention that I absolutely LOVE penguins. They are my favorite animal, besides cats. but as far as wild animals that I would never physically own, penguins are at the top of the list. Followed by giraffes. Anyway. I mentioned that I wanted to put the penguin on the beach. It only makes sense... my stamping business is named "Stamp by the beach" partly because I knew you guys would never spell my name right but mostly because I live 45 minutes from the beautiful emerald coast beaches. I love making beach themed cards and using beachy themes, I live so close to amazing inspiration and gorgeous views that it is hard to not draw inspiration and ideas for cards and projects. So here he is, two of my favorite things wrapped up in a card.

I used the Water Front stamp set which is a beautifully designed "painting" stamp set. It has all the brush strokes that you would need to create beach and water scenes and the finished project looks like Bob Ross himself designed your card. It even comes with a set of "happy trees." Don't you feel calmer already just thinking about it?? :)

The Playful Penguins set is also absolutely gorgeous and not just because I love penguins. These penguins are not your Mary Poppins cartoon characters, these guys are sketched, life like penguins straight off an antarctic ice berg. I chose this particular penguin because he appeared to be flapping his wings in pure bliss playing along the shoreline of the beach. I feel like the three penguins in this set are brothers each with their distinctive personality. We met the first brother in the card above he is obviously more playful and maybe even mischievous , then there is the serious and proper penguin- he wears his tuxedo with pride, and finally you have the odd ball penguin that mom forced to stand still to take the picture. Maybe I put too much thought into the personality of the stamped images... - at the end of the day this will likely be my favorite stamp set for the season. It can easily be a card that can be used year round; this will not just be a Christmas or winter themed stamp set in my craft room.

As far as putting together the beach scene, I stamped all my images on water color paper and blended each layer with my aqua painter. I started with my mountains which accidentally turned into an erupting volcano ( there are no mistakes in stamping, only happy opportunities). Then I created the sand bar and water line mixing and blending my colors until I was satisfied with the shades. I did notice that because this penguin is so realistic looking, the softer I left the colors, the better he melded into his scenery. My original design was very bold and vibrant with color and it made the penguin look out of place and almost lost in the background. So each of the colors that I used, they were stamped off on my scrap paper first and then washed out slightly with the aqua painter. The next step was adding the palm trees, which because I was working with a larger image with the penguin, the tree scale was too small using the stamps in the waterfront set. I googled a remedy and came up with stamping one tree trunk at a time so that I could layer 2-3 trunks on top and create a taller tree, same thing with the palm leaves, I stamped one segment of the palm tree leaves continuously so the I could "extend" the length of the branches. Finally I created a complimentary back ground on my stitched oval which is also water color paper, layered onto of crumb cake and then used dimensional to place my penguin on the beach. Creating this dimension also compensated for the discrepancies in scale and size in relation to all the images. I competed the card with a copper "sea star" which is found in the brightly gleaming suite and some blue sequins. "Friend" is embossed with the copper embossing powder to compliment my copper "sea star."

Product List