By the Sea ATCs

The August theme at ATC club was "By the Sea" and here's my two swap cards I finally got done to trade. Told the gals they could choose which one to keep after I explained my techniques and a couple of the gals took both.

 

 

The one on your left was begun with me attaching a piece of blue background paper to the tissue box base with a thin coat of gel medium, and gluing on the cloud punchies. Next I added three torn strips of tan paper to the bottom of the atc for the sand, however, it looked sorta bare and not like sand at all, so I stamped it with a Stampin' Up dot stamp, but it got covered over by the seashell stamp later. I had a Mary Engelbreit calendar page up on my wall in my studio for inspiration and it looked like she had colored over her blue paper with a matching or slightly darker shade of blue coloring pencil. I used my Korean crayons that a missionary friend brought to me from South Korea. They are slightly waxy like regular crayons, but in a twisting plastic pencil form like a mechanical pencil. Crayola makes a similar product called Twistables that doesn't glide as well as my Korean crayons, but they are a close second!

You might recognize the sun stamp from last month -- both the summer sentiment and sea shell stamps are also Mary Engelbreit stamps.

I have to work on my coloring technique. I did not  do a very neat job on either of the sentiment strips.

The atc on the right began with white cs attached to the card base and sponged over with two shades of blue and tan at the bottom like I've seen Teresa Momber  of Gina K Designs do so many times on her videos. Then, over the tan part of the card, I brushed on some gel medium and dipped the end of the card into

white sand. I couldn't find any tan sand and white was all Michael's had at the time.

 And for your info,

nothing sticks to sand once it's glued to your card, so I wasn't able to get any paper shells to stick on the bottom of the card, however, the top part of the anchor has been glued down to the paper base.

Then finished off both with doodled lines and my John Hancock (signature) on the back.

 

Here's the cards I received in exchange and

 

here's the jam cards I chose from the finished ones. The one at the top called "Dear Heart" -- the card base was donated by a member of the group,

I added sponged ink around the edges, the gold ribbon piece, and  the sea shells from ones I cut down from wrapping paper out of my drawer (Bits and Pieces Challenge).

The last person added the sentiment, a scalloped piece next to my ribbon and the tiny sea shell in the top right corner.

The other two I did not work on at all, but chose them from the remaining group of cards. We each contributed three bases and each gets to choose three to take home.