Textured Sea Creatures ATCs with Distress Inks background – Tutorial

Hey, Selene here!
Today I’m posting a tutorial to make an easy Artist Trading Card using July’s stamps set of the month:
Textured Sea Creatures. It’s 10% for the whole month! Don’t forget to grab yours!

Let’s now go through the tutorial 🙂
For the background I started stamping and embossing words from Mix A sentiment set with white powder.
I put some distress Inks on my glass mat, watered them and then randomly picked up the colours.
I used: Fossilised Amber, Shabby Shutters, Cracked Pistachio and Mermaid Lagoon.
I quickly dried them up and then repeated the process to get more depth and texture.
I dried my cards again and then used the inks leftovers to add some drops of colours – I usually prefer to create layers using the same tint, but it’s up to you! 😀

When everything was dry again, I started to add more texture to the background with stamps and stencils.
From Mixed media Marks 1, I stamped various elements such as the numbers, the grid and black border with Distress Inks.

I picked Marks 3 stencil to add coloured marks here and there – in this case, I used the following Distress Oxides: Salvaged Patina, Cracked Pistachio and Fossilised Amber.
For a bit more of interest I randomly stamped words in black Versafine Ink form Mix It Up stamps set.
Then, my backgrounds were almost finished, but… I couldn’t help adding a few drops of white acrylic paint on top 😛

As my focal images I stamped various jellyfish, starfish and shells in black Versafine Ink from Textured Sea Creatures set and fussy cut them. I already had some ready botanical elements from Pencil Marks 1 set and then I picked some coloured sewing threads.
I started to arrange the various elements on the cards, trying to balance them and then picked a few words from Mix A Sentiment set.

Final arrangements before glueing everything together, I pasted the ATCs on black paper to let them pop out a bit more and then… ta-daaaaa!
Here’s the final result!