Mailbox Muse Mermaid ATCs

I've been having a little bit of fun with my latest Mailbox Muse kit.  The theme this time around is mermaids.  Love them!!  I have several stamps already in my collection and this kit came with more of them.  And not just stamps, but beautiful papers and embellishments, too!  The kit comes with a booklet of projects you can make from the kit, but I'm such a rebel that I usually just do my own thing.  Here are three ATCs that I made from the kit.

These cards are all on store-bought chipboard ATC cards.  You can make your own from card stock or playing cards, too!  You could even start with a baseball card!  The traditional size of an Artist Trading Card is 3.5" x 2.5". 

To create the background, I used the edges of my Radiant Neon stamp pads by Tsukineko.  I wanted to preserve each color and not have them blend so I used clear embossing powder and my heat tool after each color addition.  The final blue layer is not embossed.  I used a tissue and dipped it into the inkpad and then lightly rubbed color everywhere there wasn't any. 

I went through my marker collection and found that the Neon Sharpies best matched these inks so I colored the mermaid and shells with them.  The mermaid came on a sheet of black and white images in the kit and the word summer comes from the (#1273) June ATC collage sheet from Altered Pages.

The blue background is Tim Holtz Distress Paint.  The bottle comes with a dauber top and I just rubbed paint all over the card.  When it was completely dry, I sprayed it with bronze irRESISTible texture spray and then stamped a large diamond grid using my new favorite color ink, Delicata Golden Glitz by Tsukineko.  The edges were dipped in Memento Luxe Pistachio ink and embossed with clear powder.

The starfish and clam shell die-cuts and the delicate little mermaid is from the sheet of color images all provided in the kit.  The little circle embellishments are shimmery and were given to me for another project but they matched the card beautifully and ended up here.

Finally, this little beauty was also on the sheet of color images.  The background is stamped with StazOn and Brilliance inks by Tsukineko and has clear Stickles on the waves. 

So this is what I've been playing with this week.  How about you?