Beachy birthday

It's Lizzie Anne Designs' anniversary and the celebration is going on!

One of the events/contests is a sketch challenge. There was a choice between 3 sketches. I chose the simplest one with a square base, I love square cards.

It is really funny though, when you look at other people's work, to see how much they stuck to the sketch or went in a more personal direction. For example I saw quite a few rectangular cards which surprised me...

In general I think a sketch is a skeleton and it is supposed to be tweaked to your personal taste and inspiration, but in this case (= a contest), I tried to stay as close to the original as I could, while still adding my personal touch...

I was in the mood for a beach theme, and I especially love those cute sets, plus the recipient of the card (a dear e-friend of mine) had mentioned that red was her favorite color, so that explains why my little crab is as red as if he was already cooked (yuck!)... He is just too cute to be eaten, and I knew I had to use him and that he would be perfect holding the sentiment for me!♥ I embossed him to give him some shine and dimension. Same with the sentiment and the top of the wave (too bad I didn't have a shine pen for the bottom). I used a white Soufflé pen for the starfishes.

My card is fairly small (4x4) so there wasn't much room for a lot of action, and I kept everything simple since the card is traveling to Britain and I'm always afraid of brads, ribbons and such being a problem in international mail traveling...

Actually, every now and then, I really like making a simple card like that with little to no embellishments where the stamping really takes center stage!... :-)