Alright, alright… even though MerMay is over, I still had one more mermaid card up my sleeve for this week’s Scenic Saturday. I’ve always thought that with some minor tweaking Uptown Zodiac Girl Cancer would make for a beautiful mermaid. The real clincher to making it happen came when I was inking up Edna with a Manatee for my previous Scenic Saturday and realized that with some very simple masking I could combine the end of Edna’s tail with Zodiac Girl Cancer to finally make my vision happen. I began by deciding where on the card this mermaid would reside then I placed a post-it-note where I wanted the water to cut her off at the waist. I inked the top half of Zodiac Girl Cancer and stamped her just above the post-it. I then masked off her bent arm, flipped Edna and the manatee upside down and inked up only the fin and stamped her just above the post-it as well. Once I removed the mask on her arm and the post-it below, I quickly colored some blue around her until it looked likeCancer was half in/half out of the shallow water. To alter her top half, I simply grabbed a 0.1 black multi-liner pen and sketched in some connecting lines under her bust line to turn her slinky dress into a bikini top. I then dressed it up a bit by adding the decorative scallop shell and completed the look with a belly button on her newly exposed torso. 

For the background I colored in a spit of land behind her, complete with palm trees and flowering bushes, to help give the sense that we have found our mermaid in a sheltered lagoon. I then added more sand down in front of her with large fronds of beach grass framing the sentiment, from the Summer Sentiment set, that I stamped at the bottom of the scene. Adding that tall grass also creates a really strong foreground which adds extra interest to this scene as we hit the trifecta with the mermaid in the midground and jetty in the background. When you can get all three in a scene, that’s when things really come to life!

Well, I hope this easy transformation reminds you to keep looking at the stamps in your stash with fresh eyes and how combining them with newer additions can breathe new life into those older images.

Stay cool and stay crafty!