I have a sweet BFF moving in to a brand spank’n new home hopefully in short time. I wanted to do something extra special as she is always some one who is there for me and I count those kinds of friends on one hand. I call them the Trues because they love you unconditionally, they don’t assume the negative in emails, they support your endeavors and they check in when they haven’t heard in awhile and lastly the True friendship can go weeks and months but when you call its like you just talked to them yesterday.

This True loves her ocean and anything beachy 😀

So I had these cool Fish Stand Ups from Retro Café Art. I need some dimension and this company UmWow sells confetti sized shapes. So the first thing I did was sand then gesso all the standup pieces. Not the confetti they are too small. I then laid out all the tiny pieces on my three fish and took a pic so I know where to lay them down later on.

I next went to the blocks the fish stand in and basically die cut squares of ocean/sea related themes from designer papers and so that each square looked finished created a frame for each piece. I also placed them on my desk with the ephemera that I would be using with that square and took a pic so I wouldn’t forget. Gluing on to wood can be trixsy so use what you know works. I have to say I used ScorTape and then touched up corners with TomBow’s Mono Multi Liquid Glue. You can’t do this part all at once as you need a weight to make sure the glues take so its one side at a time.

Lastly I put the fish elements together by gluing them down as I had in the pics using TomBow’s Mono Multi Liquid Glue.  It’s really good strong glue though Ranger Glossy accents work great too. Once all the scales were laid down I painted with buff let dry. Then I painted with Americana’s Coastal Waters carefully over the “top” of scales ONLY and did 2 coats. I did this so when I sanded the scales back some of the blue would come thru as distressed. Once the blue was dry repainted in Buff and once that completely cures sand back to reveal some of the Coastal Blue. There are obviously some areas you might have to dab back color because in my case I sanded too hard in some spaces and all the color came off. Easy fix!

TA DAAAA Contemporary Classic Fish Trio 😀

Here’s a close-up of all four sides of the larger block.

Hope you enjoyed and if you did please leave a comment or subscribe to my email. If this inspired you would love to see how you make this your own so email me or leave a link to the direct post please showing your arty goodness 🙂