Hello Sunshine / Cocoa Vanilla Studio

Hey scrappy friends!  I'm back again today to share my newest layout for Cocoa Vanilla Studio.  I can't say enough how much I love these beautiful products.  This is the Hello Sunshine collection, and it is so perfect for me and my Summer photos!  This is a picture of me on the beach in Aruba last year, and the colors were just right in this line.  I used a beautiful light wood grain as my background. We literally had just walked on a sandy boardwalk to get to the tiki bar here on the beach, so it reminded me of that.  I used a combination of blue acrylic paint and watercolor to create some water splash effects on the background.  I cut a big square of this beautiful Solar Flare paper to layer behind the photo.  I wanted to create the effect of sun rays coming out from behind my photo.  I used an exclusive CVS floral cut file, several fussy cut flowers, die cuts, Woodies and puffy stickers to embellish.

I machine stitched with gold thread through all the sun's rays for added texture and shine.  You can't have too much shine on a beach layout, right? :D  I fussy cut all these flowers here from the Full Bloom and added in a few leaves.  Some of the leaves are from the ephemera pack and some I cut out.  I layered in some blue tangled thread and added a cute Woodie to the center of the pink flower.  I love this beautiful floral cut file from CVS...I cut it on white cardstock and layered it in.  You can also see the cute Puffy Stickers here.  I fussy cut my title from the Summer Hits paper.

I wanted to create the effect of water splashes, so that's where the acrylic paint and watercolor comes in.  I LOVE blue....and this was the perfect contrast to the yellow rays.  I used a big dry brush first to brush on some paint and then added the watercolor using the packaging technique and splattering with the nozzle.

These two cute clouds are in the ephemera pack, and to give them some dimension and shadowing I added some adhesive foam under them along with some blue tangled thread.  Something simple yet it creates a huge statement.

I added more fussy cut flowers and another Woodie to the right of the photo.  I fussy cut those colorful phrase pieces from the Happy Days paper and layered them down under the photo.  I machine stitched through most of them with blue thread.  I also added a small floral cluster underneath them using more fussy cut flowers.

I absolutely love how this turned out...Cocoa Vanilla's collections make it easy to create something awesome :)  Be sure to check out my process video here if you'd like to see how I created this from start to finish.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog today, and enjoy the rest of your weekend!