AAA Cards DT: Along the edge ink blending

‘Along the edge’ is one of the AAA Cards‘ regular clean and simple card challenges. This week, it has the optional extra bit of work to incorporate ink blending into your card design. Here’s my sample as part of the design team:

ink blending edge border through a stencil Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: Circles

Check in at AAA Cards for their latest clean and simple card challenge: use circles in your design. The design team have interpreted this theme in numerous ways and it’s worth having a look for your inspiration. Here’s my take on the challenge:

Blended bokeh effect circles in distress oxides

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AAA Cards DT: Teal and gold colour challenge

Over at AAA Cards, there’s another colour challenge for a clean and simple card design. This time it’s my choice of scheme: teal and gold. A classy and classic combination in my opinion, with lots of potential choices for metallics and media. Here’s my card design:

teal and gold coloured folk art card Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: White-on-white

Single-colour cards can be really tricky on two levels: creating contrast to make elements stand out from the card blank and photographing that contrast effectively. The next AAA Cards’ clean and simple card challenge is to make a white-on-white design using no other colours. Here’s my design team sample:

white-on-white lily card design Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: Moodboard (All the bears)

Happy New Year from the AAA Cards Design Team! Our clean and simple 2023 challenge programme starts with a moodboard for your inspiration – take whatever elements you like from the featured photos to make your card. The moodboard pic is below. Here is my take on the challenge:

Tatty bear stamped image Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: Moodboard ± Christmas

The last challenge of the year at AAA Cards is to create a clean and simple card based on a moodboard with the optional extra of making it Christmasy. There are plenty of elements to choose from on the moodboard – you can pick colours, themes, shapes and textures. I went with a quick card based on the picture of the baubles. Have a great Christmas and I’ll catch up with you in the New Year with new challenge inspiration.

Christmasy bauble cards Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: Small and few ± baked goods #229

I’ve been using polyurethane casting resin for a long while now, batch-making every mould I have when it’s out. Consequently, I now have containers full of paintable mouldings. Do I use them up? Infrequently! The latest challenge over at AAA Cards is to add small and few elements to a clean and simple card with the optional extra of ‘baked goods’. This immediately put in mind some of these cupcake mouldings languishing in my stash. A quick lick of paint later and the choice of a large card to make them look small, I came up with this:

cupcake birthday card Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: Along the edge ± rainbow #228

The latest challenge over at the AAA Cards blog is to create a card with elements along one edge with the optional extra of ‘rainbow’. One advantage of working as far ahead as I do (I’m writing this in July) is that you can make sure you don’t clash with other DT members by getting your design in first! I chose to go with one of my favourite rainbow quotes and a basic illustration to complement it.

be someone's rainbow card Continue reading

AAA Cards DT: Anything CAS goes ± Halloween cats #227

I don’t normally ‘do’ Halloween stuff, but the optional theme over at AAA Cards this week for their clean and simple card challenge is ‘Halloween cats’. I don’t particularly ‘do’ cats either – I’m a dog person – so I dropped that part of the challenge and went with a straight Halloween theme instead. This stamp from Tim Holtz was perfect for this, or a pirate card, and I’ve just coloured it in with alcohol markers.

halloween card

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AAA Cards DT: Sketch ± thankful #226

It’s a sketch challenge over at AAA Cards blog this week – use the supplied card outline to inspire your design with the optional theme of ‘thankful’. My card is possibly the quickest and simplest I have done for the design team and I’m wondering if it will be inspiring or not! Still, it keeps to the sketch and is clean and simple so it counts 🙂


thankful washi tape card design

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