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 🙂
I’ve procrastinated a bit on my homework for this section as I and watercolours often do not get on well together. The lessons have been great on Wanderlust 2022, with each of the tutors carefully and patiently explaining the techniques they use so that they are, in the main, replicable. Here are my results from weeks 29-35…
Various mixed media techniques on papers other than watercolour paper have generally worked ok. I still haven’t fallen in love with watercolours as a medium, but am glad I have tried them. Oh, and buying decent tube watercolours made such a difference to the vibrancy of the colours over the student quality hard pan collections I normally use.
A new challenge has just been published over at the AAA Cards challenge blog. This time, it is to create a clean and simple card using a colour theme set by a photo with the optional extra of using dots. I picked out the primary four colours from the inspiration photo and spent a bit of time matching them to archival ink colours before stamping them onto white card using the same dotty stamp. Now, I usually avoid layers on my CAS cards, but most guidelines specify no or few layers so I feel I can get away with two. I like the individual pieces’ drop shadows and the depth they provide.
This ended up being a fast and simple card once I had chosen the stamps! The challenge over at Less is More for the next fortnight is to create a clean and simple card using just black and white. I was tempted to add shades of grey as shadows and to add some depth but decided it wouldn’t meet the challenge.
A little challenge over at AAA Cards this fortnight, with the main theme being ‘small and few’. The optional twist is to add (lady)bugs to your clean and simple card design. Here’s my take on the theme:
Over at Less is More, there’s a new theme challenge for your clean and simple cards/makes – ‘butterflies’. Clean and simple means minimal layers, and lots of blank space, drawing attention to the stamping/colouring/sentiment. Here’s my one layer take on the theme, using watercolour pencils and a bit of distress ink over a mask to get the blue band across the middle:
The current challenge at AAA Cards blog is to use a rectangle just 1/9th of the card face. The optional twist is to add butterflies to your layout. The normal ratio of white space to an image on a clean and simple card is 2/3rds to 1/3rd, so reducing this again makes for an extremely clean card, though not necessarily simpler. Here’s my take on the theme:
I’m looking forward to a plethora of brightly coloured cards over the next fortnight in response to the latest clean and simple card challenge from Less is More. It’s a colour challenge: ‘rainbow’. It’s been a long time since I featured a rainbow on a card and I couldn’t think of a stamp that was in my stash that had a rainbow on it. So, I dumped one possible interpretation of the theme and went with just the colours:
Another no layers card at AAA Cards in their latest challenge. There’s also the option of a ‘plant/grow/farm’ theme. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t have any stamps featuring tractors or farmyard animals/birds, so went instead for another interpretation of ‘plant’ and featured a flower on my one layer card:
It’s recipe time at Less is More, and your ingredient is ‘a tag’. Just make a clean and simple card featuring a tag, upload it to your blog and share the link over at the challenge blog. I’ve made this card for inspiration as part of the design team:
