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:
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.
Just in case you need reminding, OLC stands for ‘one layer card’ where you aren’t allowed to use any layers other than the cardstock that forms the card itself. It’s the latest challenge over at Less is More, along with the theme of your favourite flower. Die cuts are out, as are most embellishments so it’s a difficult challenge. I don’t particularly have a favourite flower, but I do have a favourite daisy stamp so I went with that!
Another challenge over at AAA Cards – it’s a colour scheme recipe with the guidance to be black and white and one other colour. As with all their challenges, the aim is to keep your card clean and simple (lots of white space, few, if any, embellishments and keeping elements to roughly one third of the card).
This one-layer card challenge is a little easier than the last one. The theme is ‘spots’ over at Less is More. I’ve previously used a stencil for making a multi-coloured spotty card, so wanted to do something different this time. After digging through my rubber stamp collection I found a semicircular spotty pattern by Magenta. It just so happens that after having it for years, this was the first time it had been used. I made two cards:
It’s recipe time at Less is More and the theme chosen is ‘more than one type of foliage’. One of the main aims of the challenge (aside from making sure the card is clean and simple) is to make the theme to be the focus of the card. There was only one stamp set I could think of in my collection that would fit the bill – a set of five fern fronds by Hero Arts. Here’s the eventual winner, from three I made, for my design team card:
CAS? It stands for ‘Clean And Simple’ and refers to a card that has plenty of whitespace around the elements. Ideally a one layer, no embellishment type of card, it is perfect for the Less Is More challenge site. And it usually is anything but simple to make. This time, the theme is ‘more’ – we did ‘less’ last time. Here’s my take on the challenge:
These pages were an exercise in complementary colours. Using the Distress palette, I chose a colour and then the closest colour to its inverse – a different way to find a complementary colour than using a colour wheel. Above, Stormy Sky meets Gathered Twigs, whilst below, Crushed Olive zings against Shaded Lilac and Dusty Concord. Oh yes, one more thing – buckled pages do not make an easy surface to be stamping paint onto…
I’ve jumped a few weeks in my Wanderlust 2016 course – I do aim to go back and catch up, but Andy Skinner was the tutor for this week’s activity, and I just had to get grungy! I transformed the front cover of my latest (A5) journal using his techniques and I’m delighted with the results. I think it looks like embossed leather, and with the soft touch varnish from DecoArt, it even feels like leather. The trickiest thing I found was getting a uniform thickness of modelling paste, so I’ll be working on that the next time I try it.
