Spring greetings cards & new banner
Spring Greeting Cards
As I mentioned on my blog in early April, I wanted to make some Spring-themed greeting cards to send out to my friends, but my craft room needed to be cleaned out first. Well I made a set of cards now, but it seemed to take full 2 weeks to make 20 of them! I am averaging 2 cards a day at that rate :( I have to get faster. I believe I have come up with some useful design principles and color schemes that I think will be useful on other cards as well. I am reading the Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird that seems to agree with most of the design principles I use on my cards. I have divided the space into 1/3 and 2/3 portions. The horizontal line also creates a plane, which is a principle used often by Cezanne. Below is a photo of a representative sample:
The card above was my first prototype. It kept evolving. I added the flowers on the bottom and the checkered stencil bottom border later. I also drew the eyes inside the cat eye sunglasses. The eyes took a long time and I needed a magnifying glass. The best way to draw them is to first draw a thin crescent top across the full width of the sunglasses with a black pencil, and then dot the eyeballs using a thin felt-tip pen.
The main stamp is "Paris in the Spring" from Stampin Up. I colored it using Shimmering H2O, which were shiny and easy to apply with a sable brush. Small details were colored with a gel pen or marker pen. I used 3 sets of alphabets for the sentiment (Curlzy stamps, brad letter stickers, and round dotted stamps). Air is stamped with Brilliance peacock, which is my favorite inkpad. It also adds shimmering shine. The bottom flowers where attached using my new Xylon 1.5". I used 2 sizes of flower punches to make some of the flowers out of cardstock. Base pink cardstock is from WorldWin. Their 12" paper is 70 pounds and feels very luxurious. I like it better than Stampin Up cardstock. WorldWin's letter size paper is only 65 pounds, and feels about the same as Stampin Up's.
This is a later design. I began to simplify the elements. I think I like these better. I skipped attaching the individual brad alphabets with tweezers because they were taking too long. "Greetings" stamp is one of my favorite from Ken Brown Caligraphy. I also mounted the alphabets for "SPRING" onto a clear acrylic block to be able to stamp it in one motion instead of six.
I ran out of light pink cardstock so I used a handmade paper from Korea with bark pieces embedded on it. I really love this paper. It is much stronger than the generic mulberry paper from the Paper Company, which is a poor quality. The Paper Company is an excellent source for cardstock, though, and they have the best possible prices. The burgundy is a bit too dark, but I love their apricot/coral color -- it is the best!
I hope to be mailing these out to you with my personal messages in the coming weeks :)
Please don't get mad at me if it takes a long time to arrive. I AM still working on a website, my StockWiki.com. I am re-energized after all the crafting and Spring Cleaning during April to get back to work on StockWiki. I think I know what to do to design the layout now. Spreadsheet programming will be harder, but I have some ideas from the math side on how it might be implemented. Cheers, and Happy Spring while it lasts! -- Jennifer --
