Taking A Look Back...

Out of date Stampin' Up catalogs are some of the publications that I just can't seem to toss out.  When I'm looking for card inspiration I get them out and flip through the pages until something catches my eye.

These cards were inspired by photos in the 2009 catalog. I used Card Games and God's Beauty stamp sets.

I colored the joker image with Promarkers and used Make The Cut to cut the heart and circle.  There's a little pen work and inking on it also.

This card has three different shades of purple cardstock; the lightest one looks white in the photo.  I used  Lilac Posies, Grape Jelly and Bamboo Leaves ink by Memento.

The background was stamped with Versamark ink for a watermark effect.

Color Charts

I use Hallmark card making software to print my sentiments and clip art images for my cards.  It seemed like every time I wanted to print some text in a color to coordinate with the paper I was using, it would take me multiple tries to get the right shade.  So, today, I finally made myself a chart of the default colors available in the software.   I can customize them too if they're not dark enough, etc.

  Right after purchasing my Promarkers, I made this chart to help me select colors.  I just set up a page in Excel and colored the boxes beside each name.  I did one for my Stampin' Up markers too.

Being able to see what the colors of the printer ink look like, I was able to get a pretty close match to some Martha Stewart ink that I used to stamp the flowers on this simple card.  The stamps are SU, God's Beauty set and I used Old Olive cardstock.

Dawn Griffith had a card like this on her blog this morning.  It's a good example of how a simple design can be used for a variety of cards by just changing the sentiment you choose.

God's Beauty Stamp Set

The paper is SU and the flower images that I stamped onto the background paper, cut out, and mounted with pop dots are from their God's Beauty stamp set.

The leaves are from an old set of Studio G $1 stamps and colored with my Promarkers.

The three shapes behind the flowers were cut from Accent Essentials cartridge and reshaped using Design Studio to make them more narrow in width.

The doodling was done with SU markers and a Signo white gel pen.

Although there's nothing wrong with this card, I am not happy with the lack of contrast on the background images.  The blue shape blends into the base paper too well.  I should have added a deeper color so that it would pop off the base paper or inked the edges so that it wouldn't have blue on blue without some delineation.

Latest cards

This first card has the God's Beauty stamp set from SU used for the flowers and Old Olive cardstock for the base.  I cut the flowers out and pop-dotted them onto the stem for a little dimension.  The sentiment is an old, old $1 stamp.

It took me some time to find the kraft cardstock in my stash and I don't have many sheets of it.  Next time I'm at HL I need to pick some of that up.

This second card is sort of a re-run.  I did the sentiment in my cardmaker software and ran across it this afternoon.  Had a great idea for using it on a card, and this ain't it! LOL!  I printed it out too big to use it the way I wanted so this is how I wound up using it.  I'm too cheap to throw it out!

I used shape scissors to trim the edges, mica paper for the little tabs and added some brads.