The tale of two card sets

As promised I am going to share some new cards with you today and how I designed them.

During one of my Creative Playtimes I made an ombré background with some greenish teals. I often play with my creative supplies without any card in mind to see what comes out.

This takes some pressure out of the process and frees my mind up to simply focus on the technique in front of me without wondering at the back of my mind, “How am I going to make a card out of this?”

During my next Creative Playtime I sit down with the pieces I’ve made previously and imagine them into cards.

If you are someone who likes making things with your hands, I highly recommend you schedule times when you just play with your supplies without trying to get things perfect. You can make something out of your experiments later. Wonderful art pieces can result from this practice! It can also get you out of a creative or even a mood slump, I’ve discovered.

Back to the greenish teal background.

After letting the background sit for a day or so I came back to it and began searching my brain for some techniques and supplies I hadn’t used in a while or had never used.

This list was the result:

• landscape orientation
• solid color border edged with metallic
• nature-inspired ironwork
• I don’t use silver that often
• I have two stamp sets I want to make card sets with

And that list resulted in the card pictured below:

Originally, I left the card with only the silver leaves on the border, but the next time I picked the card up I thought, “Why not go further?” and added the butterflies.

Satisfied with the model, I then moved on to making the two card sets I had dreamed about.

For the first one I went with a pink palette (I recently purchased some new pink inks and wanted to use them together) and kept the butterflies. I also used a champagne gold card stock.

On the second card set I returned to my most used metallic, gold, ditched the butterflies, chose warming reds and yellow, and focused on courage.

Oh, and I introduced water splatters on the second set’s backgrounds.

These two card sets are not available in my shop at present. A few technical duties will need to be performed for that to happen.

If you found this post interesting or have something you wish to say about it, you can email me at [email protected].

Thank you for spending time with me today!

To your card giving,

Grace Arant