The Joyful Soul Creates

Today’s card has another digi stamp. That’s been a recurring theme in the cards I’ve made recently! Actually as you can see this card uses both a digi stamp and a physical stamp. I think the combination gives an interesting effect.

Okay before I get into what I think of the card, I should mention which challenges I drew inspiration from. The layout is from The Paper Players‘ current challenge. I combined that with Allsorts challenge blog‘s Wings prompt and the Celebrating Spring prompt from Daring Cardmakers. I’m also entering the card to Simon Says Stamp Wednesday‘s Anything Goes challenge.

I took some creative liberties with the sketch. I flipped it, for starters. I used the bird in place of the circle and consider the branch of blossom a substitute for the banner.

My starting point for making the card was to find a digi stamp to use. I was hoping to find a nest to use with my bird stamp, but didn’t manage to find anything suitable. So I expanded my search and let myself be a bit more open to other ideas. When I spotted this stamp I knew I wanted to use it. I liked it a lot, it seemed simple and still Spring-like, and I knew it could work well in the layout as discussed above.

I coloured the stamp digitally as I have with the previous digi stamps I’ve used. I went for soft purples for the blossoms, hints of greens on the stems, and light brown for the branch itself. It was nice and quick to colour, with the only open line being at the end of the branch, which was easy enough to get around.

After printing the branch I fussy cut it. It took much longer to cut out than it did to colour, because of course it is quite a fiddly and delicate shape. For the sake of simplicity I left a small white border. The border isn’t as even as I would have liked but it works well enough.

I stamped the bird to go on the branch using purple too, and fussy cut that.

The main elements of my card were then done. I needed to find some papers to use for the background strips. I chose the pearlised cardboard you can see. I actually have it in three colours – pink, blue and green. Initially I was planning on setting the whole thing on the pearlised green as a background rather than the white. After some consideration I decided that wouldn’t look right and swapped the green out. I considered replacing one of the blue strips with green but felt that the blue worked better.

I’m pretty happy with how the card worked out. The pink and blue fit the Spring theme well. And blossom and birds, well, they’re Spring-like, right? I kind of wanted to add a sentiment to the card but couldn’t decided what. Plus I wasn’t sure where to put it. It works without anyway. Areas to improve are the fussy cutting, and also alignment, because the smallest strip in particular ended up not very straight.

Love,

Lady Joyful