Hi friends, how are you? I can’t believe it’s September tomorrow! There’ll be an exciting new RAM Stamps release tomorrow, but I’m still playing with this month’s! Today, I’m sharing a fairly clean and simple card that has a little hack for achieving a dreamy watercolour background…
TIP 1 – Printing your digital images. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll hate waste, and want to stretch your supplies as much as possible. So, I never just print one image at a time. Before printing, I sketched out some ideas for cards that I wanted to make with my digital images so I’d know the rough size I’d need, and that let me arrange them on my page, to print several at once and make sure I had no wasted card.
The August RAM release features six “scene builder” images which means that you get each element of the scene separately, and can arrange them as you like to create a scene, which is brilliantly versatile! So for this card, I used the “Hoppy Birthday Bunny” scene creator. I wanted a big greeting on the bottom, with the rabbit and mouse standing on the top of it. I copied and pasted each of the individual images into Word, and resized them to create my scene. I made sure the width of the words was about 4″ and placed over to the bottom left of the card, so that I could cut the card 4 1/4″ wide and make a US A2 sized card.
After cutting down my card, I scored above my scene to create the top-fold, then trimmed the back of the card to 5 1/2″ tall. This left me with my scene on the front of the card, coming to just over half way down the height of the card. There is a reason I did this – I wanted a watercolour background on the inside of my card, that would be showing through to the front.
TIP 2 – fancy an ethereal, flowing, watercolour background, but not sure where to start? Cheat 🙂 Today, I used watercolour patterned paper (mine was from make&create in the UK, but I know Lawn Fawn have some available – like this one). I chose a piece with colours that I liked, that faded into white at the top, so that when you open the card, there would be a space to write a message. I glued the paper into the inside of the card using tape runner.
I then coloured my image using Arteza coloured pencils. I’d swatched them out beforehand, so I compared the colours in the patterned paper to my swatch chart, and chose similar coloured pencils to colour the Happy Birthday greeting and the balloon. I then used soft browns on the bunny and mouse.
To finish my card, I added a few sequins from my favourite sequin mix by Lucy’s cards (it’s called Beauty).
I love the softness of this card. I might add it to an A2 top-folding base so that it can stand up, but I actually quite like it as it is – I’m sure the recipient will be happy to prop it up against something if they want to! Thanks for joining me again today. I’ve used affiliate links above, but they’re at no additional cost to you if you click through and purchase something with the linked supplier – it will just earn me a few cents and allow me to keep doing this and bringing you crafty inspiration – so thank you for supporting me, if you do!!