One Stamp, Two Ways, and a New OLW Challenge!

For the OLW Challenge, please visit Jennifer's blog HERE. (You can also click the link in the sidebar for OLW34.) By coincidence, my first card today meets the challenge to use just one image stamp and one sentiment on a one layer card.

The small chandelier stamp from Hero Arts is such an elegant shape and design, but it's not small. My cards yesterday and today are standard 5.5" x 4.25" size, and as you can see, that chandelier takes up a lot of space. Today, I want to show two different uses for a largish image like this one.

First, a totally flat, one-layer card. Yesterday's cards used ribbon and smaller sentiments, but to achieve balance with the larger image and just a sentiment, I looked for a sentiment that had nearly as much weight visually as the chandelier. To anchor the chandelier so it wasn't just floating around, I stamped it so the top runs off the card. The sentiment is an old PSX stamp, stamped in Memento London Fog.

While this looked simply elegant in real life, I want to add Stickles to my computer screen. Which would be bad for my screen, don't you think?

Well, the second card actually photographed better than it looks in real life, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

Here, I used the chandelier to make a background for a popped focal panel with a sentiment. The background is slightly asymmetrical (on purpose, to keep it interesting), and when I first added the sentiment panel, something looked wrong. The sentiment was nicely centered but looked too even against the background, so I added the half pearls to give a little more asymmetry to panel. I think it worked nicely, and the pearls, from Hero Arts, are a dead ringer for Memento New Sprout...the green I used.

Design Discussion: Random stamping on backgrounds is an art unto itself. If you stamp truly randomly, without thinking about what you're going to put over the background, you'll often end up with awkward gaps or crowding when you place your focal point over the background. For this background, I planned a visual triangle around the center, so you see most of three chandeliers, all slightly running off edges and all off-set from each other. Then, I stamped just a bit of the bottom of the chandelier in the big blank space at the top...not enough to register as a whole chandelier, but enough color to create three largish blank areas in a nicely asymmetrical triangle behind the sentiment panel. Also, there is no trapped white space, which I'll talk about in detail on another post. In short, trapped white space is an area of white space that can't get off the page and creates an unpleasant hole in your design.

On another note, if I'd had teardrop pearls rather than round ones, the green card would look EVEN BETTER. But alas, I don't have teardrop pearls and wonder if anyone makes them. With all the chandelier stamps out there right now, that would be a popular embellishment, I think. Plus, you could make flowers with the teardrops as the petals and leaves, rain drops of blue ones, and fun corner embellishments combining teardrops and round ones.

Oh, my gosh! Someone make teardrop pearls RIGHT NOW!!!!! I will buy them in every color. I promise!!!!!!