Nature Walk

Making clean-and-simple cards with graphic-style stamps (think of Papertrey's Modern Basics, for example) is relatively easy. Getting clean-and-simple cards from sets like StampinUp's Nature Walk or Lovely as a Tree is a lot more challenging. The artistic, natural style of the stamps lends itself more readily to shabby chic, collage, and vintage...basically, layered and embellished styles.

But there are some very simple ways of allowing these natural images to take center stage in CAS designs, and I just love playing around with them.

Many, many thanks to Reader Bev, who sent me SU's set Nature Walk. I sat down and played with it first chance I had, and here are the first two cards I made.

The crisp layout of mosaic rectangles inside a tidy rectangle arranged on a rectangular card lends itself to CAS. The trick to making these mosaic layouts work is even spaces between the pieces, and tweezers can help so much with placing the pieces.

By the way, I really loved the look of rounded corners of the blue card and wanted to do the same on the green card, but after I stamped the sentiment, I realized that rounding the bottom right corner would cramp the sentiment. The miss you sentiment was chosen because the troops need lots of cards with it, and this card is destined for Operation Write Home. As there is nothing soft about missing loved ones, the sharp, pointy corners feel appropriate to the situation, don't you think?

For tips and tricks on making these rectangular mosaics, you can see my tutorial HERE.


Supplies
stamps: SU Nature Walk, Papertrey Simple Little Things (sentiment on green card)
ink: Versacolor
paper: PTI white, light blue; SU certainly celery
accessories: dimensionals, corner rounder, tweezers