Grunging in a Different Direction

Papertrey's Grunge Me set is incredibly versatile. The last two cards I posted using it were grunge...with splatter stamps and chaos abounding. Today, we're going to rein that chaos in and go totally graphic, clean, and simple.

The colors make this card pop happily, as does the random placement of bling. I like how the rectangular shape of the dots sorta kinda resembles a birthday cake shape. It's subtle, but fun!

And lest anyone think that this sort of card is easy because it has so little on it, know that I messed it up the first time when I stamped the birthday a bit too low and unbalanced the whole design. I contemplated trying again and figured the best thing to do was to draw pencil lines 1/8" above and below the dots. Then, I lined up the words using the pencil lines. This worked because both the top and bottom of the words are flat and thus easy to line up...wouldn't work so well with a cursive font or a sentiment with ascenders and descenders on the letters.

On another note, Carol Cel asked where I learned about trapped white space and other design stuff. I was privileged to work with two fabulous graphic design artists at Micron Technology in Boise, ID. Randy and Liz took words I'd edited as Writer/Editor and made them look good on brochures, newsletters, data books, powerpoint presentations, and web sites. I soaked up their knowledge whenever I could, and then when I read Cathy Zielski's two books on scrapbook design, it all sort of came together. Took years of practice before I could actually apply what I learned to what I create, though.

Sometimes, being a tad obsessive is a good thing!


Supplies
stamps: Papertrey Grunge Me, Birthday Basics
ink: Memento
paper: Papertrey
accessories: ruler, pencil, gridded acrylic block, rhinestones