Before and After: Color Balance

Before

When I made this card, one mistake caused some odd design elements. When I stamped the Text Style background, I left a bit too much space between images. So that's where I put the twine, to cover the gap. Then, I decided that I'd use a red starfish for a pop of color, highlight it with some rhinestones, and stamp the sentiment in cool caribbean.

Sadly, the starfish is just a little too visually insignificant and just floating there on the twine oddly. (You try attaching a skinny-armed starfish over twine!) Plus, the sentiment really needed to be red.

After

By replacing the starfish with a couple of sea horses, anchored from below with the twine in a more realistic manner, the right side of the card has more visual weight and makes more sense. The sentiment also doesn't disappear now that it's red.

If I made a third version of the card, I'd make the popped water panel a smidge taller, to give more room for the sea horses. The twine is just a little too low on the panel.

And yes, I understand text-covered water is weird, but I don't care. I love text, and I love the ocean. If you want to do something similar but not so English-major geeky, you could try polka dots or flourishes or something nautical. But I'm sticking with text.

Supplies
stamps: Text Style (PTI), Life is a Beach (PTI)
ink: cool caribbean, real red (SU)
paper: Mark's Finest Paper
accessories: Martha Stewart sand dollar/starfish punch, sea horse punch, Fiskar's ocean waves border punch, dimensionals, glue dot, twine (PTI) 

Before and After: Color and Scale

It's really amazing how color and scale can affect a card...especially a clean and simple card where there is no place to hide! If you make a card that doesn't seem quite right, ask yourself if a simple change in color or scale (or both, in this case!) might make a difference.

Before

This card has two problems. 1) The green (Memento Pear Tart...yummmm!) is too light to stand up to the orange rhinestones. 2) The rhinestones are just too, too big.

After

To fix it, I switched to Old Olive ink from StampinUp (which sadly doesn't stamp as crisply with the PTI stamps sometimes), and found some tiny rhinestones to mix in with the small ones.

Supplies
stamps: Papertrey Way to Go, Kiddo; Birthday Basics
ink: Memento pear tart; SU close to cocoa, old olive
paper: PTI white
accessories: Rhinestones, scallop scissors to round the corners of the card

More Rectangles and a Before and After

So, a LOT of you really liked the Fun with Rectangles post, so I thought I'd start this week off with a couple of different takes on those happy floral birthday cards. Let's start with a festive flourish for Christmas. This card uses Papertrey Ink's Silent Night set.

Design Discussion: I made sure the flourishes didn't "match up" across the rectangles on this one. At first, they did, and it looked, well, boring. Static. Flat. Well, the stamping still looks flat, but there's enough movement to the flourishes that it doesn't matter. Having them not match up keeps a very simple card interesting. Go figure.

Now, this next card is the BEFORE version. My thinking here was to turn the original layout and make the rectangles uneven and asymmetrical...because I have an old and discontinued set from Hero Arts (Woodland Leaves and Grasses) and thought it would make a great guy birthday card. Problem was, I thought that the yellow-gold of the ink for the grass was a lot more yellow than the reddish-orange of the leaves in the upper right panel. Instead, they came out wayyyy too close to each other to allow for a green panel on bottom. The colors are just off.

Before

So if fixed it.

After

Now all the colors are in the orange-red family and harmony is once again restored. Not bad for a guy card, eh?

Supplies
Merry Christmas
stamps: Papertrey Silent Night
paper: PTI white
ink: Memento
accessories: dimensionals

Happy Birthday
stamps: Hero Arts
paper: PTI vintage cream
ink: various Ancient Page and Memento
accessories: dimensionals