How do you design a handmade card?

 

How do you design a handmade card?  Personally, I almost always start with a sketch, like the one below from Sunday Stamps' Challenge #290.  Sketch Challenges are a great place to start when trying to decide how to start creating a card.  Another great place to find sketches is Stampin' Up!'s catalogs.  They don't have sketches, exactly, but you can look at any card and get a basic layout idea and go from there. That's how I usually design my cards for my Tuesday Card from the Catalog YouTube Videos. 

The next step, for me, is usually to figure out what colors combination I want to use.  If I'm creating for a specific person, I like to start with colors I know they like.  For instance, yesterday's card was inspired by my daughter, her love of sunflowers and the colors she chose to decorate her dorm room with. 

For today's card, I knew I wanted it to be a bit more masculine but wasn't sure about the exact color combination.  I looked through my Designer Series Paper and decided on this beautiful Rustic Harvest DSP.  The colors in it are perfect to use with Celebrate Sunflowers (my Stamp Set of the Week) and can be pretty masculine.  

Of course, another way I choose colors is to flip through my catalog and get inspiration from the colors used together in projects, page layouts and the Designer Series Papers in it.  

And, in a pinch, Pinterest is always a great place to go for inspiration! 

For the inside of the card, I often add a 4" x 5-1/4" piece of Basic White (or Very Vanilla) cardstock and a narrow strip of the DSP I used on the front of the card.  Other times I stamp a small stamp in the corner of the inside layer.  Occasionally I will do something else, but those are my go to insides for most of my cards. 

MEASUREMENTS

Card Base ~ Basic Black Cardstock ~ 11" x 4-1/4", score at 5-1/2"

Layer 1 ~ Rustic Harvest Designer Series Paper ~ 4" x 4" & 1" x 4"

Layer 2 ~ Rustic Harvest DSP ~ 2" x 4-3/4"

Sunflower Bottom Layer ~ Crushed Curry Cardstock ~ 3-1/2" x 3-1/2"

Sunflower Top Layer ~ Cajun Craze Cardstock ~ 3-1/2" x 3-1/2"

Sunflower Center ~ Merry Merlot Cardstock ~ 1"  x 1"

Sentiment ~ Basic Black Cardstock ~ scrap at least 2" x 1"

Thanks for looking at my blog today.

Happy Stamping!

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