Bright & Beautiful

Today I have a card for the AAA Card Challenge #89 which is a CAS Challenge with a theme of Bright and Beautiful this week. That means that your cards needs to have clean lines and lots of "white" space with minimal layers or embellishment.  I actually make quite a few cards in this style so that when I give them away, they are good for mailing without extra layers or extra postage. While I love the look of well done shabby chic style cards, I can rarely pull that look off so a clean and simple style suits me well most of the time.

In my efforts to get back in the groove of work this week, I made an attempt to get some things off my desk. I had stamped this Kind Soul Stamp on a watercolor panel several weeks ago when I first received it, but it's been sitting on my desk ever since. Right now, I seem to be in the mood to watercolor but like everything else, it goes in stages. This is a WPLUS9 Design from Dawn Woleslagle and she has done all the hard work for us by creating this stamp in a bouquet that will fit vertically or horizontally or anything in between on a card front. There is also a coordinating die. This is good since I like to heat emboss and it's a lot more difficult to keep your embossing clean when you are also doing masking.

I'm not an artist and I don't have an art background so leaving white space is harder for me than it might seem. It's a struggle to control how much water you are using and how much color, etc. I really struggle with leaving some of the white showing through on my petals and such, so I practice although I don't know if that is helping me get better. If it's presentable is the main thing I care about and it doesn't matter to me if it's technically correct.  The moral of this story is to keep trying.  I have a long way to go but I think this was an improvement for me.

To color my image today I used Clean Color Real Brush Markers in Persian Blue, Deep Green and Violet. I used my favorite greeting from Altenew's Beautiful Day and stamped it in Versamark on the black Number the Stars Banner then heat embossed it with Simon Says Stamp Antique Gold Embossing Powder which continues to be my favorite gold. With the black centers on the anemones, it was the perfect finishing touch. Elaborate can be pretty, but making cards has taught me an appreciation for simple elegance as well.