Thursday, March 26, 2009

Adding That Little Extra Touch

When creating LTC's, or any kind of card for that matter and you want the stamp image to be the main focus of your piece of artwork but you don't want a bunch of embellishments to take away from that image, try this very simple technique that will frame your image and keep your artwork simple and clean.

I like using the Color Box Cat's Eye ink pads for this technique because I get much better control over where and how much color I want to apply to my cards.

Take the ink pad and wipe or drag it along the edge of the card to give it a kind of blended frame around the edge. You can go over it as many times as you want to give the right amount of coverage that you will be happy with.

I have tried doing this technique with the larger, stiffer ink pads and it gives it a more lined effect to the card rather than a nice blended ink effect. I am not saying that it is bad, it is just different. You may prefer that kind of a look.

Here are a few examples of cards with just the image stamped onto the card. I did us a punch on the corners to give it that extra touch.

Here are the same cards with the ink blended around the edges. See how well it frames the stamp image and makes it stand out so much more? Scroll up and down to the pictures to see the difference.

Add a corresponding color card to the backing for that extra burst of color! Perdy!

7 comments:

  1. Awesome! What else can I say!! I will definitely try this technique soon...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow! What awesome carvings! I especially like the girl with the mask...is she available for a trade?

    Lavagirl

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like the one with the mask too. May I ask where you find such images? I never seem to be able to find cool images like these.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I find all my images by doing a Google Image search. I also collect images to save for carving later because I can never seem to find them again when I look for them later. The mask was available at L&B Shiloh for the Masquerade Ball as an LTC trade.

    ReplyDelete