Week 3 Theme Challenge

Goodness, last week was yet another glorious week  here at "Less is More" with so many amazing entries for this most difficult of Clean and Simple techniques.

Some people commented that it was a very quick job to do. Some may find it easier than others...  speaking for ourselves, we both think it takes time to think about proportion and positioning, colour and the general composition of the card as a whole. It's not just a case of whopping a couple of stamps onto a card and saying it's done. We need to be critical of what we do if we are to achieve the best possible outcome.

Some crafters have expressed a wish to become more comfortable with this type of card making and would welcome 'constructive criticism'. We are happy to do this, but would not wish to offend in any way at all. Sometimes the view of another person can focus one's own perception of one's work.
Here is a comment we received from Jenny.
"Great challenge girls and thanks for taking the time to visit and comment on both my entries. I am so glad there is someone out there who is willing to be constructive and not just say how lovely when something is so obviously wrong. My first entry wasn't right and thank goodness I was able to reduce the size and remove the HUGE word, it is now a C6 size and looks so much better. 
Jenny x"
Lorraine writes
I really value your help and I would like to improve at this style :-)  I  would like you to always tell me as it is ,,, I don't need ,,, fabby card etc etc blah blah ,, lol ,, we can all write those lol :-) I really do appreciate criticism and would never be offended ,, :-) ,,, so please ,,, be as brutal as ya like ,, I can take it :-) ,,, and THANKS !!

Lots of you have been absolute stars in visiting fellow entrant's blogs and getting to know our challenge community. We would urge you to continue to spend a little time doing this and even if it's only 10 visits, you would be making 10 people very happy! In order to save time and make commenting easier for those wonderful people who have commented on SO many blogs...


PLEASE TURN OFF WORD VERIFICATION.
You can do this by going to Design, then under the Settings tab click Comments and then click NO for word Verification. You can select Always for Blog owners approval should you be concerned about unwelcome comments.Thank you so much.

On to this week and we have a Theme challenge... the theme is

SPRING

There are no other restrictions apart from the those in the guidelines for a C&S card.

Chrissie

For this card I used a digi image from Fred She Said, coloured with Bundled Sage DI and a hint of Perfect Pearls Interference Green, used with a water brush. The sentiment was done on the computer.  Here is a quick tutorial on how I did it in Microsoft Word 2007.

1. Click Insert and then click Text box and insert the appropriate number of boxes (for this I used 3, one for Spring, one for Blossom and one for the rest of the text)
2. Divide your sentiment into components and write the parts in separate boxes
3. Change the fonts to the size and style you prefer. [I wanted a mixture of script (Precious)and type (Calibri)]
4. Highlight the boxes and click on Format and then the arrow on Text Box Styles
5. When the box pops up drag the Transparency toggle to 100% and click OK

Leave the box outlines in place at this time to allow them to be moved into position more easily.

• When highlighted, the boxes can be moved around and overlapped and because of the transparency setting, the text will not be obliterated by another box.
• I created spaces between the words in the typewritten section to allow for the risers and descenders of the script.
• When happy with the positioning, (boxes can be fine tuned by highlighting and using the arrow keys to manipulate them) select all the text boxes together by holding shift and highlighting them, and when in the Format tab, click Shape Outline and select No Outline. If you right click at this stage and group the boxes, the sentiment will stay as a unit and can then be moved around the page.

I popped the image into a text box too, so that I could place that exactly where I wanted it.

and now it's over to me, Mandi...

I too used the computer for my sentiment, using the 'text box' method.
It's invaluable when you don't have the right stamp for your required sentiment!

As you can see I have 2 cards to show you which I coloured!! not my favourite activity that's for sure lol

The image is from Paper Garden Projects




















Fonts Used:
Card 1 Juice ITC and Scriptina
Card 2 Calibri and Jellyka Saint-Andrew's Queen
Available from Dafont.com
As you can see they are pretty much the same, I made the larger crocus one first, thought it looked 'wrong' and the second evolved. I then couldn't decide which one I liked best!
Our lovely neighbour Jenny has one of them now as it was her birthday yesterday.

The first thing I did was the sentiment. I tend to do this as it gives the base of the design.
A little tip next..
When I'm going to stamp directly onto the base of a card, I stamp the image onto a scrap piece of the same card to test how it stamps.
In this way I discover whether a bit more pressure over all or part of the design is required and also to see how the card fares too. I often use hammer or linen textured and use the back of the card, which is the smoother side, to give even texture. I then roughly cut around the test image to check for placement on the card! Printed the font in black, the digi is outlined in black, then the line background also in black,
which ties everything together. I stamped and coloured the images and added crystal glaze to the flowers as Crocuses are always 'wet' looking to me as they are so low to the ground and often in the damp grass!

As usual we would ask you to link directly to your card not just to your blog and to link back to this challenge within your post.
We can't wait to see your creations and do look out for the newly ShowCASed cards in the slideshow very soon.