Single layer card

Having taken a leaf from Idle Emma’s book and joined a swapping site, I find myself having international post to send, which whilst exciting is proving expensive, especially due to my tendency to add bows, buttons and other bulky embellishments.

Today’s card was a personal challenge. Make something I like but which has no embellishments, one layer only.

I used my Hunkydory For the Love of Stamps Babushka dolls, picking the ‘stay beautiful’ sentiment because I thought it was sweet, especially for someone who is essentially a stranger. I didn’t have any idea at first of how I wanted the card to look, but I’d chosen a 5×5 card blank which helped my layout. 

The sentiment seemed best central, and I needed to make it pop without lots of matting and layering which is how I’d usually make it obvious. Hmmmm.

I tried laying different size dolls around the sentiment but didn’t like the look, too haphazard without the attractiveness of being random. Then I thought I’d try a sun style layout, with lots of the same size doll forming a circle around the sentiment. I like this, but if I do it again I’ll measure to try to get an element of symmetry, there’s differing size gaps between the dolls.

Because the layout of dolls isn’t symmetrical, I decided to make the colouring different across each, White was easier said than done! I wanted to keep a fairly small, simple colour scheme, but found I was tending to too high a concentration of the same colours in the same area, resulting in me using white to dilute the colour concentration. 

I layered my card front onto red card and attached it to the card front, then looked at my handiwork and thought it’s a bit flat (yes, Michelle, that was the point!), so added a touch of glitter glue to some of the Babushka’s bows.

What do you think? I did manage single layer, ish, but in my defense ii couldn’t have used my spectrum noirs directly onto the card blank as they’d bleed through, and my pencils are a bit subdued for this subject.