MFT Summer School: Complementary Colors & MFT Sketch Challenge #392

This week, I’m participating in the My Favorite Things Wednesday Sketch Challenge #392 as well as the first 2018 session of MFT Summer School.

The fourth Summer School challenge is to use complementary colors. Everyone else seemed to be using bright primary and secondary colors for their complementary pair, but the range of complementary colors covers so much more than just those six, and I wanted to do something different. I gravitate towards tertiary and quaternary colors, earth tones, and desaturated colors, so I tackled the project with those in mind. I pulled up a color wheel and messed around with combinations, tones, and shades for a while, then narrowed down my options.

My ink and marker selection is fairly limited still and tends towards the brighter end of the spectrum, which didn’t suit the vibe I was going for, and the sketch seemed like a good way to use a bit of my profusion of 12x12 patterned paper. I bought several pads online years ago and only realized when they arrived that the reason stores sell 6x6 pads is because 12x12 patterns are enormous and don’t usually fit on A2 card fronts. Online, there was no indication that the pattern scale differed; I thought I was just getting more paper! Now I don’t know if I shall ever use it up.

In flipping through my paper pads, I was smitten with the notion of pairing a dark, desaturated red floral pattern with the green as well, so I went ahead and made two cards, using the patterned paper first as a prototype to figure out what I wanted to do with the sketch.

For the second card and my main complementary color pair, I chose dark red-violet and light yellow-green, then threw in a bit of gold since the papers read more purple and green together. I broke out my VersaMark cube and created my own tone-on-tone floral pattern, and since I had a better idea of what I wanted out of the layout, I was able to simplify things more to my tastes.

Supplies
Stamps:  Papertrey Ink “Happy Trails” (“just a note”), WPlus9 “Fresh Cut Florals” (“thinking of you”), Stampin’ Up “I Like You” (flowers)
Ink:  Brilliance Galaxy Gold, VersaMark
Paper:  Papertrey Ink Vintage Cream (bases), The Paper Studio “Affinity” pattern paper pack and “Affinity” textured paper pack, Stampin’ Up Blackberry Bliss, Recollections “Paper Flowers” cardstock pack (gold cardstock), cheap layering-weight cream and dark red from stash
Miscellanea:  Scotch Permanent Double-Sided Tape, Papertrey Ink “Double-Ended Banners” die

Dimensions
4.25” x 5.5”

Small Trio Layout

Eight whole years have passed since I last posted something here — thank goodness for Blogger’s “revert to draft” feature, or I’d have to delete this blog and start afresh. As things are, I have a nook already prepared where I can publish a little something if I have a mind to share it with the internet. I don’t expect to publish with any regularity, but posting here will, I believe, be easier than trying to use photo site links, so here I shall be.

The reason for this resuscitation? Susan recently posted a lovely card with a color scheme and layout that appealed to me so much that I wanted to mimic it immediately. That was not to be, however: freelance work comes in either a trickle or a deluge, and that week I had more work than I usually see in a month. Card-making was sidelined to such an extent that I forgot about my desire to CASE Susan’s card. When she replied to my comment on Monday, I was just catching my breath after the deluge, and the impulse to craft struck so hard that I sat down immediately and pulled out my stamps and ink.

Another deluge week is falling about my ears now (April was this busy last year, too — something in the air, maybe?), but in the six intervening days I’ve produced five cards, which is a pretty high average for me. Perfectionist that I am, I usually spend about three days on a single card, working on a couple elements each day (planning the layout, testing and selecting colors, stamping and coloring the focal element, creating the base, and assembling the components). But why make only one card if you can make two at once?

Although I don’t have any of the exact stamps that Susan used, I do happen to have a set that contains a bird, a dragonfly, and a butterfly, which made emulating easy. The text background — the main theme of her card — I had to improvise, since I don’t yet have a script background stamp. The larger and more legible words required a more subtle ink, and I realized early on that I couldn’t just stamp whole sentiments across the squares. Figuring out how to stamp selectively inked words around the focal images in a way that looked halfway decent took me longer than I’d care to admit, and I still goofed a few times on the final product. The vanilla ink was forgiving; the cyan, less so. While inking the edges of the cantaloupe dragonfly panel, I dropped it onto my ink pad. There wasn’t any way to salvage the panel without starting over, so I’m just considering it a little extra distressed.

Verdict: This was my first time truly CASEing anything, and it was a good learning experience. For the most part, I enjoyed the process, but I won’t be doing text backgrounds again until I get a background stamp! The selective inking is too time-consuming to employ frequently.

Supplies
Stamps:  Papertrey Ink “Happy Trails” (images and background words), “Spring Hills” (“sending springtime smiles”);  Hero Arts “Many Everyday Messages” (“thinking of you”)
Ink:  Memento Nautical Blue, Peanut Brittle;  VersaColor Vanilla, Celadon, Cyan;  Hero Arts Soft Cantaloupe
Paper:  Papertrey Ink Stamper’s Select White
Miscellanea:  Scotch Permanent Double-Sided Tape

Dimensions
Cards:  6.75” x 4.5”
Squares:  1.5” x 1.5”