Designing Cards

Last year during a burst of creative energy, I began to design cards for my friends. I worked up about twelve different templates that could be varied in terms of pop-ups, cut-outs and varied styles, and then I went to Pearl Arts & Crafts and stocked up on handmade papers, varied colors and textures to play around with as well as new brushes and watercolors. The work had actually begun back in August the year before when I designed a card for a friend's wedding shower. Their wedding colors were burgundy and gold (no..not the Redskins), and I created an interlocking spiral that had a pair of lovebirds, beaks joined to a gold foil heart. This was suspended by a thread attached inside the card. I also created templates for four styles of envelopes (eight in total) in two sizes to accommodate all of the card styles I would be working on.


Joe and Dani's Wedding Shower Card


In January, I started working on the cards with more involvement, and I made an origami penguin sitting on an ice floe. The card and matching envelope were handpainted on art paper with watercolor, and I coordinated the ice floes to match up visually when laid out. This went on into Spring, then I got busy around May with...I don't know..life, and I dropped it all, right in the middle of a new design involving pop-up sailboats for a friend in Annapolis. I want to get back to this project as I felt I was accomplishing something interesting with my designs, and it certainly filled the idle hours with a nice end result.



Harriet's Penguin Birthday Card