Flipping out!

I brought the stamps for this card in early spring. Some people call this a flip card but most seem to call it a waterfall card. The stamp sets for these usually have a series of 4-5 images that show the progression of something happening and then reader pulls the tab to flip them like an old paper stack of hand drawn  animations or pictures were flipped to create a moving picture before we had these cool LCD displays with millions of dots that can be changed hundreds of times a second to any color you want with a little electricity.

I am working through them and planning to use each of the stamp sets to make a card. Here's the first one themed around Halloween. Click on the card if you want to see the directions.

Trick or Treat Pumpkin Card

Here's a nice card that's not too hard to make. The colored paper is all from the same Bazzill basics stack, so the colors are the same muted tone and coordinate well together. Since they are muted they coordinate perfectly with the background mat which uses muted colors as well. The background was from a 12x12 sheet which had some printed distressing on the corners that I kept in the bottom right for visual interest where you are going to look when you open the card.




The pumpkin is colored and shaded on white paper using Copic markers. The shading adds another dimension. I highly recommend people develop some way of coloring their images but if you don't have any way of coloring a pumpkin image you can always just stamp it on orange cardstock.

If you have been following along you should recognize this pumpkin image as one of the dollar stamps I've been using a lot. You can also think of this card as the final step up on the series of simple orange cards I posted using this image because this does represent what you can do when you move beyond a simple pack of cheap colored cardstock to a higher quality coordinated pack of cardstock and a modern stack that uses the same types of colors.

As always, click on the card for the larger image and direction sheet if you want more.

Witches' Brew for World Card Making Day

	Oct 2nd is World Card Making Day and soon it will be Halloween so what better way to celebrate than to have some witches mix up a special treat!
I got this image a few weeks ago at a rubber stamp convention as unmounted rubber from a company called Rubber Cottage. It's a great way to buy stamps because you can usually get the unmounted rubber for about half the price (or less) of a fully mounted wood block, which means you can buy twice as much. You buy the cling foam (they sell it there) and put the back of your unmounted rubber image on the super sticky side and then cut it out with a good pair of scissors. The other side of the cling foam will stick to any acrylic block just like a clear stamp. You can also cut out the foam first, then stamp the cling side using Staz-on and then mount it.
Someone at the convention usually sells white plastic sheets you can stick the cling side to and organize them in a binder. This lets you have all the advantages of real vulcanized rubber in about the same space as clear stamps. Since I use this method to store them, I don't bother stamping the cling side since I won't be able to see it when I'm looking though them. Once you fill up a sheet, just ink all the images and stamp the sheet onto a piece of paper if you want a correctly flipped version of the image to look through.
I had wanted to do something a little fancier with the image but it was so large that I ended up just framing it with paper because I didn't want to go to a larger card size. The image itself was a witch to color. Before it's colored it looks like a giant mess of lines and it's difficult to follow which line is which. It was worth the effort in the end though.
Click the image above for the instruction sheet if you want more information on the colors used. For the fire, I didn't do normal Copic blending like you see on the dresses, faces and hats. Instead I just laid down flicks of red, then orange and then yellow while it was wet. The ink blended together down toward the yellow so it looks natural but I wanted to leave the random splashes of color to balance out the witches being so dark.

Witching You A Spooky Halloween

Here's another fairly simple card using mostly dollar stamps, but this one has a lot more design elements so it looks a lot nicer. It has all five of the traditional Halloween colors on it and it incorporates 5 different stamps. Another key design element is how the images manage the flow of your eye across the page. The witch takes you to the spider, the spider is going toward the start of the words and the bat and skeleton are headed toward the words as well. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting if the images had been arranged so they lead you off the page and away from the card. This is an important concept in scrapbooking and anytime you make a card like this with a bunch of different things on it that cause your eye to naturally follow them and see where they are headed.

As always click the image to go the instruction page on http://www.sharedcards.com for more information on the stamps, paper sizes or supplies used.