It has been 3 month's since my last AECP Post, so clearly, I lost a lot of momentum. I'm still very committed to this endeavor, but between work, family and the holidays, there has just been very little down time. Thankfully, I did manage to get some crafting time in. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I finally have the time to post about my progress.
The next academy class in the AECP Level 1 series For The Guys by Jennifer Rzasa, The lessons were very inspiring. It gave many ideas to try. In relative quick succession, I made two cards.
Galaxy Card
The first card I made was a galaxy card. I have wanting to try this for a while, so this was a perfect opportunity. I started by masking a circle for the moon and then used Volcano Lake, Ocean Waves, Puffy Heart and Deep Iris crisp dye inks for the galaxy colors. Then I used Persian Blue, Sapphire and Jet Black to crisp die inks to fill in the night sky.
Once I was happy with the background, I added metallic silver paint splatters for smaller stars and made dots with a silver sharpie pen to add some brighter ones. I took off the mask, and layered the moon with Tsukineko's Platinum Planet and Starlike Silver for a little extra sparkle. The moon is from the To The Moon stamp set.
For the focal point, I used one of the cats from Cat Life stamp set by Altenew. I stamped the spots in both caramel toffee and paper bag to get the shade of light brown I was looking for. Last but not least, I created the roof by using a nesting stitched rectangle set, cut at various angles and then pieced together. The sentiment is white heat embossed and comes from Birthday Greetings stamp set.
This is the final card once it was all put together.
Pop Art
The second card was a pop-art card. I stamped the Alpaca from Altenew's Alpaca Stamp Set in a grid pattern and colored each grid a different color using the Artist Markers. I know that for pop-art, the colors usually aren't realistic, but since Alpaca's come in a great variety of colors, I thought I could get away with a more realistic coloring scheme while still getting the necessary variety. I dotted the eyes and nose with a black gel pen to make them stand out a little more.
I propped the grid pattern up with a few layers of scrap paper and stamped the sentiment a couple of times to fill the open letters for a bold look. This sentiment is also from the Birthday Greeting stamp set. The final card is below.
Interactive Card
So far, it was smooth sailing, but I really ran into trouble when I attempted the next one, which was an interactive card. This would be my first interactive card ever, and I should have kept it simple, but I had this image in my head of a cat swatting a swarm of dragonflies and then scattering them.
The first problem was that the dragonflies were very small. Too small for many of the usual interactive components. The holes for "paths" created by interactive dies were too big and the dragonflies would get stuck or fall through to the back of the card. So I decided to make them oscillating instead. I tried plastic spacers, foam dots, gluing tiny die cuts of dots together, but the center pieces were either too big, or they got stuck in the small hole.. I also tried gluing the dragonflies on small circles, so I could make the holes bigger, but I didn't like the look of that. Finally I decided to glue the dragonfly to small beads. They were small enough and smooth enough to wiggle freely.
My next challenge was to create the pendulum that would make each piece move. After trying a few option, I decided on buttons, because I have those in many sizes. I propped up the card by gluing together many layers of paper, allowing the mechanisms to swing freely. This was not my final version. For the smaller pendulums (where the dragonflies were closer together), I ended up gluing the beads directly to the acetate and that helped the swinging motion.
The actual card front was the easiest part of the process. I cut out a blob from acetate and used the negative space as a mask. I then ink blended the background to look like a sky and grass. I stamped the cat, dragonflies and sentiment in black obsidian pigment ink and clear heat embossed over them. I don't have the die set for the Cat Life stamp set so I fussy cut the cat and dragonflies. Then I glued them to the beads that were attached to the pendulums on the back of the card. (I would share what colors I used, but I forgot to write them down)
In summary, visually, I love the card. As an interactive card, it is not as smooth as I would have liked. In the future, I would avoid placing interactive design elements so close together and leave plenty of space for the pendulum. I should also have put the pivot point for the cat closer to the center, because the bottom sometimes just gets stuck for a little while. That having been said, I learned a lot about what I can and cannot (yet) do with interactive cards, and that, in and of itself has made it a worthwhile effort.
