Shady Designs Frame By Frame: Creating a Landscape Card from a Portrait Design

Sometimes we fall in to the design/creative trap where we can only see what the design shows us. For a while I did too and this stamp set was my own design - Shady Designs Frame By Frame - which surprised me.

That set me a challenge: to look at the designs in a different format – a portrait design reimagined as a landscape design.

I added another layer of complication - well for me it is - embracing the white space!

A little glimpse inside my design thoughts

The Frame By Frame stamp set, for me, had to quickly cross over from art journaling to cardmaking, but the imagery had to remain clean and somewhat obvious. It was also important that it could be vintage, modern or playful – everything us creatives want without having to overthink it. Change the ink colour and you change the look.

Being a confident stamper, layering is probably something I do without now thinking about. I designed the stamp set to be layered easily and to take that overwhelm away.

Also, another conscious design decision, I added a banner and 3 sentiments - which fit inside the banner. The sentiments could be used in art journals or for cardmaking.

Portrait to landscape

Okay... I have probably made the portrait-to-landscape idea sound more complicated than it actually was. The real key to this card was the background. By making that landscape, it gave me somewhere to place the portrait stamped layer.

I stamped the single film cell on to a scrap piece of paper to make a mask and stamped the film cells so they overlapped each other lengthways. Then it was adding detail in and around the film cells.

On another piece of card, I stamped and coloured the main frame image (portrait design). Because I wanted to be able to see through the film strip, I cut out the centre sections. Using 3D foam strips, I added this to the background.

Strangely, it now looked "naked" or just "plonked" in place. From my bit box, I had some flowers already stamped out, which I coloured to match the background and slid them in place.

Watch the design take shape

I've also made a short reel showing the card coming together. The background is probably my favourite part, so I've included the process to show how the overlapping film cells created the landscape design.

Looking at the finished card, I think the thing I like most isn't the stamped image itself, but the fact that I made the design do something I hadn't originally intended. Sometimes it takes stepping away from what a stamp was designed to do to see what else it might become.

Until next time, take care,

Lou

xxx