Handmade Cards and Free Digi Stamps

I've been sitting on this post for almost two weeks now, but I wanted to be sure that all the recipients got their cards before I posted.

I've started dabbling in card making. I resisted for a long time since we have nether the space nor the money to buy bunches of colored cardstock, fancy scrapbooking papers, paper punches, rubber stamps, and markers. But a while ago I stumbled on a method for blending colored pencils using baby oil that results in a more blended 'painted' look rather than the colored in/crayon look that one usually gets. I played around with this method (you can see tutorial here and video here) in my daily drawing journal and had a lot of success and fun.

Then one of my friends had a baby and I wanted to send her a card, but the store had nothing that really fit. I saw a really cute giraffe digi stamp, and I got to thinking. I have a very limited colored pencil palette, but a giant box of crayons. And since the baby oil blended by smooshing around the wax, it should work on crayons too. (And it does, but a little differently. Experiment first if you are going to try it.)

In the end I came up with this:

Not bad, kinda simple, and I felt weird using somebody else's drawing. So when my cousin had HER baby I made up this little elephant:

and then made this card:

Still super simple, but at least it was my own art.

Then my best friend had HER baby (yeah, babies everywhere), and I came up with this little sheep because she likes sheep:

And I played around and came up with this card:

The sheep is only attached with the string, so she hands free. Also, the balloon is on a little folded scrap of card stock to make it “dimensional.”

I had gotten better at editing the drawings in Inkscape for a nice dark, smooth outline. And I was really proud of the background.

Since Mother's Day was coming up I decided I would make cards for that too. I started doodling and came up with this:

but I thought the stem was too restrictive, so I edited it out and was much happier:

Then I began playing around with background ideas. I had really liked the way the sheep background had worked, and I wondered if I could do something similar but on a larger scale, since I had four cards to make.

I also decided to make each flower different to better suit the recipient, since otherwise the cards would all be the same.

In the end this is what I had:

My handwriting needs A LOT of work still, and I'm not completely pleased with the leaf shape, but I am incredibly happy with how these turned out. The flowers and leaves have little bits of folded card stock under them, so that they stand out from the card, and it looks really nice in person. I'll probably be posting a tutorial for the backgrounds soon too. I really loved how they turned out.

All in all I'm a far cry from a master scrapbooker/cardmaker, but I had a lot of fun and I'm really happy with my results. I'll probably be making more cards in the future and I'll post my “digi stamps” here for free when I do. (Click on the image and you can go right to Flickr and download them for your own use, just don't sell any cards you make from them.)