Handmade Personalised Greeting Cards for All Occasions  Oversized Daisies Greeting Card

Coming up with the design

What does go into designing a handmade greeting card?  Sometimes coming up with a design is easy, it just seems to flow and yet other times, I seem to sit languishing staring into thin air.  The brain just does not want to co-operate.

Designing a card can take days.  One of the first steps is drawing the design on paper and setting out each of the elements and their placement.  Sometimes when you have the design in your head, you think it is going to look great.  But, once you start drawing it out, it often shows that the elements are not going to work togeth4r.  So, back to the drawing board.

I usually start with a feature element.  This is going to be the main element on the card that I want to stand out.  This element is going to be the desciptor for the card.

Handmade Personalised Greeting Cards for All Occasions  Designing a Greeting Card

Part of laying out the card elements is also coming up with the colour scheme.  This gives me a headache.  What colours look good together, and what doesn’t.  Selecting the wrong colours can drown out the hero element on the card.  And I always worry – does the card look to busy, are there too many elements in there all competing with each other.

And I know that when I start gathering the coloured cardstock I want, I won’t have it on hand.  Often when I don’t have the cardstock on hand, I end up with a happy accident.  I have to start thinking outside the square to come up with another option.

Handmade Personalised Greeting Cards for All Occasions

The above card was a happy accident.  On my work desk I had a small pile of strips of cardstock left over from other cards I had made.  I had throwing things out when I think there might just be a use for them someday.  So, I threw them all together and made that card and it has turned out to be one of our most popular designs.  Often the best designs come out of nowhere.

Is it Original?

This is always hard, have I come up with something really unique.  Everywhere I go, I see ideas for greeting cards, prints that I think would be perfect and I am constantly questioning myself – Have I seen it before?  I proabably have a few times, and this is where I have to make sure that each card that is designed has my own spin.

This is not always possible when you use commercial stamps, these kind of set limits for what you can do with them.  But I try and turn them into something unexpected, like little note cards or to create complimentary backgrounds for the stamped images.  With stamped images, colouring them can also change the way the look and give a few more options with the cards design.

When it comes to creating a new design, the weather, the number of scam phone calls I have had during the day or my schedule can all affect which way they design is going to go.  Sometimes I really want to throw everything at a card – to create a card that really stands out, and usually these cards can take a couple of days to complete.  But, they are fun to do and I have to say, sometimes it is hard to part with them when they  are sold.

Handmade Personalised Greeting Cards for All Occasions  Blue Handmade Flower Greeting Card
Handmade Personalised Greeting Cards for All Occasions  Poinsettia Handmade Christmas Card
Handmade Personalised Greeting Cards for All Occasions

What goes into designing a greeting card ...

When I do a card with paper or foamiran flowers, each flower petal has been individually cut and coloured.  I always cut them on white cardstock so I can mix and blend the colours.  Some of the flowers can take a day to make, cutting colouring and setting them out.

Even simple cards can take a little time, I find that getting the layout right between the image and the verse can make or break the look.

Just when I think I have mastered every technique in making greeting cards, someone comes up with something new.  And, I have to try it, so on Handpress Cards you may see a run of similar styles – that is me trying a new technique.  Everytime I try something new, I always hope that others will like the style.  It is always great to have feedback and when I card is purchased that is the same as feedback.

Having all the right equipment also helps.  Each element on our cards has been produced by hand, whether it is done using a special die cut or designed on the computer, all this helps to give the cards a unique look.  The way each element has been coloured gives the card something unique as well.

Some of our cards have been hand coloured with pencils, other elements have been coloured using special inks.  Some of the background areas on the cards have been pressed using a special gel press and alcohol inks (messy but fun) and by doing each element individually it is really difficult to come up wth the same look twice, there will always be differences.  But that is all part of the designing a handmade greeting card, something different happens with each card.

And, of course, being a handmade card from scratch it will never look like a commercial card.  And that is what I love about handmade greeting cards, especially Handpress Cards – you won’t find them in a chain store and I can pretty much guarantee that the recipient will never receive another card the same.

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