Come Play in Paradise!

Hello everyone,

I hope you had a great week and that you are all looking forward to some creative time on the weekend!

I am very excited to guest design again this week for Scrapbooker's Paradise Playing in Paradise challenge.  In addition to a wonderful prize and a chance to play along as a guest designer, this week's challenge also offers the opportunity to learn and try out an artistic design principle that pretty much guarantees a beautiful project will result.  So, if you have time to do some crafting this week, I hope you will check out the challenge and join in!

The challenge this week is to design a card or other project using the 'rule of thirds.'  Huh???  What is that, right?  It is a trick that photographers use to capture stunning photos and it applies equally well to any artistic design.  Essentially, you simply divide your blank 'canvas' into thirds both horizontally and vertically.  Major deign elements and focal elements are then placed along one of the lines or at a point where the lines intercept.  Of course, you do not have to place something on every line or at every intersection.  Here is what I came up with for my inspiration piece:

The image is from Close to My Heart from the Enjoy Every Moment set.  I stamped it on 300g hot pressed watercolour paper with black Stazon and coloured it with Distress inks (victorian velvet and forest moss).  

I created my own designer paper for this card using an impression obsession flourish background stamp.  I stamped the background on shimmery white card using embossing ink and embossed it with Magic Moon Pearls embossing powder by Lindy's Stamp Gang.  This stuff is gorgeous irl!  I then inked the paper with victorian velvet and tattered rose Distress inks.  As I am an artistic design amateur, I physically divided my paper in thirds.  This made it so much easier to follow the rule of thirds, plus I like how it looks - hmmmm, there might really be something to this rule :o).  I swiped the edges with picket fence crackle paint.

I crocheted a little doily to frame my image.  I first saw this idea here where C2 did a beautiful two toned version, and fully explains how to recreate it.  That is what started my adventures (madness) in crochet.  Jessi also does beautiful crochet frames and you can see many examples on her blog here.  I created my own version with little glass pearls using their work as inspiration.

The sentiment is from Inkadinkado and the butterflies are a Cheery Lynn Designs die.

To see some beautiful inspiration, be sure to check out what the team has created for this challenge over at Scrapbooker's Paradise, where you can follow the links to their blogs for more details on their projects.  I hope you will be able to join in the fun!  Odds of winning are extremely good!

Thanks for stopping in and taking the time to leave a comment.  I truly appreciate them and love having the chance to visit you back.

Enjoy your weekend!  Hugs,

Dawn