Thursday Craft 'n Chat - Composition & Color

Hello Everyone!

I am so excited to kick off the first ever ‘Thursday Craft 'n Chat’ for Made Especially For You! Every week a member of the design team will share a different crafty tip and/or technique.  We are also urging all of you savvy bloggers to share your crafty tips with us! If you would like to be featured on our 'Thursday Craft 'n Chat,' click the 'Email Me' button on the right sidebar of the blog and let Ashley know what crafty tip and/or technique you'd like to share!

Composition

For this first tip, I decided to keep it very basic since I am just a beginner myself.  When I first started creating cards, one of the main problems I had was composition- that is, how does one create a good looking card? I was your standard “colorful-background-embellishment-in-the-middle” type of gal. That was alright in the beginning, but as I started making more and more cards, I started to realize that sometimes the middle square isn’t always the best one.

My boyfriend is a computer animator and I ask his opinion on cards all the time. Then one day, he sent me this 2 minute video on Framing and Composition. He told me it was made for photographers or videographers but the actual content was very applicable with my cards. 

Framing and Composition from Videopia on Vimeo.

For example: when I first started, I would place almost all embellishments in the middle of the card.  The more cards I made, the more I realized that I could place them on the sides or even cut them off as seen below.  It is also important not to be afraid of free space. So many times I feel like there needs to be something more in my cards- more jewels, more embellishments, more sparkle and shine.  However, space isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it can stop you from creating a really busy/crowded card.

This may all seem very basic, but for newbies that are getting their feet wet in the pool of card crafts, composition is something you try hard to master. I actually feel like I’m still learning months later and perhaps we all are no matter how experienced we are.

Colors

So along with asking my boyfriend if my card positioning looks good, I always seem to ask, “Do these colors go together?” Finally tired of getting text messages with pictures and being asked endless questions, he sent me this invaluable website: http://kuler.adobe.com/#

You can look at all the different color combinations or you can press create on the left and by selecting a base color you can do a couple of things:

1.  Match colors with Adjacent Hues

2. Focus on one color with varied intensity and lightness in a single hue

3. Space your colors in a triangle around the wheel for a contrasting theme

4. Oppose two colors on the wheel for a simple theme based on two hues

5.  Combine interesting colors from multiple hues

6.  Create subtle variations of the base color’s hues

7.  Drag individual color circles around the wheel for complete freedom

Basically, this website can give you any type of color combination you could ever imagine. It is under my bookmarks now and I refer to it whenever I am questioning my color matches or if I am ever in the mood to change it up and use contrasting colors.

I hope you all got something out of this and again, I urge you to share your own tips and techniques.  I am looking forward to learning all kinds of things from this ever-growing and extremely creative community!

Michelle