The Wonderful World of Color

Our first encounter with a rainbow of colors probably all came from the same place...a Crayola crayon box. We all have our favorites; mine is, of course, purple. Even the smell is familiar and comforting. But have you ever really thought about the evolution of their color spectrum?

I came across an incredible chart that shows the progression from the original 8 crayon set (1903) to the massive set of 120 (present day)! The blog entry by Weather Sealed is cunningly written. I get the feeling we are about the same age because I know exactly what he's talking about when he heard a Styx song on an oldies station! The chart though is incredibly beautiful and graphic. I want to print it out really big and hang it on the wall.

I encourage you to take a step back in time, check out the chart, maybe even grab some of your kid's crayons and draw a little picture. Feel free to post your favorite Crayola color here. It'll be fun...just like the old days when we would play 4-square during recess.

Nordlund Holiday Card

I’ve been working on custom holiday cards for the Nordlund family and wanted to share some images with you. The most important thing when starting a new project is communicating with the client. If everyone is to be happy with the end result, you need to find out what their expectations are; color palette, layout ideas, likes/dislikes.

This family isn’t very religious and they have many friends who don’t celebrate Christmas. The first step was deciding that this would be more of a holiday card and can appeal to a larger audience. We choose a winter theme and stayed away from a typical Christmas color palette (red and green) instead choosing blues, purples and whites. I picked an incredible patterned paper by Heidi Grace and paired it with a deep purple (almost looks black in the photos).

They wanted to incorporate a photo of the kids as well which led me to creating the bracket. I die cut these with my new Sizzix Epic Six using a heavy silver metallic paper (thanks to Bramkamp Printing). This creates a nice landing spot for the photo to live. Setting it off to the left helps create interest in the layout and gives room for the holiday greeting. The holiday greeting was stamped using a Stampin’ Up stamp and their metallic ink in Platinum. I am so in love with this ink since it has a really metallic finish and is completely opaque. Plus it dries quickly! Happy Holidays was stamped onto a dark blue pearlescent paper (scraps/cut-offs from Poeme) and will be applied in the upper right corner using dimensional stickers (Hobby Lobby).

The client is providing the photos but I assisted in cropping the image and showing her how it would look on the finished card. Since the photos aren’t arriving until next week, I completed as much of the work in advance so I just trim the photos, stick them down and place the greeting.

I hope you enjoy this and I’d love to hear your comments! I’ll post pictures of the completed cards in a week or so.