Adapting a Sketch For a Card

Hello Off The Rails scrappy friends,

It's Wendy here today to show you how I adapted Fiona's fabulous sketch and mood board to a card. I love the sketch, the vintage feel and the colour palette of this month's challenge.


At the beginning of the month I showed you my vintage layout based on this sketch and the mood board. But you don't need to restrict yourself to a large layout, such as a 12x12 page or canvas, in order to interpret a sketch. This is a card I made using the sketch and the mood board.



As you can see, I stuck with the vintage theme and, although I didn't use the exact colours, I did stay within the palette.

The base of the card is half a piece of Kraft card stock (15cmx30cm) so that when it's folded in half the card measures 15cmx15cm. There are four things I did to make sure I could adapt the sketch to a small area:

1. Simplification. I didn't use all the elements of the sketch. I omitted  much of the background stencilling for a small amount of light stencilling and a couple of pieces of strategically placed altered chipboard. I also omitted to use any threads or twine. I did this so the card wouldn't be overwhelmed with too many elements.

2. Scaling back. The ephemera paper behind the picture is quite small in order to keep the scale. To make sure it didn't get lost though I inked the edges with dark ink (Tim Holtz Walnut Stain). The picture is a Cardmaker's Delights vintage tag that I cut in half. The die cuts used for the title are small and so are the perfect size for this project. I received these die cuts from my swap partner in the Die Cuts Swap over at Scrap It With Attitude.

3. Overlapping. To make up for omitting some elements but still keep it interesting,  to keep the small scale, and to still have white space, I overlapped a lot. The main area this can be seen is where I have overlapped the rub-ons. This way I could provide a big impact in a small space.

4. Use the right tools. Normally I would do my background with lots of Gesso, Gelatos, water colours, etc, but with this project I wanted to keep more control. As I said before, I wanted white space and I didn't want the card to be overwhelmed. For this reason, I used my Whispers Strokes brush pens to do the background stencilling. This gave me good control.

Here are some close-ups of some of the techniques.

An added bonus of doing this project was that I got to use some of my scraps from my stash - always a good thing.

I hope I've encouraged you to think outside of the box a little when adapting sketches.

Thank you for stopping by.

Cheers.