Salaric

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I made this card for a friend who was going away to sunny climes, leaving the rest of us to freeze – sort of a bon-voyage card.

Equipment needed:

Paper Card Pritt stick or equivalent Fine-line pen

Mainly what I do with these cards is think about what sort of things I want on the card, and then collect together the different colours I want and the paper punches I want. In this case, I chose pale blue card for the actual card. Then I selected dark blue paper for the sea. This paper has a sugar paper type texture to it – ie it’s not glossy printing paper, more like mounting paper you get in schools.

Yellow paper for the sand.

Red for the boat and the crab.

Orange for the starfish and the sun.

Green for the leaves of the palm.

Brown card for the palm tree’s trunk.

Pink paper for the shell, and white for the boat’s sail and clouds (the white paper was actually an old envelope).

I punched out a selection of shapes becuase originally I wasn’t sure exactly what sort of design I was going for. In the end I used:

Six cloud shapes – these were punched out of white paper

One orange sun

One orange starfish

One pink shell

I also punched one red crab out.

When punching out of the paper I find it’s better to fold the paper twice, as the shapes punch more easily that way. If you just have one thickness of paper I find that the shapes tear out instead of looking clean cut.

I had to punch out three palm trees – one out of yellow paper, one out of green paper and one out of brown card. I then used the thicker brown card as a base. I cut the bottom off the yellow tree and stuck it onto the brown tree. This is the sand. I then cut the green leafy bit off the green tree and stuck that onto the brown tree. I was actaully quite impressed with the result.

For the boat, I used the same technique as I did with the tree. I punched out a red boat and a white boat – then I cut the white boat’s sail off and stuck it onto the red boat.

I then folded the pale blue card into four, making sure I lined up the edges as much as possible.

This produces a card that stands up. I use card that I got in a big multipack in Costco’s. It is slightly bigger than A4 when unfolded but folded in four makes a good card size!

I then cut out a piece of dark blue paper to stick on as the sea, and stuck it onto the pale blue card, leaving a nice bit of pale blue showing as the sky.

Then I cut a strip of yellow paper for the sand and stuck that on.

I then arranged the shapes on the card to see where I wanted things.

Once satisfied, I started gluing the shapes on. As a finishing touch, I drew some features on the pink shell to make it look more like a shell and less like a pink blob!

I think great variety and style can be achieved by overlapping shapes, as in the case of the sun and two clouds on this card. Just as an aside, I actually sell these paper punches.