Card Sketches featuring Altenew's "Believe" Stamp Set

Card sketches. What are they? Sometimes people actually plan out their cards before making them! Do you? Sometimes I have an idea of what I'm doing in my head; sometimes I don't. What I don't do often is create card sketches. Sometimes it can be intimidating looking at a blank card panel on a piece of paper and try to come up with a design to fill it. However, in the past 2 days I’ve learned how useful card sketches can be getting back my creative flow when I’ve lost my mojo.

I started with a blank sketch book. In the book, it’s purely sketches. No nicely printed pages; I just create card designs as I think of them and put them to paper - sometimes with color - sometimes just black and white with labeling. I thought the best way to begin was to start with a stamp set. A single set. See what I could come up with for just that stamp set.

I began with Altenew’s “Believe” stamp set for a few reasons. One, it was first in my entire stamp collection (alphabetically). Two, it’s a Christmas stamp and it’s almost Christmas in July time (ever heard of Christmas in June?)! Three, it was a new stamp that I got a while ago and STILL hadn’t used. There’s a lot more where that came from… Am I the only one who just hoards stamp sets and never uses them?

Below is the stamp set and the first sketch I came up with for a card design. Once I designed the first one, I thought about another stamp set I wanted to incorporate with this one, which was Lawn Fawn’s “Snow Much Fun” - another new Christmas stamp set that I actually recently bought so that’s why it was on my mind to use.

Once I designed the sketches, creating them was the next part. I did each card individually. Used a mixture of techniques: stenciling with a chalk marker for the first card and ink blending and 3D technique for the second card.

I’m really loving how these cards came out and their completely different from each other too! I ended up creating a few more sketches for a few more stamp sets, which I will share in separate posts :)

Thanks for stopping by! Happy crafting :)