Graphics by Fran, card by printer...

There's a very special post on the Stars and Stamps blog today - beautiful art cards by a very special lady. Fran doesn't use stamps or clipart or patterned papers - she draws and colours every one of her cards by hand, and they're amazing! And because she's so special, she gave us some digital art to play with, as long as we're using it for OWH. There are four different clips, so if you don't like the fishy, there are plenty of other choices.

Anyone who's read my blog knows I'm not fond of colouring. Sandy's examples are totally awesome, but I couldn't possibly do justice to Fran's designs if I tried to colour them in myself (you really don't want to see what I did to the poor fishy I tried to draw scales on by hand...) Luckily I don't have to try. I cheated! lol There's another solution that works really well for simple designs with fairly large pieces - I paper-pieced them! NOTE - paper-piecing wouldn't work well on Fran's other images because they're too detailed and you'd go barmy trying to cut and reassemble all those fiddly little bits, so I chose the fishy by default. Besides, he's CUTE!

So how do you do paper-piece a piece of clipart? Easy peasy! I printed the art out on four different coloured sheets of paper, and then I cut out the bits I wanted and assembled them on top of the blue background. I had to cut the yellow fish right out of the sheet to get the fins and lips, so I used the other parts on a second card - this time I just glued the yellow on top of the white sheet and coloured in the background with a pale blue marker. There's still enough bits left to do a purple fish with lavender lettering, but two was enough to give you the idea.