Card Design Handbook: Setting the Mood with Color

Kerri Miller

Card Design Handbook week continues here at Paper Crafts. Susan, Kelly and Julie have already covered composition, balance, and style. Personally, I find it helpful to think of these rules as where to put things on your project, how to put things on your project, and what kind of things to put on your project. Today I’m covering color and how it creates a mood for your project.

Picking the color for your project is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. There are a lot of things to think about when choosing color, but the areas I will focus on today are seasonality, mix and match, and the gallon/quart/pint rule.

Seasonality

Wait, what? You can now wear white after Labor Day, but its called Winter White? Just because you see pastels in the spring and reds paired with greens around Christmas, doesn’t mean you can’t use these colors throughout the entire year. However, choosing the right shade of color at the right time of the year can really make that card or project bring to mind a wonderful seasonal mood. Using a golden yellow card base, Cristina Kowalcyzk creates a perfectly cozy autumn feel with her Oh Happy Day card found on p. 87.

Mixing and Matching

Everyone can mix and match colors, but any mother of an independent three-year old who insists on dressing themselves can attest that not everyone can mix and match colors well! One surefire way to ensure some semblance of good mixing and matching is to check out the saturation of your colors. In other words, keep your bold colors together and your soft colors together; nary the two shall meet on your project. Angeline Yong Jeet Leen does a remarkable job of mixing a variety of colors with the same saturation to make a fun and bold card, found on p. 97. While you may not think to match purple, teal, green, and orange, the saturation of these colors make them blend beautifully.

Gallon/Quart/Pint

Have you ever wondered how many colors to use to create an interesting combination without overdoing it? The gallon, quart, pint rule is simple solution for mixing just the right color quantities. Chan Vuong does a wonderful job of mixing colors by using a lot of orange, some pink, and just a pinch of green in her Orange Birthday Card from p. 107.

The next time you sit down to make a card, don’t forget to think about the mood you’d like to create with your card and then decide on the colors you want to use. Often my mood is what dictates the colors I use. I guess that works too!

Moody with color,

P.S. Don’t forget to check out today’s challenge at Moxie Fab World and we have a giveaway today too! I have here Crate Paper‘s new collection, On Trend, which with its florals, animal prints, stripes, type, and tribal prints, all in a plethora of colors, is a great example of mixing and matching. We also have Echo Park Paper‘s the Apothecary Emporium, which is a great example of seasonality—perfect for Halloween, which is coming up sooner than you think! Lastly we have My Mind’s Eye‘s Follow your Heart 6×6 paper pad, which goes along with our Gallon/quart/pint lesson—gallon is pink, quart is light blue, and pint is yellow! One winner will win all three of these plus a copy of Card Design Handbook!

Just make sure to leave a comment by Monday, August 27th at 5 pm MDT for your chance to win!