Press On for The Spot Challenge #124. As it is midday on Tuesday, it must be time for another The Spot Challenge, and it is! This week it is another Colour Challenge. When I first saw this colour selection I thought Rick (who sets the challenges for us) had gone a little mad. I was never going to be able to use these colours together, but I was wrong. As soon as I started to look at what I could use everything fell into place. It was the scrap of paper from the Gilded Autumn Specialty Designer Series Paper that was the key for me. Click on the image below to see what the other Design Team Members have got up to with this.

Now I do have to make a small confession here. I am an addict and have been for some time. I am addicted to coffee, and when I say coffee, I mean really good ground coffee. Please understand, I do not mean that powdered stuff that you pour boiling water on, that is NOT coffee (or worth drinking) in my opinion. I am very happy to declare myself as a Coffee Snob. This addiction to really good coffee means that I order my coffee online and had it sent to me every few weeks so I can enjoy it at its best. But please don’t worry, I have it under control and only have one, or at a push, two cups of coffee a day. But enough of that, you want to know about the card, so here we go.

The Project

Having decided that I was going to use the scrap of Gilded Autumn Specialty Designer Series Paper I then started to look at stamp sets. It was not long, given my love of coffee, that my eyes fell on Press On. I decided to stamp and colour the row of cups using Stampin’ Blends in the Challenge Colours. This was a tiny cheat, because it actually doubled my palette, but nobody told me I couldn’t, so I did!

The colouring is really quick and easy to do. My tip on colouring images with such small areas would be to allow one colour to dry completely before adding the one next to it. This is much the same as when you are water-colouring. If you don’t wait for each colour to dry, they will run, or blend, together. So, having completed my colouring I decided to fussy cut the images and use the strip of paper as a ‘shelf’. To include the other colours, I decided to mat the scrap of paper on a piece of Cinnamon Cider card, with just a tiny border showing. I also decided that I wanted to keep the colour scheme as ‘clean’ as possible.

With the ‘clean’ look in mind it helped me decide to use a Blackberry Bliss card base and a Mint Macaron mat. This felt ‘clean’ to my eye, although I am wondering how this would all look if I switched the card base and mat colours, I am thinking it would be very striking. I wanted the paper scrap to run off the edge of the card, so layered the mat onto the base, before adding the paper and Cinnamon Cider strip and trimming the edge.

I wanted a sentiment, but did not want it to interfere with the coffee cups too much. From a design perspective, your eye prefers that your elements are either very close together or far apart. I decided to go for the latter option and to keep it pretty simple, with just stamping on a small punched piece. Using Cinnamon Cider helped to tie the two areas of the design together, but adding the Enamel Dots in a triangle in the same colour also helped. On the inside of the card I stamped the Coffee Beans in Cinnamon Cider and then coloured them with the Light Cinnamon Cider Stampin’ Blend. Oh, and I forgot, the cups were added with Mini Dimensionals.

Video Tutorial Time

Today’s video is an insight into how I worked this project out. It takes you through the step by step process I used. I hope you find it interesting.

Don’t forget to take a look at the inspiration the other Design Team members have come up with. The link to The Spot Challenge website is in the Challenge Header at the top of this page. If you click on the image a new tab will open for you.