Handmade Sympathy Cards are a great way to provide comfort to friends and family who have experienced a loss. Since we don’t always know when we’re going to need one, it helps to have some made up ahead of time. Unfortunately, I didn’t take my own advice on that account, and had to make a quick card to show my love and support to a friend who just lost her mother.
A Sympathy Card needs a design of simple elegance. I skipped all my usual frilly embellishments and fancy techniques to create this tasteful card, using Soft Sky, Island Indigo, and Midnight Muse. The three-panel triptych is always an effective design element, although I felt that coloring all three panels would have been too busy. What do you think?
You may be wondering how I got the flowers colored white, since the stamped image is only an outline (as you can see on the other panels). Usually when I color an image, I use a Blender Pen with ink from Stampin’ Write Markers. But did you know you can also use ink from an Ink Pad? That’s what I did here, using Whisper White Craft Ink. Don’t you just love how it looks against the dark card stock? It actually picked up some of the color from the Island Indigo Card Stock, and turned the white into a very light blue. Just perfect with the Soft Sky card stock.
You can get a similar effect coloring in an image with the White Chalk Marker, although the tip isn’t as sharply pointed as the Blender Pen so you can’t get as fine a line. The Blender Pen is on the left, the White Chalk Marker on the right in the photo below:
The stamp set is one of my favorites from the Occasions Catalog, called Happy Watercolor. You’ll love the beautiful images, backgrounds, and fun sentiments that will help you make awesome handmade cards and paper crafting projects.
Happy Watercolor (wood mount 133188 or clear mount 133191)
If you haven’t tried Blender Pens yet for coloring your stamped images, you’re definitely going to want to experiment with them. They’ll improve your coloring technique by allowing shading and blending, whether you’re using Markers or Ink Pads.
Leave a comment if you this article gives you some new ideas for your cardmaking projects.
You never know when you’ll need handmade Sympathy Cards to provide comfort for a loved one.