Playing with Pattern, Colour and Scale

In this week's theme of patterned paper, today’s card is a sweet kid birthday design, and plays with the scale of pattern in our designs.  The image is from the set, Beary Sweet Birthday from My Favorite Things.  

Though I’ve seen more people using a clean and simple style of card design, I still love patterned paper and have a lot of it in my stash.  I’m trying not to buy more paper and use what I have - though if I walk through a craft store it’s always what catches my eye, and I have to remind myself how much I have back at home.  

Companies do such a good job of putting paper collections together, but some designs go better together than others.  On a 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 card you really have a small space to work with and some patterns are too big in scale for that size of card.  

Scale is the size of pattern on your pages. I’ll be honest and say, sometimes I get this to work better than other times!   When combining a lot of patterned paper, it’s good to pay attention to the different sizes of pattern you use and to vary the scale, along with varying your colours.  

In this design, I have four different patterns of paper going on.  That’s actually a lot, so why does it work?  On this card, the patterned numbers are the largest scale of pattern on the card.  I used that in the largest space - the background of the card.  This way it doesn’t overwhelm the design, and you see lots of it. The numbers work well for a birthday themed card too.  It also sets the palette for the card design because it uses the most colours.  I’ll take those colours and incorporate them on the rest of the card in smaller quantities, which results in a pulled together design.  

The next three patterns are of a much smaller scale (tiny stars, medium sized diamonds, and mini gingham), and vary in colour.  

I add these patterns in smaller amounts (I’ve heard it described like gallon, quart, cup - or for us in Canada - 4 L, 1 L, 250 ml...or something like that!).  The green works nicely as a larger panel and anchors the coloured image.  Because of the subtleness of the pattern on the green - it almost works like a solid colour. Next, because I didn’t want the bright yellow to take over the design (it’s such a strong colour),  I used it in smaller bits, and then the little gingham pattern works for the tiny stars.  The pattern, scale and colour is all used in proportion and you get a cute kid card out of it!  

Thanks for popping in for more patterny fun!