Inspiration and Perspiration

  Years ago, a friend to whom I was bemoaning my lack of design ability, set me free with a single expression for which I am forever grateful.  You see, while I can recognize good design, and render with great skill, I am not an inventor.  I am able to make corrections and improvements on a design presented before me; but to come up with something great, something new, something all mine, seems far beyond me.  Upon hearing this, my friend looked right at me and said simply, "Why be original when you can be good?"  BOOM!!  Freedom.  I can now practice my various arts and crafts, taking great pleasure and leaving the worry behind.  And as I have written previously, the card-making community in particular loves sharing and having their ideas copied, tweaked, re-introduced. 

  With all this in mind, I am now having a lot of fun pushing the "tweak" further and further.  We can take a nice card and move the ribbon over a smidge, or use a button instead of a brad.  We can change the proportions, the colors, the theme, simplify, complicate, reverse, or occasionally, be inspired to create something new which would not have taken place without the original.

  Here is an example of a card which came from TWO sources, both on www.splitcoaststampers.com

   Inspiration #1, by Margaret Raburn                                               Inspiration #2, by Janet Holmes.

So cute, love the colors, and especially
the way the polka-dotted blue reminds
me of a starry night sky.

Love the cut out ghost, layered with vellum to make it look more ethereal.  

                                                                                                            

                                                                                                 
Here is the result, using elements of both:

I used my Midnight Muse pattern paper snail-taped to Basic Black cardstock, cut out the moon using two different sized oval framelits, and the ghost using the new Fall Fest bundle.  The pumpkins and stamps are from the same set.  The background is popped up with dimensionals, and the ghost's face is stamped on a white background which is placed on the Tangelo Twist card base.  I snail-taped a scrap of vellum behind the ghost cut-out on the blue/black rectangle. This gives the ghost depth when you see him in person.  The scrap of Daffodil Delight I also taped directly to the back of the moon, but in hindsight, I should have taped it to the card base, to give the moon some depth as well.  The little pumpkin in front is popped up, while the larger one in back is taped flat.


Here is the inside of the card, with the third pumpkin in the set, plus a couple of the cute leaves.

You'll notice the ghost's eyes are the same as this pumpkin's, but not the mouth.  The pumpkin has the mouth from the stamp.  For the ghost, I covered the mouth with some scotch tape when stamping, to get only the eyes.  I then drew on the mouth with my Stamp & Write marker, drawing a little oval, and then giving the mouth corners at the top to make the ghost smile sweetly.

The BOOOO is from last year's Googly Ghouls stamp set.  I used Versamark and embossed it in white.  The Happy Halloween is from September's Paper Pumpkin, but if you didn't get it, there are several cute possibilities in the store.