I sometimes struggle with simple cards. If you haven't noticed yet, I love an ink-blended background, or an good interactive element. With this stamp set, though, I really wanted the characters to be the star of the show, so I decided to pull an element from their wardrobe and feature it as the background.
To make it more eye-catching, and to help keep me within the parameters of simplicity, I opted for shaped cards. They look complicated and impressive, but they are so simple! Another bonus- they work with any large shaped dies that you might have.
This stamp set was part of an exclusive box from one of my favorites, Kindred Stamps. (Their boxes are stuffed full of awesomeness, and so well thought out!) It's called You're Super and features a variety of heroes and some great mix-and-match sentiments. I chose the metal hero and the patriotic hero for this particular project because their symbols translate really well to a card background.
I also grabbed my stackable circle dies, and some of the Tim Holtz metallic card stock.
For the metal hero, I cut the largest circle out of black metallic card stock, and then chose a circle die 3 steps down in size. I cut the largest circle again out of teal metallic card stock, and from that piece, I cut the smaller circle from the middle. That gave me a black base, a teal center piece, and a teal donut. I cut the donut into small pieces, labeling each one as I went so I could reassemble them. I trimmed 1/4 inch from each small piece to allow space between the elements.
I laid my original die in the center of the base for alignment help, and used a strong liquid adhesive to attach my segments, eyeballing the space between so it was as even as possible.
I used the large circle to cut a piece of heavyweight card stock, scored it at the top at 1/4 in, and used a strong double sided tape to adhere it to the metallic card front. This gives me a top-folding circle card.
For my patriotic card base, I used a similar method with the same stackable circles, alternating every other size and using a dark blue metallic, red metallic, and simple white cardstock. I also cut a star using another stackable shape set. I used liquid adhesive to stack and adhere my shapes.
For my stamped images, I stamped them on a piece of Bristol smooth paper with an alcohol friendly ink and colored them with my alcohol markers. I added some white gel pen details on my patriotic hero, and some metallic gold gel pen accents on my metal hero. I also added glossy accents to his eyes, hand and chest piece. When those were dried, I adhered my heroes using some thin foam squares.
I used distress oxide ink to stamp my sentiment, and heat embossed it with a clear embossing powder.
And because I apparently can't complete a project without getting inky, I used the stencil that came in the You're Super box and added some embellishments to the coordinating envelope.
And there you have it: two *fairly* simple cards that make a big statement!