More Harlequin Hearts

Jan 28

One of my favorite items from the recent To Love release from Simon Says Stamp is the Harlequin Hearts background stamp. I love the geometric and graphic style of it, and it is fun to use either high contrast, or as a more subtle background pattern.

I used it on some treat packaging in a previous post.
Here are a few more ways I’ve used it.

card 1 - Love you hearts

Techniques:

This is really a very simple card to pull together. The card base is bright red (Poppy) stamping on a deep red (Cranberry) cardstock base.
The stack of hearts is from a die in the Sweetheart Treat Box die set. I cut hearts in a variety of sizes and then mixed and matched until I found a balance of colors and sizes that worked well.
- You can see that there is a pattern in the sizes. Large, small, medium, large, small medium. Balance and pattern create a “known” for our brains, and I knew that since I was going to mix up the colors, a symmetrical pattern would help keep it from being busy. I also didn’t want to cut off a heart at the top or bottom of the card, so found a mix that fit this A2 space just right. (You can see that I did tuck in the lbase of the little hearts to make that work.)
- The colors are all lighter and brighter than the background for contrast, but are an analogous grouping. (Meaning that they’re adjacent or nearby on the color wheel, so they mix together well and work as a visual group.)
- None of the heart colors are as light in value as the white that I cut the greeting out of. I also made sure that the hearts behind the greeting overlap were midrange and not the lightest. That contrast helps the greeting really stand out.
- Keeping the stack of hearts in a symmetrical and centered alignment maintains the precedent set by the background pattern.
The bold white greeting maintains some of the simple geometry of the background pattern. Stacking it a few layers thick provides nice dimension and additional contrast to the card design.