MKC Digitals | Mirroring With Digis | Digi Stamp Week

Today I’m sharing a project for MKC Digitals. All this week on the blog the design team are sharing all the things we love about digi stamps. What I love about digi stamps is how versatile and easy to use they are. Unlike with traditional stamps it’s very straight forward to resize them. They can easily be layered on top of one another, without needing to do the masking that you’d need with traditional stamps. And, as is the focus of my card today, they can be very readily mirrored.

I’ve never had much success with mirroring traditional stamps. It requires stamping the image onto, for example, the flat back of another stamp, or a piece of acetate then pressing your paper to it to create an impression. The mirrored stamping is never crisp, and often needs to be outlined by hand to get a proper impression.

With digi stamps the process is a lot simpler. I use Word to create my card layouts when I’m working with digis. The image formatting bar at the top.of the program allows you to easily resize, rotate and layer images. I use the bring-forward and send-back tools to enable me to layer up images such that I can create a one layer scene. The mirroring is a part of the rotation tool – there are options to flip on the vertical or horizontal axis. The one you choose will depend partly on the look you are trying to create. For this card I flipped on the vertical axis.

I used the new Candy Cane Gingerbread Man image and a sentiment from Holiday Sentiments to create my card. I mirrored two of the images so that my gingerbread people would be facing one another. I also did some resizing to give the look that there are two adults and two children. My original idea was that they are all from one family, though it could also be interpreted as an adult and child each from two families.

Once I was completely happy with my arrangement I printed it directly onto a card base and coloured with my Spectrum Noir Illustrator markers. As the focus of the card is the mirroring technique I kept everything else very simple.

I used golden browns to colour the gingerbread people for a biscuity look. I kept the buttons and trims of the hats white. The hats themselves and the scarves were done in a variety of colours, though I reused each colour a couple of times for consistency. I went with a couple of shades of purples and blue-greens.

The candy canes of course were coloured with red and white stripes, and I finished the colouring with some grey cast shadows. I then used my white gel pen to fix any bleeding and also to add highlights to the candy canes.

Whilst I could have done more with this card I’m happy with the clean and simple design. And I love that I was able to create the design using just one digi stamp image. This kind of design would not have been possible with just one physical stamp image. The ability to manipulate the images in this way is a wonderful feature of digi stamps. What’s your favourite way to use digis?

Love,

Lady Joyful

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Challenges:

Allsorts Challenge Blog – CAS Christmas

Christmas Crafts All Year ‘Round – Gingerbread

Craftyhazelnut’s Christmas Challenge – Anything Christmas

Creatalicious Challenges – Anything Goes

HLS Christmas Challenge – Anything Goes and Optional: CAS

Polkadoodles Craft Challenge – Anything Goes