With Sympathy

I am experimenting with some of my photographs to see how I might be able to incorporate them into my cardmaking. Here is a card that I made this morning, offering sympathy:

To make the background for this card, I used a digital image of a flower that I photographed while on a trip to Costa Rica. The flower was interesting against the stark backdrop of the grey brick wall, but the bug-eaten leaves would require some PhotoShopping to make them look card-worthy (in my opinion, at least).

So instead, using the PhotoShop program, I "filtered" the view of the flower to the "Artistic - Cutout" version, which you can see here in the picture at right. I printed out the Filtered version of the photograph onto standard cardstock paper.

I then trimmed the card to 5"x7", embellished the flower with a loopy orange flower from Creative Charms, and added the text from the Cricut Calligraphy cartridge.


When I do this card again, I would likely print the paper on either a finer texture paper, or use my laser printer, and/or print on gloss stock to see if the dramatic colors would snap on the background. I think I would also use a shadow effect on the text, or perhaps set a different type for the same message, to give it a little more substance. What do you think?