Welcome to Thursday! This post marks the midway point in our current Design Team series of each member’s creative process. All of us are sharing how we design and how to stay organized and on top of things – or at least, as much as we can!

Here’s a list of the Design Team members who have shared their process so far:

Julie
Jen
Anita
Laura

Each one of us have a unique style and we also have similarities as well. I encourage you to check out all of the previous posts to see if there are any tips you can pick up!

So what is my process for when I make paper craft projects? Let me show you! I’m going to focus on how I design for Your Next Stamp, but this is also how I design for my own personal projects. You’ll see a mixture of YNS products as well as some other manufacturer’s products as the Holidays are around the corner and I am currently working on both.

The very first tip I want to highlight is to be organized. Yep, we all know that’s what we should be doing, but I can’t stress that enough. Don’t get me wrong, I have my fair share of times when life gets in the way and there’s an assignment I have due. I then resort to panicking because I feel rushed and my creative mojo isn’t there! I have a solution for this (when I’m on top of things). Here’s what I call my Inspiration Station; I have pulled out all of my Holiday stamps and embellishments that I want to work with and placed them in a plastic IKEA Antonius container. I tend to forget what I have when it’s not right in front of me so I save myself the trouble and the time I’ll spend later looking for items by placing them in this container for a quick grab when needed. I think these are also the same baskets used for the infamous IKEA Raskog carts.

When I’m ready to create, I just go to my little Inspiration Station and start pairing things such as colours, papers, embellishments, etc together and I keep the items together in a binder pocket page. I colour in most of my YNS images and when I’m ready to work on a certain image or set of projects, I grab my Copic markers and start colouring the images. It’s so easy – the colour combos are already in front of me so that way, I’m not stuck rushing around later.

I keep a digital calendar as well as a paper planner to write down when assignments are due. That also helps with organization and keeps me on track so I’m not panicking (which still happens sometimes).

Other resources I use to assist me in creating YNS projects are the different challenge and sketch blogs. YNS has our own bi-weekly Sketch and Colour challenge, but I like diversity and trying to bring you the most current happenings. I use Feedly to read all the different blogs I subscribe to and have organized a handful of challenge blogs under that label so that I can refer to them quickly and pull a sketch out to use when creating.

The card I created to share with you is one of my favourite Holiday stamp sets – the Ugly Sweater – that YNS released last year! It cracks me up and is so on trend. My idea was to create a quick and easy card without having to colour any images. I wanted to mimic the ugly sweater look without having to spend too much time on the actual sweater. I love the typography of the sentiment and I wanted to focus on that. I also used the Stitched Line Die to create a border around the sentiment.

Here’s a review of my creative process:

1. Keep organized by having an inspiration station or make sure that your tools and supplies are in sight
2. Plan ahead or keep a calendar to stay on task if you have set deadlines
3. Use resources when creating to aid in making things quick and easy

Hope you enjoyed my take on designing and make sure you come back next week to see what tips and tricks Tracy will give! If you have any questions, please drop them below.

Thanh