When I think about mass produced cards, I think one design, run through a fancy printer like a zillion times (very nicely, of course). But I ran into an opportunity a little while ago that lead me to think about mass production in a different way with my small scale Drawn & Delivered card project. This method even involves recycling so for this girl who uses (what feels like) a metric ton in paper it made me feel really good.
One morning, I spent an unusually looooong time working on my #dailyintention of the day to share on my Instagram and I wound up with 5 or 6 sheets of paper that I would have otherwise chucked into our recycling, but after becoming more interested in cut paper and mixing texture, it lead me to think about how I could use these sheets differently. I was also a llllllittle behind on my card schedule so all of this paper and started to look like an opportunity.
I sat down after randomly cutting up the pages and arranged them onto the cards. I liked how abstract everything was looking and the strange amounts of white space I was noticing too, so I opened up my glue stick and started to put the pieces together. Once I had everything glued down, I trimmed out the edges and voilá!
What makes this method work is the very simple color palette and some of the repeated shapes that you start to notice from my original pre-cut pages. It's almost as if there is a hidden system to the madness.
At the very end of creating these cards I thought they lacked a sense of grounding so that's why I added the black lines around some of the edges of the paper.
I would love to do some more work with small batch designs like this in the future.
If any of you have scraps from sketches hanging around, try doing this too! I think you'll like the results. It's also very quick and kind of like putting a puzzle together that has no image. So like freestyle puzzle building? Yeah… that sounds about right!
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