Adding Drop Shadows w/Feature Guest Artist CYNDE WHITLOW

Hey folks!

Cynde here, and I’m so happy to be back with another Guest Design post for Wplus9!

For my card today, I’m stamping a simple background, coloring it in and finishing it off with a drop shadow. I think adding drop shadows is one of the easiest and coolest ways to finish of a card. In fact, I think it makes such a huge difference that I rarely make a card without one.

I wanted to use the Color My World Stamp Set for a couple of reasons. For starters it's super cute! Also, I like the size and shape of the images. I knew that I wanted to stamp a pretty simple background on my card panel and these were perfect! The paint tubes aren’t symmetrical, but the lines of the image are mostly straight and that helps a bunch when stamping a full background!

You can watch the video below, where I walk you through the whole process.

Watch above or watch in HD at YouTube

I started by stamping the sentiment on a 4” x 5.25” piece of white cardstock. I stamped the sentiment and the one bent tube first then built the background around that. Since I was going to be coloring with Copic’s, I used a Copic friendly ink.

Before I started coloring, I used a pencil and I lightly noted on the panel what color I wanted each tube to be. I knew that I wanted them to be in rainbow order, but I wanted to make sure that the colors would be pretty even across the panel.

After I had the panel colored in, I wanted to add a drop shadow to each of the tubes. Drop shadows are hands down the easiest way to finish of your cards. You could skip it if you like, but I think adding a drop shadow gives your images or scene a more finished look.

I colored all of the tubes in as if they had a center light source, but I added the drop shadow as if my light source was in the top right. When you have a background as busy as this your light sources don’t necessarily need to match. The eye can take it all in as a whole, but it won’t rest on anything in particular that tells you that your light sources don’t match. More importantly what you will see is that your finished card will look three dimensional. That’s my favorite part!

Since I feel that adding drop shadows are a nice finishing touch to my cards, I typically skip adding any embellishments. However, what’s a card without a little (or a lot) of glitter? So I did add a bunch of glitter to the highlights on all of the images.

I think black and rainbow are perfect together so I adhered my card panel to a top folding notecard of Wplus9 Black Cardstock and called it good!

That’s it! Easy peasy. I hope you enjoyed my card today and as always I enjoyed being here for Wplus9!

Thanks so much for stopping by! ~Cynde

Featured Supplies

For your convenience, here is a list of the featured Wplus9 supplies used on today's project(s), along with links to purchase.

Wplus9 Black Cardstock Shop at: WP9

Color My World Shop at: WP9