Bella Blvd Studio Blog: Using Clear Cuts as Embellishments with Missy

Hey, friends! Missy here, and I'm wrapping up Clear Cuts Week here on the blog. Several of our last collections contain a Clear Cuts Pad. These are awesome acetate sheets with all kinds of designs on them. I love to cut the images out and treat them like embellishments. The layout I'm sharing today uses no patterned paper at all and a lot of Clear Cut images. I started by pulling a few sheets that caught my eye from the Illustrated Faith Basics Clear Cut Pad. Those beautiful flowers just jumped out at me.

I used my smaller precision scissors to cut some of the images out. The good thing about these is that you don't have to be too detailed with the cutting because it's clear. You really won't see the edges on your layout.

I kept on cutting and cutting! I wound up cutting a few images from the Illustrated Faith You Are Loved Clear Cuts Pad as well. I love all these bright colors, and those cute cacti gave me a great idea for a title that would go really nicely with my photos.

After I got everything cut out, I began to arrange all the shapes around my photos. I stacked the photos so I could add lots of the Clear Cuts around them. These photos are of my daughter and her sweet teacher from a few years ago. It was Halloween so they were dressed up. My little girl absolutely loves her teacher and is constantly hugging and kissing her as you can see :) I love the title "Stuck on You" because she really is, and the cacti matched perfectly. I didn't add too much more to the page so the Clear Cuts would really shine.

Here you can see all these amazing shapes. I think they show up best on white cardstock. It really allows their colors to stay true and really pop. The colors would look different if you added colored cardstock here. The cutting isn't perfect, but you don't even notice it when you're looking at the page. I used a few of the Wonky Alpha Puffy Stickers for my title and added some tangled thread around the photos.

I did a little bit of mixed media work down below the cacti. I figured they needed a grassy area to stand on, so I drew a line across the background and then used green gelatos and some spray inks to create a sort of grass. I machine stitched across the line for some added texture. This way it appears that the cacti are growing out of the ground. I used some of the Caio Chipboard for a big statement at the bottom, and I used pink and red gelaots to create that shading. I also created another floral cluster down at the bottom as well.

It's fun to layer the Clear Cuts like I did here. Since they're clear, you can still see what's behind each one. If you didn't want that to happen, you could adhere each image to white cardstock first and then cut it out.

I wanted to pull some of the blue color from the flowers and title down at the bottom of the layout, so I blended in some blue gelatos and spray ink into the green "grass." I love the contrast between that and the reds & pinks on the chipboard.

I decided to curve the title around this big pink flower, and I love how that turned out. I hadn't planned on doing that until I saw how the design was going. It's always a pleasant surprise when you get a fun design opportunity like that when you didn't even think about it in the first place :)

I hope this gives you some ideas to try with the Clear Cuts Pads. They are really fun and full of color. They're really easy to work with, too! Thanks for stopping by!