Stipple brushes vs sponging?

At least once a month I read about a different technique that you can use on cards and scrapbooks and then once in a while I actually give those techniques a try. Although I haven't used it much, I know that you can pick up ink on a sponge and apply it to cardstock to add background color. Until today - I have only done that once, on this card where I sponged the pink ink on the edges of the white strip with the small pink flowers:

A few months ago I read about applying color with a stipple brush instead and I wanted to see the difference between using a stipple brush to apply color to a background instead of using a sponge. To do this I made 2 almost identical cards. Here they are:

The "Find Joy" card using sponging and the "Happy" card uses stippling instead on the white square (then on each I stamped the flower multiple times). When I stippled the color on, it was quite faint and I stippled color all over the background of the white square. However, I noticed as I started to sponge the same Certainly Celery ink on the white square of the Find Joy card, the color was coming off onto my cardstock much darker, so I only sponged the color around the edges and left the rest white.

Both of these provide texture to the cards that wouldn't be there is I had just left the white sqaures white. Which is better? I love them both!!! I guess it just depends on what type of effect you want to give.

Something else that I did on these cards is that I used a lot of punches. Actually I only used 4 punches on each. I used both the small tag punch and the tag punch and punched each side to create the happy and find joy tags. I used the slit punch to creat slits to put the ribbon through and last but not least I used a 3/4" circle punch and punched out the corners of my white squares - I only tricked you into thinking that I had used a corner punch on these!