Tuesday Tutorial

Many of you have told me that you are very interested in my scrapbook layouts. As I've been working really hard scrapbooking my recent vacation photos I had a bit of a revelation. I've decided to start a new chapter here and mix my passions of papercrafting and teaching. So welcome to my new Tuesday Tutorial. In this tutorial, I will share with you some of my techniques for designing scrapbook layouts.

This is a card that was one of the Make-n-take's at Seattle Regionals. I have already posted an 8x8 scrapbook layout that I created which was inspired by this card. I redid this layout as a 12x12 size. You see the layout below.

I love this photo of my family. Almost everyone is looking at the camera and the colours are really beautiful. It's important to find a good photo to start with. For me, the colours are the most important part of a layout. I find myself very attracted to certain colour combinations. Usually I love very bright colours. I have to admit that this layout was a real stretch for me. And then I noticed that the flowers in the stamp were very similar to the colours in my sister-in-law's dress. I pulled out the colours from the stamp to mount the photo on. This layout was very easy and didn't take a lot of planning. Here's where the tutorial begins...

Step One - COLOUR
What do you do when all your pictures are NOT perfect? When we posed for this picture, we also took several other shots. Of course, my children did not cooperate and we wound up with several uninspiring pictures. I wanted to make this a 2 page layout, so naturally I decided to use the same colours as the layout above. After sorting through my pictures from that evening, These are the ones I decided to use. They are unimpressive pictures by themselves, but as a group they have the same colour palette and I am really drawn to the lighting with the bright desert sun so low in the sky.

STEP 2 LAYOUT
So after deciding on the pictures I needed to figure out how to lay them out on the page. I often use scrap maps for inspiration. For this page I went straight to the goddess of scrap maps herself - Becky Fleck. I went to her website http://www.pagemaps.com/ This is an excellent place to start. This is the layout I decided to use.


I like to treat scrap maps as a place to start, and as you will see, the final layout doesn't really look like this map very much. I was drawn to this map because of the thick border near the bottom of the page. I knew I would be using the thick grosgrain ribbon like I did in the previous page. I was also drawn to the layout with one larger photo and a few smaller ones.
I decided to highlight the photo of my son, so I blew it up. After I played around with the photos for a while, I came up with what I thought was a balanced layout. Next I mounted the photos on cardstock which not only matched the first page, but also drew from the colours in the pictures themselves. The Old Olive worked best for the photos of my daughter, but my son's turquoise shirt clashed a bit, so I mounted it on Riding Hood Red. I also decided to include some journaling so I needed to leave some space for that.

So here it is, the final layout. Remember that none of these photos are great photos by themselves, but in a double layout like below, I was able to pull them together to make a layout that is interesting, and representative of our holiday.