A Contest

Go Digital Scrapbooking has begun the first round of their Supreme Team IV Contest. I was only one of the 164 to sign up!

We were given a great looking kit by Andrea Gold. All deep purples and blues. The colours were gorgeous! The elements beautiful. Only one thing, being called Winter Frosting you can imagine a lot of snowflakes, mittens and a snowman. Not very helpful here in Florida where we are decidedly snow free.
The pieces that called to me at first sight were the cardboard paper and the knotted ribbon. Once I had downloaded and unzipped the files I opened my 6x4 page and placed my favourite paper, adjusted in size and rotated. Because the challenge is about using the kit for a layout I did not concentrate on pictures. Instead I used two blank rectangles placed on my paper to 'place-hold'. Using my other favourite element, the knotted ribbon, I began wrapping the portrait picture. I wanted it to squish, like this:

image from NBC

After playing with the liquify tool I had to admit defeat. I wasn't getting it. Instead I used the wrapped ribbon provided in the kit. I also put the matching ribbons behind everything.

I chose two background papers to mat my pictures. I didn't want them to frame, just stack. This is hard for me because I love symmetry and balance, but feel scrapping should seem natural. The transform tool let me find that look as I adjusted the size. With the themed ribbons and mats, my page looked very purple.

Using the eyedropper on the colour swatch provided, I painted over the torn cardboard with the color replacement tool to make it a coordinated blue.

To show the judges my creativity I wanted to use a snowflake as something else. One look at the paper snowflake and I knew it could be photo corners, just by clipping it into quarters. Looking back, I should have changed my picture to a square and used the flake as is. By layering a copy of the flake above and below my picture layer, I was able to erase the top flake where I wanted the photo corner to poke through.

I used one of the provided tags for my, undecided, title. I made a hole in the picture so it would appear to be punched together with the eyelet. I also added staples and the paperclip to look as though they were holding everything down. After the difficulty of selecting my pictures, a title was easily chosen. Drop shadows added were the final step, and here is my finished layout.

Posting my layout in the gallery I join all those waiting to see if we go on to the next round. Whether I move on or not, I have a scrapbook page I enjoy.

Messy

I have been wondering about "messy" pages. The kind with a lot of elements all over; stacked on the picture, under the picture, around the picture. Messy, except they make a beautiful page. Random, so all the pieces looked like they were naturally strewn on the page. I wanted to try this.

Becki had some sparkle swirls that would be a wonderful chance to simply fill a page with elements. I envisioned a wreath made up of the swirls, all entwined, and a circle shaped picture in it, on it, or feathered behind it. I would figure out the single picture after I had my messy elements.

I started with four of the coloured swirls: silver, gold, green and red. I placed them together and rotated each one ten degrees more than the one before it. The plan was to copy these four layers around enough times to create my circle of swirls. By the time I had four sets that went all the way around I realized that they looked nothing like a wreath, and were looking too patterned for the natural look I wanted.

Instead I layered and rearranged the sets so they were different. Starting with the top swirl I erased where I wanted it to be under the other three swirls. Each layer had one less layer it could swirl under, making each step faster. In a short time I had four unique yet intertwined vines.

Since they would not form a circle on my rectangular page, I chose to have them come in from the corners. Then I could tell which picture to use, and how I wanted it to go on the page. I also realized that a title would be too much for me to deal with. If I just put it on the page I would lose my entwined mess. If I entwined it, the title would probably disappear. There would be no title on this page.

credits: Becki Kress - Sparkle Swirls

And this was the result. While it is almost nothing like I planned, I like it. It has a feel of the Princess Pea walking in a tangle of vines, in the woods, as Little Red Riding Hood does. Without a title or journaling it lost the feel of a scrapbook layout. Instead, I see it as a beautiful picture.

How messy do you like your pages? How do you keep track of all of the layers?

Introducing Diamond

I am a stay at home mom with a great husband, yet to be named on this blog, and two children, the Princess Pea and the Little Gunner.

This is my blog to show off my newest hobby. Digital Scrapbooking. Most likely there will also be posts about my family, my other favourite hobby-knitting, and eating gluten free. I have galleries in a few of the digital scrapbook stores, but this will be a place to share my thoughts on my pages. Please note that I will be blacking out names and the faces of my children's friends from the scrapbook pages I post here.

My earliest photo editing attempts began in 2005. I began using the Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2 that came with our digital camera, bought in 2002.

A sampling of Halloween
an amusing sequence
and a year-end collage
of the Princess Pea for her pages in the "Grandchildren's Calender" for my Mother in Law.

Not very impressive. I had to paintbucket a colour behind the pictures or cover all the space with pictures, otherwise there was nothingness and I didn't know how to handle that.

Except the next year, I did it anyway.
I didn't want to overload the page with pictures, and I didn't want to overlap too much of the pictures. I also found the cool button that shaped the text like a fish. And so I chose nothingness behind everything.

I started Digi-Scrapping in February of 2007. I was so excited to learn about digital background paper. Suddenly it wasn't nothingness or a blah colour.

Sadly, I was distracted by extractions and didn't know how to do them well.I'm happy to say I became better rather quickly. I began to use more of what I call the "scrapbook look." I learned about drop shadows, adding a whole new dimension to my pages.

And the rest you will see as my blog continues.

I apologise to the designers of the four kits used for the layouts I posted today. I did not keep records of the designers when I started, so do not know who to give credit for on these. This is what happens when you don't understand how the community works. I never thought others might want to see my pages, or that I would want to share my pages with others. I was simply making a brag book for the Princess Pea.