Remember this layout from the other day and the mixing of ye olde 2006 patterned papers with things that I’m using throughout my current album? Well, this page sits opposite that one in my album. So although they are not a double page layout, they do have a few things in common and I wanted them to be linked in some way, so I started this page with the leftover supplies from the first page… then added more to make it a completely different mix. It’s something that really makes me love the album process… and I think I might share some more thoughts on that with you very soon. But for now: the sketch!
This sketch has quite a bit of flexibility and a bit of a 1-2-3 methodology: one square of paper, two photos and three circles. The sketch looks overly simple, but you start there and can then add as much embellishment to each of the circles as suits your style. The circles can be moved about a bit to accommodate portrait or landscape pictures, and the square of paper can be made from more than one sheet if you want to use up some scraps. I ended up using two papers because nothing I had chosen was big enough to make the square on its own. As you can see here…
(And an extra little thank you to everyone who as subscribed to the videos over at YouTube. I appreciate it so much!)
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
The last sketch was actually two weeks ago so the extra time meant even more pages submitted – and so many fun designs. I love the energy on these pages that comes from the strips of patterned paper.
Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two, three. Middle Row, L to R: four, five, six. Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? Choose two pictures and grab a few papers to start. Give it a go and share it with us!
One of the dangers of really showing you a layout as it comes together is that sometimes things really don’t go the same way they are planned in my head. That happened with this week’s sketch page. But for as much as I may stumble in this week’s video as a result, it reminded me why I love the creativity of this craft. Why I love something that is so flexible and doesn’t require following a pattern to the letter. Why I love to design on the fly more than being penned in with rules and measurements and guidelines.
So this doesn’t look anything like how I imagined. I imagined all matching, small letter stickers. But that was before I realised I didn’t have a single T left in that set. (I thought I was being smart because I had run out of the letter E and this was a nice long title with no Es. Then the T had to throw a spanner in the works!) I imagined a line of brads down the right side. I imagined this pesky little flower sticker that partly inspired the colour scheme but in the end there was no nice place for it to live, so it is still in my stash and the page is in my album. But I love the problem-solving element of making a page and realising the masterplan isn’t working – find other letters, mix up the fonts, deal with the changed size and in general just make it work. I love that process.
And there was one thing I had no plan for at the beginning. In a bit of an unlike-me turn, I really had no idea what I would write about these photos. They were taken on my birthday while we waited for the bus and The Boy was generally being a bit silly with the camera. On that day, I didn’t really feel anything special about the pictures, but two years later there was just something from that made me realise this captured a very real moment of life and it really did have its place in my albums. And by the end, I knew what to write. Just another little creative challenge along the way.
This week’s sketch includes three 2×3 photos, which could be swapped for a photobooth-style strip or perhaps one portrait 4×6 photo. This sketch should be easily adjusted to 8.5×11 since there is a great deal of white space at the left side. Although I left the row of brads (or other circle embellishments) off in the end, I’ve included them here. Use them or don’t use them as you see fit. And you can add the banner back in for the title or you can just add a big, blocky title in that same space.
Julie has been blogging about purple lately and had me thinking about purple in my stash. Before I started looking, I thought I had a fair amount of purple, but it turned out to be the least represented colour in my supplies! I have been loving the deep wine-tinted purple shade (somewhere between burgundy and violet… so much so that I almost typed ‘purgundy’ but just… no.) from the Garden Cafe collection, so I like the idea of pairing that with a more obvious purple (from BasicGrey Eerie) and that pairing I love so much – yellow and grey. So that meant a mixed palette of grey, yellow, purple and fuchsia. In the light of day, I still liked it! I’m intrigued to try some of Julie’s purple palettes a bit more completely soon.
Also, I realise I make a ridiculous hand gesture in the beginning of the video. Nice one, Shim. You can forevermore use this hand gesture to mock me. In fact, I do believe it should become a night-club dance move named The Shimelle, of course.
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
Last week was possibly the simplest sketch I’ve posted, but I love the freedom it gave everyone to make it their own. And I giggled at the comments on so many blog posts that sticking confetti to a layout is a bit pesky! Yes… it really is. But worth a try now and then! Thank you to everyone who gave the sketch a try. This is just a sampling of nine favourites. Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two, three (bonus points for scrapbooking an OSTRICH). Middle Row, L to R: four, five, six. Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? Let’s see how you adapt this idea of vertical strips and a big banner of a title. Give it a go and share it with us!
It’s been a while since I’ve sketched out my favourite photo arrangement – two 4×6 prints in the same direction on a 12×12 page – so that’s what appears in this week’s sketch! And pretty much everything aside from the background here came from my scrap basket, so it feels a bit like something from nothing, which I love! I also got to use that confetti idea that a few of you have used for earlier sketches, so thanks for the inspiration to give it a try.
This week’s sketch is very, very simple! I’m intrigued to see if you keep it this simple or jazz it up with lots more. Either way can work. I didn’t really purposefully set out for it to be so minimal, but after I had added the paint and fabric dots it just didn’t seem like it needed further embellishments in this case… but your page might be different! Adapt as you see fit, of course.
The die-cutting website I mentioned in the video is I Diecut and you can find the free shape I used here. I have a Silhouette SD and cut using the Silhouette Studio software from a Mac. The DXF file from I Diecut worked just fine and I could add it to my library in Studio. You do need the latest update for Studio. With Studio open, go to Help at the top menu and pull down to ‘check for updates’ if you’re not sure if you have the latest edition. I Diecut also includes SVG files for those of you who use SCAL software or other SVG-reading options. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re an Echo Park fan and would like to cut shapes to coordinate with the paper and sticker designs.
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
Last week’s sketch inspired a mix of pages with one, two or four photos. I loved the variety! These are four of my favourites. Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two. Bottom row, L to R: three and four.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? Grab two pictures and see how much of the page you can create from your scraps, perhaps. Give it a go and share it with us!
This morning I was flipping through some prints looking for something when I realised I had never printed it at all, because I had actually made a digital page about something. And it’s actually a digital page I like but I’m not completely sure how I’m going to work it in with the flow of that particular album, so I figured some other photos from the same day could live happily on paper. (And if you read my Facebook/Twitter post asking for title suggestions for this page, now you know why! I apologise for resisting all the adorable ‘deer’ puns.)
I know it’s a bit of a shock but this week I actually printed my photos at home. On my printer. Mostly because I was totally inspired by the Snapshot frames by Paislee Press. So this week’s sketch as a little something different for the photo element – a block of pictures that can be just one photo or you can fill it with as many pictures as you like in a space of about 5×7. I went with four photos, all landscape, printed with the frames.
In the video you can see my original rough for the sketch, which included scallops for the border at the side and the small punched border strips. If scallops are a better fit to your layout, then feel free to take inspiration from that version of the sketch.
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
Here are four of my favourites from all the layouts shared last week. Love all those layers on so many pages! I think I’m going to take on a new motto of I have paper and I’m not afraid to use it. It can be a group motto, of course!
Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two. Bottom row, L to R: three and four.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? Will you use just one photo or add several photos to a block? Can’t wait to see your interpretation of this sketch!
(I’m trying a different linking widget lately. If you find it better or worse than the old option, could you let me know? I haven’t quite decided which option is the winner just yet. Thanks!)
A little red, a little black? Has to be a whole bunch of Jenni Bowlin! This week’s sketch of the week comes from this page I made for the JBS blog. Lots of layers in limited colour scheme, and for this page a mix of old collections and newly released products. (I love that about JBS papers – new releases always mix well with older stuff!)
I worked on this sketch with just a single 4×6 photo, but it could easily be adapted to two or three 4×6 photos or a collection of smaller prints. Two portrait shots would sit in the same place as the single photo, or for three landscape images you could stack them in a row and move the title to the left. One photo or several – feel free to change it up to make it work for you! And of course the butterflies can be absolutely any embellishment you like.
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
I love how many different styles and looks came from last week’s sketch! These are nine of my favourites. Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two, three. Middle Row, L to R: four, five, six. Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? What colours will you pick for your page? Give it a go and share it with us!
How about a wedding layout for this week’s sketch, since it’s wedding week and everything? But not to worry: you don’t have to create a wedding layout to follow the sketch. This week’s sketch is a way to give a special treatment to any 4×6 photo you might have.
There are some definite similarities between this week’s sketch and the last sketch. Don’t worry – they won’t all look like this from here on out! But I wanted to show two in this style in a row to illustrate how you can take one sketch and adapt it to work for you. I always find the feedback from different sketches interesting. A few people told me last week’s sketch wasn’t for them because it used too much paper on one layout and a few others said they didn’t like the idea of splashing paint over all those layers once they were in place in case it all went horribly wrong. I totally understand both of those comments, though neither of them worry me too much: there is a huge amount of paper in my scrap bin that should be used rather than just stored, so I don’t mind the extra paper on my pages. If I didn’t have a bunch of paper sitting there staring at me, then I’d most likely think differently about that! And as far as paint or ink messing things up at the end, I will assure you yes, this happens. I have plenty of layouts that just don’t work in the end the way I imagined them at the beginning. I either find a way to fix them (usually by adding more layers) or by salvaging what I can and starting over on a new layout. It’s not the end of the world. So I say err on the side of wild and brave and use your supplies and throw paint as you may.
But also, feel free to look at a sketch and reinterpret to make it work for you. That’s why these two sketches have similarities. Last week, my basket of scrap papers was making me think using a stack of paper would be a good idea. Then I looked at my bowl of die-cuts and had the same feeling, so I added a smaller stack of things to this week’s layout. Last week I added the paint midway through the layout, this time it’s pretty much right at the beginning. That way if it goes wrong, I can just add more paper over the top and no one needs to know anything ever happened. So that sketch became this week’s sketch and you can move things around again to make it work for you – add more photos, give it a title, turn things around. Replace paint splatters with punched shapes, replace a stack of embellishments with one bold motif. Hurrah for a craft that doesn’t rely on following an exact pattern – I love that we each make something unique.
Here’s a look at how this week’s page came together and notes on the supplies I used. Have a watch! (You can subscribe to all the videos here, by the way.)
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
Though last week’s sketch was a different style than the usual, a bunch of scrappers gave it a try and I loved the results. These are six of my favourites.
Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two, three Bottom row, L to R: four, five and six.
In that last page, Deb replaced the splattered ink with confetti made with circle punches. I love the look it created and it’s something that could be useful for this week’s sketch too.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? What photo will you pick for a bit of special treatment? Give it a go and share it with us!
Time for something a little different for this week’s sketch, I do believe. Not too different, but just enough. When I draw the sketches, I’m very aware that essentially my style involves lots of blocks of paper and to be honest, if I couldn’t use blocks of paper I wouldn’t really be sure what to do to make a page. But to change it up, this week I figured we could pile all the blocks in one stack rather tan arranging them in different areas of the page surface. Sound like a plan?
There’s something very flowing about making a layout like this – it seemed to be a case of almost dropping things onto the cardstock and seeing how they fell – papers, ink, leaves. A different process to change things up and keep it interesting!
This week’s sketch includes two square photos and I printed them at three inches. There’s also a fair amount of room for your writing and a big stack of layers. I mixed fabric with paper and ruffled the edges to create some messy depth, but you could adapt this to be need and clean with nested squares, perhaps.
This is the post I mention as the source of the writing on this page.
As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.
And we have two older sketches to catch up on! These favourites are from this sketch and SJ is going to pick her favourites since she sponsored the giveaway for last week’s sketch. Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Top Row, L to R: one, two, three. Middle Row, L to R: four, five, six. Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? I’m quite excited to see this sketch adapted to different styles. Give it a go and share it with us!
Two things that came out loud and clear from the comments at the weekend? A bunch of you love the sketches. (Yay!) But you wish there was a way to go straight to all of them. (Oh.) Well, actually there is! All the sketches are right here, and there’s a link at the bottom of each individual sketch post to take you there, but maybe that’s not very clear… so I’ll get a button added like the 4×6 Photo Love button and that will make things easier.
And if you have two landscape 4×6 photos, that will make participating in this week’s sketch challenge easier. Plus this week there is both a video and a prize! Oh, it’s just happy crazy scrap land here, I tell you.
The printable camera I used is from a kit called Picturebox and you get thirteen printable camera images for £1.50 (about $2.45 in US dollars). Then you can print them at any size, on any paper and use them on as many pages as you like. (Digi scrappers, you can also paste them into your pages, of course.)
As part of the week of giveaways, this week’s sketch is sponsored by Little Musings and one participant will win a collection of free goodies! Please like them on Facebook here to keep up to date and thank them for supporting this week of scrapbooking fun!
To enter the challenge, create your page based on the sketch and upload it to your blog or a scrapbook page gallery. Copy the URL for your entry and paste it into the linking box below! The deadline for this challenge is the end of next Tuesday – the 23rd of August 2011 – at midnight, UK time.
Since the last sketch is still open for a prize until this Sunday night, I’ll wait to share my favourites from that and next Wednesday I’ll share both lots together for double the fun!
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