paper: Designing scrapbook pages with strong horizontal lines | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Working on more pages for existing albums in preparation for The Scrapbook Process class has given me an even longer list of pages I want to make – not just for the topics and how they fit into those stories, but to work with different design techniques that haven’t been on my radar recently. Things like what different ways can I… and then ten different ways to finish that sentence! So for today, what different ways can I create with strong horizontal lines?

I love that ‘strong’ in design doesn’t have to mean shoutingly obvious. The bridge in the layout above gives a definite horizontal flow across the page, especially with the patterned paper strip below the bridge and the red bus to catch your eye just past the photo. A motif like that stamped image can certainly create a horizontal line – think border stamps or designs cut from patterned paper and placed in a horizontal line across the full page!

Horizontal flow can also come from how you cut and place any number of elements on your page. In this case, it’s blocks of paper, all anchored with the darkest paper of the bunch as the larger layer right across the middle. There are lines going every which way on this page! Diagonals in outside frame, map chaos in the yellow background, but nearly every block of paper runs horizontally, from that big woodgrain block to the tags at the top left and the labels at the bottom right.

Of course horizontal lines can come directly from the paper itself, like in this example from guest artist Katrina Hunt:

I love patterns and I usually let the pattern papers tell me how my page should flow. With stripes, well it’s easy, I will either have a mostly vertical design or a mostly horizontal design.

I loved the green striped paper in the Shimelle Starshine collection and knew it was the perfect starting point for my page.

And scrapbook those food pictures, because you know you take them!

And if all those individual techniques can create horizontal lines across a page, you can definitely mix them together! The background paper here is a horizontal pattern even though it’s made from numbers rather than stripes. The cloud die-cut has a similar result to the stamped bridge – a shape that is anchored on a horizontal line. Border-punched strips and washi tape run on the horizontal line along with the blocks of paper, and you can even find a few more horizontal patterns hiding in there, like the coffee cups! (There’s a video for this page here if you fancy a watch.)

What pages have you loved making with strong horizontal elements? Share with us in the comments – we’d love to see!

Today’s Guest Artist: Katrina Hunt loves dogs, doilies and scrapbooking. You can find more from Katrina on Instagram, Facebook, and her blog.

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31 May 2016

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