Thursday, April 4, 2013

My Own Way

Today's layout (which was posted to the FB page last night), started out like most of my other projects- with a sketch or layout I found online that I wanted to replicate. And once again, as per tradition over the last few days, I wound up taking my own route. Nothing was jiving!

I love how this layout turned out. I love the bright colors, I love the layering, which I'm coming to realize is my 'signature style'. A layout isn't a layout if I haven't layered a bunch of papers on top of each other. I have a very hard time not layering paper! Maybe its the depth that I crave so much? The other part of my 'signature style' is that I tend to use a lot of brights in my work. I love neutrals too, but I seem to gravitate towards bright colours quite often. What do you consider your 'signature style' to be? Do you have one?

For this particular layout, I wanted to pick up the colors in the photo, so chose to use yellow, green and blue. And, as I got going, pink somehow got intertwined into the design, and now it overpowers the entire layout! It looks as though it was meant to be the dominant color, but no!! It was supposed to be an accent. Meh, oh well, I think the design is eye catching anyways. I've read, somewhere along the way, that in order to help you create an appealing and 'balanced' layout, break your color scheme into parts- from lots of one color to very little of the last color. (I can't remember how they exactly explained it, so I'm going to paraphrase). So, the dominant color (or the color you use the most of on your project) would be (for example) 75%, the next 50% (so, a moderate amount of that particular color), and the last 25% (or the least amount of your last color) of your overall layout. That's probably pretty confusing, so take my layout, for example.

The pink wound up being the dominant color, and what I mean by that, is there is a lot of it. Proportionately, there's more pink in my layout than there is any other color. Its the largest piece of paper that I used on my photo mat, and it accounts for (I'd say) 75% of the colors I chose to use. Next most dominant color is blue. There's not as much blue as there is pink, yet there's still more blue found scattered around than there is yellow. I'd say that accounts for about 50% of the overall color scheme. Lastly, is yellow. As you can see, the yellow became more of an accent color than anything else. So did the green, but there's so little of that, it most definitely IS the accent color. The yellow would account for 25% of the overall color scheme.

Does any of that make sense? Is it as clear as mud? I'll try and find the link for you and share it in the very near future. It makes sense in my brain, but I'm not sure its translating well onto the computer screen.

Back to my layout. To beef up the scallop circle accent piece, I searched through all my Carta Bella and Jillibean (as well as the ancient CM and SU goodies I've  got) for something, but came up dry. Nothing fit. Then, I turned to Pinterest. I looked up my Quotables board, and found a great little quote to suit the theme of my layout. The quote says, 'When it rains, look for rainbows. When its dark, look for stars'. Its perfect, because the subject in my layout kept up her spirits pretty well while she was out of commission with Mono. It can be pretty rough on a person- any time they get it- but I hear its even worse as an adult. It wasn't as bad for her as it could have been (thankfully!!), and she bounced back rather quickly.          

One last quick little note--the two punched borders on the left-hand side are scraps that I'd cut down and made into my own borders. I'll post what I do with those in the near future, too!

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