Legos and a birthday

*I had planned on showing a work in process to share my creative process, specifically embellishing. I set up my page on the ottoman, turned on the camera--which promptly shut off since the battery was dead. It still gets dark here early, so I'll have to share that process later this weekend.

Instead, I though I'd share two pages I created last week:




This was for Sketch Support. The sketch was for a card, but when I saw the candles on the sketch, I thought of my sons' favorite part of the birthday: turning off the lights and blowing out the candles.

Every year I do that, mainly to get a cool sublit photo. At my birthday in January, the boys told me to wait before blowing out the candles so they could turn out all the lights. They don't have my reason for doing it--no photos were taken--but they like it, and it's a tradition, so they did it. Thus my page was born.

I used my February Studio Calico kit Candy Shoppe. I especially liked using gems for the candlelight. And check out my son's face! Yes, he's praying in one of the photos. He's wishing.

This layout involved some collected Lego photos I had of Rowan. I decided to put them together on a page and use the title Lego Dude, which I've probably used countless times:



Just an interesting note about the photos: the one on the left is normal, no tweaking, and the middle and right ones used Pioneer Woman Boost action. Don't they look much warmer and richer? I though about throwing away the one on the left and reprinting it using Boost, but I regained my sanity: my son will never gasp and say. "Mom! You should have used Boost!"

I trimmed one photo to serve as a title block; it sort of looks like patterned paper. The title also contains some of my typical layering. I'll write more about this later this weekend, but I think of layering as including three things:

1. Something flat--stickers, paper
2. Something dimensional--dimensional stickers, flowers, gems, brads
3. Something textured--stitching, especially

You'll notice I did all three here.