Friday, April 8, 2011

Designing by twos

Last weekend I finished these two layouts, both using Studio Calico's March kit Into the Woods:

The one I made for my son that I posted about last week, and this one:

A celebration of my husband and me going out for coffee.

Both pages have essentially the same design, two vertical photos side by side and in this case aligned right.. I take more vertical photos than horizontal, mainly because my husband is 6'4" and my sons are short, so to fit them all in the same photo I generally have to go vertical. Now I tend to go vertical automatically.

Design-wise, the easiest way to put two vertical photos on a page untrimmed is side by side. I do that often. Here's some other pages I did in the past year, all of which have slight alterations to make them look different:

I did this one for the Big Idea Festival last summer. Unlike the earlier pages, I lay the photos only partially on the mat. I also used my Coluzzle (remember that?) to cut a home for the circular photo.

These two photos I trimmed and matted. Again I lay it on a mat, adding many punched and stitched layers below, plus journaling and title to the side.


Finally, this layout used a sketch from Sketchy Thursdays last year. The two were still on a mat, but I had a cross of patterned paper and color core cardstock alongside the photos, though the title is still on top and the journaling still to the right.

I mention this basic habit of mine because I think we scrappers tend to punish ourselves for not coming up with new ways to design pages. I can understand that feeling, but sometimes you can do many different, creative things with a basic design.

7 comments:

BabyBokChoy said...

You sure are amazing at generating lovely layouts using SC kits!!! love these!! Not everyone can do many different creative things with a basic design, that's a lot of work! lol.

Donna Jannuzzi said...

I completely agree with that last sentence. And you illustrate your point so beautifully with all of these layouts. =)

Carolyn Wolff said...

Awesome layouts.

Keshet said...

This is such a clever idea, and LOVE the layouts!

Sue Althouse said...

Love that you showed the same basic photo orientation, but each page looks unique. I need to take more vertical photos, I always end up with mostly horizontal.

Hedgehog Reader said...

What a helpful post! Love your layout, and really enjoyed all the informative bits. :o) I have a question regarding your journaling: how do you do your journaling strips in the top two layouts? I really like how it looks! Do you print them on paper, cut them, and hand-border? Or some other technique?

Sharla said...

I love all of your layouts, and they all look totally different, that takes a lot of talent!