Sheri’s son loves to dress up as superheroes. He has several costumes and takes on a fun persona when he plays. She took this photo 9 months ago and was waiting for the perfect kit, so when she saw Traci Reed’s new Heroic kit, she couldn’t resist! Usually Sheri is drawn to kits and then finds photos to match, but this was the opposite!
Sheri used Misty Cato’s Go Bold Stripes to jumpstart her page. She typically designs the composition of the page, using custom shapes to decide paper placements. She then determines photo placement and adds elements last. After designing the page, she adds title work and journaling. In this particular page, Sheri used the cut out filter in Photoshop to create the photo treatment mimicking the look of a comic book.
Sheri loves circles. Her layouts have some evidence of circular designs. While it’s fairly subtle in this page, she definitely gravitates towards circles. She also enjoys adjusting shadows to add depth to a page and using lots and lots of elements. Sheri considers herself to be a ”kit scrapper” and almost always focuses her page using just one kit. She does use other elements, such as stitches and brush work, but the majority of her pages come from one kit each.
A Good Teacher by DALE
This was created by Dale for a CT layout with a school theme. One teacher inspired her at school so it seemed natural for her to use her good feelings about this teacher as inspiration.
Here is how she did the page:
1) Dale started with the picture of the teacher and children, and then used two different background papers to blend the picture into the background using Pinlight at 100%. To create a more vibrant image she duplicated the blended layer twice.
2) The border was made by duplicating an element of a square ruler and positioning it in opposite corners of the page. She desaturated the images slightly to blend in better. Three crayon shaving images were then used in the top left hand corner to “fill the gap.”
3) Dale added the quote in red and then did her journaling. To emphasize the red quote, she added a gesso mat clipped to a mask underneath it.
4) She added a picture to the little chalkboard and placed it in the bottom left hand corner.
5) For the journaling just above the bottom border on the right hand side, she cropped a piece of checked paper to make a journal tag and stapled it in place.
6) Dale added the School Days label, the crayon outline “frame,” and the A+.
7) Shadows were then added where necessary to give the page a more realistic feel.
Dale uses the principle of thirds the most in her layouts. When in doubt, this always makes a page work well. She does admit, however, that the best design principle for her is: “There are NO rules!”
“Rules are great in the beginning when you are finding your feet,” she said, “but once you lose the rules you will find your own style and develop your own techniques….it is so much fun!!” Dale is definitely not a traditional scrapper. She started learning digital scrapping when she joined Tangie Baxter’s Art Journal Caravan and has seriously loved every minute of digital art journaling. She has also recently started doing Digital Art layouts and is really loving being creative in a different way.
Couleur Automnale by zaza09
Isabelle created this page for a challenge using a cluster with a photo on the upper left side. The cluster had to include a butterfly, ribbon, and bow. At the bottom of the page, there had to be another cluster, this time centered.
Isabelle does not really use a guideline for her pages because they are made according to the inspiration she feels with the kit but in general, she selects the papers first, then the picture that goes with the theme. Then she select the elements and tries to harmonize the page. After that, she creates realistic shadows and sharpens her page.
In Isabelle’s early digiscrapping days, she created a lot of scene pages; now, she creates both scene pages and classic pages depending on the kit and also the inspiration that strikes.
Explorer by mummyd
Donna’s son inspires her to create pages using his pictures. He is autistic and non-verbal and tends to go off into his own little world. She often wonders where he goes in his mind when she sees him staring into a blank space and then start to chuckle away to himself. So this amazing new kit came out, she just had to create a page of her son with that cheeky look on his face telling a thousand stories, and made it look like he was going on a flying adventure.
Donna started out with the paper, which had a few elments in one corner that she duplicated to the other three corners of the page. She then chose the picture of her son, extracted him (he was actually sitting on the sofa with his arms in the air), and added him with the propeller of the plane to his back to look like a flying back pack. She then decided to make it look like he was doing a dare devil stunt, hanging from one plane and walking onto another one in the air.
Donna loves to see pages that are well balanced, with great use of white space and composition. These pages draw her attention along with layered and detailed pages.
She considers herself to be a varied scrapper creating scene pages that take the viewer into a different place but also loves to create clustered pages. She especially loves when she is able to to incorporate both features into one layout.
The DST Gallery is packed with amazing layouts and inspiration. Join us each month for a selection of pages from our amazing members along with a behind-the-scenes look at how each page came together.
