A Few Layouts

Whoof! I feel like it's been forever since I've posted--but I've been working like crazy. Starting on a new stamp sheet, as well. Been a while!

Unsurprisingly, lots of Father's Day stuff (compounded by the fact that this past Saturday we went out for a picnic on one of the loveliest days of the year so far: warm, but breezy enough to wear a light jacket; brilliantly sunny; and we picnicked in a field of wildflowers on the highest point on the Oregon Coast, with a splendid view of the ocean...



Here's today's (click for credits):



I enjoyed playing with Katie Pertiet's masking tape photomask, but I also enjoyed making my own to blend the two backgrounds together. And those dried flowers and leaves add such depth, it's great!

Here's another that's a fun one. I can't even remember how I found Amy Sumrall's blog, but she was giving away this darling kit (A Walk In The Park), and I snatched it up! I sure practiced my extraction skills on this one... ;0



And in a totally different style, a rather graphic design that I came up with, inspired by a piece of Japanese patterned paper I saw somewhere, which consisted of little pastel triangles that were each slightly faded at one side, printed on a nice, textural hand-made paper. So I placed a random grid of guides on my layout, then selected random rectangles and filled them with a gradient going from color to transparent, all in the same direction. This, I placed over a background of a scanned piece of handmade Thai paper, which I recolored a bit. The end result is a visually intriguing blend of texture versus flat, as well as highly saturated color versus a lesser one. The light, cool grays of the photos were a perfect (and serendipitous!) foil for all the color, movement, and texture going on, and I really like how it came out!



Have a great week! I have a feeling there might be a couple more freebies this week... ;)

Speaking of running with what you have...

A couple more challenges today. The first on 2Peas was to use an image AS IS - no cropping, focusing, changing light, sharpening, nothing. So I used this fun picture of Allen from the other day--he was a bit too close, and the focus is actually on the far part of his hair.



I had fun playing with the typography (font is Coolvetica) on that one: the bottom of "Mom..." touches the red line and the left edge, the top of the "you'd better..." is touching the red line, and the end is touching the right edge, and the "mischievous" is touching both edges and the bottom of the lower line of type. I love it when it all works out! By the way, did you know you could kern type (move letters closer or farther away) by using alt+right/left arrow? I used the kerning on "mischievous" between the e and v, and v and o to make the spacing more balanced.

The second was in response to a challenge by Jessie Edwards over at Designer Digitals for the ad challenge. It's a series of brushes with very jaggedy, rough edges. Definitely not my style, but I love pushing myself, so went with it:



Fonts are Sabotage and Antique Type. I used the heavy wax crayon smear brush to do the erasing, which was kind of fun. After I'd finished these two, I realized that they're both "flat"--no drop shadows or any kind of 3-D effects. I guess that works here!