Let’s study pages by Celeste Smith, Kayleigh Wiles, and Lisa Dickinson
In the audio of the November Masterful Scrapbook Design (MSD) seminar on details, I suggested studying pages that you like in order to understand how you might approach your own pages. MSD member Mary Nelson asked how to go about that.
Mary is a woman after my own heart. What do I mean? How does one do this? Since applying analytical skills to creative projects is something I enjoy (like solving a puzzle or cracking a code), here’s a breakdown of how I would go about this.
I’ve chosen three layouts each from three scrapbookers who have different styles/looks. I’m showing them (at first) small so you can get that “squint” look at them and at the bottom of this article, they are shown larger. I’ll use these layouts to walk you through the questions and observations that are helpful for figuring out what a scrapbooker is doing so that you might do it too!
Examine how a designer includes or uses:
- the five parts of a page (canvas, photos, title, journaling, embellishments),
- design principles, and
- product.
For each of the designers I chose three layouts that I really like and that have some commonality in design.
Looking at Three Layouts by Celeste Smith
See Celeste’s Two Peas gallery
1) Discover
Here’s what I discover when I look at these three pages by Celeste.
- Celeste prefers a rectangular canvas (as opposed to the 12x12 square canvas)—even when she works on a 12x12 canvas, she often creates an inner canvas that’s rectangular.
- Celeste often blocks her canvas with patterned papers.
- Celeste frequently divides her canvas into thirds—into horizontal bands that are about one-third of the height of the canvas.
- Celeste does not use lots of photos on her pages—frequently just one, sometimes two.
- Celeste uses tidy titles (they’re aligned and cut cleanly) that are simply rendered and clear in meaning. She positions them in a sweet spot (about one-third of the way from the top or bottom). She uses one alphabet or font. She uses alpha that contrasts strongly with the background.
- Celeste types her journaling and includes it in one spot—spanning most or all of her canvas.
- Celeste puts her embellishments in one spot.
- Celeste places embellishments near her title.
- Celeste’s embellishments are simple and clean.
- Celeste often uses a border strip—see the white and black ribbon on “Loves Me” and the oranged stitched strip on “Road Trip.”
2) Use what you like
Here’s a page of mine with a lot of Celeste in it.
- I’ve got an inner rectangular canvas holding my photo, journaling, and title.
- I’ve used one bold photo.
- I’ve put my title all on one strong line spanning my entire inner canvas.
- I’ve used a border strip that runs horizontally across the page.
- My embellishments are simple (for me!) and sit in two spots.
- My journaling spans the entire inner canvas.
Looking at Three Layouts by Kayleigh Wiles
See Kayleigh’s Designer Digitals gallery
1) Discover
Here’s what I discover when I look at these three pages by Kayleigh.
- Kayleigh leaves lots of white space on the page.
- Kayleigh creates one block that contains her photos, journaling, title, and embellishments and then places that off center on her page. The block takes up about one-third of the total area of the page—the other two-thirds are white space.
- The block I just described is backed up by brushwork. On two of the layouts here it’s very subtle (tone-on-tone). On “India,” it’s bolder.
- Kayleigh uses page borders.
- Kayleigh stitches things down with long runs of machine stitching.
- Kayleigh’s titles don’t sit all tidy in a line and they’re usually overlapping and going under other elements.
- Kayleigh uses embellishments that spill or trail or sprinkle. See the small beads, the ends of ribbon bows, the berries on a branch.
