The Story of My Sweet Girl

Now that I've figured out what all my favourite techniques are (see my last post here) I find it so much easier to create quickly and still be happy with the results.

And when faced with a challenge or an extra criteria (like this sketch by Nadio Cannizzo for The Scrapbook Store this month) it's now quite a simple matter of making the challenge fit what I want to do, rather than trying to fit into the challenge.

But even when sticking to your own 'rules' that you've created for yourself doesn't mean that you can't have fun and take it a step further. For this page I started with my plain(ish) base paper and built up a bit more interest using some mixed-media techniques. It didn't quite come out like I imagined but that's ok. All part of the creative journey.

After spreading on some gesso, and applying texture paste through a stencil I had in my mind that the mist would add a water-colour effect behind all the paper layers... which is kinda has. But I was aiming on having the blue extend up the top and the yellow down the bottom - to reflect what's in the photo. Instead it merged a bit too much together and spread too far. Never mind.

Then it's onto my brightly coloured linear layers of paper, building up as I go. I didn't really suffer over my choices of paper, or even measure. In fact, these are just the leftover scraps from a kit. I try to add some dimension between the layers by curling up the edges a bit and not gluing the corners down. I'd like to say I have a never-ending packet of foam dots that I use but the truth is that would probably end up being quite expensive so instead I just glue scraps of packaging cardboard between them.

I cheated a bit on the title / typography front. In my SC kit that I was killing (which I probably haven't touched in over a year) I actually found this title that I cut with my Silhouette way back then. It was one half of 'Sweet Memories' and I used the negative from that cut on a layout years ago. So whilst it wasn't planned, it actually worked really well, so there it stayed. Told you this layout came together quickly ;-)