I have a lot of photos from the recent China trip when my parents came to visit. And most of the time there are too many great pictures to choose from, so I usually do double pages, where on one page I feature mainly photos of events and sights, on the other page I focus on the people. So, “Little Venice” is a page where you see several photos included, and …
Here’s what I did
Admitted, I was lazy with this page. Usually arranging lots of photos neatly takes me a lot of time, but I wanted a quick fix, so I based my layout on a template by Erin Ink that was included in the Digi Files in September (if I remember correctly).
But I only used the two background papers from that template and in place of the four smaller photos the template actually had 9 squares for clippping. So, I simply used the Control + T keys to change the format of the 9 squares by dragging the corners until I had the desired size. The rest of the (unused) squares I deleted.
I also added more papers behind the photos to give the page a fuller feel. Then I added the clusters. Starting with the leaves, I resized them and arranged them in the corners, added flowers and ribbons to make everything look a little fuller.
Tip: It really helps resizing things when you realize it’s hard to make things look good on your page.
Brushes
To make the leaves pop off the page even more, I took the leaf-stamp (which is provided in the kit) and arranged that right on top of the green background paper. I also changed the opacity, so the stamps are only very subtle, but it really made the real leaves pop off the green background a lot better.
Scatters & Splats
I love scatters and splats. This kit has both, so I used them to give even more life to the lower right side cluster, while on the top I looked for a string from my stash to add to that cluster.
Title
Next, the title. I wanted “Venice” to be large and prominent, but wanted to keep “little” just that: small. I tried a lot of different options (usually I like using beaded/round alphas to counter with the letter alpha used on a page), but on this page it didn’t work well. So, I decided to use a paper strip. It took me forever, though, to find the right font, and when I wrote the word it was too large to fit on the strip, but too small when I reduced its size. That’s when I actually got the idea of having the word bleed beyond the strip boundaries. But I never like it when actual fonts like this one are shadowed – this would never happen on a real scrapbook page. Quick fix to that: I merged word and strip before adding the shadow. Now it just looks like some wordart.
Shadows
Lastly – and here comes the art of any digiscrap page: I tweaked the shadows. Actually I always add the shadows immediately to anything on my page, because I get a better feel of whether something looks good or not, but the fine tuning comes last, when everything on my page has found its final position. This is when I actually separate the shadows from their original layers (on the more “bulky” elements like the leaves; you do that by right-clicking on the layer style of the layer you want to modify and choose “create layer” from the pop-up menu). Once the shadow is on its own layer, you have several options. Sometimes I add the Gaussian Blur (from the drop-down menu “Filter”/”Blur”) first, and then use the smudge tool to smudge the edges of the shadow so that they make my elements look like some parts are closer to the paper while others are further away. It really gives the elements a more realistic feel. Sometimes I smudge first and then add the Gaussian Blur. I only learned about this recently, so I’m still experimenting with this tool.
