We’re shining the spotlight on this beautiful scrapbook page featured in our January–February catalog. There are so many pretty little things happening throughout that add up to this final outcome. We’re breaking it down, technique by technique, and showing you how you, too, can use some of the same ideas and principles behind this page to create a layout of this caliber on your own and in your own style!

Start with the photo or group of photos you want to scrapbook and look for a common color, or color scheme, among them.

In our case, the darling little girl in our picture is wearing a dress that matches our exclusive color Sundance. We picked the Sawyer paper collection, which features Sundance in its color palette, and picked from the collection’s set of coordinating products to create our page.

(If there isn’t a paper collection that fits your particular color needs, turn to our Love of Color how-to book series. These books were designed to help make color choices with confidence by offering several color combination options for each of our exclusive colors!)

Once you’ve got your products selected, it’s a good idea to start with the base page.

White Daisy cardstock is a favorite base page choice because it complements both primary and secondary colors, and visually brightens and neutralizes any dark or busy patterns you may be using on your layout.

Our next design choice was influenced by the sticker sheet and pattern papers we had picked out. Some of the elements in the sticker sheet and patterned papers looked like they had been painted with watercolor. We wanted to tie that watercolor paint scheme with the rest of the page, so an easy solution was to add splatters of actual watercolor paint to the base page.

Before any of the other elements were attached, on our bare sheet of White Daisy cardstock, our artist picked up watercolor paint with the tip of a waterbrush and gently tapped the barrel of the brush on her index finger, above where she wanted the splatters to land. This splatter technique is a really fun way to add some “controlled chaos” to artwork. You get to choose the colors and the general placement of the splatters, but the results don’t feel so thought-out or rigid, providing a more artistic look to the overall aesthetic of your page.

A challenge you may be faced with is choosing from all of the beautiful, patterned papers and coordinating colored cardstock. When working with the Sawyer collection, we wanted to showcase them all! If you find yourself in this predicament, a great solution is to build a background using as many options as you can fit!

One approach is to pick a Cricut® or Thin Cuts shape and replicate it. You can also use strips of paper or replicate a pattern that inspires you—the possibilities are endless! We picked a diamond shape from our Artiste Cricut® collection (#M3BAC4) and cut a few from all of the patterns and solid color papers we wanted to incorporate into our design. If you take this approach for your own artwork, cut more of each shape than you think you will actually use. This way, you have extra to play around with as you decide on a pattern before attaching the final arrangement to your base page.

*To replicate our design, use 21 diamond shapes, each 2⅞” tall and 2⅛” wide. The top and bottom rows are 1″ from the top and bottom of the page and the left column is 1⅝” from the left edge. Draw light pencil lines to use as guidelines in order to align your shapes just right. Remember to erase any remnants once your pieces are attached!

After completing the design in the center of the page, we felt like balancing it out with some sort of frame on the top and bottom edges. We turned to the Sawyer paper packet’s zip strips for inspiration. The zip strips are ½” accent papers along the top of our patterned papers that provide extra design options. We chose a multi-color pattern and then cut it in half to create two 12″ x ¼” strips of paper—perfect for using one at the top and one at the bottom. We paired those pieces with some Sundance cardstock to further accent the photo.

With this excellent foundation in place, we’re ready to move on to the foreground elements of the layout! When considering a title for your layout, consider whether any of the stamp sets, stickers, die-cuts, or pocket cards have a sentiment that fits what you are scrapbooking.

We pulled the title for today’s page from the Sawyer coordinating sticker sheet. But before attaching it to the layout, we needed to determine our photo placement—the most important part of any layout!

Adding a photo mount with a coordinating cardstock color or patterned paper is a great way to make your photo stand out from the page. Because our background is pretty busy, we decided on a solid Harbour cardstock for our mat. (We matted our 3″ x 4″ photo on a 3¼” x 4¼”.) Not only is Harbour one of the Sawyer collection’s featured colors, but it is also a prominent color in the title stickers we chose. By choosing a photo mat in the same color as the title, we created a visual tie between the two.

After considering their placement, we attached our matted photo and title stickers to our prepared base page with 3-D foam tape. When you raise different elements of your layouts with foam tape the added dimension draws attention to those elements. In our example, we wanted the darling picture to be the focal point of the page, and a little bit of foam tape helped create this effect.

Once you’ve got your base page designed, titled, and mounted with photos, all that is left to do is to embellish and add journaling to your heart’s content. You can add as much or as little as is your style.

If you’re a regular on our blog, website, or other social media pages, you may have noticed that we like creating clusters of embellishments on our layouts. The trick to these is to use different sizes, shapes, colors, and materials when you do, and to allow the embellishments to touch and overlap each other and other parts of your layout, including your photos. In our page, you’ll see that we’ve clustered stickers and die-cuts, some mounted on 3-D foam tape for that added dimension mentioned earlier, and layered them on each other, some overlapping the photo. Clusters also create a focal point, because of all of the visual attention they require when you’re taking a layout in as a whole. Place these strategically throughout your artwork and see what a difference they can make.

This gorgeous scrapbook page certainly has a lot of intricate things going on throughout it, but, taken one at a time, they are not very difficult to understand and replicate for yourself, and when you put them altogether, the end result can be truly breathtaking!

For more ideas and artwork examples, flip through the pages of our catalogs. There is so much there to see and to get inspired from!

Did you learn anything new from today’s walkthrough? Is there something on this scrapbook page that you noticed that perhaps we did not talk about? Leave us a comment below, we love hearing from you!

Recipe

12″ x 12″ Treasured Moments Page
X7277S Sawyer Paper Packet + Sticker Sheet, X6054 Grape Cardstock, X6062 Harbour Cardstock, X6051 Sundance Cardstock, 1385 White Daisy Cardstock, X7277E Sawyer Die-cuts, Z3132 Watercolor Paints, Z5021 Wild Berry Loose Sequins, Z3224 Small Round Waterbrush, Z2089 Glue Dots® Micro Dots, Z2060 Thin 3-D Foam Tape, Cricut® Artiste Collection

Cricut® Shape:
Artiste
#M3BAC4

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