Evoke the Emotion

Today I'm going to talk about a couple of ways to evoke emotion in our layouts.  This first layout is about a father who broke up a family when he started seeing a "lady friend."  I thought the somewhat "fractured" background paper embodied the sadness of broken hearts and dreams.

This next layout discusses a frightening situation we found ourselves in.  How do you see the emotion being conveyed here?

For me the stark black and white and the font used for the title both help convey the fear we felt as we drove over roads that were little more than tracks with steep drop-offs on the sides as we tried to find our way to our destination.

By the Numbers - Two Photos

Today I thought I'd share a few layouts that have two photos on them:

This one uses fairly typical sizes of photos. The border paper helps set the Australian theme, and the kangaroo brad reinforces the theme of one of the pictures.

I have found, especially for pages with two photos on them, I love having one photo oversized.  Here's an example of a layout using a panorama photo with a regular one.

Perhaps my very favorite of all, are pages where one photo is used as the background with another photo superimposed on it.  I can do this easily even for 12" x 12" pages since I have a wide-body printer, but even without that it's a technique that can be used for 8 1/2" x 11" or 8" x 8" pages to great effect.  Here's a 12" x 12" that I did this way.

Make it Focal - Part 2 - Color

If you look back at the scrapbook page I shared, in Make it Focal - Part 1, you can see that, in addition to looking at the composition of the picture itself, another thing I did was use COLOR to help the photo stand out.  Bright colors are GREAT for drawing the eye to a focal photo!  In that case I used yellow to mat the photo for several reasons.  For instance, the bright yellow formed a nice complementary accent to the blue of the page. Also, the yellow in the mat reflected the yellow in the blanket in the photo itself.  However, the most important reason was that the contrast of the bright yellow against the blues of the rest of the page, helped draw the eye to that focal picture. 

Here's another page where color was an important component in creating the focal point:

Notice how the red bird really stands out compared to the other photos.  I helped ensure that it did by using a red background paper.  I used several other tricks to help the focal stand out.  I'll talk about them in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, what ones do you spot?

Here's another simple layout where color was used to draw attention to the focal picture - this time by contrast with the black and white photos - as well as the maroon in the mat that surrounds it.

Do you spot other things that were done to bring attention to the focal picture?

More Thanksgiving Cards

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!  Here are a few more Thanksgiving cards.

Another Wallpaper Card

A wallpaper card

Matstacks and sentiments CD card

Another wallpaper card