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Monday, May 6, 2013

More Layout a Day Pages


The prompt for the second day of the Layout a Day challenge was the dagger from the game "Clue."  That may sound like an odd prompt but the subtitle was "take a stab at it" which opens up many more possibilities. Some people tried a new technique or made a page about a taking a chance on a new activity.

I ended up using a more literal approach since I had just come across some photos from many years ago when we lived in England.  We took a weekend bus tour which included an evening banquet with some actors portraying the king, knights and members of the court.  There was audience participation after dinner with a chance for our sons to try out some helmets and (dull) swords.

The photos had lots of extraneous details that I found distracting so I ended up scanning them.  While I wouldn't want to try to scan all of our old photos, it is amazing what a difference it can make to have the editing abilities we now take for granted with digital photography.


I thought I'd show you the original scans and my edited versions.  It is wonderful to be able to crop the images and clean up the distracting details in the background.  On the top photo I actually made a mirror disappear because the flash reflection was the unintended focal point.


For the top photo, I couldn't eliminate the mirror easily but the flash reflection matched up with the plume on the helmet.  I did crop and clone out the wall sconce in both photos.


Here is a screen shot of the basic layout of my page.  This is a very typical way to fill a page with two vertical and two horizontal photos.  I added mats and anchored the four photos on a red background layered on a grayish page (the color was sampled from the wall color in the restaurant).

The trouble with this basic grid is that it doesn't leave much room to title and caption the photos.  So I added a rectangle to hold my title and made the photo of our older son into a square.  I needed to shift the image slightly within the space - another benefit of working digitally.


To add more definition to the page I added more layers to the background, creating some thin black borders.  If all of these layers were paper it would be a very thick page.  I could add the black line with a pen in a paper page but there would still be three nearly full page layers plus the matted photos.  Since I was working digitally, I could also easily try a lot of variations without cutting up all of my paper.


Here is another look at the finished page.  It was fun to see how young our sons were at the time and remember our weekend trip.


While I really do enjoy working digitally, one of the hazards of digital scrapping is the ability to go back and redo your pages over and over again.  Here is my second version of the page I did for the first day of the challenge.  I like this page but it didn't fit the prompt of "white" as well as the one I posted for the challenge (posted below for easy comparison).


I have been keeping up with the challenge so far - five days done and 26 to go! 

Do you do mostly digital, mostly paper or a mixture of both when you make pages?  If you have never tried digital is it something you'd like to try or do you just prefer playing with paper?
 
I hope you had a great weekend.  With the change in the weather I seem to have come done with some allergies so I am trying to fight off the watery eyes and stuffed up nose. 

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2 comments:

  1. I love what you do digitally. My main concern is the cost of printing the pages once they're completed. That, plus I, like you, don't want to have to scan all the photos first. I use the 8 1/2 x 11 format and crop the heck out of my pictures to fit as many as I can on a page to tell my story.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Bobby,
      Getting pages printed isn't terribly expensive when you compare it to the costs of the papers and embellishments you would have "used up" on a page. Digital paper and other "stuff" lasts forever and you can use your favorite sheet of paper over and over!
      I watch for sales and try to print a group of pages all at once if I order online to keep the shipping costs more reasonable.
      I will never be able to scan all of the physical photos I have from our "pre-digital" life but I can pick and choose the ones that have special importance and enhance them by working digitally.
      So some of both types of pages works for me - I have plenty of paper and other supplies on hand for the "real" pages too (just can't resist buying pretty things!)

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