Wednesday, March 1, 2017

It's All About Boys! -- Boy and Beagle Layout

One of the trickiest parts (I think) of putting together boy friendly pages is using the colors that boy "stuff" is mostly made up of  bright blues, oranges, various hues of green, a little red, some black...  And lots of times once you find some papers with the appropriate colors... the designs are so bold that they can easily overwhelm your photo!  That was the case here. 



 The issue?  A night-time photo, so not so great lighting.  And odd photo composition to get both the boy and the beagle in.  And then the colors...  

 Once I had located a paper or two or three that contained the colors I was looking for (a bold-ish blue with a slight turquoise hint, lime green, pure green,  and orange; then I struggled with the paper designs being so bold as to overload  the eyes when paired up with the photo!  You just lost the little boy and the beagle!  To combat this, I went to a tried and true method of combining the papers up under the photo--only allowing small slivers of color to appear rather than the pattern(s). 


When all those little layers were in place, I wound a length of orange baker's twine around the photo, tied on the wood veneer "XO", and cut some banners (both for under the layered photo and to repeat at the top of the page).   The camera was fussy cut from an older paper and used as an embellishment. I chose to take it easy on the use of embellishments for the same reason that I didn't want too much pattern showing from the papers.  Too many embellishments would have overpowered that photo. 



With the photo layered up, I ran a few strips of the same papers across the top and bottom edges of the page, splattered a bit of lime-y green and orange and glued on a couple sequin stars.

Next up was the title and I knew immediately I wanted a short and simple title---and a little quirky.  So instead of  Crate & Barrel... here you have boy & beagle...  I chose a slightly lime-y green Thickers set from my stash and lined it up with the lower edge of the photo.  The asterisk got added, well mostly cuz I just wanted  something to fill that little bit of space above beagle.  So there!  LOL!




That was it...  a boy page with a problem photo and (kind of) problem papers.  It was fun and it's done!  Always a plus in my book (or 'er album... ). 


So tip #1?  Like in many of my pages, I look for color first.  There are ways to accommodate patterns that perhaps don't work.  Tip #2..  if the patterns do not work for you... hide 'em!  Just let little slivers of color peeking out.

best!
Cheryl

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