by Ethan Johnson
November 18, 2007

A friendly reminder: Working in the scrapbooking medium, such as it is, can be arbitrarily confining and tough to deal with. My suggestion to those who are staring at a blank 12x12 piece of cardstock or patterned paper and wondering what on Earth can be made with it that anyone would ever want to see ever again is, think outside the box. Case in point: I was going bonkers trying to cram every last "autumn leaves" photo that I took last week onto a 12x12 piece of cardstock. I finally broke with convention and bought some 8.5x11 photo paper and printed a large version of one of my supporting photos. The result:

Thanks to the perpetual sale prices at the local craft store, plus weekly coupons, I have been amassing a small stash of frames. Ever since I made an 8x8 layout for my sister (framed and shipped), I have been wanting to make a "something" for the craft room to hang on the wall. The above layout is serving as much needed artwork for the space. I figure I can swap out the layout for future 8x8 designs, or Marlena suggested that 3 more layouts for the other seasons be worked up and hung as a series. Options!

I really like the photos I took of the fall color (which was in recession) during my trip north. As a result, I wanted to use as many of them as possible, but instead opted for this more spartan approach. Using one of those perpetual sale coupons, I bought a book about getting back to the basics of scrapbooking, and learning how to slowly incorporate some new adornment or art style to future works. This approach was very inspiring, and I am looking forward to trying and learning new things.

Techniques:

Instead of cardstock or patterned paper, I used a cut-down (not exactly "cropped", as I wasn't trying to manipulate the image content, just the size) photo of scattered leaves. Instead of cramming lots of photos on the page (as I would have with a 12x12 or larger layout) I picked ONE photo that I wanted to showcase and matted it with a little extra room for some sparse yet informative journaling. Considering what a shopper's paradise North Texas is, we don't have an Archiver's store (yet?). I hit them hard during my trip and used some of my finds for this layout, such as the peel and stick letters and the thin chipboard title.

I deliberately stuck the letters on the page haphazardly to give a handmade, "I did this" feel. I thought the chipboard title was competing (and losing) to the background, which admittedly could have been muting using fancy computer tricks. I made some alignment marks subtly around each of the title letters, and opted to outline them with a fine point black pen. The scanner makes the black lines seem stronger than they actually are. The title stands out but allows the eye to take in the whole piece, rather than hogging up all of the attention.

Working directly onto photo paper was a bit unnerving, but in this day and age of digital photos, I figured I could always re-print the background photo if I messed it up too badly.

Lessons learned:

• Less is more. I want to do a more substantial fall leaves layout, especially to justify my new autumn leaf rubber stamps (I got them cheaply using - wait for it - another sale coupon). In the short term, however, scaling down to 8x8 achieved my desired result with grace and aplomb. And they make 8x8 albums these days, so it can be stored in book form instead of framed.
• Don't sweat the semantics. Can we maybe stop calling this "scrapbooking" and instead call it "art"? Making that conscious decision is really freeing. Suddently it's OK to work in non-conventional page sizes, like 8x8, 6x6, 11x17, 20x30, 24x36, whatever. It's OK to not buy pre-fab papers and embellishments and do your own thing. If one takes a notion, one might find it eye-opening to notice how the scrapbooking industry not only sells you your memories (by way of selling the materials to capture them in the "scrapbook" medium), but even lays claim to the associated words, feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Check out a sheet of rub-on stencils for say, "wedding" or "family". One way or the other, the industry manages to persuade people to literally buy in to the idea of external validation. (It's "fun" because CompanyCo made a sheet of stickers that say "fun" in different colors and fonts.)
• Remember, the theme drives the layout. I took fall color pictures partly because we don't get that stuff down here in Plano. But when I finished, I knew I had the raw material for a scrapbook layout/art project. I went with autumnal colors to support the photos and invoke the seasonal theme.

Supply list:

I'm not making a formal supply list anymore, as I feel this adds to the misconception that projects such as these require specific supplies from a specific manufacturer. So:

I used photo paper, cardstock, thin chipboard letters, peel-and-stick letters, yellow paint, and a fine point black marker. Make your own, your way.

Thanks for looking! <EM>

(Want more scrapbooking articles? The full list may be found here.)