Heather's Adventures in Lesotho

Nerd alert: I’m taking a digital scrapbooking class online. Most of you can stop reading now ;), but just so you know I’m LOVING it. It’s the Guided Study Critique Workshop at debbiehodge.com I’m in a group with 15 other scrapbookers (both traditional and digital) and every week we focus on different design principles. Then we have an assignment to create two layouts using the principles we’ve focused on that week. One gets critiqued in the gallery and the other gets critiqued by the instructors during a live webinar.

I did my first live webinar last week and it was SO MUCH FUN and I learned a lot. I’ve never had anyone give constructive feedback on my layouts and I actually really loved it. Plus the instructors are so kind in how they give feedback you’d have to be extremely sensitive to have your feelings hurt. Last weeks assignment was on breaking borders and space. This was an especially good topic for me because I tend to be very “boxy” in my layouts and little adjustments to break space can add visual interest. Here’s my original layout for the webinar critique documenting a story from my travels over Christmas:

My examples of breaking space are pretty subtle – there’s the doily sticking out at the top, the “g” in magic breaks into the photo and frame, the photos break into blue/gray strip of patterned paper and my journaling sticks out below the major horizontal band of the photos and paper. The major comments that came were to:

1) Move the doily more to the left so that it was also breaking space on the left side of the horizontal band. (It was already sticking out just a TINY bit, but only by accident.)

2) Stretch the bands of patterned paper so that they broke space on either side closer to the edge of the paper.

3) Make “magic” standout more in the title (a piece of word art).

The first two issues were easy to do and, I think, make it just a little bit more polished. The tougher issue was how to get magic to standout. I had become attached to the word art just as it was. One suggestion was to make it red so that it made a visual triangle with the old man’s shirt. The result? Meh. The red was just TOO bold for me.

The other option was to make magic into a “sticker” by adding a white border to it. I also added a shadow to it to make it pop up a bit. The result? Much better and having magic bolder really emphasizes the story I’m telling.

I really like how this turned out and the feedback process was painless. As I said before, I think the little details I’ve added just give it a bit more polish. So it’s not that I’m designing terrible pages but I definitely have things I can learn to make them better. This is the third time the class has been taught. I wanted to take the first one when it was offered but I had  conflicts with the time. There’s at least one person in my group that has taken the class from the beginning and I’m totally jealous. The content builds on itself so it’s not repetitive each time but as a newbie I don’t feel like the topics are super advanced. This weeks assignment is typography and text as a design element. It was REALLY hard for me. My titles are usually pretty plain so I tried to kick it up a notch. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll share my layout and it’s progress next week.