I’m signed up for a class by Ali Edwards at Big Picture Classes called “Hello Story” that started this week. The class will be 12 weeks long and cover 12 different story telling devices. This week’s topic was “timeline.” I was inspired by one of the projects that Ali created as an example that I went into PSE and recreated it almost exactly:
Hello Roadtrip by Heather Awsumb | Supplies: Away We Go Solids, Surf Lagoon Element Pack, So Fine Element Pack, Away We Go Element Pack, Almost There Element Pack by Katie Pertiet; Dotted & Dashed Frames by Cathy Zielske; Going Places Kit by One Little Bird and The Ardent Sparrow.
When I saw the inspiration I knew immediately what photos I wanted to use because I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do an overview of this road trip that I took with my family in April. It worked perfectly because we stopped at four different sites – Goblin Valley, Arches National Park, Monument Valley & the Grand Canyon – and there were four spaces for photos. The whole layout is basically an exact copy of Ali’s: the number of “slices” in the circle, the slices being cut into three horizontal pieces, the san-serif font labeling each photo, the wood veneer geotags, the journaling around the outside of the circle. She even scrapped travel photos, but used a collection of photos from trips across multiple years while I used photos from one trip. So the only thing that I really did differently was to add the little cluster in the middle.
It took quite a bit of trial and error to figure out how to create all the pieces, line them up, shadow them correctly and to arch the lettering but I learned a lot along the way. The biggest tip that I learned is that in PSE if you hold down Option (or Alt in Windows) while drawing a shape it draws it from the center rather than from the corner, as usual. This made it a lot easier to get the lettering arched correctly (the smaller words like Valley and Canyon) because I could draw the Text in a Shape tool from the middle until it lined up with the circle I was writing on.
So creative. I love it.