This is the first of many ways you’ll learn how to do creative journaling. Creative journaling keeps your pages from looking, “ho-hum” boring.  And when you can use a little bit from the photo’s as a theme for the journal part, then the pages really start to POP!My photo’s were taken on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. So I wanted to go with some fun vertical stripes, so I cut a wavy line to give me the pieces I needed for  my layout. I like to use vertical stripes  for two reasons.

1. They draw the eye to the main subject.
2. Just like in fashion, they are slimming. So when you have much on your page, a vertical stripe here and there can do wonders!

Now since I had these stripes, I did not want the eye to go right off the page, so I free hand cut 4 strips from some orange reddish patterned card stock . When I do this, I focus on:

1. The subject of the layout (this being Dyllan’s shirt)
2. And the least amount of color shown in the photo’s.

These two things help me create a great eye catching layout in just minutes!

I had one porthole shown in a photo so I wanted to play off this porthole for my journal area.

(You may have noticed by now, I’m really into making “free style”  layouts.  I tend to embrace mistakes rather than freak out. My theory, is that life is to short to be a perfectionist. And that, I am not.)

So for the porthole, I grabbed a piece of scrap white card stock and cut a circle. And then another circle out of that and so on till I had what I needed. The middle of the layout where all the circles met, were not important as they would soon be covered with photo’s.

Do you see how I draped the journal circles over the border? Just because you  have a border there, does not mean you have to be confined with in it.

I overlapped my photo’s and tilted them this way and that way to keep with fun feeling of being on a boat. Then starting at the end of one porthole circle, I journaled my way around until I got the the end of the last circle.

Lastly, I cut some decorate paper with camera images and stapled them in place.

Thanks for coming by! I hope I’ve inspired you to try some creative journaling!

Random Extra’s #12

If you love to use a stapler on your pages as much as I do, then you might be getting bored with the generic silver staples. Try instead coloring  them with alcohol inks. Not only are you saving money from buying staples in limited colors, but you are customizing your layout !

Tags: Journaling, layouts, Random Extra's, Tutorials

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under General Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.