There are lots of creative Valentine layouts around right now. Pinterest is full of them and digiscrap stores seem to be selling mostly ‘love themed’ kits, all of them with gorgeous example layouts. You are sure to find some ideas that you can ‘scrap-lift’; draw inspiration from a layout or borrow some (or all) of the ingredients, for future scrapbooking. I thought I would add another to all the Valentine scrapbook layout ideas, with a layout I did last summer. Although it has absolutely nothing to do with Valentine, I’m hoping this layout will nonetheless inspire you. My inspiration was a word-art I came across browsing through layouts on Pinterest. Somehow it grabbed me and I jotted it down in my little sketchbook I carry around for scrapbooking purposes. It said “If all kids were flowers I would pick you”. Well, if you have been reading my blog, you know I am a flower-person. 😉
Not long after, I ‘forced’ my daughter to have her picture taken, which is always a daunting process, as she only wants to make funny (read; scary) faces at the camera. But it was a sunny day, I was feeling up to it and I came up with a shrewd plan… I asked her to take MY picture! She always loves to take pictures of this-and-that and I was an all new adventure for her. I laid down in the grass, asked her to do the same and take my picture. After she was done playing, we changed places. And it worked! I actually got some cute facial expressions instead of scary ones. Yay!
The sun, the grass, her bright shirt, the word-art; it all seemed to cry out for LOADS-AND-LOADS of flowers. I had a hard time masking the wooden fence in the back, since it had virtually the same color as her hair. But I came across a great tutorial on how to select hair in Photoshop and although it took me an hour or so, I am very pleased with the result. And, it gave me a nice blank space to fill up – with flowers!
I dropped a heart (any heart will do, as you delete it later on) in the middle of the layout and scaled it to just fit the canvas. Then I placed my -already masked- photo on top and brushed away the parts of the grass that were sticking out of the heart. I could have clipped the photo to the heart (which I did at first), but I didn’t like the harsh ‘cutout’ look that causes. After the photo was to my liking, I just filled up the heart behind my little girl with all the flowers I could find! I repeated some of them, to make the layout look more ‘coherent’ (does that make sense to you? I hope so, I can’t seem to think of another word right now). I added a few lawn daisies, since our lawn was lacking them. And because the layout looked a bit flat (really? with that amount of flowers?) and the daisies gave it the ‘pop’ it needed. The last step was to add a paper stack on the background (working backwards here, because I always start with the papers first normally). This time the heart itself was more important than the background, which is not saying it didn’t take me forever to find just the right sort of paper…
I dragged the word-art itself up and down the layout before I decided to give it it’s own space; the left page. All the attention was already on the flowered heart. A title, whatever the size or the spot on the layout, was just too much. Besides, I really loved the quote, so a page of its own was no sacrifice. 😉 Curious how it turned out? Take a look:
Most of the flowers are from a huge Scrapflower freebie kit which is no longer available. I can’t remember all of the seperate designers… The paint-splattered paper is from the same Scrapflower kit, by Lisa Sisneros. For the word-art I used the ‘Bloomified’ freebie by Miss Tiina as a base and expanded on it.
Hmmm, somehow this post started out as a ‘fun idea for your Valentine scrapbook page’ and ended in a short (maybe a bit too short in some places?) walkthrough on how I made this page. Oh well… Do you have any questions after reading this? Would you like me to expand on some of the techniques I used? Let me know, I’d love to help you out!