+Looks pretty easy right? Nope. Not for this girl. It's these simple sketches that stump me. Especially with a vertical 4x6 photo. I've grown quite used to scrapping smaller, usually square photos, so to scrap a larger photo was more of a challenge than I expected (and I still had to skinny it up so it's more like a 3x6).
I started a layout with the larger squares of paper layered behind my photo. Agonized over it for a couple of hours, then tossed it and pulled out a light grid covered cardstock and my good old Faber Castell gelatos.(shocker, right?) ;-) Every time I have struggled with a layout I have ended up coming back to the gelatos and I always feel happy with the outcome. So here's a bit on my process of putting together a layout using mediums as substitutes for paper elements on a page. Give it a try!
For this layout, I used the gelatos as a stand-in for the lighter gray paper layer shown in the sketch.
First I put a decent layer of gesso over the background paper. Once that dried, I scribbled big lines of color with the gelatos, finger blended them, then went over them with water and a watercolor brush. If you want your gelatos to blend well without hard lines, apply them softly to the paper - you don't have to press down hard at all. Then wet a watercolor brush and apply a generous amount of water on the lines that separate your rows of color. Blend the colors out until they look the way you want them. I stood my paper up and tapped it on my desk to get the colors to run into each other and make some dripping and pooling.
I used a stencil and added some circles with modeling paste over the gelatos, then layered strips of vellum to stand in for the darker gray paper in the sketch.
A few hearts, a button flair, and a little bit of doodling. Viola. A super cute pastel page of the kiddo. :) I switched the elements but stayed pretty close to the sketch shape.
Have a fabulous weekend!
xoxo,
Shawna
