Have you ever looked at the mixed media products and although you are dazzled by the creativity, color and design, you just don’t know where to start? Initially, I was one of those who bought but didn’t use my M3 kits for quite some time because I just wasn’t sure what to do with them. Looking at all the layouts using mixed media products confused me and although I was enamored with the products and the layouts using mixed media, I didn’t know what to do with them. Not looking at the totality of a kit but rather, looking at bits and pieces, looking to see what stands out to me, is what helps me determine a page design.
While not afraid to venture outside my comfort zone, my style, whatever that may be because it is always evolving and changing, I now look at mixed media products to see how they fit in with my style of creativity. I may never be as free and artsy as some other scrappers yet I am no longer a minimalist scrapper, I am somewhere in between and that is just fine, that is me. So, I no longer try to mimic what others use mixed media products for, I try to use them to enhance my style.
Let me walk you through my process and how I often create pages using M3 products. Often there is an element or word art that catches my eye and I know I want to incorporate that into my design, or there is a specific photo I want to showcase in my LO. I will open that up on a fresh 12×12 page but will push it off to the side or up in the corner as I want to focus on the background products first. l open up the last couple of mixed media kits I’ve acquired (unless there is a specific older kit I want to work with). I find that the paint, overlays, brushes, etc are so versatile that I can make almost any kit work with my page idea, so I don’t spend a lot of time going from kit to kit, I open a couple and then start pulling out what I want to use.
Here’s a walk through of a recent page I’ve created using Mixed Media Monthly August 2017 products. I knew I wanted to use one of my flower photos so when I saw this paper I knew I wanted it for my background, as it fit in nicely with my photo. Then it’s time to explore the paints, overlays and brushes. I start dragging files onto my page that interest me, some will be on the finished page and others will go into the trash bin. I saw the messy circular paint (brown circles and dots) and it made me think of the wild flowers in my photo and how combination of dirt, seeds, sun and water create this glorious mess of nature that I feel at home amidst and it both invigorates and calms me. The next step will be to position and possibly re-color or reshape the paint/overlay/brush files. I start to move them around, moving them up and down in the layers palette. On some I might change the blend mode. Some layers are duplicated and re-positioned on the page (the brown circles and dots and the large blue paint from the middle were duplicated and positioned around the edges). I place my photo roughly where I want it to go, later I will decide if I want to mask, frame or further enhance the photo. For now, I work on the background. I look at colors, how they look as I layer paints together; I look at lines and shapes and how to build off those and I look at colors and opacity, to see if I might need to tweak these.
Here is my page with the paints, brushes and overlays.
After adding in some elements and one more paint (green dots to the left of the photo), I added the word art about dirt and added my journaling. Although the design may look messy and scattered, it has come together in a cohesive manner (at least in my mind LOL).
Mixed media products can be used by anyone, can fit in with any style and are just so much fun to play with! I think if you give it a try, you’ll love it, as I do. For these my samples, I used the Mixed Media Monthly products from July and August 2017. You can find the mixed media section of the store HERE.
Leave a Reply