To some of us, there is nothing more nerve-wracking than attempting a scrapping style out of your comfort zone or more daunting than a blank canvas with infinite possibilities.
(OK, yes, I’m talking about me personally but I’m sure this applies to others as well!)
So in this blog series, I’m attempting to make Mixed Media less daunting by giving you (and me) some jumping off points. Where to begin with digi – mixed media scrapping? Right here for Mixed Media Beginners!
As a paper scrapper I would rely on sketches or scraplifts as part of my scrapbooking process, and now templates kick start my pages so today I’m looking at how you can use a clean and simple template to make a fairly straight forward mixed media page, focusing on paint.
Here’s the template pack by Designed by Soco I grabbed from the Retiring Products section. I’m using the one on the right.
The basic idea I have is to use some basic long paint strokes in place of some of the paper strips in this template. No other fancy techniques, beginners jump off point remember.
Paint is a must-have to my thinking in mixed media scrapbooking and one of the perks of digi-paint is that colour selection is painless and if you don’t like it or change your mind or just want to see what a different colour would look like, you can just click to recolour and always go back to the first colour without wasting product or even having to wash a paint brush.
This is the brush pack I pulled by Paula Kesselring from the Retiring Sale. It’s Grunge Collection {Textured Brushes 2}, and it has PNGs of each brush so you don’t even need to load brushes in your digital scrapbooking program. The different length and density paint strokes should work well with the template.
I’ve also grabbed Soco’s Sunset Memories kit to use for papers and elements.
Here’s my first work-in-progress step. I’ve opened the template and dragged my photo in, along with a background paper and added the brushstroke PNG’s in the default black where I think they will go.
And now after some switching of papers, I’ve turned off the paper strips I’m replacing with paint and added some elements.
I also used a painty frame from Paula’s Urban Blight Frames as a mat to give the photo a bit extra something.
And now here’s my finished layout with colour applied to each brush stroke and an extra paint splatter element from the Sunset Memories kit.
(Yes, I have to try all the papers in every paper pack in every paper spot, I’m indecisive like that). I added some stitching and that swirl of blue cord for texture, both from the kit and just added an ‘underline’ to a chunky journal font so it was still able to read easily enough against the geometric patterned background.
And because I was on a roll, here’s another page I started with brush strokes in place of some of the template’s paper strips.
The template is from Sara Gleason & Crystal Livesay’s DSD 2014 Grabbag and the brushstrokes are more watercolour style from Paula’s Watercolour Bits {Stamps 1}, both from the Retiring Products sale. I also Mashed-Up a kit from Paislee Press and another kit by Becca Bonneville with some stitches by Allison Pennington. And here’s the final page, I removed the scatters but I added some splatters & smudges that felt in keeping with the painty mixed media twist on the traditional template.
See you next month for some more beginners mixed media!
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