JANUARY 10: Storytelling with Drop Caps (Journaling Challenge)

Hello and welcome to day 10 of MOC! You are one and half weeks in … and doing awesome! Today I have a journaling challenge for you. You are to tell a story about anything you wish, but it must be in your own words and include at least 10 sentences. To emphasize the importance of our storytelling on our page, we are also going to twist things up a bit and give our page a bit of a punch with Drop Caps.

What is a Drop Cap you might be asking? It is the practice of using a large letter at the start of a body of text which helps to mark important passages and guide the reader through the text. I think it can be a great design element on a scrapbook layout and helps create interest in the story you are telling. Here is a visual of a simple Drop Cap:


The easiest way to create a traditional indented drop cap on your page is to create two text boxes for your journaling. One text box will be indented - to make room for the large leading letter. This text box will contain the beginning lines of your text. The other text box will be the full width and length of your journaling column, containing the remaining portion of your journaling, and will act like the “shelf” for your Drop Cap to sit upon.

If this seems too difficult for you or the software you use to scrap with, you can also create Drop Caps which reside in the margins. Here are a few more images of Drop Cap styles to help you, along with some design tips you may wish to consider:


Here are a few Drop Cap design rules & tips you can follow if you wish:

- You can use the same font as your journaling or a contrasting font/alpha.

- Once you chose your drop cap style, be consistent. Use the same drop cap style throughout your page rather than mixing up different styles.

- Drop caps look best when there are at least 3 lines of journaling/text, but not too deep that they take over the text. A good rule of thumb is 3 lines deep to 7 lines deep, depending on how much text you have.

- Don’t make your drop cap too big relative to the width of your journaling. Just like they shouldn’t be too deep, don’t make them too wide.

- Align the text to the left.

- Give your large leading letter some breathing room (so the text is not right up against it).

But remember, we are not print/type editors so any of these rules can be broken as you create your page to make this Drop Cap design work for you. Here are a few images of Drop Caps that make a powerful design statement while breaking many of the "rules":



And here is my page using a rub on alpha by Allison Pennington for my Drop Caps. I think it helps draw a little extra attention to the story being told.



Requirements:
1. Tell a story about anything you wish using at least 10 sentences that you journaled. Quotes, lyrics, word art, etc do not count as your 10 sentences of journaling ... please journal using your own words. (Once you have written at least 10 sentences in your own words: quotes, lyrics, word art, etc may be added to your page.)
2. Include at least one Drop Cap in your journaling. You can have more than one Drop Cap if you choose.
3. Your Drop Cap can be a font or an alpha.
4. You can include photos or do a photoless page. The choice is yours.

Have fun and get creative. I can’t wait to see how you incorporate Drop Caps in your storytelling.

Your page must be a new page in order to count for the Month of Challenges. Your page should be uploaded to the TLP Gallery and not an outside hosting site. Please post your page in your page thread you created in the MOC Layouts Folder. You should have one post per completed challenge page. If you complete all 31 challenges, your thread should contain 31 posts. Please do not comment in the participants’ page threads so we can keep them clean. You should also post your page here in this thread, and people can comment here if they wish. Pages should contain at least 75% current Lilypad product (currently for sale in the store). All MOC pages must be posted in your main MOC page thread by 11:59 pm eastern time on February 2 in order to count!

 

Excited to see everyone's pages ... give a holler if you need more help on how to do this.