Your FAVORITES and not so favorite!!

Favourites:
Paint
Gesso
Vintage paper scraps
Word strips (I LOVE wordstrips anywhere and everywhere - saves tons of time)
Lace brushes
Grunge overlays
Messy masks
Scribbles and strokes
Scattered stuff
stitching

Not too big a fan of:
flowers
big 3D frames
all the female images popping up everywhere (dolls especially - I strongly dislike dolls under any circumstance)
templates for AJ (there are not many I'd consider the right for the style I am going for)

 

I love paint and spills. Especially when they're somewhat glittery. Also sequins.
I always need stitches: straight, messy, shaped into figures. I love 'em all and I use them on at least 90% of my pages.
I love doodled people or heads.
I love wordstrips. And strips with quotes or sentences on them.

I don't like ephemera either. I don't know how to use them. I don't like how it looks if I try to use them. I sometimes like them on other peoples pages. But usually it's just not my cup of tea. I guess I just don't like the look of vintage?

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In my regular scrapping I LOVE templates. Again, probably 90% of my pages start from a template.
I also I LOVE journal cards. Everywhere and anywhere. Yum.
I like some alphas. I guess my reasoning is that they need to be flat? Like I looove the Acetate Alphas from Heather Joyce. I am not a fan of the big puffy alphas. Half the time I don't add a title to my page though.

 

I just looked through the first few pages of my gallery... on an AJ page, I stick with papers, thin elements, mostly flat... as if I put my emotions into the paint, hid some scribbles, or used word strips to speak for me. When I print these, I usually print them 4x4 instead of 8x8. They have a special album: Kristina's art journal album. Haha

On a mixed media page, I will use dimensionals, like flair, buttons, flowers, etc. Those pages tend to just be my style of scrapping, so they are the pages that go into my books and albums at "regular size" (8x8).

Then I have more "traditional" layouts, where I really focus on telling the story of the memory, and those layouts tend to have less painty/messy parts. Just enough to be artsy, but not deter from the journaling on the page. These also make it to my albums as 8x8s.

 

My favorites are art dolls, paint and gesso. I also really like clipping masks.

I guess a less favorite for me is element spills. I like the idea, but I can never make them work for me.

 

My favs: paints, splatters, overlays. Lots of backgrounds blended together. Stitches or tape, I always need something to ground my focal point. I always enjoy a good quote, am finding myself using word art more now, yet I would hardly ever touch it before. Art dolls - I have mixed emotions on them. I find myself using them because some are just so gosh darn cute. But then I realized that I use them as a crutch, so I will "occasionally" challenge myself to NOT include an art doll, just because. Ephemera - while I love it, I find it hard to use, other than maybe tucked into a border, my work seems awkward... And did someone mention lace & doilies? Love them, it is the romantic in me.

 

Must-haves for me are paint, splats, thread/stitches, masks, overlays and wordart. As my AJ pages are kind of a hybrid, I usually include photos and dimension so usually use buttons, flowers, flair, etc to put together a cluster stack. I also like lifted frames and doodled frame brushes. My most loved and used products are brushes for background, edgers and texture.

My least used products are ephemera and templates.