Do you have a special place where you go to rest?
I think we all do. Maybe it’s the couch, or a sunny window seat, or a favorite chair…it’s your favorite place to rest. For me, it’s the puffy recliner in our living room. It becomes a spot where you know you can go and get a break and feel good. And just like we need a good place to rest, our layouts need a place for the eyes to rest too. This is never truer than when you are working with patterned papers as your background.
Secret No. 2: You need to give the eye a place to rest.
In order to create balance and order on your page when you’re using a patterned paper background, you need to give the eye a place to rest. This is also really useful in creating a journaling spot on your layout. Giving the eye a place to rest doesn’t always mean using a solid, however. There are a few ways to create spots for the eye to rest on your layout.
Use a solid…or a nearly solid. This is the easiest way to give the eye a place to rest. When you use a solid on your layout, it breaks up the pattern you have as your background and creates a little variety. You can also do this with what I call “nearly solids.” Nearly solids are usually tone on tone papers, with small patterns that are very light. A small houndstooth pattern or a tiny swiss dot paper are both examples of a “nearly solid.” On my recent Disney Cover layout, you can see that I created a nearly solid, with a very light pattern by blending two papers together so the focus could remain on the colorful numbers and the eye still had a place to rest.
Surround your photos with a solid. Like I mentioned above, putting some solids around your photos automatically draws the eye to the photos on the layout. This could be a large paper placed behind the photos, small layered papers under the photos, or even a small white stroke around the photo. On my layout Awesome, I used a ton of patterned papers, however, I made sure to use some solids around the photo to give the eyes time to rest and focus on my photo.
Break up the patterned background. When you take a minute to break up the pattern, it helps to prevent the patterned paper from taking over the background. This is often where I’ll use a “nearly solid.” You can also do this by combining two different patterns, as long as one is more basic. Automatically then, the eye is directed to the less busy solid and it uses that as the place where it can rest. On the layout Our Stories, I knew that I wanted to use that bold dotted paper for the background. However, using it for the entire page would have been overwhelming, so I broke it up with the white solid. That way, I still have the dotted paper as a background, but the eye still has a place to rest.
Next week, I’ll share my last secret for using patterned papers as backgrounds. Stay tuned!
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