Summer of Color, Week 3: Purple & Yellow

Hello! June is nearing its end and that means the Summer of Color is on again! Busy with other duties after my trip, I've missed the first two weekly challenges, but luckily you can join in anytime. The Summer of Color is a fun and friendly challenge blog with different colour themes for six weeks in a row. You can participate with any kind of art and craft, from layouts to cards and paintings to crocheting.



The colour prompt for week three is Two Purples and One Yellow. I chose a dark violet purple and a lighter metallic one.(I'll pop in to add the colour names a bit later!)

My yellow is a bright lemon yellow with just a bit of white in it.



In the near future, I hope to use my mixed media products and ideas also for cardmaking more than before. So the Mixed Media Card Challenge was a very welcome find! I haven't joined it before but I'm glad I fount its inspiring themes now. This month it's Collage, and optionally also a Frame. My card has both elements.

I started the very background with a collage, under my first layer of paint. It does not show through a lot, but you do see for example the little black hand that is the logo of 3rd Eye Stamps in the bottom right corner! After the first layer of paint, I glued napkins for the frame with modeling paste. Between these layers, I added texture stenciling modeling paste on the edges of the card, so that adds to the frame, in a way.

I meant to add a photo of how I started out the collage, but I'm having a very bad connection and can't seem to make it work right now. I'll edit to add it later, as this is one of my favourite ways to make a background!

The third challenge I'm joining with this project is at 13arts, with the theme of Textures and Layers. I love making both of them, so it was a perfect theme!



The heart is hand painted and scratched with a spoon. This was not an easy project to finish - I tried both the Girlfriends Silhouette stamp and the painted heart for focal images alone but was not happy with either of them. Finally I thought of cutting and lifting the heart out, and added the stamped image behind it. I'm still not perfectly happy with it, but I'm glad I tried something new!



I wish you a nice weekend and hope to see you at the Summer of Color! The new challenge is up each Monday, and if you wish to create in Purple & Yellow you still have until Sunday to join this week!

I'm in Scrap Africa Design Team!

Hello all! I'm back from my travels and got some good news while I was away: I'm in the Scrap Africa Design Team for 2015/2016. Yay!

When I travel, I always come home with lots of photos and ephemera, but when it comes to making them into actual albums, I haven't been quite so productive. My travel albums have been left unfinished way too many times. Having just come home from a long trip, I decided to try a different take now and start my first pages in Project Life style!



Et voilà, this is also my first DT project for Scrap Africa! The current mood board is themed Planes, Trains and Automobiles, so it was a perfect inspiration for starting my travel album.



Here's the Scrap Africa June mood board, open for participation until June 30!

For those of you who don't know it yet, Scrap Africa a fun and friendly challenge site that I warmly recommend! The challenges run twice a month, one of which is always a sketch challenge and the other has a different theme or mood board each month.

We are a big team of super creative designers, if I may say so myself, and represent lots of different styles. I am very honoured to be a part of this team and look forward to knowing my new teammates, both first-timers like myself and returning designers! And of course I hope to see many of you joining our challenges!


For my travel album, I'm using a kit that I put together myself before our trip, and I hope to share more about it in a separate blog post soon. I can already tell you that designing that kit was a lot of fun, and it's a great way to use leftover stash as long as there are some coordinating elements to keep it together. I can also tell you that my kit is a lot more colourful than you might guess based on these pages!



My spread is titled Planes, Trains and an Automobile, and we used all of these transports when my family and I travelled around the U.S. & Canadian West Coast last month. In the mood board I was particularly inspired by the graphic cross, circle and heart shapes, and also its bright colours, even though I chose to do my double page spread predominantly in black and white.



Making this spread was fun, but not particularly quick or easy, I have to add! I hadn't realized previously that the common digital photo size needs to be cropped to reach the traditional 3x4 inches or 10x15 cm pocket size. Secondly, I found it hard to match together colourwise these photos that were taken in different occasions, each in a different light etc and therefore had too many different colour schemes for my liking. I decided to turn them all into black and white and they became easier to work with.

The finalized pages have very little colour or embellishments compared to my usual style, but then again it probably won't hurt to have a more neutral layout here and there in my album - then I can add colour more freely to the next pages I do and those will pop out nicely, I think.



Here, by the way, is a link to another layout from earlier this year where I also successfully turned an ugly coloured photo into black and white!

I wish you all a lovely Midsummer weekend and hope to see you soon at Scrap Africa!