Week 5 of the Find Your Voice workshop, already!! Time flies way too fast for my liking!!
This week’s lesson is all about design and style preferences. I went through all the questions and I just can’t manage to answer them. My answer is more of a global thing to be honest.
I love grid style layouts, with geometrical pattern.
I love fun layouts with bright fun colours or girly colours.
I love the effect of black & white photos combined with bright colours.
I LOVE DOODLES!!! When I buy digikits, I always look for different themes in doodles (even though not exclusively); I like the fact that in some kits you can get the doodles as “stamps” (no colours) so that you can colour them any way you want to (in Photoshop, or if I do paper crafting – as I am now hooked, I’m even bringing a bit of my stash when I go to see my mum this summer!! – I’ll use watercolours to give it a soft effect or felt or oil pastels for a more dramatic effect). Also, doodles are so easy to do yourself. I’m not particularly a good drawer but doodles I can always manage (simple ones that is!! LOL!). Kristin Tweedale put a link on Facebook of Brainstorm designs, 100% DOODLES! That’s it, I’m in love!!! I found their designs really inspirational and can’t wait to try.
As far as names are concerned, I don’t really single out, I like quite a range of styles, really. the above are just the ones I feel comfortable with. I’ve never tried art journal and I greatly admire the layouts from Dalis (on thelilypad gallery and sweetshoppedesigns websites, she’s done quite a few art-journal-style digi layouts and they are amazing; I also love her other layouts, they are really fun and eye catching. I love her sense of humour on her pages; even the sad ones). That’s something I would like to try to do on paper; it’s gonna be trial and error!!

Also I really like chocochoco layouts (at theshabbyshoppe); they are simply unbelievable! The page is full of embellishments clustered together (and when I mean full, I mean FULL) and it just works to simple, unmistakable perfection. I’ve always been really rubbish with clustering. I have tried a few times as on a couple of digi challenges I did it was a requirement, but each time I struggled like hell. I got a e-course on Big Picture Classes website, “Clustering Like a Pro” by Aaron Morris aka “Sir Scrapalot” a while ago. It is a great class, really worth it. It really helped me, as it got me to understand the simple rules of layout balance better (even though I still chuck elements randomly here and there!!). But I feel I’ll never be able to do a page like chocochoco’s. I just don’t have the design eye for it. Shame 😦

I’m not really sure yet what style I’d like to emulate, probably Dalis’s art journal, but on paper. Any ideas, tips on how to do it, techniques, tools necessary? Any help will be greatly appreciated!! Thanks 😉 xxx