Spring Mountain Ranch

Shows and Exhibits

Photography was forbidden in each of these exhibits/shows, so for the pages, I had to improvise.  On the Titanic page, I did happen to have a picture of the ship that was on display in the hotel lobby, but that is such a tiny portion of the display.  

I searched for quotes of David Copperfield for this layout since I had no pictures at all to represent this show.  This quote, "Magic is my paint," really stood out among all the others to me.  This layout is based entirely around those four words.

Red Rock Canyon

I am kind of excited.  The mask I used on this was of my own creation.  I spent some time today making my own masks.  It was fun and it will save me some money in the digital scrapbook stores!

Bus Trip to the Grand Canyon via the Hoover Dam

I will have to try extra hard to make sure these next two batches don't look exactly the same colorwise.  It's going to be hard since everything will be mountains and similar in color.  Hopefully I will be able to find something in each image to make the colors just a bit different.  I suppose I should have gone with a greenish for this cover layout, but, I didn't really think about that til just now.

     

The Bellagio

 

This is a mixture of Anna Aspnes and LineA.Scrap.  The elements are from a couple of different kits:  Bow and button from Moments in Time by Jen Reed and the crocheted flower is from Melo Vrijhof from pixelscrapper.com.  I almost forgot to put in the "signature" courier text on this one!

I originally had used a clipping mask of Anna Aspnes for the statue on the right, but something with the layout was just not feeling right.  Then I decided to get rid of the clipping masks and just use a mask with a large soft brush to go around the statue.  I like this look a lot better for this particular layout since I like the feeling of softness and dreaminess that the soft brush created.  The original masks gave the image and layout too harsh of a look. 

I had a really hard time with this one.  I think what was bothering me was it was just so busy with everything going on in the photos and then trying to get as many pictures as I could.  I ended up deleting some pictures from this page and just left two. The ones I deleted had more pink in them, and even though there is pink/red in the other pictures, I wasn't liking the look of when I added too much pink/red/orange to the layout  Again, it was making it look too busy.  I knew I was going to have to do several pages for Chinese New Year, anyway, so, I guess there ya have it.   

Even though I think this one is a bit busy, there are a couple of things I like how they turned out.  I like that the main image had an object so I could wrap the string around it (and I like that I found the string in the first place in all my stash since I wasn't really looking for it).  Also, to me, the bridge looks like it wants to come out of the page too.  Mark is carrying a bag, so I hid it with the other picture.  

Miscellaneous Pages that don't fit into any one category

This is a template from Anna Aspnes that I altered a bit.  I watched a Youtube video tonight about altering templates.  It didn't occur to me to do that with her files.  I assumed her templates were quick pages, and I don't like to do quick pages because they aren't my work.  

I really liked this picture as it was of the statue in front of Caesar's Palace, but it was "just a picture" until I added it to this layout and added some overlays on color burn around the edges.  Now I love this picture. 

Las Vegas April 2014, Part 1

Updated November 12, 2015
 
I am crazy about Anna Aspnes' work and I aspire to be even half of what she and the people who use her design elements on their art pages are, but I know I have a very long way to go. That's exactly how I see their pages - art.  They are scrapbooks, but they are also so much more and that is how I want my work to be eventually. 

 

Though I am having fun learning this technique, I am also finding it frustrating since on some pages, I want to include several pictures, but, they seem to be getting too busy.  I see scrapbook pages that are crazy busy, and my ADD gets set off so much.  I had a seriously difficult time with the Luxor page because I wanted - no, needed - to include so many pictures that it just kept getting way too busy, yet, other spaces were way too bare.  This page has been altered many times from its original version and I think I finally got a visual balance going.  I managed to get six of my photos in this layout. 

I found a new designer today.  LineA.Scraps selling at Oscraps.com.  The two kits I got are pretty much identical except for the colors and one of the kits has a few more elements than the other.  I used the paper and the key only from that kit along with more Anna Aspnes overlays, brushes and elements.  This layout came together pretty quick, although I must say that once I had the tall tower on the right on the page, I wanted to stop there.  I really liked it exactly as it was, but, alas, I figured I should put a couple more pictures on the page.  

Next time is the Bellagio.  I took a million pictures of that hotel, so that will most likely be a million pages all by itself.