Club Scrap Blog Hop - Lakes - November 2014

Well this month I figured I would do a tutorial about how to make a special background using punched out circles but our very own Ron beat me off the mark with a great tutorial about turning Julie's punched circle backgrounds into a digital treat.  So the thinking cap went back on and it has been really hard to come up with something that works well with such a tremendous kit.

Here goes.

Have you always looked at layered sketches and wondered how they work?  Well I am going to help you along with your first try at them.  With a little information about the sketches and how to work with them, and some step by step instructions on how to complete a layout using a sketch - you will soon be playing with every sketch that Club Scrap provides to us.

Here are some examples of sketches which I have randomly chosen from previous kits.

Since you do not have to worry about design, you can really focus on kit selection, and making your pages come to life with color, patterns, journalling and of course most importantly your photos.

An important thing to remember is that the sketches are not concrete.  You don't have to use everything in a sketch and if you want to delete a row of brads or a piece of paper you can.  The sketch is to help you get started along the creative process and you can make it your own any way you want.  You can replace or trade any element or paper any way you want to.  You can resize anything or change anything to make the layout truly your own.  Most layered templates do not include layer styles.  Personally I add those once I have my photographs in place.

For the Lakes kit I have chosen to use a sketch that came with a kit in the past.  Some of you may remember October 2008 - Private Eye.  I felt that the sketch I have chosen works well with the photo and Lakes kit so please forgive my creative license of using this sketch instead of one from Lakes. 

Since the photo I want to use is portrait orientation I will rotate the sketch 90degrees clockwise.  Go to Image, Image rotation, 90 degrees clockwise and hit enter.

What you get looks like this.

Open up the paper you would like to use as your background and move it over to the layered sketch (either drag and drop or copy and paste).

Once you have your background in place you can add your mat and the photo you are using.

You can see here that the sketch has a suggested placement for a fiber.  I am not going to use a fiber like this so I just hide that particular layer.  Meantime, I have opened up the digital extras that came with the Lakes kit.  I pretty much know what I want to use for the layout but here is the selection of what we got.

The left facing fish are going to be on the layout but reversed and resized.

At this point I want to add layer styles.

Now all I need is some journalling and I have chosen a stamp from those that came with the kit.  I also added a fiber and here is the finished layout.

I do hope you have enjoyed this tutorial on how to use the wonderful sketches that are provided to us by Club Scrap.  Your next stop is

http://craftycolonel.blogspot.com/