Club Scrap Blog Hop April 2015 Botanicals

Well here we are again and what an absolutely lovely kit for the month of April.  The colors are so appropriate for April - what with the beginning of spring and Easter and Mother's day coming up.  As soon as I saw the first spoiler for this kit I absolutely knew what I was going to do for my blog post.

Of course in the middle of preparing my notes I did the Shatterproof challenge and made some layouts using this wonderful Botanicals kit.  Here is just one.

The rest of them have been posted in my gallery in the Club Scrap Forum and on Facebook.

Anyway, enough of that - here is what we are doing this month.  I figured that this topic had not really be visited in the past.

Negative Space!

or 

White Space!

What both refer to are areas on your layout which do not have anything in them.  It does not have to be white but what is important is the arrangement of your photos/elements/text etc. 

As a design factor, negative space is used to add symmetry to your layout to make it look clean and natural.  Negative or White space should be used to align or balance elemental objects to make them look more pleasing.

Here is an example.

Generally speaking the design factor is not really important to me when I digi or paper scrap.  I tend to go with what feels good probably looks good and of course, with digi scrapping you can always delete!

So now we are going to construct a layout using the Botanicals kit.  I am off to find a photo now.

Here it is!

Open a new blank 12" x 12" document with a transparent backgound at 300 ppi.

You could use the rule of thirds for making negative space layouts and get really technical about it but I tend to go with my gut and put the focal photo somewhere off center and build from there.  You will see in the next photo that I have decided to use a mask for this photo.

I felt at this point that I would build a quick template to use here.  So here is what I have so far.

It is already coming together quite well.  Now I have added the photo and a couple of additional elements to the template.

Now the time has come to experiment with background paper to see what will work with this.  After much trial and error I found that the lovely pink worked well so here it is with the paper added!

Now for a little embellishment and a few words.

And here is the final layout.

I do hope you like what I have done with negative space and will play around with this on your own.  

Your next stop on the hop is:

http://shonascraps.blogspot.com/2015/04/BotanicalsBloghop.html