Creating With a "Theme"

Hi Everyone

Hope you all had a terrific weekend and managed to do a little creating!  Today I want to talk a little bit about creating with a theme in mind! Now a few of you will most likely just raise your eyebrows and say "nope I just sit down and start putting things together and go with what works".  That is totally fine if it works for you.  If every time you sit down to make a layout or a card you struggle to get something you are happy with then read on.  

I always create with a theme in mind, even for cards.  The reason being is that I find my designs come together so much easier.  The theme might be the colours, the picture, the embellishments, the paper collection, the event (birthday or anniversary) or a set of stamps and dies.  I am going to use the canvas I did for Imaginarium Designs a couple of months ago as an example.

Firstly our brief was a "selfie layout" now I don't scrapbook so I chose a canvas.  I knew the photo I wanted to use was of myself wearing a sombrero, when I saw the "Sugar Skull" stencil I new that was what I wanted in the background.  The Day of the Dead is a celebration in Mexico where sugar skulls are used to celebrate the lives of loved ones passed away. I have a picture of the little skulls below that they make from white sugar. Now can you see where I am going with this? Once I had chosen the stencil and the colour paste in "deep water" I knew that I wanted to use orange in order for the word "fancy face" to stand out.  Can you also see how the swirly bits on the word match the stencil?  Tick, my colour theme is chosen and the skull and the word tie together.

I also had some barbed wire / thorn flourishes and knew that I was going to add some silver embellishments later on so I used "snow white" embossing powder to bling these up, can you see again I have tied in the Graphic 45 - Steampunk Spells cardstock to match and then added a rose. Again it ties together.  The dragonfly and arrowhead strangely enough were just a random selection but actually mean "change" and "alertness" which is very representative of life in general.

I love, love, love little crochet doilies and would put them on everything if you let me so I searched around and found a lovely little orange one topped it with a cog (cogs represent the inner workings of my brain!!!!) and a tassel (another item I love using).  I did have a little silver pistol I was going to poke under the doilies given what occurs in Mexico everyday but thought better (it did actually match really well).

Mini Sugar Skulls

I put this to you, do you feel your cards / layouts are a muddled mess some of the time?  Then just stop, look at one item on the card or layout you want to focus on either a stamp, a photo, or the paper and create your project around this. This also applies to art journaling, when you really look at some of the best in the business their art journal pages always, always, always have a theme, it might be colour, the writing, the free hand shapes of circles and squares, trust me if you look hard enough there is a theme in them all.

Even if you have a particular go to style you can apply this same style around different themes and this is probably the most important take away from this post.  True, I have a more vintage, grunge style but as long as I work out my theme I can work with bright and bold or shabby chic!  Speaking of which someone in my world has challenged me to create some shabby chic cards, as they know how much I dislike that style so you know what, I am going to take that challenge and will create something in the next couple of months just to show that even when you are not in your comfort zone as long as the theme is right the rest will fall into place.

I will be posting all my Deisgn Team work here (I know I have a few to catch up on) but I will be covering the "why" on my blog and the "how" on the Imaginarium Blog so stay tuned.

Next post will be about "embellishments" and do's and dont's (in particular I will touch on flowers and why peeps tend to over-use them as an embellishment).

Keep Creating
Wendy