One Mama Duck

Crafting my way through life - one adventure at a time.

Hi! I'm LisaDV. Thanks for stopping by. This is my life, crazy and chaotic most of the time, and I wouldn't change a thing.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Summer Camp = Many Layouts!


Could a summer camp get any better than creating lots of layouts?!! 

I don't think so.


Over at The Digital Press this month, they are running a summer camp. They have activities each week. Although I followed a few designers over there when it started, I had never attempted to get onto their forum until May of this year when I joined to grab part of a freebie set that was broken up among different places: their forum, blog, facebook, etc.  I do both digital and traditional scrapping, so I never thought to join their forum. The summer camp has been fun.  The creative & design teams there are executing it really well, and I am enjoying myself.

Now I said, I do traditional and digital. Here's how I decide, if my photos are more event and will be multiple pages - they're digital pages. If the story has multiple photos or photos that could use more manipulation or sizes other than more standard size like 5x7, 4x6, 4x4, 3x4 - the page is digital. Lastly, If I know that I have the best supply options for doing a story in digital format, then I chose digital.

For week one, I told chose stories that  were based on supplies or photos and one story about my childhood that wasn't even on my radar to tell.


Since these were really poor photos, they lend themselves nicely to being very small. This was for the orienteering challenge. They provide a template (map) for you to create with. I LOVE this template so much. I did have to make a few changes to make it work for my story, but I see using this template again and again.

There really isn't a story here, but I knew I wanted to use so many of the photos that I took. The LOVE on the bottom right had to be taken off to enter it into the challenge gallery at TDP. The LOVE is from a retired designer from there, and only current designers are allowed. It didn't hurt the layout at all, but I will print with the love on.

This was for the Arts and Crafts challenge. We needed to look through their list of tutorials and choose 1 to use on our layout. I chose one that said expanding your digital toolkit and scraplifting yourself. Well, I didn't have anything posted in their gallery, so I chose another layout to scraplift. I turned her one page layout into a 2 page spread.

This was one that I thought my products might be better for the story telling. But my products from their current designers weren't school related but book related. I do have school related products so this might get reworked and another photo added in here.  
This was for the Bonfire challenge. Here we meet in the chat room and as we chat for the hour, the designer also slowly gives out a list of to do's to make your layout. So you have no idea how many photos would be used. I found this challenge the most difficult.
 
This was not even on my radar to tell. It was prompted from their journaling challenge - Letters Home. I'm very happy with it and having the story told.
 

For week 2, having seen what the challenges were all about gave me some "clarity". Not sure if that's exactly the right word to use. I'll try to explain below.

 This was the Orienteering challenge. The template was given. This is what I entered. With so many photo spots, I thought the template lended itself nicely for using in my Christmas pages that need to get finished.

Although after seeing the above page a couple of times on my computer screen, I did add a gray over the top of the green, blended it and changed the color of the white dots to a mint green.

I like this one so much better. I made those changes after doing the arts and crafts challenge from this week. Part of my clarity was that I have many Christmas layouts that need to be finished and I could use some of these challenges to accomplish that goal.


This started out in the letters home challenges. But as I thought about the page, I saw the "be" in a font in the background and knew that it would be better served in the arts and crafts challenge. I had to learn about the gradient tool and masking with it. The tutorial wasn't clear to someone like me that generally just uses a template for digital scrapping, but YouTube is my friend. I also used their blending modes tutorial. Although I know and have used blending modes, I often don't.   This is an 8.5x11 page and it starts the book that will, hopefully, be about the changes I hope to accomplish in my life.

This. Well. This became my letters home challenge layout.  My daughter suffers from a chronic illness of some type. Although she complained off and on of belly aches for years, I could not find any correlation to her diet or any rhyme or reason. In the summer of 2014, she became horribly bad. 2014-2015 was a miserable year and started search for a deeper medical answer. We've been to a naturopathic, to the GP, to a GI, to an ENT/allergist, to a neurologist and all to no avail. I knew I wanted to document this as a separate free standing book, but hadn't really thought about it much. The Mayo accepted her as a patient and we will be going shortly. It's been weighing on her mind.  I've done the page in 12x12 but will print in an 8x8 book once all of the pages are complete.

 This was for the Bonfire challenge. I chose my story before I went into the chat. This has one photo. but I knew I could use the same photo 2x if the challenge called for 2 photos. I could leave a fuller image or just crop in. If I needed 3, I would have  cropped in on the hands as well and converted the larger to black and white. Here is where more of that clarity comes into play.  For these challenges, I've decided to choose stories that I want to tell that could work with 1 or multiple photos. If I have multiple photos, I can use the challenge page as the left side of the layout and create a 2nd page to coordinate.

For the above, I chose a softer palette that I hope to continue throughout the whole album.

Now for something really fun. My layout for my daughter, (2 layouts prior to this ) was chosen as a gallery standout.  When Mrs Peel commented on my layout and let me know, I was surprised and honored. But, also, I was thinking this was a TDP shoutout, not THE Gallery standouts. Now I'm even more honored and quite frankly shocked.