Pages from the Heart's Color Challenge

Color Challenge:
Pages from the Heart is having its first challenge on its blog for anyone who would like to participate. The rules are to create something using a yellow, grey and kraft color scheme. For more info you can read the blog post here. Who knows? Your work might be featured on their blog!


Sample Layout:
Some members of the design team created a sample as a source of inspiration. I made a single page layout and I have to admit it wasn't easy for me to get started. I searched through numerous paper kits that I already had and found that yellow was not the prevalent color choice right now. There were a few in the summer collections but they were too bright, bordering on orange and wouldn't have matched the subtle greys I wanted to use. I finally found one muted yellow piece in a vintage kit along with another cream colored paper which had a bit of grey in the background. For an embellishment I found one yellow flower, and that is how I started. Here is how I ended:

Kevin and I at El Presido military fortress in Santa Barbara

Supplies:

The colors in the challenge reminded me of the colors I saw at El Presidio fortress in Santa Barbara so I knew I wanted to use those photos. Since it is a historic site, the next logical step was to use a vintage paper collection. I mostly used papers from Echo Park's For the Record and one piece from Basic Grey's Black Tie collection, plus a flower from Sassafras Entwined Bloom sheet. 

Echo Park For the Record

Basic Grey Black Tie

Sassafras Entwined Blooms

Embellishments:
I usually like to have three main groupings of embellishments, as termed the visual triangle. I liked the flower with the missing center from the Entwined Blooms set, but the rest of the flowers were too green and I  didn't want to veer too far from the color scheme. I decided to make my own to match the original flower. I punched out circle and flower shapes, layered them and wrapped them with baker's twine so all three flowers has similar characteristics.

Original flower with a brochure drawing center

Another thing I like to do is add photos in unexpected places or find ways to add more photos to a layout. I cut out a small drawing of the fort and a small photo of the soldiers from the brochure and placed them as the center of two of the flowers. That way I added two more photos into the layout but they were camouflaged as embellishments. In total I managed to put 11 photos onto a single page layout.

Recreated flower with brochure photo center

Recreated decorative flower with i-Rock center

The layout still looked too stark at that point, so I punched out some mini-flowers and scattered them around the title, and also arranged them like leaves around the main flower. I used the i-Rock tool to put on the Glam rocks, which are the small silver flower centers. This was a lot easier to affix than punching holes and getting poked by brads.


Inspiration:
Here is the color palette if you'd like to join in the fun. You can see two more samples from the design team on Page's blog. If you'd like to participate, email a photo of your project to our DT leader Andi at ayokleyjessup@gmail.com by June 5th.

Color Challenge

Take care,