A Visit to Central Perk

The Layout

My Friends Layout

The Background
Kevin had a day off for Memorial Day so we decided to find something different to do and ended up taking a tour of the Warner Brothers Studios. It is an actual working studio that has numerous sound stages, outdoor facades and giant warehouses of costumes, props and cars. They will demystify the movie making experience, so if you'd rather just enjoy the magic of cinema and television, then don't go. We walked onto the set of a live show, Chuck, and saw how the sets were constructed. The buildings and rooms are just partially constructed and made of plywood and the views from the windows are canvas paintings. It was interesting to see the live set because it is one of Kevin's favorite shows and on TV it looks so large and so real.

House facades used for numerous
outdoor shots like Growing Pains. 

General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard

Construction zone using lots of plywood

Professor Trelawney's crystal ball
was cotton floating in water. 

City Views for various cities like New York
or  Chicago

It was informative and fun at the same time so I'd highly recommend it if you are in the Burbank area. You can find out more about the tours here. 

The Details

Back to the layout...I decided to focus on just one aspect of the tour, the Friends set. We couldn't take any photos on the live sets but they left an older set for the tourists to see and photograph. I thought Friends filmed in New York, but the inside scenes were filmed on sound stages and the outdoor scenes were the on these city streets. I was looking around for a sketch and thought this one from Creative Scrappers was perfect.

I saw the circles in the background and thought I'd ink them out of coffee to match the coffee shop setting. I just microwaved some coffee grinds with water since I don't drink coffee and didn't have any on hand. 

I dipped different sized caps into coffee and stamped
the caps onto the paper. 

Stamped and dripped coffee stains

I'm not usually into the grunge look, but it matched what I was going for. I wanted to give the layout a construction look with wooden beams. The grid paper I used had a ruler border. I cut that off and rubbed some brown and black inks on them to make it look more like wood. The sticker set that came with this collection, Crate Paper's Portrait, had a filmstrip sticker border so I cut some pieces and placed that with the background strips. There were also some word stickers which I generally ignore, but I thought there must be one that said Friends. There was one that said best friend so I added the s to the end. 

Wood beam trim

This was a fun layout to create and I liked how the embellishments all came together to make it work. If you use any of the sketches from Creative Scrappers, you can link your layout to their blog post for a chance at monthly prizes. 

Thanks for reading and hope you have some friends who are there for you,