Down by the Shore

Let's get to the fun, scrapbooking!! I'm super excited to share my first layout with you all!! Being inspired by all the watercolor layouts, I thought I would try another one of my own. Being a newbie scrapper there are so many new to me techniques to try. This was one of them. I wasn't even sure if I could make it work for me. I mean I love bright colors and to be honest I don't even own my own set of water colors. Yeah my lovely children have a watercolor set that's all one color now from being loved!! But I thought, hey I have stuff to bake with right. Why not try those gel food colors that are mostly sitting looking pretty in my cabinet. Not sure if it would work but part of this journey in scrapbooking is trying something. Maybe it won't work at all, maybe I will have to throw it away. But I think I would learn from it too. I would know why it didn't work and it would help me figure out what is going to work. Being a newbie scrapper I know I'm not perfect but I want to learn. Get my hands dirty! And this self discovery is what I love about scrapbooking!! Well and the pretty paper too:)
As I am rambling I will get on with my layout. So I toke out those gel colors and looked through what colors I thought would go with a picture I had of one of our favorite beaches. The amount aims surrounding this beach are gorgeous, Every time we go I take pictures of these same mountains, it never gets old either. The greens and the blues in this picture screamed out to me. Those would be perfect. So I played, let the water and gel colors drip. It was fun. I still wasn't sure how I liked it, but I have found out that you also have to keep playing sometimes a layout starts out rocky. Sometimes it takes time to get the scrapbook mojo juices flowing.
So now it's time to start putting on the picture and papers. What next.. I debating for a while if I wanted a background sheet of paper to border the watercolor page I just finished, which by the way, I used My Minds Eye Bluebell Smile as the background. White probably would have looked nice but in the back of my mind I though I might do some kind of grid design with the papers and I thought that maybe the slight yellow grid lines might work with the colors I had in mind. I ended up not doing that, yes it would have stopped my eyes flowing off the page because of the angle in which painted on my page. But I really wanted as much open space as possible. So yes I'm thinking again about this grid design I might want to use, and I'm thinking about the open space I wanted. I did just paint all

pretty colors on my page and I wanted to see some of it. So I thought about doing two squares above my picture and one square on one of the sides, having my photo in the bottom corner. I look through papers to find mostly blues and greens in summer bright colors, with pops of other summery colors too. Cut out a ton of 2 and a half inch squares and started layering. I used my circle punch on some, I used a corner round on one, decided I didn't care for it too much. I found a cute AC photo overlaying to add as a layer too. This part was fun, it took time to find colors off course because I had to go through a lot of my stash. But picking out the papers is fun!! I went with a lot of papers from the good day sunshine collection from simple stories and I used some old paper from Echo Park, the paradise beach collection too. I added a few paper scraps from last months Scraptastic kit that matched too.

As I layered and taped the layered boxes to my layout I realized I didn't like the open space left open in left corner. So I quickly made another square group of papers and added it to the page and hanged it off, cutting of the extra. I added lots of embellishments that were summery in color or theme. Some tabs, tags, etc and add to the layering. It was so much fun just adding things to these boxes. And the boxes let me add as much embellishments as I wanted but it was contained in one small area so I didn't go too crazy. Which can be so easy to do. I used a lot of simple stories good day sunshine stuff it just went so well color wise, also some older ek success stickers, and old jillibean soup stickers. I used old echo park letter stickers in colors that matched and some green jillibean soup letter stickers too, for my title.
In the end I was happy with the space I had left over. I journaled underneath the photo and embellishment squares, the lines really helped keep it neat too. Over all I think for my second watercolor layout it turned out good. I think now looking at it the title would have been better some where else but I learned a lot. And I was happy I didn't have to use a sketch, which I do a lot just because I am learning about where things work.

I hope you all enjoy this and are inspired to try watercolor techniques or anything you haven't really tired before. Play with your scrapbooking stuff, use tons of embellishments in a contained area so you can go crazy!! Also let your surroundings inspire you!! Aloha and have a awesome scrap session!!!