They've been quite popular as photo props lately, from chalkboards to white boards to handmade tag boards. They've made an appearance here and there in scrapbookingland for the last three or four years, but I have a sneaking suspicion, speech bubbles are going to be big for the next while. More and more manufacturers are jumping on the speech bubble bandwagon and if you look around the web, you see them all over the place.
Why?
Because they are fun!
It's like creating your own private cartoon strip!
For the layout below, I started with the photo in the left bottom corner. I had split the layout into two sections, the bottom that housed my title and the top that housed my photo and journaling. I started the journaling on a tag but something wasn't right. I tried writing it straight onto the layout like I often do, but again, it wasn't right. Then it hit me, it was boring. That's the only way I can describe it. So to liven it up, I totally changed the top portion, making it two even columns. Then I moved the photo to sit between the two columns. I made some speech bubbles in Photoshop and adjusted them to fit my journaling and the side of the layout to indicate who was speaking. It made a plain old layout really fun.
Vivian made this layout using October Afternoon's Cakewalk line. It's actually for the Here & Now 6x8 binder system, but Viv used it as an element on her 12x12 page. Doesn't it just work with her journaling so well?
For this story about my son's preteen voice issues, I needed something that would make light of a very.serious.issue. Getting mistaken on the phone for your mom isn't something a boy is proud of. I took a photo of my boy and my mom (the usual culprit in mistaken identity) and handcut a really big speech bubble to represent the deep voice that he used to muster up when he saw it was grandma calling. I made two, to show the break in his speech pattern, he'd stop after he said," Hi Grandma" then proceed with the second part, "This is Ethan." See how many things speech bubbles can do for you!
Along with the October Afternoon speech bubbles that Vivian used, you can find a few other varieties out there, including the Simple Stories [email protected]! line. My favorite is a sheet of paper called Bubbles, it's covered with all sort of different varieties filled with text. Here's some of their journaling cards, see the many speech bubbles!
Amy Tangerine has a couple of sheets of paper in her new line Ready, Set, Go (coming soon) that feature speech bubbles. They'd be great to use either as a whole sheet or cut out a few individual ones and use on your page or card. She's also got this cute chipboard element as well.
Pebbles has a paper from their With Love collection with more whimsical varieties to choose from as well.
And yet another approach you can take with speech bubbles is to add them to your camera phone photos with any number of photo editors. Just do a search in your apps store and read some reviews. I have an Android base phone and downloaded PicSay from the Google Play Store for free (there's a full service version called PicSayPro for a small fee). I looked at a couple of others before settling on this particular app because it had great reviews. It was easy to figure out and there are quite a few options. I could size the speech bubble, choose the font, move the bubble to fit my photo, share it a number of ways, and I know there's lots more I can do, but I was looking for speech bubbles and this was the perfect fit.
So step away from the boring, add a little playful element to your next scrapbook page or card, let's talk speech bubbles!
