Hello! It's Jennifer Larson. I'm at a very busy time of year--one more month in the term to grade papers, my son's birthday, and the beast called winter. To relax, I love scrapbooking, but if I have to think too much, it slows me down. To stay creative, I remind myself to think only of three elements: photos, journaling, and title. Though I love embellishments, I center the embellishments around one of those three elements to avoid design paralysis.
If I start with those three elements, the rest seems to fall in place more easily. Here's three pages where I did that.
With this page, I started with the photos, printing them all the same, small size to get them on one page. They fit best in one block, so the most logical thing to do from there was to put the journaling above the block. I could have put the title below for balance, but I always try to save the tickets for baseball pages, so I put the tickets in an envelope below and budged the title against the journaling. I embellished to highlight the title and the journaling, two of my key elements with this page.
For this next page, I again started with the photos:
I had two 5x7 inch photos, so I opted for a two page spread, the photos centered along the spread to give them equal importance. I may be the only one in the world with this problem, but I seem to have a bucketload of Project Life cards, so I picked ones with similar natural hues and themes to surround the photos, including a journaling card in the mix. The most logical place for the title was in a line below the photos; I chose to embellish the title, then the other side of the page for balance.
Finally, this page flew out of my brain starting with the title (pardon the pun):
The title was the first thing from my head, so I gave it due space in the bottom quarter of the page. I centered the embellishments around the title. I had many Project Life card-sized photos of this event. My son helped me narrow them to his three favorites. Since they were Project Life-sized, I picked my most autumnal cards from the bucket 'o cards, making sure to include one journaling card.
Thank you for letting me share with you my design process! I hope if you get as busy as I have been, you can focus on these three elements and let the design flow easily from them.!