Playing with Paint

Here's the second layout I made for Nancy's family. The pictures are from their May 2011 trip to Moab, Utah.  

I wanted the design to be stark, much like the landscape in the photos. I love the way the red rocks look against the blue sky, so I chose that for my color palette. I poured some Americana 'Georgia Clay' acrylic paint into my Frisbee. Then I got out the old toothbrush I keep in the craftroom.

I dipped the toothbrush into the paint, then ran my thumb across the bristles to splatter paint onto plain tan paper. I let a few accent drips fall, then used the toothbrush to paint the chipboard title and date stickers. What fun to play with paint! 

Scrap for Hire

Nancy, my childhood best friend, contacted me with a proposition.  Her family has years of photos sitting on their computer and they've never done anything with them.  She wanted to know if I'd be willing to scrap them.  She'd pay me for both the supplies and my time.  

I gave it a lot of thought and carefully considered my (numerous) current commitments.  I realized that this was both something I could do and something I wanted to do.  The idea of scrapping someone else's photos was interesting and would be a fun challenge.  A bit of income would be nice.  Nancy and I arranged a time for a phone consultation.  (She lives in Colorado and I'm in California.)

During the consultation, we sat in front of our respective computers and went through my blog and online galleries.  She'd said she loved my style and wanted me to have complete creative freedom, but I wasn't comfortable with that.  I wanted to hear exactly what she liked and didn't.  Here's what we settled on:

• pages will be 12x12 or 12x24
• layouts will be clean, simple, graphic and linear 
• pages should not be especially whimsical or cutesy
• titles should be informational, not clever or punny
• no journaling - the title will convey the event/place/date
• titles will be stamps/stickers/etc. (not my handwriting)
• color scheme is at my discretion, but preferably minimal pastels and brights
• I have permission to post the completed layouts online
• no deadlines and no obligations - I can do as many or as few layouts as I'm able

Armed with my guidelines, I waited for the first set of photos.  The email arrived with approximately 20 pictures and instructions to pick whichever ones I wanted.  I chose six, printed them, and came up with this:

It came together so quickly and easily!  I thought it would be harder to scrap someone else's photos, but I realized that the most time-consuming part of my scrapbook process is deciding what story I wanted to tell and then actually doing the journaling.  With that part absent, I was able to just focus on making something that looks good.  I love how this turned out!  Happily, so do Nancy and her family.

By the way, doesn't that green background paper work perfectly for this camping page?!  I thought so too.  It's by SEI and it's part of their Holiday Cheer collection.  Don't forget to check the B-sides of heavily-themed patterned paper.  You never know when you'll find the perfect camping paper on the other side of a page of Christmas trees!

Have any of you ever done any scrap-for-hire?  I'd love to hear about your experiences.  Mine... so far so good!