Escape, Explore, Unplug

Hello, and welcome to my blog! I'm super-excited to announce that this month I am guest designing for White with...1! Yay!

I've been playing along with their monthly challenges for a while now - I started participating in their challenges initially to stretch myself, as using a white background hasn't always been easy for me. So with that little journey in mind, to be asked to guest on their blog is a real honour!

The colour of choice this month is rainforest green:

To inspire you further, White with... 1 also had a mood board this month:

I love mood boards - they always give me ideas I wouldn't otherwise go for...

So, here is my completed layout:

I decided to make a double page layout. The mood board inspired me to choose photos taken during a woodland walk. I chose patterned papers and embellishments from the Wolf Pack collection from Heidi Swapp, which is an all-time favourite of mine, and was also perfect for this layout both in theme and colour scheme.

I used a paw print cutfile from the Silhouette design store to cut trails on the white card stock background. I slightly trimmed the card stock and mounted them onto patterned paper - this created added interest to the page, as you could see the paper peaking through the apertures, as well as around the edges.

Next, inspired by the mood board, I decided to use mixed media on the background. I used the packaging technique to add some ink to the cardstock. To do this, instead of using gesso on the cardstock, I sprayed water on it, to encourage the ink to spread a bit before being absorbed. This also created softer edges of the inked areas, which I quite like.

I also added some more ink by stamping paw prints onto the page, just to re-iterate the intensity of the rainforest green colour, as the colour became a bit diluted in the inked areas.

Next, I placed the photos and the title onto the background. Originally, the title was going to be 'Explore', an acetate word printed just in the right shade of green! However, I was inspired be the alphas on the mood board to expand on my title, and going through my embellishments and stamps, I realised that I could do this, as I had a word stamp and a smaller acetate piece, which matched perfectly both in theme and font.

Last but not least, I added three embellishment clusters to the page, to frame the photos and to bring the two pages together. This was a bit tricky, as I am running a bit low on embellishment in this collection, but I managed to make it work in the end.

I hope you like my layout. If you want to see how it all came together, you can watch my process video here. Thanks for visiting my blog! Happy scrapping!