Thursday, 24 May 2012

Style Analysis

I have just completed an exercise as part of my Cover to Cover class trying to determine what I mostly do with my layouts. The challenge was to look at the last five layouts I completed and analyse the style, products used and determine what the components are of the pages I love.





These are four of the five layouts I analysed. The fifth one I have not actually photographed yet I just realised!

  • My love of patterned paper is pretty evident. With the exception of the Me @ 38 layout all contain a mixture of patterns and the pattern on the Me layout drove the whole design.
  • I use a single photo almost exclusively. All five layouts I analysed were single photo efforts and increasingly I am using Instagram shots. I went through my entire 2012 album and found only two layouts containing more than one photo.
  • I love bright colours and generally warmer colours too. I lack confidence in combining colours so the Studio Calico kits have been an absolute godsend in that someone else with a far better eye puts the colours together.
  • I used Thickers for every title of the five analysed pages with the addition of other letter stickers for the majority.
  • All my journalling is hand written and I am increasingly using printed journalling cards. There is one layout with no journalling and one with hidden journalling among the five.
  • I always leave either the top left or top right corner of the layout empty.
  • My layouts are very flat.
I am surprised at how little cardstock I have used lately and how much more confident I am becoming at mixing various patterns. Overall I was pretty pleased with all these layouts. Often it is the photos I love rather than the layouts themselves though ... perhaps I should just be sticking them in a photo album!

I found this exercise really beneficial and will try it on a second album soon to see if my style has evolved at all.

Have you ever analysed your pages in this fashion? Did you discover something unexpected about your style?

3 comments:

  1. This is such a fun exercise!

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  2. I love all these pages! You are doing well with pattern/color mixing. How do you think you'll apply this analysis? Scrap multiple photos more? Or stick to what you've been doing?

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  3. Thank goodness for kits with the patterns! I think I will make a conscious effort to scrap more multi photo layouts. I will rely on sketches to start with I think and go from there. I am going to do one of Shimelle's challenges from True Scrap last year and cut all the papers in a kit before I choose any photos and then work on layouts including a double paged spread. I have never scrapped a double page layout so that will be a fun challenge.

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