I admit it, I like to pinch pennies. When I can, I put as many photos on a page as possible. Lisa’s Disneyland layout was a good example of this! When I see layouts in magazines that feature one photo, I have to laugh. Those types of pages are few and far between in this household. There are, however, times when less is definitely more.
On this layout, I really wanted Eli’s creativity to show. He has an incredible imagination and I tried to find a way to highlight it. After several test runs with other layouts looked less than wonderful, I realized it was going on the back of a page with old black and whites. Inspiration! I love black. It lets the background fade away and forces you to concentrate on the photos. I cropped everyone else out of the photos to be used, and then lined them up in different configurations. The one looking left didn’t work anywhere except on the right side. Since he was wearing the same shirt in one of the others, it couldn’t go next to the first.
I came up with the quote because he’s definitely imaginative and his “different-ness” must be genius (spoken like his mother). After deciding where it would go, the page was too plain. I played around with different matting, but the matting defeated the purpose of the plain page. I’d already decided to use gold ink since all three pictures had elements of gold that could be drawn out, and found gold bars in my Navy stickers. They were perfect! They anchor the page and draw the eye to the photos in the middle.
Using black worked really well because it helped with the continuity in the scrapbook as a whole. The following page is of Eli’s ancestors and relatives – some of whom show the same “uniqueness” as he does. Though the photos are very different from the ones on this page, the black background on both pages is a good transition.