Challenges

I love challenges. When I first started digiscrapping, I hated them though. I was doing good just to get my LO done without trying to do a LO with someone elses requirements. Now, they make me think outside my comfort zone. It has helped me develop as a scrapper. I would describe my scrapping style as very clean and organized. I need all the help I can get in getting away from that. I always see these LO in galleries that have tons of stuff on it and those LO overwhelm me. I will never be a scrapper like that. There is too much on the page for my liking and it distracts from the photo for me. I want the photo to be the main focus in my LO. I do want my LO to have a little bit of what some of those full LO have though and that is where the challenges come in.

The 2 LO below were done for challenges at Snap and Scrap. The first one is for a sketch challenge. In this LO, I would have never thought of using papers as patches for my background. The original sketch had a flower where the stamp is on my LO. Since this LO focused on my son, I chose to change out the flower for something not so feminine. I chose this title because Rachael made him pose this way in the bottom photo. He wasn't really pouting. He can fake it really well though.

credits

This LO is from a color challenge at Snap and Scrap. The challenge was to use primary colors in a LO. The thing I like about this LO the most was what I did with the picture. There was a lot of green in the original picture. It just didn't look right with the red, yellow and blue LO. I took the picture and changed it to black and white, but I still didn't like the way it looked. I messed around with the tints in photoshop. I tinted this photo red. I love the way it turned out. Because I turned the picture B&W first, the red in the photo is not overwhelming. I have used the red tint in other photos and didn't like it. In those photos, I went straight for the red tint and it turned out very red.

credits

Speaking of photoshopping photos, how many of you always adjust your photos? I read several comments on a photo challenge at Make it Scrappy about how some woman alter every photo they scrap. The challenge there was to make a LO with a photo and then a close up of the same item but you couldn't adjust the photo at all except cropping it. Most of the comments were about how they didn't think they could do a LO without altering a photo. I alter very few of my photos before I scrap them. I may crop them if I have excess background or I may do something to the edge so it isnt' just a square edge. I don't adjust the colors or apply filters to my photos at all. This is one of the areas I would like to explore a little more. The area I would like to work on the most is titles and journaling. My LO always have such boring titles. It usually is just a name, or the event or something like that. I can never think of catchy titles. I also have very boring journaling on my LO. It is usually just the basics of where, when, who in the LO. If anyone knows any great tips for journaling and titles, I am up for suggestions.