Creating Shadows by Inking Edges

by Julie Gentry | More from this Blogger

My brother and his wife just had their first baby. He's darling (of course!). Since she doesn't scrapbook yet, I'm sending her a starter album with a few pages already done and awaiting photos. The first time I made a page without photos, I was really surprised at how much more difficult it is to see the whole picture without your subject in the page. I still haven't gotten completely used to it, and sometimes pages turn out completely different than they'd been planned once the photos get mounted. In general, I think it's much better to scrap to the photo rather than cut the photo to the layout. But since they live in Hawaii, it'll have to do!

One page I did was for bath time. I used a technique I'd seen but hadn't done before, creating shadows by inking the edges. It's very easy, but the results are excellent and help a page or a particular element to stand out. In this example, I traced a duck from a coloring book and hand cut the letters "Bath Time". When I put the letters on the patterned page, they seemed to get lost. I temporarily put them on a white background, which helped to bring them off the page, but then there wasn't enough delineation between the yellow and the white. I liked the way the page was going, but knew it just wasn't quite right. After playing around with matting and backgrounds that weren't subtle enough, I accidentally smeared a little ink on the T. A happy accident.

With a makeup sponge in one hand and a letter in the other, I just lightly inked the edges of each letter, creating a shadow. It brought them out just enough! (Don't look too closely at the capital T, please.) The duck didn't need to pop, but I gave it a Christmas gift tag ...er, I mean, a specially ordered and handcrafted embellishment to add interest. I finished it off with some fly-eye dots hole-punched from a mirrored piece of paper. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - simple, clean, and ready for the photos that Daniel's parents will blackmail him with when he's 15!

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Julie is affectionately known as GoGo Mama to her friends since she seems to always be out and about.

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