Kids Scrapbook Album Project | Natalie Edition Make Your Own Rainbow
Hello everyone and welcome back to our Kids Scrapbook Album series! This series has been on the back burner for a while, and since I now have Project Life on hold I am excited to hop back into these albums. Today I am sharing 3 Ways To Incorporate Good Design into your Kids Scrapbook Layouts, with this bright and happy layout for Natalie’s albums. I am working with this amazing collection from Pretty Little Studio called Color Me Happy, designed by Cat Martin. This collection is so incredibly bright, happy, and up beat. If you’d like to see more layouts from our Kids Albums Series, check out this link: Larkindesign Kids Albums Project. Follow along with my process video here.
I purchased this collection from Clique Kits, and it included this lovely turquoise card stock. I have used this as my base, and while I was spending some time in the bed not feeling so well, I cut out lots of these adorable clouds, hot air balloons, and scallops from the patterned papers.
The story of this layout is about how Natalie, when she was just 4 and 5, would come into the kitchen while we were cooking dinner, to tell us all about her day. She has always been such an upbeat, happy go lucky kiddo, as you can see from her photos. She loved to be up on the counter and so I wanted to incorporate a feeling of up on my layout. The elements from the patterned papers were perfect to help bring that feeling into the page, but good design can also help accomplish this.
1. Use the Golden Mean concept.
What is the Golden Mean? This is a design concept that almost looks like a seashell. This concept helps create a page design that leads your eye around the page. Good design always tells your eye where to go on the page, so we don’t have to work so hard to try to figure out what is going on on the page. For this layout, the eye begins with the photo. This is our main focal point. The scallops lead the eye from the photos across the bottom of the page, and then the hot air balloons carry your eye up and around the page. This creates the classic seashell shape that demonstrates the Golden Mean!
2. Include an element that grounds everything to the page.
We already mentioned this, and it is worth mentioning twice! Good page design is grounded to the page, and on this layout I have used the scallops to serve that purpose. They go almost across the entire bottom of the page, and give the eye a good place to go. Setting them across at the bottom creates a great line so that all the elements of this layout come out of this stable line.
3. Lines, lines, everywhere are lines.
The shortest path between two points is a line, right? Your eye looks for lines to help it travel across a page. We already established a circular line with the Golden Mean on this page, but we also can find a great diagonal line when we follow the hot air balloons going up the page. I also arranged them so the larger ones are on the bottom, and they get smaller as you make your way up the page. This gives the illusion of depth.
Notice how each of the hot air balloons are part of a cluster that include clouds, balloons, word strip, and a stamped element as well. This gives these clusters presence so they aren’t just “sneezed” across the page (you know what I’m talking about, right?!) This layout was so much fun to create and I am so happy you are here to share it with me! I hope you are inspired to use these design concepts in your pages as well. See you again soon!
~Theresa
Join us in the classroom! In My Pocket Kids Album Edition is a great resource to help you get your albums completed! Click on the image below to learn more and to sign up!