Mojo Monday Project: Product Inspo- Color Focus

One of the Get It Scrapped forum topics last week asked for help filling mojo back up.  Everyone chimed in with such great ideas that it inspired me! I've decided to keep my blogging more regular-like, I'm going to do a post every Monday to get our mojo on.

What is mojo? It's the internal stock of creativity you project out to the world. When your are mojoless, you need to explore the world around you to find more and do things to shake you out of your comfortable creative spot.

I'm going to break each Monday of the month into four categories: Product, Pinterest, Process, and Past. I'll scrap a page to show you how I've used these things to inspire me and hopefully get your mojo recharged, too!

Let's begin with the product that inspired me today:

Digi Scrap Addicts'  Group Therapy | Life – Defined collection. Now a little disclaimer-- I did find this because Just Jaimee contributed to this collection. Before that, I wasn't even aware it existed. But boy, was I pleasantly surprised when I saw the giant inspo e-zine you that requires zero purchase!

The colors of the kit were completely outside my comfort zone. To me, orange says Halloween and fall. Even for Halloween and fall, I am not drawn to orange. The times I have used orange en masse are on pages I kinda want to forget. I had this kit in front of me full of oranges and decided to turn aversion into color focus challenge. People scrap great pages with orange all the time, so I should be able to do it, too!

Product Mojo tip #1 & #2: Start with a open mind, positive attitude and embrace product outside your comfort zone. Then go look at amazing pages made with product you wouldn't normally use.

I decided to go all in with the color orange. I started by thinking about what the particular shades of orange in the collection made me think of... and it was definitely sunshine and warmth. That led me to photos taken on a super sunny day at the beach (instead of the normal humid haze). There was a shot of my sandals in the sand that was rather monochromatic which I decided would fit perfectly with a color focused layout.

Product Mojo tip #3: Let the Product inspire the story and pick photo(s) accordingly.

Since my photo's colors didn't quite match the orange papers and embellishments, I used my handy-dandy free photo filter program, Photo Effects 4, to add some orangish filters, a little over exposure and a little light leak to the image. It took me only a few minutes to tweak, which is why I use Photo Effects instead of PSE or PSP.

Original:

Edited:

I picked out the orange chevron and solid orange ombre from Jaimee's contribution the collection. While I loved the ombre of the solid orange, I liked the movement and texture of chevron. I decided to blend the two together so I could have ombre, movement and texture to mount set the mood for my summery page.

I put my photo at the bottom of the page because it seemed to ombre itself down there (see the page below). Notice the overexposed bit matches the bottom of the background. Serendipity! I decided to help my photo stand out, I'd edge it black. That gave the photo a funky, unexpected contrast and there's no doubting that it's definitely the focal point!

I created my title using a speech bubble and sketched title font in white. If I'd use an alpha or a dark color for the word 'summer', it would become really heavy. Sunlight is not heavy, so the sketched font keeps things airy and light. Shoes don't talk (yeah, I actually said that to myself while scrapping) and the speech bubble didn't happily make a smooth transition from the photo, so I added in the star flair. Now the star is saying "Hello" and we all know (I hope) our sun is a star meaning the summer them is reinforced by that flair.

There are some great journaling labels and word art I wanted to include in the page, but again using them as is killed the light and airy feel of the page. I still liked the shapes they created, so I decided to try blending  them (screen, dodge and overlay are awesome) and then fiddling with the opacity. That's my secret weapon for wanting to add it all without making a heavy page!

I used a journaling card for actual journaling and added that flower to ground it together with the photo. I picked this particular card because of the red quotes for two reasons: Firstly because they work with the red label on the sandals in the photo. Secondly because the star flairs are more yellow-y, the red balances out deviation from orange. Red and yellow make orange therefore you can have a little of each on an orange focused page to add subtle tension without throwing things off. Try it- it works.

Finally I added my journaling in two spots, defined that top journaling spot repeating the flairs (small, contrasting with the big one in the title), added some date stamps and framed the top and bottom edges with black to keep your eye in the page. (I like to call that framing of the edges "visual Pong")

I hate orange, but I love this page!

Product Mojo tip #4: Design the page with intention. It really works when attempting something outside your comfort zone.

The Result:



Now I challenge you to try using product and colors that don't thrill you. Feel free to share your creations with me in the links!!

♥ Carrie