GIS Scrapbooking Ideas: Making a nautical motif modern with color

Hello Sunshines!

Up on the GIS blog today is one of my favorite motifs: Modern Nautical. For my page, I used two of my favorite beach photos of my kiddo when he was small. It was his first introduction to surf and sand shortly after we moved here. I've scrapped the bigger photo before, but not the little one. I used Pixlr-o-matic to process the photos- one warm, one cold to match my page.

Credits: Just Jaimee: Ice Cream Papers; Kaye Wienecki: A Little Message Elements; Allison Pennington: Seize Papers,  Rain Rain Elements; One Little Bird: Lemon Drop Elements; Valorie Wibbens: Swoon Elements, Sprinkles v. 22; HGD by Laurie Anne: Shine Basics; Amy Martin: Blanc Stitches v. 2; Fonts: Jane Austen, Albertsthal Typewriter, Slim Pickins

I am not a huge fan of a traditional nautical motif. It reminds me of surf & turf in the late '80s. But I live near the ocean, so nautical is always in this time of year. I have no lack of inspiration for an updated, trendy nautical look. What I notice in the shops and magazines lately is softened or muted color tones mixed with punchy colors, dark navy and black, with linen and raw material type neutrals. I brought that influence to my page for a fresh take on an old motif. Using modern colors is an easy way to freshen up trends we feel are dated.  

There you have it. Now go read the article for more ideas!  

Inside GIS: Constellation Motif

Today's Get It Scrapped blog post is about using a constellation motif on your pages. I was excited about this idea because we have front row seats to Wallops Island. When they launch rockets all we have to do is step outside and look up. It's extraordinary.

(Forgive me if I am hazy- I'm under the weather at the moment)

I used a kit from One Little Bird Designs and alphas from CD Muckosky to compose the page. I have photos of the launches, but to get good photos of things of the night sky, you really need a telescopic lens on a DSLR and not a tiny point and shoot camera. The tiny dots on my photos just failed to capture the magic of the story.

Wikimedia Commons and Flickr Commons  are two great resources for finding free to use photos that don't violate copyright. In the end, I used this great photo by John Hanson.  Creative Commons licenses are awesome!

You can read the article to find out how I approached this motif along with other great ideas (and there are some amazing pages there). 

The white background is really a great ombred star paper that I duplicated and overlayed to wash out the stars and amp up the white. It may seem counter-intuitive to have a white background for a story about a night event, but that's exactly why I picked it. Against the white, the colors and photos pop. It also allowed me to use my text in yellow, instead of black (something I rarely do, but broke out of my with here).

As always, I framed the page with some borders, skewing them to give the overall page a bit more energy. Since my scatter, photo and title blocks are very constructed and orderly, I did some scattering and broke the border with the ampersand (the & is for the two launches, in case you are wondering).