Sketchiosity: It's About Sketches

[Faces of Olivia - sketch from Racketty Scrappety]

I love looking at sketches! There are so many talented folks out there willing to share the enormous variety and styles of sketches with scrapbookers like me. For me it's all about choosing the papers and embellishments. I can really make time on a layout once I have a plan. That's where I get hung up - I really need a plan. Once I realized that the generous sketches were handing me balanced and and unified layout plans, I grabbed on. The sketch really allows me to evaluate my photos, identify the story, and match that to a roadmap to success. While I used to skim through magazines and online galleries to find layouts to inspire me, the sketch doesn't intimidate me with the fabulous techniques and stunning photos of other people's families or vacation spots. It is instead a sturdy tool to which I measure my photos against and see if they have what it takes to live in that layout.


[Labor Day Swim - sketch from Racketty Scrappety]

Sometimes, as in the sketch for Labor Day Swim above, the sketch pushes me to think about using the photos differently like irregular cutting of the focal photo and the photo cut off the edge. I seldom have these unique flashes of brilliance on my own and appreciate the fact that the creative types at Racketty Scrappety do regularly, AND invite me to try it on my own. Awesome!

There is such a robust and rich world of free sketches available for interested scrapbookers. I have linked this site to some of my favorites. It's so worth it to visit the sites at least weekly to check out what's new and see the layouts that others have made from the sketches. If these are not sites you have been visiting regularly, then by all means check out their archives. They are gold mines of years of original and inspiring sketches.


[Backyard Restaurant 2007 - sketch by Stuck?!]

At last Friday night's crop I was able to layout, crop and start embellishing three layouts in a very short time with the help of the some great sketches. I was able to convince Kit to take a look at some two-page sketches. Kit and I suffer from the same affliction (no, it's not an addiction to cardstock)-layout paralysis. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. It's when you set all the pictures from the event down on the table and stare at them without movement or progress for an extraordinary amount of time. You shuffle the pictures around and turn them this way and that. 30 minutes later you decide to just get something down and start cutting. Using the sketches, Kit was able to sort, select, and crop photos for three 2-page layouts in just a few hours. We were both taken with sketches by Chris Greiser from Scrap Me If You Can.

Sometimes, however, I just see something great and scraplift the living daylights out of it to get pages like these two. That still works.


[Face to Face w/ Fluffy 2007]


[Septemberrrrr Swim 2007 - title credit to Kristi Y.]