Fondue | Lisa-Jane Johnson | Sketch

Hello lovelies!  It’s Lisa-Jane from Pretty My Page here with you on the blog today to show how I used one of this month’s sketches.  I actually used both of the sketches and shared the double page layout during the National Scrapbooking day celebrations, which seems ages ago now sadly. 

I love using sketches so I knew I would end up using them both and I fully intend to use them more than once – there are just so many ways you can interpret them and make them your own. 

When I’m using a sketch I tend to print it out and have it in front of me while I’m scrapping or I have a tendency to get side-tracked and veer widely away from the original – of course this is absolutely fine when we are scrapping for ourselves but if you are taking part in a challenge or showing different interpretations like we are here then you do have to kind of be able to see where the original idea fits in…

For this sketch I wanted to keep very close to the original so I didn’t rotate or flip or change the dimensions etc.  Initially I started on a highly patterned background and used a dry brush to apply some white paint as a base for the corner placement.  Then I put it to one side to dry and NSD came along and it got buried and I totally forgot I had started it until I came to tidy up this week!  (Now you see why I will be using this sketch again… ahem…

On my second attempt I used the packaging technique to apply some watercolours to the bottom corner and began layering the different elements on top.  The photo is quite yellow due to the lighting in the restaurant we were in and the fact that it was almost entirely made of highly polished pine!

The collection I am using for this even does have a bit of yellow in it but I wanted to tone down the shade of the photo rather than draw attention to it (that comes in another layout where I discuss the strange décor…)  I used quite a few scraps to layer under the edges and give me some spots where I could add in a pop of yellow rather than ignore it completely.

And that was it done.  But it didn’t feel quite right to me as there seemed too much white space for my normal style.  I didn’t want to add bits to the top right as I was really trying to keep to the sketch as close as possible.  However, I am going through a rather lengthy phase of having a slight border around my pages so I decided this would be a less conspicuous option and trimmed the white cardstock down.  Then I accidentally trimmed it too much and ended up with a wider border than I intended – gah!  With last month’s sewing topic still in my mind, I decided that a simple stitched border would break up the edges and make me feel at peace with the layout once again.
  

I hope that you’re feeling been motivated to use the sketches we’ve been playing with here and please do tag us if you post something inspired by our monthly topics – we love seeing all your layouts and you could be featured on our social media pages. 

Go forth and make pretty pages!

xx