Beautiful You | Pol Prince | Large Photo

Hi lovely scrappers! It's Pol on the blog today with a new layout featuring a large photo; July's theme of the month.

I don't scrap very often with large photos, but when I do, I really enjoy it and I vow to use them more often! I love the impact that large photos have on a layout, especially a black and white photo. 

I love the photo I have chosen for this layout, it was taken at my friend's wedding last year, and is a beautiful photo of us girls (and one honorary girl for the day, Shane!). I have been meaning to scrap it ever since. When I got the new Cocoa Vanilla collection, Wild At Heart, I knew the colours were perfect for this photo. Everything on my layout is from this collection.

I normally stick a large photo to one side of my page, but this time I decided I wanted some space at the top for a cluster, to balance the page out. The three clusters I have created around the photo draw your eye down and around the page whilst keeping the large photo as the main focal point. 

We'll be talking more about clustering in our second joint monthly blog post in a few days.

I chose this background paper as I loved the watercolour effect round the edges without being too busy. The navy colour crosses gave me the idea to do a few matching hand stitched crosses of my own, to 'anchor' my photo to the page.

The basis for my 3 clusters came from the small chipboard frames in the collection, and I added some cut up pieces of the paper die cut frames along with a die cut doily cut in half.

There were sooo many of the chipboard words, stickers and die cuts I wanted to use with this photo, so I really had to limit myself to just a few!

The wooden title 'Beautiful You' really was perfect for the gorgeous bride, and I tried to get it as close to her on the photo as possible, whilst trying not to cover up her beautiful dress too much!

I added some of the navy thread I used for the cross stitches underneath the flair buttons and the circular sentiment die cut.

I then chose a few simple small die cut flowers and butterflies for the clusters, in order not to overwhelm the page. The great thing about using a large photo on a layout though, is that you can really go to town on the embellishments if you want, as the photo will never look overwhelmed!

Finally I popped a few glittery enamel dots in and around the clusters to finish them off. Voila, one large photo layout finished, with a renewed resolution to create more! 

We'd love you to have a go at our challenge this month, to use a large photo to create a new layout. We're defining 'large' as a 6x8 size photo as a minimum, so even larger if you'd like. Don't forget there's a great monthly challenge prize to be won, so add your layouts to our UK Scrap Addicts facebook page.