Getting caught up....digi layouts (with tips, of course :)

I decided instead of a new post for each of my layouts I've been working on over the last month, I should just lump the rest into one post. Easy peasy.

All of the products in this layout are from last month's Digi Files from the Daily Digi. It is an amazing deal every month with a huge amount great products. The two kits I used here are 95 Days of Summer Fun from Sarah Jones and Sara Gleason's Coconut Tree. Tip: in my journaling you will quickly notice some words that stand out. Using a bright color and a larger font size it is easy to see what the important words are. And it gives some visual interest to these large blocks of text.

I was going for the look of a magazine ad: large photo and white space. I even added the photo credit as in a magazine. And don't you love that font for the title? The tip here is to find fonts that match the mood and theme of the page. There are so many free fonts out there waiting for you to find them! (The title font is called US Declaration.)

This page was one of my first. I worked hard to get a paint look behind the journaling. It didn't turn out how I wanted, but it's kinda fun to keep old pages to see how I have progressed. I worked a lot on this page to get the shadows right. When you have layered elements, like in the top corner of the photo, sometimes the shadows don't look right as elements have different layers to shadow to. The tip? Right click on the element layer in the layer palette and choose create layer. Then the shadow will jump down to it's own layer and you can manipulate it to suit the situation.

This uses a template from a Jessica Sprague challenge, which just happened to work with one of my favorite photos last summer of Grandpa's canoe. Tip: Use an inner glow around your photo to give it a bit of a chalked edge.  You can also paint on a blank layer to get more of an uneven edge to the "chalking", but for a quick fix, inner glow is the way to go.