Sketch Week, Part 1

Sketch Week is officially here! (And with another guest designer.)

This week the sketch is another one of my favorites that has been sitting in my personal sketch book for way too long. It's time to break it out and actually use it! This is another sketch that at first glance might be a little intimidating or appear to be time consuming but you'll see over this week the different things you can do and a few ways you can simplify it.

The sketch that will be used as the starting point for all five layouts this week.

You can download and print this sketch by clicking on the printable sketches link on the right sidebar. I have posted the sketch here minus all the usual information that comes on them just because you can get a closer look at it. The sketch on the downloads page it has all the information like the sketches normally do. 

Layout #1 - "First Halloween"

Supply list - Cardstock: Bazzill; Patterned paper: BoBunny; Stickers: BoBunny; Alphabets: Making Memories (first) and the orange is unknown; Jewels: KaiserCraft

One thing you'll notice this week is that I've gone way back to Drew's early pictures in an attempt to get them on some pages. Goodness he's grown so much!

• Variation #1

I love the picture of me, Drew, and Stacey and really wanted it to stand out on the layout so I used a 5 x 7 cropped down to a 5 x 6.  The reason I cropped that one inch off was to leave enough room for my picture on the left. You could always leave the seven inch width and use a smaller photo on the left but it just wouldn't have worked that way with the photos I used.

If I would have followed the pictures sizes on the sketch that photo that I replaced with an enlargement would have stood out. With it being a 4 x 6 and the other photos being smaller it was already the focal photo. However, because I used a 4 x 6 in place of a few 3 x 4 photos on the right page it wouldn't have stood out as much. Which leads me to the next variation.

• Variation #2
I didn't end up using any of the suggested photo sizes on the sketch.

I really wanted to keep a good balance within the photos on this layout. To do that I kept the same width of total photos on both pages the same. I didn't want to crop the photo on the far left to a 3 x 4 because I would have been cropping too much off the photo. Instead I cropped it to a 4 x 4. The width of the enlargement is 6" and the width of the other picture on the left page is 4", giving me a combined width of 10". 

To keep the balance I made sure that my combined width on the right page was the same as the left by using another photo with a 6" width and the other one a width of 4", giving the combined width for the right page 10". 

There are so many different combinations you can use to come up with the same combined photo width on both sides.

• Variation #3

Instead of using the circles as on the sketch, I went with stars instead. There aren't as many stars as there are circles on the sketch but the amount of elements you use to make up that swirl across the page shouldn't matter. You can use as little or as much as you want, it's just all about how you arrange them.

I started with the three largest stars first - the orange star, the green star, and the purple star. As long as you have those three bigger ones down on the page in the suggested area then it shouldn't matter how little or how much of the smaller ones you add in. I would recommend not adhering anything until you have the shape of swirl you want.

If you are having trouble with the swirl on your own you might try the BoBunny flex ruler or maybe a piece of embroidery floss as a guide.


Did you know that our store, Scrapbook Generation, will be turning six this month! We thought that would be a great reason for Scrapbook Generation to sponsor Sketch Week this month. To celebrate our 6th birthday I will be giving away six Sketches for Scrapbooking books (volume choice is all yours). This will be a little different than the past giveaways. There will be a giveaway each day this week and then one on Monday when I do the Sketch Week wrap up. So this month you've got six chances to win!