The Anatomy of a Digital Layout with Cheryl

Hey y’all! It’s Cheryl @watchcherylscrap sharing a layout with the new Island Time collection by Traci Reed Designs. This collection is filled with all things travel and sunshine, and it was perfect for some photos I took back in 2011 of my daughter.

We are blessed to live near the beach, and I have some amazing photographs that I’ve taken over the years (well, I think they are anyway). For today’s layout, I chose two photographs. The first and largest photo is long horizontal shot of my daughter walking into the water. The second and smaller photo is inset at the bottom left corner, and was chosen for the inset because it was blurry. I still wanted to use it though! Lots of times I’ll work in Lightroom and Photoshop to fix blurry photos, but this time I wanted to preserve the feel of the wind and waves and feeling of action it gave to the photo.

I used traveler’s notebook signatures and cards to build a vertical line that almost, but not quite, grounds both my photos to the paper. I let the horizontal photo hang off to the right, but then built up a cluster with paint, scatters, and a variety of embellishments. I added a word art tag above the inset photo. I didin’t want all the text included on the card, so I simply tucked the part I didn’t want showing behind the photo.

I changed a comma to a period on the tag, and it was perfect! You’ll notice that I have three clusters that move your eye from the top left to the middle right, then down to the bottom left and up again. This allows my photos to shine while still allowing me to use heaps of embellishments.

I added a premade title at the top, and then stuck my journaling/date over to the right. I didn’t have a special story to share, but I did want to identify her age and location when I’m looking back over the layout again.

If you’d like to see my process for this layout, you can view it on my Watch Cheryl Scrap YouTube channel or on my Instagram @watchcherylscrap.