Description:

This October I will celebrate 31 years of marriage to my best friend. We’ve had a wonderful life together, marred only by the fact that we have lived 300 miles away from our extended family for all of those 31 years. Despite the miles between us, I have remained very close to my parents and my siblings. They have all played a huge role in my children’s lives, and watching my nieces and nephews grow has been one of my greatest pleasures.

Over the years it has become tradition for my immediate family to travel to Upstate New York the first week of July to reunite with the rest of the family for a week of fun in the sun. The highlight of that week is our annual Fourth of July clambake. Consequently, I knew immediately that THIS was the event I wanted to feature in my "Reunion" layout!

For me, the photos always come first and are the most important element on a layout. I start the process by selecting the photos that I want to include on a layout and editing them in Adobe Lightroom. I shoot with a Canon 30D digital SLR in RAW mode and love the ease in which I can adjust colors, fix exposure and apply presets via Lightroom. I normally do all of my photo editing before beginning work on the actual layout. The colors in the photos determine the papers and elements I will ultimately choose to use on the layout.

I began the layout by creating a new 12 x 12 inch 300 dpi document in Adobe Photoshop CS3 and dragging a piece of digital kraft paper into the document. While I love the delicious digital patterned papers available, I tend to gravitate towards plain backgrounds when I am creating a layout with multiple photos. In fact, I seem to gravitate towards KRAFT backgrounds a great deal of the time!
The next step was to create a "word mat", which I accomplished via the use of two custom Photoshop brushes from Katie Pertiet at Designer Digitals. (See the accompanying video for the technique used.)

A digital rub-on sun adds color to the layout and balanced the visual weight at the top of the page. I also created a sticker using digital word art designed by Ali Edwards at Designer Digitals and layered that on top of the word mat and sun rub-on. (See the accompanying video for the technique used.)
A second mat over the word mat became a home for my photos. I drew out a rectangle with the Rectangle tool and added a digital paper via a clipping mask.

To place my photos precisely where I wanted them and to insure that the sizes were consistent, I added solid grey rounded rectangles on individual layers above the photo mat. A layered .psd template by Ali Edwards made quick work of this job! I simply opened the template and dragged the layers I wanted to use in my layout onto my document. When I was ready to add my photos it was a simple matter of dragging each photo onto a layer above the corresponding shape and creating a clipping mask.

It always makes me chuckle when someone looks at one of my digital layouts and exclaims "It looks so REAL!" While I admire the graphic style that many talented scrapbook artists do so well, I personally have found my niche in creating layouts that resemble those created with traditional paper supplies.

To achieve this look I usually add elements that appear to "adhere" items to my layout. In the case of "Family Reunion" I added digital staples, eyelets and a string.

I believe that realistic drop shadowing can make or break a layout! I usually find the default setting for Photoshop’s drop shadows to be a bit harsh, so I typically change the shadow color to a dark brown and lower the opacity. I always keep in mind that in "real life" thicker elements create deeper shadows, so I use a larger drop shadow for items such as chipboard, metals, etc. then I use for papers and photos.

A pre-designed digital journaling overlay created a perfect home for my text. I simply added the date using custom Photoshop brushes, and typed in my journaling in the space provided.

A trick I like to employ when using handwriting fonts such as the CK Solid font I chose is to create a duplicate of the text layer, rasterize that layer and use Photoshop’s Eraser tool with a grunge brush set to an opacity of somewhere between 20%-30% to randomly reduce the opacity of the text. Why duplicate the text layer before rasterizing? Because I’ve found many more spelling errors on completed layouts than I care to elaborate on … and once you’ve rasterized type there’s no turning back. (Simply click on the eyeball icon in your Layers Palette to hide the original text layer from view, and take comfort in knowing that your insurance policy is intact!)

As much as I love plain kraft paper backgrounds, this layout seemed to "need a touch of something" so I experimented with several digital edge overlays. In the end I added three different overlays in separate colors and adjusted the blend modes of each to accomplish the look I was going for.

Although I wasn’t able to fit photographs of all 25 people in attendance on one layout, I feel that "Family Reunion" gives a good glimpse into the festivities we participated in that memorable day. And the best part of "doing it digitally?" I can have copies printed for everyone in the family to add to their albums!