Kraft+ February Challenge

Hello Everyone,

The challenge over at Kraft Plus Challenge Blog this month is to use Kraft plus postage stamps.

I really had to put my thinking cap on for this challenge. I thought of many different ways to approach the challenge but, in the end, went with a fairly difficult, time consuming hybrid layout. I could have gone with a traditional layout or a digital layout but, somehow, neither way really spoke to me for this challenge. I couldn't turn the picture I had in my mind into a layout without thinking of a more innovative way to do it, so hybrid it was. This is how I eventually ended up interpreting the challenge - I hope you like it.

People often ask me if my layouts are traditional, digital, or hybrid and, of course, I do all three depending on what I'm trying to achieve. For this particular challenge I didn't have the right traditional or digital elements to create what I wanted, so I combined both. Just to give you a bit of an idea,  below I have highlighted how I created it.

First I started with this digital background paper:

I liked the Asian feel of the paper but it wasn't right for my Vietnam layout. So, I extracted the flower drawings from the background and got rid of the white paper, and the Chinese writing.  I ended up with this:

Once I cleaned it up, I saved it as a digital element. Then I printed it on some light coloured Kraft card stock, scanned it, and saved it as a paper.

So, after what seemed like a very long time, I ended up with the exact background I wanted (and I still have the element and background paper to use over and over again). 

Next, I scanned the Vietnamese stamps and saved them as digital elements. I added the photo to the digital Kraft paper using a digital mask so that it blended into the background. I changed and resized the elements I made from the scanned stamps and added them to my layout. Then I used parts of the plant drawing as overlaps. The lanterns, arrows and tickets are purely digital embellishments (I didn't make them).

The red circles highlight the masking effect that helps the photo blend into the background. The blue circles show How I used the drawing of the plants to overlap parts of the layout.

This is a long blog post but I thought it was worthwhile because I am so often asked how I do my layouts and this will give you a bit of an idea. Plus, it highlights the lengths I go to to create exactly what I want. :)

Thank you so much for stopping by.


Thank you to Everybody who has left nice comments on this post. I know there are many more comments, because Google+ keeps advising me, but they are not showing up in the comments section. It's not that I don't appreciate your comments, I'm just unable to reply until the problem is sorted. :)