Croptober Lesson #5: Magazine Inspiration

I loved this lesson.  It was so much fun.  AND... I got a big compliment from one attendee, Laura.  She said this was the most inspirational lesson I've ever taught.  Now, that's a big deal because Laura has been to just about every workshop and specialty event I've ever had for TEN YEARS!  She is one of my most consistent and long-term customers...  so I can only hope everyone else likes the lesson even half as well!

This lesson is called magazine inspiration.  Often times I read through a magazine and I don't necessarily notice the content of a certain page, but rather the layout.  With SBC 4.0, I realize that there is just about no layout I cannot duplicate.  But, I was worried that traditionally, it would be harder to create a magazine inspired page.

Well, not so much.  I found that with the traditional magazine inspiration, I was more or less inspired by something on the page...an arrangement of elements, a color scheme, etc... as opposed to the digital magazine inspiration where I wanted more to duplicate the page.  So, I did just that.  I perused a few magazines that I had around to see what caught my eye from a design perspective.  The idea to teach this as a lesson came from the cM virtual croptoberfest where they suggested using an advertisement to inspire page design.

They used this ad as inspiration:



And from this, they created this traditional page as an example:



Below are the samples I used to demonstrate to my Croptober attendees how I was inspired by layouts in magazines to create both traditional and digital pages.  First, digital:

Here is the magazine inspiration page:

 

And here is the digital page I created.

 

Again, here is the magazine inspiration (which obviously had no inspiration from the actual content):

 

 

 

And here is the digital page I came up with emphasizing the layout:

 

 

 

 

This last magazine page was my favorite! Some of my favorite digital embellishments are from our office supply kits and this page was perfect for incorporating those embellishements:

 

 



 

See how great it worked out?  I love this page!

 



 

 

You may notice the pet theme of all my digital sample pages?  Well, I will be making a calendar for the couple who provided foster care for our dog before we adopted her from the rescue association.  SO, I was able to complete some of the pages to use in my calendar and that also led me into talking about the fact that our calendars are on sale this month (for NINE more days) and to re-iterate the process of buying digital product credits for digital sale items.  By the way, I sold about $400 worth of calendar product credits at my Croptober event, so at least a few people were listening!

 

Next, I made a couple of traditional page designs to show my attendees how a magazine page can inspire page design without having to match that design specifically.  I created two traditional examples.

 

Here is the first magazine inspiration for my traditinonal page demo:

 

 

And here is the layout I came up with (each of the circles will be photo mats for a corresponding circle cut photo) although the colors in the magazine were also inspiring:

 

 

And here is the second traditional magazine inspiration:

 

 

 

Here is the traditional layout (sans photos) but I would want to add a photo that I had hand cut a bit of so that it would overlap the yellow paper, the way the photo above has the top of the woman's head cut out.  I'd overlap my journaling with the photo and add titles and subtitles to the other color block squares  on the page.  As you can see, I also copied the color inspiration from the magazine page.

 

 

So there you have it - Magazine Inspiration!  I hope you enjoy this lesson and that when you are reading a magazine, fold down a few pages that could become part of your next digital or traditional album.  Stay tuned for Croptober Lesson #6 - the last lesson I taught at my event.

 

Happy Croptober Scrapping- Sher