Hi there! I am very happy today to share with you my first project life layout for the month of February. Love is in the air so the Cupid Collection inspired me to fill the page with hearts!
I am not used to play with bold colours on my layouts but the Cupid collection has so many vibrant colours in it that I could not resist to give it a try! So the layout ended up looking like this:
Today I would like to explain how I put it together. Since colours are mostly predominant on this collection I will explain with this brief tutorial how I composed the layout from the point of view of colours.
Before starting with any cards of photos, we have to keep in mind one basic rule of composition: balance. The layout must be balanced between cards and pictures. In this case, we will balance the layout with colours. So, in other words, the presence of different colours must be harmonic on the layout. If we use one predominant colour, this one must be equally present throughout the full layout. If we decide to use different colours on the layout they must be also balancing their location either with cards from the collection or the colours from the photos.
The tool that will help us understand how to compose the page is going to be a polygon. In this case, a triangle. I am going to explain myself further here. We have a 9×12 page that has three rows of three 3×4 pockets and three columns of again three 3×4 pockets. If we start placing the shape of a triangle joining three different pockets, we will get different composition ideas that we will translate into colours and then cards or photos. It would look like something like this:
To give us an idea of how a composed layout might look like, we can do the exercise of joining cards crossing triangles horizontally, vertically, equally spread, from corner to corner or even irregular ones.
Now is the turn of choosing cards and pictures. In this situation, to me the card from the collection that has four bold colours in it (blue, red, pink and yellow) drew my attention… I sometimes get inspired from one card only and I compose the rest of the layout around it.
So from here I keep choosing cards that follow the same ‘theme’ or even have any of the colours of the first one in them and put them apart. It does not matter how many, just a few would be enough. Remember, at this early stage, we do not know how many we are going to place in the pockets so, for now they are just the ones we like.
Secondly, we get to choose the photos. I take quite a few normally so for me choosing some cards from the month of Feb that had some of the colours of the first card in it was not difficult at all. Remember, they also have to sort of follow the theme of Feb: L O V E so I also tried to choose them from a sensitive meaning… Again, no matter how many photos as we will take the ones that fit in the composition and discard the rest.
The third step that I also take is making my own cards. The ones from the collection are great but don’t forget we have the elements as well so they will be very useful when having those extra cards that complement the first cards and pictures. If in the end we don’t fit them anywhere, we mustn’t forget we can print the elements and use them later as embellishments!
As a starting point to begin with the composition, I take the only card I am certain about and choose eight more and start analyzing them in terms of colour:
And like in this figure we will have four cards from the collection, two cards I made with the elements or other embellishments and three photos.So then I coloured in every rectangle (= 3×4 card) with the predominant colours of each.
Once we have the possible triangular combinations and the colours on each card, we will proceed to make individual triangles per colour with the cards we have:
And like this we get to a balanced composition of a layout regarding colours:
And a couple of close ups of the layout:
Handmade cards and from the collection as well:
I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial of how to compose and balance a layout in terms of colours!
Let us know whether you try to make one and post it and tag us on Instagram using #sahindesigns!
Hope to see you on the next blog post!
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