MDS Design Hint

O.K., so you may find this hard to believe, but I have SUCH a hard time coming up with page layout designs.  I almost always have to have a 'starter page' to jump off of for inspiration.  Faced with a blank canvas is almost paralyzing for me!  The 'Little Miss Marker' page from earlier this week--I even had a page I used for inspiration there. . . I had ideas in my head of what I wanted to do, but it took seeing a layout that could adapt to what I had pictured in my mind, to be able to jump start my creativity and get me started in designing that page in My Digital Studio.

So, where do I get my ideas?  Well, Scrap Maps (or scrapbook template layouts--whatever you want to call them!) are one SUPER resource to have.  There are TONS of these available on the web, and I've collected some of my favorites over time, and when I'm looking for inspiration to strike, that's often where I go. 

The second thing I've done is to create Word documents of some of my favorite pages on mydigitalstudio.net, usually labeled by designer/creator, and scroll thru those.  Often I'll see a layout and just 'know' that's the one I want to use.  When I'm really feeling in a crunch, I might just 'copy' the layout exactly as it's shown--papers, embellishments, fonts & all (and just add my 'own' photos/journaling), and other times I'll maybe change out the colors, but keep the basic elements on the page the same.  And other times, my final page winds up looking NOTHING like my inspiration page.  And that's totally O.K., too!!

For this first page, the inspiration page was shown in pinks and grays, as I recall. . . .

The number of photos on the page was also different, and I added a few little embellishments, but I love the vintage feel of the backgrounds and colors to go with the photos.

For this second one, I used a scrap map--which is a basic layout that just shows placement of the title, journaling, photos, etc.  The page colors with the DSPs I chose turned out to work even BETTER than I had imagined!!

The alphabet for the title is the 'Announcing Baby' punches--they import REALLY small on to the page, so it was a bit of a challenge to get them big enough to work with!!

And this final page was another scrap map.  Finding papers that went with the photos was probably the biggest challenge for me on this one.    I'm not sure WHAT I was thinking in putting the purple and red together in my outfit--but then something like that probably wasn't a HUGE concern to me back then!!

I also love how I used the center of one of the watches to put my journaling in.  Just a nice added 'touch' to the page!

This weekend is Defeat of Jesse James Days here in town.  I have a cool page I have done up of last year's event that needs a second page added to the layout (I have more pictures I wanted to include), so hopefully I'll get some time and you'll get to see that completed two-page spread a little later in the weekend!

In the meantime, feel free to check out my online store for all of the great offerings Stampin' Up! currently has!!

Happy Stamping!

Pam