We Love Our Members Contest is on!!!

Erin issued a great challenge for the first week, and even gave us a little education about design, check it out:

Please read over all the rules and requirements carefully before beginning your challenge for the MAXIMUM points possible!

Basic Weekly Rules:

1. All work must be your own, no sketches allowed unless part of the weekly requirement.
2. All photographs must be your own, this means YOU took them, not just that you own them. Smile
3. Ask questions if you have them.
4. Make sure you upload your photos by the deadline!
5. All participants must have a minimum of 100 forum posts by the END of the contest.
6. Have fun!

For Week One we're going to start things out with some basics of composition.

In general things are more pleasing to the eye when they are asymmetrical. This means that always centering everything can get BORING after a while. I think many of us are familiar with the rule of thirds in photography, basically the composition is broken up into three horizontal sections and three vertical sections, and the lines those create tend to be the most interesting places to have your focal point.

This is true for photographs, paintings, and our intended medium, scrapbook pages! If you'd like more info about the rule of thirds, here's an article from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds.

In addition to the rule of thirds, hierarchy is important in composition. We usually just call this clustering and layering. Smile The idea is to visually organize things into groupings and subgroupings- layer and cluster! Smile

Another way to organize a composition is through color. As scrapbookers we wield color as a weapon most of the time without even realizing it! Pay more attention as you are pulling things together, see how you interpret color in your work, other peoples' work, and the world around you.

The last thing to talk about this week is visual movement. We don't want your viewer to get stuck on only one part of the layout, keep those eyes MOVING! Smile You can do this by physically tying elements together- having them touch, connecting with doodling, etc, or by creating some sort of repitition or unity.

Your challenge:

1. Create a layout where the focal point follows the rule of thirds (make it asymmetrical)
2. Include ONE photo, also using the rule of thirds.
3. Include an example of hierarchy- embelly cluster, paper layering, the way you do your alpha, whatever you would like to use to show hierarchy
4. Unify with color, either a palette, monochrome, complementary, what you think looks good!
5. Keep those eyes moving! Create visual movement.

Here is my example for this week.

As you can see the main focal points fall along the thirds, I clustered for interest, and the colors are all from the same saturation level and tie together. I also used hierarchy of objects by repeating and organizing the clouds on a visual line. The ruffled edge of my daughter's hat draws the eye to the photograph as it mimics the contours of the clouds. I continued the movement of the eye with my vertical title, which pulls to the row of rainbows, then the smile rainbow pulls back up to the journal cloud and to the photograph.

If you have any questions at all, post them here, send me a private message, or email me at admin@treasuredscrapbooking.com. Please remember that I am in class most of the day on Monday and Wednesday, but I will check in as I can throughout the day.

I am so excited and I can't wait to see what you all do!!! The grand prize will be announced SOON!

****This layout MUST be uploaded by midnight next Tuesday, March 9th at Midnight PST. ****

And for some samples that have been created by some of our members following Erin's challenge: