Hello Friend − Layout for Scrap Africa Sketch Challenge 78

Hi! Happy Friday, and happy September! It's monthly challenge time again at Scrap Africa!

I felt like making a light and neutral coloured layout with some mixed media elements on the background. I'm still using my Krafty Travel Kit I joined the Counterfeit Kit Challenge with last month.



This month we have an elegant simple sketch with a circle around the focal cluster.



I'm also sharing a couple of photos of how I got the layout started. For the background, a cardstock colour called Straw was suitable for my idea, light but not completely white. I had spread a very light layer of gesso on it previously. The journaling card, the gold and white striped straw and the paper with the crosses or plus signs are from my Counterfeit kit as well as the cardstock.



Due to having a toddler at home, I quite often start my projects at night, choosing materials and trying different layouts. If it's already late at that point, I don't necessarily do anything else but just "sleep on it", and next day I have a better idea of how to go on.

The photo with my messy table below is about a trick I have learned at patchwork quilting.



That is, for checking if the layout still looks mainly white when I add the plus sign paper and the blue journaling card.

Sometimes it's hard to compare the lightness value of different elements from up close, so it helps to look from a distance. Blurring your eyes a bit or taking a blurry photo, like I did here, confirms that the other elements are fairly close to the background in lightness value. I wanted it to be this way so that it's just the photos that pop out from the background, not the whole cluster of elements.



At the point of taking the photo above, my 2-year-old had been drawing beside me, and I wanted have the mark of his pen on my background, too. He and his brother are also the stars of the layout, so it felt like a nice way to keep a memory of his first drawings!



In addition to the doodling, I used mists, white and gold structure pastes, yellow Paint Pen and turquoise Stickles for the circular frame.





The chipboard rocking horse is from Wycinanka. I used blue acrylic paint on it first, let it dry and embossed around the edges with Midnight Teal from Lindy's Stamp Gang. Last layer is clear embossing powder. The separate stars that came with the horse just have the blue paint and the clear powder layers.



Apart from the thin washi tape strip in the top left corner, I felt like no more embellishments were needed this time!





Thank you so much for looking. I hope to see you at Scrap Africa!

Memuaris: Back to the USSR / Work & Love

Hello there! This month, I've been inspired by art shows and one of them went really well to combine with the unusual theme of the Memuaris Challenge: Back to the USSR.



The exhibition was featuring art from the Soviet Union, and this delightful women at work scene that I scrapped is called Weavers by Vladimir Myagkov.



For us in Finland, the Soviet Union was of course our neighbor like Russia is now. I was nearly grown up at the transition time so I have plenty of memories from that time. I also read Russian at school since age 13 through High School. That wasn't something we had to do, but I'm very attracted to the language and have always been.



I used the May Week 4 Sketch by Brenshevia Baker at Lets' Get Sketchy (rotating it to the left) and was also inspired by the challenge at Our Creative Corner: Hit the Books.





I was really happy with the background I made splashing with different paints: tube watercolours, acrylic inks and mists. I meant to keep the layout really simple and in the end, I wish I had left a little more empty space. That said, I'm mostly happy with my layout, anyway! It was really inspiring to work on a very different theme than usually.

I like how I used mainly just the buttons for embellishments, and just a few wood veneer ones. My favourite things in the layout are the long title (from a song lyrics) and how I used the Russian alphabet and dressmaking stencils in a less usual way: tracing with pencil.



Thank you for coming and especially for commenting, as always!