Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

Lydia shares some inspiration for freeing yourself from your usual scrapping style.

After I started digiscrapping, it took me a few years to figure out my own personal style. I tried a lot of different things and finally found my comfort zone. It was a happy day. But, sometimes being in a comfort zone can feel more like being stuck in a rut. So, it’s always good to step out of your usual style and try something new every now and then. I asked the Sweet Shoppe staff to share some examples of layouts that they feel represent their usual style and then show us a layout that they’ve done in a style that made them step out of their comfort zone. So let’s take a peek!

SugarBabe Jacinda had this to say about her typical scrapping style: “This is what I would consider my natural scrapping style. Blocked composition, using a template, linear and tidy, with a fairly obvious visual triangle of elements.”

And, here’s an example of Jacinda stepping out of her comfort zone: “This next one is definitely freestyle for me. I started by just putting heaps of elements on the page without knowing what the end design would look like. I don’t have my usual visual triangle, or at least not an obvious one, and the elements are more scattered and random compared to the way I usually cluster them in groups. It took me ages to do, but I was really happy with the end result.”

Next up, Designer Misty Cato shared these thoughts: “I consider myself a clean scrapper in the traditional style. Typically my pages are linear and very structured with the majority of the space filled with photos and/or journaling. I tend to stick to subtle papers and minimal use of elements.”

“In the layout below, I scrapped photos of my daughter in her new dress-up wings. Her play was so full of a joy and imagination that I was inspired to try to add a sense of whimsicality to the page. The structure is still there, but I borrowed a bit from the art journal style and added playful elements and lots of brushwork. I extracted one of my photos and used more open space than my typical pages. I love the results.”

SugarBabe Lexi described her normal scrapping style in this way: “My style is really eclectic at best. BUT I’m most comfortable doing clusters. Anchoring my photos and elements to an area of the page is definitely very comfortable.”

And, here’s what Lexi says about stretching her boundaries: “I do do some art journal layouts, but I stress a lot more about them because there’s quite the amount of blending AND I feel like I want to fill the entire page, as opposed to just one area. So my art journal pages are definitely outside of how I usually scrap. For this layout, I also “cut out” portions of the silhouette and clipped papers to them–I’d never done that before.”

Here’s what SugarBabe Rebecca had to say: “Hmm . . . I think I’m a very traditional scrapper. I love to used themed kits to help tell the story of the photos and journaling. Straight lines and clustering . . . like I used to make my own paper pages.”

And, here’s a beautiful example of Rebecca trying something new: “This was really outside my comfort zone . . . paints and blended photo . . . white space.”

SugarBabe Tara says: “My typical style (which is ever changing! LOL) is lots of bold color and pattern papers with clustering. I tend to fill as much of the page as possible and not have a lot of white space.”

And, here’s what Tara came up with when she stepped outside her comfort zone: “This one was out of my comfort zone because I never write on a picture! It just seems so wrong to me but I always love it when other people do it. SO I gave it a try and loved it!”

Of course, I had to give this little experiment a whirl as well. I consider myself to be a “clustery” scrapper. I always have a lot of elements clustered around the page. Like Jacinda, I usually have a fairly obvious visual triangle somewhere on the page, and I like using bold patterned papers.

This layout is an example of something that’s a little more challenging for me . . . more open space, no photos, and lots of painty goodness. A layout like this takes me a long time to complete, but I’m always so happy with the results.

Hopefully you feel inspired to step out of your comfort zone and try something new on your next layout. We’d love to see what you come up with, so feel free to leave a link to your layout in the comments. 😀