Faded memories of everyday life
The All New BYOC + pocket page fun
About the BYOC (Build Your Own Collection) and Pocket Pages
The first Friday of the month is ‘BYOC’ day at The Lilypad, when designers release digital assets with a common colour palette. The idea is you can pick and choose which packs to purchase to build your own personalised collection.
Our designs are ideal for Digital and Hybrid Scrapbooking, all types of Creative Journaling and other Paper Crafts.
We also enjoy creating so-called ‘pocket pages’. 1
We often like to get messy with them…
This month Rachel has included a pair of pocket templates with threads and messy painterly masks, which we both had fun playing with.
A NEW HOME BY LYNN
I often reflect how lucky I am to have a father who was a keen photographer. But it’s fair to say the ‘70s were not the glory days for amateur photography. While his earlier slide transparencies that I scanned and touched up are an amazing trove of colourful memories, the photos I have from later years are often badly discoloured and blurry. Something went very wrong with photo processing in those days. I have years of photos that are all bright orange!
While I often spend a long time in Lightroom fixing them up, I also sometimes like to play with them pretty much as they are.
While their imperfections may be disappointing scrapped alone on a clean, sharp page, on a messy mixed media pocket page they are part of a whole and (to me in any case) add to the artistic effect. There’s a truth and veracity about using them like this, as well.
Along with messy threads and stitching, Rachel’s new templates include optional painterly clipping masks. I retained one and clipped the top photo to it. The middle photos I added a pinkish overlay on darken mode to, to match the discolouration of the bottom pic (my sister and I posing for a photo to be sent back to relatives in England, so they can see our fancy new kitchen!)
Alone, each of these photos would not convey much, but together these faded memories of our past everyday life tell a story and were a joy to create with.
I combined both of our BYOC releases - Rachel’s “This is Everything” and my own “All Day Long” to make the page.
THIS IS MARCH BY RACHEL
One of my new memory keeping goals is to make more ‘monthly round up’ pages like the one I’ve created this month with my new and messy ‘pocket’ style template.
I selected a mix of photos from my camera roll for March that I thought would all work well together and fit the orientation of the pockets in the template.
Not focusing on big events or milestones here, rather the in between moments and candid shots of everyday life that i’ve been snapping and storing in my camera roll.
I used the Photoshop Express App (my go to) on my iphone to edit my photos applying one of the ‘charm’ filters that you can find under ‘looks’. This gave them all a unifying tone that matched my “This is Everything” kit perfectly.
I colourised the pocket cards a little to bring the warm tones through and created my own doodled stamp for the ‘THIS IS MARCH’ title in the top right.
Looking forward to revisiting other months and years that have passed and creating more ‘round ups’!
THIS DAY BY RACHEL
Inspired by our recent post the other day, where we chatted about starting to record what surrounds you, I snapped a few random and eclectic photos whilst on my morning walk yesterday morning.
Moving away from the pocket format, but ‘borrowing’ some bits and pieces from the pocket style template itself, namely the painterly mask to enable me to ‘paint’ my photo into a background paper from Lynn’s new Collection . . .
If photo blending is something you’d like to learn please do let us know and we can work on a post with more step by step instructions for you or a video but I’ll warn you whilst I follow some principles, my process is very experimental and reactive depending on the colours and tone of the photo I’m working with.
For this layout here are some of the steps I took:
After ‘clipping’ my photo to my painterly mask I erased away the hard straight edges of the photo shape that I using a soft brush.
I added the painterly edge border from the template around the edge of the photo and colourised it in parts to make it ‘as one’ to blend in more with the background.
Adopting a ‘clipping mask’ design approach to the majority of this page I used ‘paints’ from Lynn’s Mixed Media Pack which are essentially abstract painterly shapes with semi transparent areas as ‘masks’. I drop them onto my canvas where I want to blend one texture into another. I then layer other paint or papers above the ‘mask’ and ‘clip’ them together until I reach the effect i’m desiring.
I continued to add painterly layers that were either colourised or used as a mask with with papers clipped to them on top of the edge of the postbox until the edges were softly obscured enough to be ‘at one’ with the background paper.
You may notice I added one that goes right across the top of the postbox so that it gives the effect of painted layers and painting into the actual background paper.
Several papers were blended together to achieve light and dark areas in the background as I liked.
Blending modes were applied to various layers and some were duplicated until it ‘looked right’.
I also created some custom stamps from various elements and papers enabling me to stamp marks and paint around the page in colours that suited.
It’s all a process of experiments and happy accidents . . .
Ironically it was all the blue in Lynn’s kit that inspired me to use my postbox photo as the sky was sooooo blue in this original photo BUT I ended up blending and using soooo many layers and different effects that the sky in the photo ended up being all white with just a little blue tone but I love how it all blends together.
New Digital Assets for the April BYOC at the LilyPad
Our ‘All Day Long’ and ‘This is Everything’ collections are ready to purchase and are 20% off through Sunday. If shopping Kits, or Individual packs enjoy ‘buy more save more’ discounts.
The value bundles are conveniently discounted for you with no minimum spend needed ;)
Take a peek at our video to learn more about the new collection and see design inspiration.
We hope you will find the time to pop to the LilyPad for more details and eye candy because there is diverse range of page designs that feature more pocket pages, more traditional layout designs along with some hybrid crafting.
Closing Notes
We are excited to see your stories of everyday memories using “This is Everything” and “All Day Long” and we wish you a wonderfully creative weekend!
And, a heads up for our premium subscribers, your next project kit and creative prompts are coming this Sunday!
Here’s a sneak peek . . .
If you are interested in subscribing to the premium level, you can do so at any time.
And, as always, thank you to EVERYONE for reading and for being here :-)
Rachel & Lynn
These are multiphoto pages loosely based on the style and products developed by the iconic Becky Higgins, creator of ‘Project Life’. She aimed to make memory-keeping simple by selling plastic photo protector sheets with standard sized pockets into which you could slip photos and also pre-designed ‘pocket cards’.
Of course, if you are creating digitally, you can crop your photos into any size and shape you want incredibly easily. But the concept of filling an album page with delineated photos and cards is one that has become an album-designing staple.
I would really appreciate more detailed instructions for blending photos into the background. I just can't seem to master the technique, and yet I admire it so much. I learn many things from your posts and layouts. Thanks.