Life in Pictures Deconstructed No.4
Deep Dives into Page Design + Wednesday Half Price Offers
Join us on another trip down memory lane. Revisiting stories that we have been telling, deconstructing some of those page designs plus popping some of our older products on sale for this week’s flash sales.
PAIN CHANGES PEOPLE BY LYNN
Scrapbooking in its boom days was a way to document the fun and happy times and record momentous events like weddings, graduations, holidays and trips.
Which is absolutely wonderful and fun, and I have a shelf full of photobooks of my daughters’ childhoods which fill exactly that purpose. I hope that they will enjoy looking through them throughout their lives.
I LOVE those albums, even though now I mostly create with old family photos OR with photos of myself and about myself. But if I am telling my life story, and reliving things as I create, it is impossible to ignore the complexities of life, which is not all ‘wonderful and fun’ all the time, for any of us.
When Rachel and I began the ‘Hear My Voice’ project our intention was to make collections which could be used to make digital mixed media art and layouts about ALL our inner thoughts and feelings, including the painful and often quite private ones.
There are pages I make (such as with the ‘Hear My Voice: Hurting’ collection ) which I personally treasure and which felt cathartic to create, even though they will never be framed on the wall or make it into the annual calendar I make for my parents (!).
Looking back at these photos (which I probably wouldn’t do otherwise) and creating with them allows me to revisit those painful memories with the clarity of hindsight, helping me to contextualise and reframe them within the continuing narrative of my life, growing an acceptance of their role in shaping my identity.
Because pain changes people. And not always in a negative way.
I can integrate and organise these scattered memories of a crazy time into a cohesive narrative. And, in fact, studies show that revisiting old photos mindfully helps by allowing you to observe past struggles from a detached perspective and reinterpret them by focusing on the growth and resilience that has happened since.
Whatever the science or psychology behind it, all I know is that the resulting pages hold so much meaning for me and ARE part of the personal photobooks I print and will be part of the ‘record’ of my life, just as they should be.
This page above was very much a purely ‘art therapy/play’ creation. Obscure to anyone else - and literally obscured (by laying the butterfly paper transfer over the photo and erasing just a part of it), it nevertheless is full of meaning for me.
In fact, the obscuring of the photo reflects the fog of denial I was in at the time, and the confusion I felt when confronted with reality and everything fell apart very shortly after returning from Germany. The truth behind the goofy smiles, so to speak.
From a matter of weeks after Berlin:
And musing on my childhood, somewhat marred by ill-health and the ostracism that comes when you are an introverted oddball with a broad foreign accent ;-)
SEW HAPPY BY RACHEL
The overlap between Scrapbooking, Art Journaling and Collage is a fascinating one to me.
It’s where storytelling meets creativity in such a fun and experimental space and when combined together we can create unexpected combinations.
When creating using Mixed Media Supplies I definitely feel that element of ‘play’ and ‘experimentation’.
Such as this intermix of collage and memory keeping in my page here which features a sweet little photo from way back when.
I’m quite partial to a garden centre visit, not because i’m green fingered, but we are lucky that our favourite one is a very pleasant few hours out.
Alongside the garden centre it houses an art and crafts shop, a huge array of homewares and gift type products, clothes, shoes, a pets and aquatics dept, a food hall, a lovely restaurant, and beautiful riverside gardens which is where this photo was taken.
We were walking through the gardens alongside the river and suddenly we came accross trellis lined pathways and this one had a circular passageway. I asked the family to turn around just before they went through as I knew it would be a lovely photo to keep.
Notice how the composition naturally formed a triangular flow . . . I started along the right-hand edge of the canvas, layering botanical stamps and other elements. Once I placed the spotty, painty paper peeking out from behind the banner at the top of the photo, I instinctively continued downward, adding sequins for a cascading effect and filling in gaps with paint and stamps.
To keep the focus balanced, I kept the photo reasonably large so it wouldn’t get lost among all the collage elements.
I carefully pulled colours from Mackenzie’s dress and the grasses in the photo for my limited colour scheme along with the pops of black.
GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN BY MARILYN
Talking of ‘play’ and ‘experimentation’ I want to share this layout with you from Creative Team Member Marilyn.
Mixed Media Scrapbooking supplies work so beautifully with older photos of our ancestors.
There’s something special about the combination of history and artistry, giving new life to treasured memories.
Richly textured and worn Mixed Media Papers can really enhance the nostalgic quality of old photos, making them feel right at home on the page.
Here Marilyn blended a photo of her mother and work friends into one of my papers with one single click using ‘blending modes’ in Photoshop.
NOTES FROM MARILYN
My mother is featured in the photo, the arrow subtly pointing to her.
She worked for a mail-order company in Chicago before she married in 1942 and whilst the original photo wasn't dated I suspect that it’s from the late 1930's or 1940.
The other women would have been her co-workers, and the photo taken on the property of the mail-order firm.
Their outfits, their shoes, that purse, the hair styles all make me smile. I also love the vintage cars and brick buildings that you see in the background along with the overall grunge of urban life and so I used a background paper from Rachel’s collection that I thought would work well when blended with the photograph. I loved that electrical pole in that paper!
I always appreciate larger photos when creating heritage pages. To me, they show my ancestors in a new light when I can enlarge the details. Rather than tiny photos adhered to black pages in those vintage albums, I try to show them as real people, people having fun. And enlarging does that for me.
The actual photo spans horizontally across my 8.5 x 11 page and as you can see in the original below, the sky and some of the pavement were quite white but with a blending mode of DARKEN (one of my favorite modes), the hard lines of the photo disappear into the texture of the paper with little effort, no extra masking needed.
Here’s a ‘before’ with my page arranged, but before I blended the photo, so you can see the difference, and here is the original paper that I chose to blend the photograph into that had the details of the electrical poles.
I added a half-circle stamp to match up with the women's feet, some word art, white paint to brighten the sky decorated with the string of bows (symbolizing a happy cloud), a newsprint flower at the bottom of the photo for balance, and some blue paint for good measure.
And that's it!
It showcases Mom in a life before kids, before being married. I really do treasure these heritage photos, and I have been blessed to be the keeper of so many of them.
WEDNESDAY SPECIALS
The examples shown above (plus many other products!) are included in our ‘Something Old Something New’ sale at the LilyPad which includes discounts of at least 50% off - save extra on bundled collections ;)
Find photobook templates, elements, and collections for today only, 9 April 2025.
(For those who only shop at Oscraps, we also have our ‘Weekly Oscraps Wonderful Deals’ ← there, with a smaller selection of specials.)
Leave us a comment, we’d love to connect and hear your thoughts.
Thank you for reading and as always, thank you for being here :-)
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Rachel & Lynn
Done with one click blending! Impressive and not something I would've thought of. I really enjoy seeing the creativity of the master layout artists here. Even the background paper Marilyn chose is wonderful for that photo.