One-Photo Layouts

Do you ever have a problem with one-photo or one-page layouts?  I'll be the first to admit that I do!  I tend to be a very linear, clean, and simple scrapper, and I mostly do two-page layouts with lots of photos.  Even with "everyday" types of subjects, I like to use multiple pictures on a page.  So when I have a great photo that I want to enlarge and make into a single-photo layout, I tend to find myself somewhat stumped.  A lot of the one-photo layouts that I see these days are in more of the extreme shabby-chic style, a style which I can admire, but am not really very good at imitating.  Or, they have tons of flowers and lace and other girly embellishments, which look great but won't work for pages of my two boys.  And, while I'm sure I could find some sketches that would work for single-photo layouts, I always seem to feel that these pages shouldn't be that hard, and that I should be able to just come up with some sort of design on my own.

I'm sharing the one-photo layout above because I think it's somewhat successful.  I like it fairly well, and it didn't take me three days to put it together, either.  I should say here that you'll probably notice when I post layouts and cards that I mostly use older supplies.  The reason for that is pretty simple.  I have a fantastic scrap room, and it's filled with supplies, but unfortunately, all three scrapbook stores in my city closed, the last almost two years ago, and now the closest dedicated scrapbook store to me is more than an hour away.  While I do go there occasionally, with gas prices what they are, it's not a trip I can really make very often, at least not just to shop.  So, because I don't have anything close to me but a Michael's store and a Jo-Ann's, I tend to not have a lot of really new product in my stash.  I sometimes buy online, but for me, it's hard to really get a "feel" for whether I'd like something if I haven't at least seen it in person before I order it from cyberspace.

So, the layout above, true to my recent form, uses older supplies, including the patterned paper which is from one of the first My Mind's Eye "stacks" that Hobby Lobby carried.  I split that huge stack with a friend and I have to admit, I still love a lot of the papers in it.  I also forced myself to use a 7 Gypsies tag for my journaling.  I often skip over tags and similar embellishments because I don't handwrite most of my journaling, but I made computer journaling work with this particular tag, and I like the way it came out.

One thing that often saves me when I do a one-photo or one-page layout is what I like to think of as my "default" ideas.  I have a number of techniques, page designs, and embellishment ideas that I use a LOT and that are simple enough that they look good on almost any page.  If I'm stumped with an element of page design, I turn to one or more of my "defaults" and I can usually get the page finished.  One of my most-used "defaults" is matting a photo with extra space to the left, and adding the page title onto that left part of the mat, "facing" the photo.  I used that technique in the Back-lit layout, adding a computer printed title (I believe that title font is called "Rough Draft" and it's one of my all-time favorite fonts for titles).  Another "default" technique is tying ribbon or twine around the bottom of a photo mat.  I tied twine around the photo mat in the layout above, making a cute knot at the side.  A simple vertical border of some kind is another "default" technique for me.  In the layout above, I added the ribbon along the left side of the page.  I find that when most things on the page are going horizontally (including the photo), it looks great to have a vertical element along the side to offset the horizontal elements.

One final word about photos.  Sometimes I enlarge a photo that isn't what someone might typically call a "great" photo.  The photo of my son above is cute, but I could easily have passed it up when I was looking at my pictures on my computer.  But what caught my eye was the back-lighting, and how Brian's cute little face is lit up from behind in such a way that even his little ears look pink.  Anyway, the point is, sometimes photos that don't really have anything special going on, but just have good lighting or a great background, can make super focal-point photos.