Color Combos Galore Challenge #166 is Live!

I've been in charge of making the palettes for the past couple of weeks at Color Combos Galore, and it's been so fun! This week's palette is upbeat and lively:

Here is the page I made. It's for an ongoing book I'm making about Farzad's many quirks. I used the Studio Calico kit called Documentary plus some odds and ends from my stash.

Our Designer's Challenge was to create texture and shadow by including dimensional elements. I used lots of pop dots to create shadows (the photo is also sitting on pop dots). And I tried to add texture to my flat elements, too, like using embossing powder on this awesome balloon stamp, and then adding further dimension with the button-topped star.

I pleated the cool Fabrips to create shadows, and I layered lots of elements, along with stitching, for added texture:

To create my title, I used letter stamps with clear embossing powder, and then outlined the letters and cut them out. I adhered some with pop dots to create shadows. I love the little stick-pins that came in the kit and thought the "explore" one was perfect for this page, since that's what Farzad does with the menu--even though he always winds up ordering his tried-and-true favorites.

The green paper I used wasn't in the kit, but it's a Scenic Route pattern I adore and have been hoarding and thought the green was perfect for the palette.

That green element is a long story. It's the cover of a chipboard mini-album that came with the kit. I'm notorious for hoarding mini-albums and never doing anything with them, so I thought this chipboard cover would be perfect for adding dimension. It had a nice embossed design on it, and I had a plan for it. A plan that didn't pan out, but I wasn't going to give up. My plan was to mix paint to give it the perfect shade of green I needed for the palette, and I'd paint the chipboard and then sand it so that the embossed part would be the raw chipboard color.

Well, I painted it and then sanded it, and nothing happened. Ugh. So then I thought, well, maybe if I rub some white ink over it, that would make the embossed pattern stand out. Nope. Okay, what next? How about if I rub embossing ink over it and add some sparkly white embossing powder. Third time's a charm, right? Wrong. I was about to give up and try something else, but I had already designed my page around this element. So I grabbed a woodgrain stamp and black ink and just stamped over top of the painted chipboard, and decided that was good enough. I liked how it kind of looked like wood.

I had a little extra white space to the left of that chipboard that was bothering me, so I added some Magic Mesh. Love that stuff and always forget to use it. I added some blue pearls for more shadows and at the last minute I added that gingham brad.

I hope you like the palette I made, and I hope you'll come see what the rest of the team made and play along with us! Thank you for reading about my layout!