A Happy, Vibrant Summer Palette

Challenge 195 is live at Color Combos Galore! We're kicking of June with the theme of summer and have a happy palette and Designer's Challenge...

Here's the page I made. I have several papers with balloon images and even a balloon stamp, but I had a hard time fitting those with the page I made. I found some balloon images through Google instead. That's my husband in the middle and my best friend's daughter and brother-in-law rocking out.

I had picked out these pictures to go with the colors, and I was trying and trying to think of an angle for my page and then it came to me--air band--balloons, clouds... air--get it? I usually like to add a story to my page, but I in this case, I think the title says it all!

My page was inspired by Creative Scrappers Sketch 117. My pages don't always resemble the sketch because they're 8 x 8 and it's sometimes hard squeezing everything I want onto a page, but I used the basic design of the sketch as inspiration.

Here are some closeups of the balloons. The blue balloon was a black-and-white image I found--I recolored it with my photo-editing software. I lifted them up with pop dots and added some pearls for fun. I found I didn't have a lot of "true" blue papers in my stash, but this one by SEI was pretty close to the blue in the palette. The green paper is really old Scenic Route.

One of my favorite papers--the Sassafras Lass monsters. I originally didn't have them on there, but I've been leaving my layouts for a day before photographing them, and my page didn't feel humorous or whimsical enough to go with the pictures, and I remembered the monsters had blue and red in them. I outlined them with a fine-tip pen and did the same with the Webster's Pages letter stickers, which I have grown to love for their small size, perfect for my 8 x 8 pages!

The cloud paper came from my Work in Progress kit this month. I cut them out and inked the edges with dark blue (the edges were more aqua) and outlined them with pen and then ran them through the Cuttlebug with an embossing folder.

I used a Tim Holtz mask with acrylic paint and a stencil brush and just brushed the paint outwards which gave it a fun starburst-y effect. I long admired how Emma Trout outlines her stenciled images, so I tried this out, and I like how it looks. I see that I missed a spot (gotta fix that). I added the "Rockstar" sticker at the last minute to form a visual triangle with the green papers.

I found some old Magic Mesh in my stash and put some snippets here and there on my page. The star stickers are Jenni Bowlin, and I added some black rhinestone brads, by Recollections. I tucked another Sass monster into this cluster. I dug out some old 7 Gypsies rub-ons (the "Check it out"). The metallic circle word "live" is old K&Co. Life's Journey. I thought it was perfect for this page if read live as in "live from New York..." rather than the way I think they intended to use it (i.e., live as if there's no tomorrow...). And I'm always picking up packs of word stickers when I see new ones I don't have because you just never know when you'll need them. I felt lucky to find the "jam" in blue for this page!

Not sure how I like this painty detail at the bottom, but the red masked image at the top made my page feel top-heavy, so I added some strokes down here and then added the scrolly rub-on (another oldie from my stash--BasicGrey). I wished I hadn't added that after I did--it felt really off-center, so I added some more bits from a rub-on border. I have a million of those tiny 7 Gypsies labels and always forget to use them, but I wanted to add a date and found this to be the perfect thing.

The CCG design team and our Featured Member made some awesome pages with this Combo, so hop over and check out what they made, and I hope you'll play with the combo this week--it was so fun to work with!

Thank you for stopping by and reading about my page!