by Ethan Johnson
August 6, 2007

Alrighty. I've completed my second-ever 12x12 layout. I uploaded the finished product to scrapbook.com, but of course, it's included here with bonus commentary:

Click here to view the full-sized version. Warning: Large file and image size.

This layout was partly done because it was "top of mind" of late, but there was an added incentive to have it done by tonight to enter it into the August 2007 Buckethead Challenge. The theme was "overcoming obstacles", and I decided that losing a dog food bag's worth of excess poundage counts. Now it's all up to the voters. A sheet of Disney® embellishments surely hangs in the balance!

How I printed onto cardstock with our wrap-around printer: Normally cardstock is too thick for HP printers that have to feed the paper around a roller and then back out again. Epson historically made printers that fed sheets through from back to front, which allowed thicker paper to pass through. But we haven't owned an Epson printer in years. Rather than do without, I printed a test sheet of titles onto plain old printer paper. Then I cut each sample title out and tested it against the design.

Once I picked one, I printed the sheet again, and laid a blank sheet over it. Using a glass table and a flashlight in lieu of a lightbox, I lined up a rectangle of cardstock and temporarily adhered it to the blank sheet. I placed the blank sheet in the printer and printed the sheet once more, which was able to print the single line onto my patch of cardstock, like so:

If I had to do this over again, I would have cut the title card into individual blocks rather than jamming it onto the page in one strip. I'm still trying to get out of "default options" mode.

Speaking of "default" options, I was originally going to take a bunch of photos of me pretending to do each of my workout activities. Since I had a short time frame to finish, and it's really stinking hot outside these days, I thought about what I wanted to convey with my layout. Rather than making it "about me" in terms of modeling, I decided to use items like my bicycle odometer and the heel wear of my shoes to support my central thesis.

But since this layout is fundamentally All About Me, I did indeed have to appear in it somewhere. I was looking at a bag of dog food one day and was amazed to learn that I lost more weight than that bag represented. I don't like buying the oversized bag because the dogs take a good long while to get through it and it doesn't fit in their food hopper, but since they were low on food and I had a layout to make, I splurged. Before the dogs got to have at it, it was my prop for a self-timer and tripod portrait.

Marlena noted recently that making a craft project (such as a scrapbook layout) to give to others is a "whole lotta self-esteem going up on their wall." Doing a layout about yourself is just like that, only like a million times more stressful. Well, potentially. Since I was on a deadline, I didn't have the luxury of being all squidgy about posing for photos. In fact, I decided to dive right in with a belly shot:

Although it is pretty strange shooting a self-portait in a would-be "beefcake" mode, it actually worked out well. It stands in sharp contrast to the "before" photo I scrounged up:

Everything about both photos couldn't be more different: Less hair, more intensity, thinner... it's amazing to really see the change over 11 months that normally goes unnoticed when you're seeing everything from the inside out, so to speak. I guess I really have made progress!

Lessons learned:

• Just because you have a photo available doesn't mean you have to use it. I had one that I really wanted to work into the layout but it just was clutter. I removed it from consideration and pressed on.
• But take lots of photos anyway. Especially in this digital day and age. I bought a load of photo paper from Woot some time ago and it's giving me the freedom to print several takes of a photo until I find the size and positioning that I like. Or not - some photos just don't work in a given project no matter how much you want to use them. Refer to the previous bullet point.
• Try to see beyond the default options of any given undertaking. That title block really bugs me, now that I can see the value in cutting the title into smaller pieces.
• Try to work with the smallest possible unit. Apparently, the really well designed layouts that catch my eye have one-word titles. Two tops. Any more, and the person is really a whiz or else is a n00b like me. Mostly n00bs. Instead of my "long" title, I could have shortened it to "40" or "In the BAG". Breaking the design elements into bite-sized chunks means more design options. For the record, I decided to not use "40" because I didn't want this layout to be about a specific number. The journey is what's important, at least to me. I wanted to capture that in this project.
• Have a point, and stick to it. The central thesis drove the layout, not the other way around.
• Just because you have negative space, the world won't end. It's like the Blues: It's all about the design elements you don't use. I used ONE embellishment for this layout: A single eyelet in the top right-hand corner. Not that embellishments are bad. But in my view they would have really cluttered up an already stacked layout.
• Indigo photographs as virtually black. The color scheme for this layout is blue, yellow, red. Primary colors, in fact. But not obnoxiously so. The background is indigo, FYI, keeping with the color scheme.

Supply list:

Cardstock: Worldwin Papers, DCWV mats and borders
Paper: (Patterned) Karen Foster Design, My Mind's Eye, A2Z Essentials
Lettering: (Chipboard) Basic Grey Mini Monos
Lettering: (Computer) Fonts: Melba (Chatterbox), Bookman Antiqua (MS) + MS Word
Eyelet: Making Memories

On to the next project. (He says, re-setting the work area.) <EM>

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