Freestyle Now and Today

The style itself still rings true over a year later. It can still be recognised in the usage of splashes of paint, grunge frames, doodles, random fonts, and big words (if used at all) and formations of unlined-up photographs to one edge of a layout, leaving lots of lop-sided white space. Expert scrappers of the form ensure some balance, using well-skilled and layered elements in montages of so many layers that it must be difficult to get a paper-based layout into the page-protectors of an album. 

More recently, the style also seems to support a couple of new trends (or returns of older ones) -

1. there appear lots of usage of circles in arrangements,
2. and the use of special characters in layouts (predominantly the curly bracket comes to mind).
3. And let's not ever forget the abundance of swirly (or curlique) doodles for frames, corners or anywhere else. These elements and techniques can be localised if you look at some example templates found for sale at Scrapgirls, where actual templates and brackets are suggested to help out in freestyling.
4. Additionally, think bright colorschemes, and painted cartoony layouts - in fact comic strips and superhero themes are a minor theme which you can find kits, elements and photo filters for.
5. Painted graphical backgrounds are another strong trend - highlighted by the use of silhouette forms and borders.  
6. Doodles are getting even huger than I ever expected two years ago. There are now digital artists making their name in the quality of their coloured doodle packs (several who produce handdrawn and coloured doodles). Traditional companies are supplying doodles, and alpha packs to keep up with those demands also.

What particularly for me emphasizes  a freestyle layout is the combination of real elements (or for digital - real-like) such as tags, buttons and ribbons with digitalised elements or hand-drawn doodles, alphas, frames and swirls. Digital layouts do this in almost impossible logic - hand-drawn swirls curl in and out of real-like ribbons, frames and over and under photos. Although difficult to do in a hybrid or paper-based layout (without many twists and turns of transparent overlays) there are none-the-less, some incredibly interesting traditional layout interpretations of the freestyle also. The latest edition of Creating Keepsakes has quite a few layouts which might be thought to be freestyle in format.

But what is vitally important in all of this is that it's easy to suggest that many other styles have been used in a layout - many people might recognise a shabby style, or a simple style, or a heritage layout. But for freestyle - it's difficult to recognise - anything goes, and it could go anywhere. Therefore the above should be taken with a great big mountain of salt - the freestyle world is ever changing, and taking on as many trends as possible. It is simply about freedom to do whatever one wants.

Going back to basics, a June 2007 Great American Scrapbooking retreat promised a class to create a freestyle layout - which was suggested as an advanced course, and the attendees should be prepared to accept the following  -

Creative freedom is a must for this class so be prepared to relax, have fun and get a little messy.

Traditional Paper Layouts and Digital Layouts

Paper Scrappers are well-endowed with purchaseable elements - overlays and transparencies, rub-on alphas in all sorts of type - to help create these free layouts. And of course - traditional scrappers can add as many layers as they want (provided they fit within that page protector) and as many hand-drawn doodles and paint splots as they feel inclined.

But perhaps it's within digital that you may find the freestyle form more prolifically utilised (if you can suggest that no-rules scrapping is a form which can be utilised in the first place, that is). In digital, layers take no space. And the digital world embraced doodles and continues to embrace multiple fonts and alphas for several years. Few digital designers worth their salt, will refuse to bring out sets of purchaseable doodles, and paint splots, grunge frames, and now the current trend for photo-frame clusters pre-set for easy photo collaging. Just about every digital store out there on the web has a category solely for doodles to meet our freestyling needs (which is somewhat ironic, if you consider that we are using somebody else's doodlings to interpret as freedom to experiment in these freestyle type layouts).

If you do a google-search on the term, "Scrapbooking Freestyle" you will find digital scrapbooking sites, with tutorials on how to do freestyle digitally, high up there in the rankings. Some are listed for you below. And it's within digital galleries online now that you will find some absolutely remarkable freestyle layouts which look like real art pieces, full of many stories and interpretations to the viewers' eyes. Digital scrapbookers have embraced this style with love and gusto, and it works. And because of the ability to mix real and digitalised elements, the style makes an easy movement into hybrid layouts. 

Interestingly, some such classes and tutorials, available at Digital Scrapbook Artisan Guild, appear to have split out some of the formats interpreted above in the Autumn Leaves Freestyle idea book, as separate styles in themselves. DSAG actually provides guild classes in Magazine Graphic Style, Photo Montage, Dynamic Space layouts, Freestyle Layouts, Art Journal & Collage layouts and finally, Eclectic Style Layouts. Many of which I consider freestyle anyway - depending on what the freestyler does with the layout itself.

For me, freestyle is all about being free of other design formats, although my own personal interpretation does not go as far as allowing things to simply fall onto a page - my own sense of structure, balance and perfectionism gets in the way of a full "fallen and staying that way" layout. But that's all okay with me. I'm at ease with some order in my own freestylin'. And that's the whole point - ease, play, art and freedom to simply create and see what happens.