An Interesting Addendum

In early July of this year, I noticed a thread on Digishop Talk which piqued my own interest. [An Observation About Published Layouts] On it, the poster questioned  the magazines and their publications of layouts which she would not necessarily consider "hot" or "trendy" as found on the DST galleries as of now. The thread responses tended to agree with her, but pointed out that magazines need to cater for a common denominator of scrapbookers and to increase that market for their own sake. Plus the magazines are secured six months in advance, so once published the trends found within are dated anyway.

New scrapbookers, whether traditional or digital, may well be put off by the freestyle style - much of which can certainly be found in the winners of digital competitions, throughout digital galleries on the web, and within ezines for digital scrapbookers, published monthly. Ironically, to understand this supposedly advanced but free style, scrappers need to acquire a sense of proportion, balance, and other more traditional design principles firstly. They need to know the rules, before they can break those rules. So, we will continue to see magazines publishing more standard formatted layouts, as a drawcard to entice new people into the craft.

Resources For Freestylers

General Freestyle Sites and Books

• Effer Dares Blog - challenges to dare your creativity.
• Freestyle : The Blog - supporting the book, challenges ran from April - October 2006. Includes layout examples.
  
• Autumn Leaves Freestyle Book - available and currently still in stock at IdeaBooks4U.com.
• Elsie Flannigan, who many consider a freestyler, has her old blog archives here [A Beautiful Mess] and newer blog here [A Beautiful Mess Photoblog]. Her 52 Scrapbooking Challenges idea book also features the work of Danielle Thompson, who contributed layouts to the Freestyle blog.
  
• You can find quite a few freestylers designing for Scrap in Style TV as fashionastas. Ashley Wren can be found there, as can Claudine Hellmuth; whose popits art - originally a huge thing in visual journals, altered books and other papercrafts - is available as scrapbooking papers, of course. Claudine's book, Collage Discovery Workshop, also is a great resource for discovering some freedom in our style.
  
• Ashley Wren's blog - her freestyle style can be found even in the header for the blog.
  
• Another fashionasta from Scrap in Style TV is Adrienne Looman  - check out her blog for constant examples of layouts in freestyle. Addrienne has just announced on her own blog that she has a new idea book out, entitled, Doodle Formula, by Bluegrass Publishing. It's going to be available October / November this year.
  
• Adrienne has a couple of layouts featured in a new book out, by Nic Howard called That's Life. Nic's blog will show you her own empathy with freestyle layouts, and the book will show you many more examples. This link takes you to the book available at Amazon.com which also suggests new scrapbook idea books out there on similar themes (below)
  
• Out of Bounds : Scrapbooking without Boundaries by Jodi Amidei
• We Dare You - Scrapbooking Challenges about Real Life by Kristina Contes, Meghan Dymock, Nisa Fiin and Genevieve Simmonds. Genevieve featured in the Freestyle book.
  
• If books aren't to your own liking, there are many challenge blogs out there now. Search the category found here at Digiscrap Zine under the links directory | Inspiration
  

Classes and Tutorials (Digital)

• Digital Scrapbook Artist Guild - several classes including a Freestyle class, Eclectic Class and others. 
  
• Everyday Digital Scrapbooking - Freestyle tutorial - a simple tutorial by Amy Duquette written in May of this year. And then there is this one also, written by Susan Rodriguez - Creating Freestyle Layouts.
  
• Freestyle Fandango - in August 2006, Digital Scrapbook Place ran a series of challenges for freestyle. This link will take you to those challenges.
  

Credits for images used : Katie Pertiet, Jennifer Trippetti, Michelle Coleman, Dani B, Fee Jardine, Kristyann, Jana Billman, Lauren Reid,  Shawna Clingermann, Trish Jones, Amber Clegg (Ams Scraps), Jan Crowley, Sarah Jones.

Originally published in The Zine, Edition 1, July 07

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