Believe

I thought this was such a cute picture of my niece, Jordan, visiting Santa. My sister had emailed it to me, and I had to try to do a layout for it. I lowered the saturation on the picture because I thought it gave it a nice sorta artsy look to it. I also didn't want it to clash with the red on the paper I used. This layout didn't take me as long as some of my previous ones have. I'm sure that's partly or mostly because I'm not making the paper like I was doing over the summer. I still may at times, but I was doing that more to match my pictures better. Anyway, I'm pretty proud of this layout. The red paper was from a set that scrapgirls.com was offering if you made a $10 purchase. It was designed by Melanie Johnson. The two papers on the side are both from Brandy Murray's Christmas Chronicles set. The green edge was recolored from the original brown. The frame/mat was designed by Paula Wright, and the swirl on the top was also in the Scrap Girls bonus set, designed by Carrie Stephens. The word art that says "The wonder of the season" was designed by Ariadna Wiczling.

I knew that I wanted to title it Believe, just because the layout focuses on how Jordan is looking at Santa, and the whole childhood belief in Santa. I was excited, because Scrap Girls had another collection they were offering with a purchase, and I saw that they had a "believe" word art. However, when I got it, it looked too casual with the rest of the layout. I kept doing different things, like changing the colors, or adding paper as a clipping mask, but I didn't like the look of those either. I finally decided to go with a font, and to keep the color gold. This was another Christmas font from theholidayspot.com. I typed it in gold, then duplicated the layer and offset it some to give the letters more depth. The snowflakes looked funny, though, so I deleted them from one of the layers. I added some glow and gave it a dissolve blend, so it would shimmer some. I was finally satisfied with it, so it was done. Yay!