NKOTB Contest Week 2

So on to week two of the NKOTB Contest at the Digital Scrapbook Place.  This was a fun week and I was able to complete it with far fewer changes to my layout. The original layout version still took me a long time to complete, about five hours if I remember correctly.  My husband was very irritated because I stayed up very, very late working on it, well into the wee hours of the morning.  One of the problems was that I was learning my way around PhotoShop while at the same time trying to learn the fundamentals of digital scrapbooking. It was a sort of trial by fire.  LOL Oh, there was one other thing, I was doing all of this graphic work on my 10.1 inch Asus EEE PC Netbook!

The basic rules that we were given for the second week of the contest are shown below.

DSP Rule of Thirds Tutorial:
Employing the rule of thirds

ROUND 2 RULES:
• You MUST use the designer kit you were provided but you do not need to use everything in the kit.

• You MUST use an overlay, either from the DSP Freebie Gallery - Overlays or purchased from the DSP Store.
If you choose an Overlay Stax that has more than one layer you do not need to use every layer.

• You MAY use more than one allowed overlay.

• You may NOT use elements from any other kits except for the allowed overlays.

• You MAY re-color, re-size, and otherwise alter the allowed products however you want.

• You MAY use anything that comes with your software such as shapes, presets, styles, actions, brushes, tubes.

• You MAY use any font.

• You may NOT use ploppers or quick clicks.

• You MAY use sketches or scraplift (recreate, copy or adapt an existing layout or design sketch (with credit given to the original)

• You may NOT use stock photos (royalty free photos from websites)

• You MUST give PROPER CREDIT: DSP kit name and DSP designer name. You are also encouraged to give the store link and keyword

The kit from the DSP Store that we used for the week was a beautiful creation by Carole Harden. I really enjoyed working with the beautiful textures and images she provided us.

Autumn Nocturne page kit

Created by Carole Harden

©2009 Carole Harden

The overlay I chose to use for my layout was from the Overlay collection created by Erica Belton available in the freebie gallery of the forum. Remember, if you register on the forum this wonderful resource gallery is available to you as well as many wonderful people to help you along as you learn digital scrapbooking.

72_OL_AutumnWinds

Just Doodles Overlays

Created by Erica Belton

©2009 Erica Belton

The first version of my layout for this week of the contest used a couple of pictures of my daughter Mary's children.  I really like this layout, especially the finished version:

 As you can see the text on the page is dark and hard to read against the background.  During this week the "mommies" mostly had me make changes to my text and this layout went through 4 revisions for a total of 5 versions before I was finished.

This was a tougher week for me because I was doing a very physical job at a couple of the local Home Depot stores shaping Christmas trees and I was very tired most days. The job involved a lot of ladder climbing as well as reaching stretching and bending.  Most of the stores had about 28 trees and some were 9 and 10 foot tall. It took me and another lady two evenings to complete each store.  This was in addition to our "normal" jobs.

So, here is the final version for this layout:

I experimented a lot with the text and as you can see I changed both the color of the text and the fonts used.

If you would like to see all of the different versions of my layouts you can go to my gallery at: http://deeannek.digitalscrapbookplace.com.

Thanks for visiting and sharing my journey with me. Until next time,
Blessings to you and your family,
Denise.