In one of our recent chat sessions in our ScrapHappy membership community, the topic of scrapbooking styles came up. I had made an offhand comment about scrapbooking ruts. I didn’t mean it as a rude comment at all. Instead I meant is as a commentary of our own internal critical voices that tell us that doing the same thing regularly is boring – just being stuck in a rut.
However, if you like what you are doing, then is it really a rut? Or is it your style? Today I want to share with you an ah-ha moment I had as I sat down to write this post. In order to get to that point, I’ll need to share some context.
In the month of May (and flowing into June!) we are being inspired by music album covers. Now, this isn’t a first in our group. We had the chance to experience this topic in our community once before. Back during LOAD** of October 2022 we had a technique prompt to use an album cover as inspiration. Here is the layout I created a year an a half ago for that inspiration. (Process video available for anyone interested.)
Now take a look at the inspiration and my layout for this time around. (Process video also available.)
That brings us to the point of this post. When I pulled up the photo of that 2022 layout in order to add it to this blog post I just laughed! The old layout was not really on my mind when I created the new layout. Yet, I noticed so many things these two projects had in common. I just kept thinking, “Well my brain really is my brain!” Apparently this is part of who I am; it is part of my style.
When I created this new project I loved the process of making it and I love the end result. Yet my little inner critic started whispering to me. “You are too literal.” “You are too boring.” Even that rut feeling was swirling in the background of my mind.
Maybe you have an inner critic that whispers things to you also. So what do we do about it? We can quiet that critical part of our brain by working an exercise. I’m going to list the similarities that I am noticing about each project. When you do this exercise you can shift your mindset from “rut” to “style”.
- I am often literal. When I am inspired by something it’s because that thing was interesting. I don’t need to alter it since it is already good! You can tell by my nearly element-by-element recreations of the album covers.
- I like a good play on words. Both layouts use the original album titles/text as inspiration also! Do you see the ways I tweaked each one to fit my project? (Clicking on the images will expand them!)
- I use a lot of journaling. This was no mystery to me! In fact, I really did think about where the journaling would end up on each of these projects before I event set to work making them.
- Simple. Bold. Graphic. White space. This was the most surprising part of this whole exercise. I was drawn to each of these images because they felt graphically simple, yet complexly interesting. However, when I create on my own I tend to be a messy, full bodied scrapper. “Full bodied” and “white space” are quite opposite of each other. Why do I have these two seemingly disparate sides to my creativity? Honestly I don’t know. This exercise has opened up a new path to explore…
Okay. Why does any of this even matter? In noticing these things about myself, I can let go of “should”s and create in a more authentic way. I can do what feels good to me. I can shut off that inner critic. I can call my work a style rather than an a rut.
In fact, Alice shared this same discovery about her layouts in that chat session I mentioned at the start of this post. She realized one of her go-to styles was a variation on an L shaped design!
So… I encourage you to pick an album cover to be inspired by. As you look at it, ask what it is that inspires you and how will it click together in your style as you create! If you are like me, then maybe that will help squash your inner critic too.
**If you don’t know what LOAD is, it stands for LayOut A Day. During LOAD, each day for a month, we are give a source of inspiration and then story and technique prompts derived from that inspiration. If you want to check it out, there is a one week free trial version offered most summers).