My Mind's Eye Sketch Challenge and Scrapdango challenge layout

Hi everyone. Megan Aaron, here. I am so excited to be one of the new staff writers at scrapstreet and this is my first blog post. One of my favorite sources of inspiration is challenges. I am almost always working on a challenge, contest or design team assignment, and that is just the way I like it! So, today I thought I would share with you one of my most recent pages, that I created for a sketch challenge that I plan to enter, and also as an example for a challenge that I am issuing. I love combining things because I am always short on time, but also because it gives me even more of a 'recipe' to build my layouts from.

Today, it's my turn to post the Core Class for the School's In contest over at Scrapdango. I chose Science because I have always loved science. The requirements for this challenge are: Use green as a major color on your layout, use something botanical (like a flower) and use one or more hexagons (like bee hives or molecules).

I also happened to be working on the My Mind's Eye monthly sketch challenge, so I used that sketch and added in my challenge requirements to create this example.

The My Mind's Eye sketch featured lots of journaling, and a prompt of "Back to ____". I took this as a great opportunity to tell the story of how Ellie acts when I take her picture. Sometimes, if Im lucky, I get one decent picture, then it's right back to being silly! She has the most adorable poses, which is great, but sometimes I would like a more 'normal' picture. Oh, well. I guess this way the photos convey her personality more anyway.

I used Lime Twist papers, featuring a lot of green. For the hexagons, I used a honeycomb texture stamp to create a mat behind the photo. Then I added an American Crafts Details flower which I doodled a little bit on. I also added some leaves and a vine to the flower. Since I was using a lot of journaling, I broke out of my handwritten journaling rut, and used my computer to print out the journaling, which I then cut into strips as shown in the sketch.