Hello everyone, Christin here today to share with you a layout with the August 2016 kits. Last week I went very dark and black with my layout on the Hip Kit Club with a mix of black and yellow with help of the Prima Marketing Oil Pastels from the August 2016 color kit. This week I am going for the opposite. This time I have again used the oil pastels and painted it in strips in Wilna Furstenberg style.

To create a dark page it’s all about the contrast colors, but to create a bright page it’s all about avoiding hard contrast, but focus more on the subtle ones.  For instance one of the papers with yellow was not as soft as the others, so if you feel that some of the papers are stealing the focus you have a few options: You have them as far away from you focal point – your photo(s) as possible; you can just use little pieces; you can tone them down with vellum (not done here).

The same principle goes for backgrounds. To soften up a background a great idea is to use stencils and heavy gesso. (Here I have used a stencil from an earlier kit)  I used quite a lot of water with my oil pastels, but I felt they could use some more softening.

Another thing to think about when you want to make a layout with soft colors is to use a lot of white. I have a white background, I trimmed the edges of my photos wide and I added an Amy Tangerine heart  under the photo (from the color kit) so that the light colored photo could stand out even with these spft colors.  I feel that the layer just underneath the photo is the most important layer. If you use a dark color – its’ because you want the photo to stand out more against the other papers and the secondary focus is contrast. But when you work with lighter colors you still want to do a contrast color and white does the same trick, just more subtle and the wider the white edges around the photo – the more the photo will stand out – even with darker colored papers.

Have a nice weekend /Christin