Sketches for Scrapbooking Part 2: GotSketch and Allison Davis

This post really has two purposes. One is to bring you the final part of my discussion of my favorite scrapbooking sketches (the first post is here if you missed it). The second purpose is to show what happens when I try to scrap outside my "style."

I will admit up front that I do not know what to call my scrapping "style." It's somewhat simple, but not. I like to embellish, but not much. I like pattern and color, but mostly keep that limited to my patterned paper. I like linear. Neat. Clean.

Recently I have found that I scrapbook like Allison Davis, though I'm not sure what to call her style, either. For years I didn't know who she was, just that I had been copying a lot of her layouts from Creating Keepsakes magazine. And I certainly didn't know that she has published four (yes, four!) volumes of scrapbooking sketches!

Imagine my delight when I stumbled across these books. They are self-published for the scrapbooking store that she and her mom run, and each book contains 30 sketches. The sketches are centered mostly around standard size (4x6) photos or crops of 4x6 photos. The layouts are very clean and linear, and dimensions are included for photo size, paper size, and paper placement!

These books are printed in black/white/gray on plain paper and comb bound and do not contain any sample layouts to accompany the sketch. I've found, though, that the sketches are so easy to follow that I don't really miss having an example page to look at.

I scrapped the following page (of a trip to the Louisville Zoo all the way back in 2000) using one of Allison's sketches, and it came together so quickly and easily!

The clean lines of Allison's sketches make embellishing very easy for me. These are definitely my new favorite sketch books!

The final set of sketches that I find myself using often is Valerie Salmon's "Got Sketch" series.

Valerie offers her sketches in two different forums. The first is on her Got Sketch blog. These sketches are free and posted every other week or so, except when the blog goes on hiatus while she runs a paid sketch class on the Got Crafts site (the second place she offers her sketches). Sketches on both sites are accompanied by at least one (often several) example layouts.

I've taken all of the paid Got Sketch classes and have enjoyed them, but at the same time I find Valerie's sketches the most difficult for me to work with. It's not because they aren't well done, because they certainly are. I think it's just a difference in style. Take the layout below (from my brother's wedding) for example.

I love the layout of the photos (again, Valerie uses mostly 4x6 photos or easy crops of 4x6 photos) and the positioning of the patterned papers, but the embellishing hangs me up almost every time with Got Sketch! Maybe it's the large amount of empty space between the photos on the left page that throws me off, though I did place my embellishments according to where they were shown in the sketch.

I'm slightly happier with this next layout (also from my brother's wedding), though I think I could have done a better job choosing the background cardstock color.

This final example layout from a Got Sketch pattern is actually the one in this set that I'm happiest with. The clear photo groupings made it easier for me to place embellishments, and the page doesn't look cluttered even though it contains a ton of photos!

So what do I do when a page doesn't turn out exactly as I would have liked? I put it in my album and move on. :) This is all a learning process, and I've often found that if I just put a page away for a while and come back to it, I'm far less critical of it than when I first finished it.

So, there you have them- my favorite sources for scrapbooking sketches. I hope you found something to inspire you here!