Michael Myers / The Ink Road

Happy National / International Scrapbooking Day!!  (Or as my husband likes to call it..."Every Day," haha!  I'm starting off this weekend by sharing another layout I created as a guest over at The Ink Road.  This time, I played with some truly incredible stamps designed by my friend Zinia Amoiridou.  This is the Meow Mix, and you can get it HERE.

I can't believe I've never scrapped a photo or story about our cat.  I decided to create a bunch of little cute cat faces to scatter around these photos of Michael Myers.  He sort of adopted himself to us when we moved into our house back in 2009.  At first he looked like a serial killer cat with his white face and black trim...and he liked to stalk us by staring in through our windows.  He warmed up to us, and we warmed up to him.  Now we love him, and he's our guard cat :)

I started by creating lots of fun cat faces with the stamps.  You can make so many different faces...even with cute glasses or bows or mustaches!  These are such fun stamps to play with.  I used some Prima oil pastels to smudge them with color.  I tried to make the faces pretty realistic colors.  For my background, I used white cardstock and some Shimmerz Acritonez acrylic paints.  I combined the blue & green to create a rich aqua and I scraped it onto the paper using a palette knife.  I don't even know what inspired me to use aqua...I just grabbed some paint and went for it.  I love how it makes my photos pop since there is so much white in them.  The aqua paint gives a nice separation between the light photos & white background.

Look at these faces!  Super adorable.  I fussy cut them all out.  Before I glued anything down, I machine stitched some mess circles around the painted area.  I like how this gives some subtle detail and texture.  I raised my photos up with foam adhesive and then began to scatter & layer the faces around the circles & photos.  I love how the cardstock's texture shows through on the faces.

I did add a bit of light grey thread under the sides of the photos, and I added an old October Afternoon flair button.  It matched perfectly, and I like how it points down to my journaling.  I just glued it right on top of the photos.  I like doing this when the photos allow.  I'm not covering up anything important.

I pulled out some realllllly old dark grey Prima alphas here.  They really didn't even stick anymore, so I had to glue them down.  I had a lot to say here, so I typed my journaling on my computer and printed it out into sentence strips.

I know that this layout is totally different than my normal pink, yellow and blue layout.  But I have to say I love how it turned out!  These cat faces totally inspired me, and I love that I chose a different color scheme.  I also love how the palette knife smudged the paint.  It's a completely different look than using the packaging technique.

Here's one more close-up.  I love the dimension here...I know I say that a lot, but it's true!  It makes such a difference when you raise something up or bend up the edges of something.

I do have a video to share....so here it is!  I hope you enjoy...I had LOTS of fun putting this together!

Thanks so much for stopping in!  Have a GREAT scrappy weekend, friends!