I’ve been asking myself this questions for a long time because all the talk about freestyle in scrapbooking just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.
Is it “fun, artsy, and totally your own style?”
Is it anything with lots of doodling and handwriting with a look similar to Elsie’s? I have looked at layouts in magazines that the editor labels “freestyle,” seemingly because of one element that reminds them of the queen of freestyle, like the funky-fresh handwriting.
Is it scrapbooking without rules? Which rules? Archival rules? Design rules?
Is it expressive scrapbooking? Scrapbooking where we do more to express ourselves, to communicate who we are?
I’m not the only one who has scratched her head, trying to figure out why some label certain layouts freestyle but not others. Debb Cozzi put this question to work over a period of a few weeks a couple years ago and discovered what I have long believed. In a forum on Digital Scrapbook Place, she began a thread on Freestyle and said, “After studying this style I can tell you what it is NOT….it is not a style where you throw design principles out the window and just ‘go with the flow.’ (Although that is what many of the articles and books will tell you!)”
Study any excellent freestyle layout long enough and you will find underlying design principles. It’s just usually less obvious.
The layout above is what I would consider Freestyle/Noell-Style. It’s my freest-form layout ever…and yet the design principles are there, holding it together. You see the black rub-on line that stretches across the top? That is an anchoring line. It makes you feel that all the “stuff” on the page, the receipts and photos, are in place, although haphazardly.
What about the three green elements? They form a triangle, giving balance to the layout and keeping your eye from straying. There is also a balance of black and a pretty equal amount of empty space at the top and the bottom of the layout.
But my handwriting? Nothing like that of the amazing and trendy Elsie Flannigan writing.
Not quite putting her finger on what Freestyle is, Debb listed some common elements in many freestyle layouts. Mixed media or collage, unique and fresh uses of open space; doodles or hand-drawn/written elements; heavy emphasis on type and print, especially when used as a design element; photos used in fresh new ways, like journaling in the open space, or the edges of the rectangular photo painted away; an emphasis of line and motion and organic shape.
If an inclusion of some of those elements distinguishes a layout as being freestyle, then I guess many of my pages fit. But I don’t see myself as a freestyle scrapbooker and I doubt anyone else does, either. In fact, I don’t equate any style label with my own scrapbooking. The closest label that I can come up with for myself is “eclectic.”
Frankly, I’d prefer it if we didn’t label styles at all, but I know sometimes it just helps communication to have a label. My style has more to do with my method of scrapbooking and less to do with an overall consistent look from page to page.
So what light have I shed on the definition of Freestyle scrapbooking? Probably none. And the more I think about it, the more I feel that freestyle has less to do with a certain “look” and more to do with a breaking out of norms and trying something new and risky. Maybe it is always evolving, because what is new now will eventually become old. But then again, maybe not.
