I was junior high age, in the car with my Dad, singing along to the radio and enjoying the sound-bounce off the windshield. Knowing I was serious about singing for an audience, he handed me some advice that guided me not only in my singing, but also in dance, and scrapbooking. He told me I was scooping.
Do you know what scooping is? It’s when you don’t hit a note right on. Instead, you land just below and then scoop up into the correct note. The less skilled one is at singing, the farther away they tend to land from the target note and the more they scoop.
“But professional singers scoop.” I protested.
That’s when Dad delivered the key principle. “If you want to perform, you need to learn to hit the notes right on. Then you can scoop if you still want to. But you can’t scoop effectively until you can hit each note exactly.”
Scooping In Dance
This principle also applies to dance.
Hip-action is a favorite characteristic of Latin Ballroom dances like the Cha Cha or the Samba. Another interesting characteristic is the sensual arm movements. What I learned when I took good technical classes from skilled trainers was to forget the hips and the arms. We had to first focus on strong and centered foot and weight-placement. Once a dancer nails that skill, good weight-placement will push the hips out naturally. With increased training a dancer will eventually be ready to put more emphasis on the stylistic arms and hips.
Scooping is Stylistic. To excel, good skills must be the foundation. Style can build from there.
How I Overcame Premature Scrapbook Scooping
Have you ever tried to emulate another scrapbooker’s style without outright copying their pages, and found that you couldn’t pull it off? I have. Not long before I began to learn principles of design, Elsie Flannigan hit the scrapbooking world and I loved all the bright colorful pieces she gathered around her photos. Of course, she did mainly single-photo pages and I did two-page layouts with multiple photos. I once tried to apply some aspects of her style to a four-photo page. My result was some out-of-control scooping. Here it is:
I remember how excited I was to use my products, but how frustrating it became to work with all my photos. I could see that the page looked chaotic but I couldn’t figure out why. Now I know that I was ignorant of basic design principles. In other words, I was scooping without the skills.
The layouts below are some examples of pages with similar style characteristics to what I was trying to attempt. You can see that these other pages all make more visual sense.
Ordered Chaos
There is a lot going on with this layout. Why do so many busy products work here?
1) One strong photo with a clean background stands out in all the pattern.
2) The solid matte and straight angled journaling within it provide a firm spot for the photo.
3) The tags are gathered together so they act like one piece you can digest when you’re ready. In the first layout, each piece is separated and demands its own attention.
Simplicity
In Artsy Girl I used products from the same line as in City Walk, the first layout. Sure, it helps that I’m only using two photos, as opposed to four, but even a two-photo page benefits from a foundation of skills. Here are the principles that made this one work:
1) All of the elements have their own defined spaces. The journaling extends along some lines. The drawings lie in a sequence that form a line. The title sits in a box that fits into an empty spot. The photos line up with the drawings and the patterned paper.
2) Each of the embellishments debut in clusters of three.
Managing Multiple Photos
In case someone was thinking how much easier it is to make sense out of one or two photos as opposed to four, I included a nine-photo spread.
1) With more than three photos, I it becomes imperative to gather them into one or more groups. In this case, I made one giant gathering.
2) I prioritized my photos over my products. I first decided where my photos would go, and then I saw how much space I had left to add embellishments and patterned paper. I determined that no matter how fun the bigger stuff is, this layout would only remain manageable with small-scale items and patterns.
3) I clustered embellishments together.
Scoop Or Don’t Scoop: My Disclaimer
There are those lucky few who have a natural sense for design, music, or dance skills without even knowing what they are. These artists will find their way to an aesthetically pleasing result more often. But even these gifted ones have their days when their art isn’t working and they don’t know why if they haven’t learned what the skills are.
Does that matter? It’s up to them. Scrapbooking is a personal thing. For some it is like singing alone in the shower. Maybe they do it for their own pure pleasure. The joy they feel to be carefree with it is all they need. Others find fulfillment in improving their skill.
Learning about design principles and how to apply them is just as fun for me as sitting down to scrapbook. It’s part of my hobby. It may not be fun for you. And really, isn’t fun our main reason for doing this?
But if you want more satisfactory results more often, remember that style and fancy products only shine within the framework of good principles.
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This article is part of a series: All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Performing.
If you enjoyed this, you’ll probably like the others, as well:
Advanced Design: Visual Dynamics
Design: Rules? What Rules?
