Wherever you may be.

Good afternoon blogland, I've got a 12x12 digital scrapbook page to share with you today. I created the page with Expedition by Sarah Hurley digital kit. So how did you do it I hear you cry, well lets go....

When I first looked through the kit, I was amazed at the quantity of the kit. The quality speaks for itself, because the kit was designed by Sarah and not only did Sarah design the kit, she drew all the elements herself, by hand. In the kit there are twelve, 12x12 papers, that can be resized so they can be printed, 88 hand drawn embellishments, 1 alphabet and two A4 sheets of hand drawn embellishments. So the kit is bursting at its seams, with all you would need to document and capture your holiday memories and so much more.

I started by loading the kit into CraftArtist by Serif. I will be posting a step by step tutorial on how to load all of Sarah's digi kits onto CraftArtist on Sunday. It's really simple to do, even I managed to load the kit with no problems. I will also be showing you how to turn Sarah's embellishments into digital frames. So pop back on Sunday if you have some spare time.

When the kit was loaded, I first pulled on all the 12x12 resizable papers onto my workspace one by one, so I could see all the beautiful papers. I decided to use the wood effect paper. I then did the same with the material. I decided to go with the yellow striped material, because I thought it would  look like wallpaper against the wood effect paper. Everything started to fall into place. To give a ripped wallpaper effect, I cut the material with the digi scissors.  I was happy with the ripped paper look I had created. Now it was time to look at the embellishments. Whilst looking at the embellishments, I noticed the tall ships and the hot air balloons that Sarah had drawn beautifully and they jumped out at me. I decided to pull the two hand drawn tall ships and the two hand drawn hot air balloons onto my work area. I resized one of the tall ships, to give the effect of distance and faded it a little with the transparency tool. I did the same with one of the hot air balloon and applied a drop shadow to the ripped paper and all the the embellishments.I wanted to use a sentiment that meant something not only to me, but to other people as well, but I was struggling, until I looked at the embellishments and they gave me some inspiration.

I moved away from my hometown nearly 9 years ago and I try to go back to see my parents as often as I can, but sometimes life just gets in the way. To remind me that my parents are always there, especially my mum, I made up my own sentiment, using a font that was already loaded on my laptop. I then pulled a photograph of my mum. If she looks fed up, she was, because She was trying to have a rest, but it's hard when , you've got someone saying smile every two minutes. Sorry mum. I faded the picture using the transparency tool and I chose to use the plasma effect, to give the photograph the look like it was in the clouds, with the hot air balloons.

There we have it. A reminder for myself, that even though I am 60 miles away from my mum, she will always be there for me, no matter what.

I hope you enjoy.

Ian xx

The Expedition by Sarah Hurley digi kit and all of Sarah's marvelous products can be found here and if you've got a spare few minutes pop over to Sarah's blog for tips and inspiration from Sarah herself.