Pixel Scrapper Blog Train for July, plus a bonus!

Starting this month, the Pixel Scrapper Blog Train has changed things up a bit. Since some people wanted to play with the colors more and frequently people wanted to go a bit (or a lot) afield of the chosen theme, rather than a single small palette and theme, Marissa decided to try an expanded palette and four suggested themes. This gave designers more "sanctioned" leeway for their designs, and it was well-received in the forums. We'll see how it plays out in practice. I will say, I do miss the cohesiveness previous kits had, but I'm not opposed to this idea.

Here's the guide for this month:

Given the theme and color options, I decided I wanted to do a nautical-themed kit. I'd seen the inspiration photo in the suggestions thread and it appealed to me as a color challenge I hadn't done yet, and would give me some good design ideas to play with. I put off working on it until midway through June, though (life and mood both got in the way), so I tried not to go overboard on the number of elements (no pun intended). I may revisit in the future to expand on the kit, as with many others I've done.

One great thing about the Nautical kit was that I was able to reuse some discarded paper designs from last month's Kumbaya kit. I mentioned on that post that I went through a few paper designs that just didn't work out, so I set them aside. Since they were water-themed, I went back to them and recolored two of the designs and put them in this kit instead (along with a color variant of one).

Since the palettes have expanded, I've started including the palette I used in my preview, as seen in the bottom-right corner. Not every color will necessarily be strongly represented in the kit, but it at least gives an idea of what I restricted myself to.

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But wait, there's more! I wanted to do the fantasy theme too, but not necessarily devote a regular-size blog train contribution to it, so I thought I'd put together a bonus mini for that theme with different color choices. Since I was limiting myself to a very small kit for this, I had to narrow the "fantasy" focus down. We did "Renaissance Faire" last year, so I didn't want to overlap with that terribly much (no sense retreading the same ground when I don't have to). I toyed with the idea of doing dragons, unicorns, princesses, etc., until I came across some inspiration (via Google Image Search) for fairies. I decided I'd do that.

I started with silhouettes of ballerinas, to which I added butterfly wings. I wanted a paper cut-out look to them, so I layered them and added glitter to the wings. The rest of the kit was pulled together with the intent for the pieces to mix and match a little into a single designed scrapbook page, so there's a frame, some paint stamps, a single ribbon, and a bunch of flowers and leaves. Overall, I think it looks pretty good for being put together in two days.

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When you're done picking up your kits, head over to Pixel Scrapper to find the other lovely contributions to this blog train!