So far we’ve had a two photo sketch and a three photo sketch. This week I decided to really challenge you all and give you a five photo sketch. What do you think? Personally, I love multi-photo layouts, but it can be tough to fit a lot of photos on a layout without it looking busy and cluttered. Which is one reason that I love sketches. Sketches help me to “see” the finished layout before I’ve even started working. I can look at the sketch beforehand and get an idea if my completed layout will be balanced or not. This week’s sketch also repeats a favorite technique of mine from last week and that is it mixes up the sizes and orientations of the photos on the page. It also features three square photos. In all honesty, the photos on my page needed to be cropped anyway. They were too busy in their full size so cropping them allowed me to add them to the page and tell a more complete story but without adding too much visual clutter.

As for the 8.5 x11 version of this sketch, it pretty closely resembles the original design. I decided to adapt it to the landscape orientation (so it’s actually 11x8.5) and the photo sizes have been decreased in order to maintain the overall feel of the 12x12 sketch. Sometimes when converting sketches that have a lot of photos I like to break them up into two pages but since this design is asymmetric I decided to keep it to one page.

(By the way, you can see examples of how to convert a one page design into two pages in Angie’s article Stretch your Sketches in this month’s issue of Scrapbook Ellaments.)