Each month we get a glimpse behind the scenes of our Scrap Girls ScrapSimple Club designers, and this month’s designer is Melissa Renfro!
When you started working on your club, what was the first thing you did?
When I first started working on the ScrapSimple Club, I started with the motif of leaves. I wanted to include hand drawn leaves and I was experimenting with doing some drawing on my iPad. I have a stylus and was trying out iDraw. My husband and I had a plane trip we needed to take so I took the opportunity to draw and sketch a bit while flying over the great state of Texas. I worked on the Brush Set: Sketched leaves, and had some fun sketches to work with by the time we got home.
What inspired the colors in your club?
For the ScrapSimple Club I usually don’t worry much about colors. I knew that I would need to come up with the colors for the bonus Nano Collection but I wanted to get my other design work most finished up before I started working on it. I had an idea of the colors I would use. I think I was a little influenced by the fact that it was Febuary and I was watching the gray clouds and cold days pass by and I was dreaming of the beach. When I finally got around to working on the Nano Collection I tried to work with the color palette I had saved originally. It was awful! I really wanted it to look bright and summery, but instead it just looked flat. The muted grays and blues were ok, but by this time I was craving bright and bold. I wanted summer to show up, and with it flowers and watermelon, and popcicles! This was not my year to go to the beach, so the watermelon greens and majenta red and sky blue ended up being the winning combination .
Where did you find the inspiration for your club?
Another strong inspiration for me was working with Pocket Life layouts. I really love to see how people put them together. I worked on a few just straight grid type project life layouts, but when it came right down to it, I am a digital girl all the way! I had a tweak a few things here and there, make a few of the pictuers bigger and leave some room for the background to show through. These layouts became the inspiration for the ScrapSimple Digital Layout Templates: Pocket Plus. I started with a basic grid of 3×4 inch and 4×6 inch sized pictures, then I just played with them a bit to get the sizes right.
The club includes several products. Did you start and complete each one before moving on to the next?
When I work on several products at once like I do for the ScrapSimple Club, I typically will just work on everything all at once, and then separate it out. With this set of designs, they each kind of came together separately. When I sat down to work on the brush set, I did it all in one sitting, same with the Photomasks. Then, of course I had to go back in and refine things and save them out, but my workflow was very different this time around.
What was your favorite thing to design?
My favorite thing to design was the ScrapSimple Digital Layout Templates. I wanted to add in some extras like the messy stitching, the paint and the taped pieces, to give it a finished artistic look. A long time ago I had made some “paint” brushes that I had used from time to time, but for this set, I decided to create all new realistic paint brushes. I pulled out my watercolors and ended up with 5 pages of splatters and strokes of paint to use to add to my creations. It was fun to actually step away from the computer and pull out my paper and brushes and play around for a bit. It is even more fun for me to use them in Photoshop as brushes on projects like these.
About how long did it take you to design this club?
This club took several months to complete although I wasn’t working on the club the whole time. At first this club came together very quickly. I even started pretty early. I was excited about the concepts that I had and when I sat down to design them, I had a lot of ideas to work with. Once I got the initial designs worked out a bit, my life got very busy. Things like saving out files and checking them, creating the marketing graphics and layouts actually take a lot of time for me, and I waited until the very end to get all of it done. I had a few very late nights in there doing some of the finishing work, but once I got started on it I really enjoyed it.
To our Free Newsletter
