It's All There in Black and White

Lots of photos for you today! The next set of displays focused on a brilliant photographer named Ansel Adams. Known for his dramatic photos of landscapes using black and white photography, a group of designers used the black and white motif to present multiple national parks in this theme and even included large prints of Adams as backdrops. I am putting them all in this post as I think they should be seen together. 

The first park represented was one I would not think of seeing in black and white--Kalaupapa National Historical Park in Hawaii. The site is now a place of refuge but had originally been isolation for those with leprosy and other infectious diseases. It's now home to many rare plant species. The cascading flowers create a lot of movement in a still-life I think.

This layout was created for another challenge in the CM Virtual Crop in February 2021. I again turned to the mystery box papers. I thought blue was a good color to offset the black and white flowers. Two of the papers had ombre tones in them and I thought flipping the stripe ombre (dark top, light bottom) on the regular paper (light top, dark bottom) highlighted the cascades on the photos. I chose yellow stickers to accent the page as well. There are some ivory/yellow tones in some of the "white" photos--though that might be artifact from the lights in the space.

The next part of the display was the domed room of Carlsbad Caverns. I have visited this park but not been in the cave so I definitely need to go back someday. I do like going through caves, as long as there is ample room to walk. I'm not one of those who want to go on the cave tour where you have to shimmy through a box to prove you won't get stuck. Let's just admit that I'll get stuck and leave me on the regular path!

This layout is another sketch from the virtual crop. More importantly, it used a template that was included in the mystery box. Check out the blog post here to see the sketch and a photo of the template (you couldn't buy it, you could only get it in the mystery box). I will be the first to admit, I don't really like using templates. I've used them several times and I always seem to mess up the cuts and ruin the intended "symmetry". This one had a lot of straight angles so I figured I could use my trimmers to make the cuts, which helped a little. I chose papers from the O Canada pack. The darker background reminded me of stone and the yellow I chose just as an accent. The diamond-shaped pieces are from a scrap of stone paper I still had. I thought it would help fill in the page since I didn't have many photos of this section. I finished by using an icicle border maker cartridge to punch stalactites and stalagmites for the edges. That's probably the part of the layout I like best.

Next stop, the Grand Canyon! I've been here twice now and I can't say that I ever knew there were aspen groves! I focus so much on the canyon that I forget there are other things. Here they are collected and secured with flowers around the middles. 

This was one more of the challenges for the virtual crop. I changed the number of photos in the original sketch, which you can see here. I utilized paper from the Camouflage pack. The background paper is birch bark and I turned it so that there was some definition against the direction of the trees in the photo. I also used leafy paper in the middle to help the photos stand out. Two brown borders also helped define the photos. One is a leftover border and I liked that it had the hiking boots printed on it. I chose the CM Stamping set to create the title. I thought that the uneven covering of ink on the letters also represented the tree bark.

OK, we come to the last layout in the Ansel Adams collection. This one is King's Canyon--another site I've not been to. Though I found out recently that my grandparents did! I have their photo album from the 1960s when they went on several cross-country trips and my grandmother labeled many of the sites so I know where they are. Now I can recreate their photo when I visit!

One more sketch from the virtual crop (check it out here). I returned to the mystery box papers and to the use of blue to offset the black and white flowers. For one of the circular elements, I chose to create a journal box by using the custom cutting system on a piece of ruled paper. I accented with some stickers (top and bottom) from a couple of older, non-related CM packs. But I thought the colors and tones matched the layout. My favorite piece of this layout is the border at the top and bottom. I used a new border maker cartridge called "Mirrored Triangles". In addition to punching a set in white, I punched a set in black and used that to edge the white against the striped paper. It gives a great shadow effect. The title was one of our laser-cut titles. I love those packs. So much easier than splicing letters together!

Happy Trails part 23--the Final Entry

 The last of my trip was a night-time visit to Carlsbad Caverns. While I can certainly count this as a unit visited I did not arrive early enough to visit the caves. I was able to tour the visitor center and then head to the Amphitheater for the Bat Flight presentation. Our club snagged several rows together and we had fun calling to the newcomers at the top of the staircase. My husband still can't believe I attended this event because I tend to freak out when a bat flies in the house. Luckily none tangled in my hair that night! There are only daytime photos because phones, cameras, and other electrical devices are prohibited once the bats start emerging from the caves.

In a rather unusual burst of enthusiasm, I completed this page a little earlier than normal. One of the Facebook pages I followed showed how to make the bats--from an Airplane Border Maker Cartridge! They are punched from black paper, turned upside down, and embellished with a white gel pen for the eyes. I knew I just HAD to make the page right then (it was October 2018 and I was still a couple of years away from completing the album). So it's been sitting in one of my pre-made page containers waiting until I got to this album. Because I made it so far in advance, I used cardstock as the base. I found 2 close shades in the yellow/orange family. Then I took one sheet of stone paper from the CM Textures pack and cut it to make the non-symmetrical layout. I made 3 12" strips of "bats" and layered them across the middle. A few bat stickers and die cuts from my Halloween collection helped create the bat flight across the page.

I was having trouble getting all the photos on the page so I used a peekaboo pocket on the photo above the park brochure. If you lift it, the journaling is underneath. Hindsight is 2020. I didn't realize when I made this that it would be the last page in the album. Had I been planning it out, I would have rearranged the layout to make 3 pages with the last of the photos as the final entry. 

And that leads us to the final page. I struggled with what to put on the page but finally found inspiration in making a closing page similar to my kick-off pages. I used the "Happy Trails" theme to say goodbye and to talk a little about the upcoming convention in Philadelphia. (That set of pages has been covered if you look back through the blog posts).

Once I decided what I was doing, this page came together quickly. I had a western themed photo page with the hat and hay bale. I used the Cricut to make the Happy Trails sign and the letters to indicate the next trip. I may use this technique again!

50 States Album Part 15--New Mexico

My foray into New Mexico has so far been limited to my NPTC convention trip in 2015. The convention itself was in El Paso, TX, but our weekend events extended into the surrounding area. El Paso is not that far from the New Mexico line and I spent a full day exploring various NPS sites.

This page is based on the elements of this layout. I merged the state flag and the state cutout so I could include the photo of the Welcome sign--even though I'm not in it. It serves as the title of the page in a way. I rather like the desert structures in the bottom right corner It was a free cut and I think the tones of yellow give it depth for such a simple cut. Yellow mats tied the rest of the page together. It was a fairly quick layout.