Designer Showcase: Blocked/Shadow Box

Hello everyone!  For today's Designer Showcase, we are sharing pages that use blocked designs or shadow boxes.  These are a great way to include lots of photos and papers on your page or project. They also help to quicken the process of putting together your page.  By using a set block style design, your sections and sizes are already decided. You just fill them in with papers, photos, elements and journaling and your done.  Let's take a look at the inspiration from the Contributing Artists.

First up is a "beautiful" page by Vicky. She has used a blocked style to feature some photos and pretty clusters of flowers and elements. By sizing the blocks the same, Vicky was able to lay them out and leave negative space between each block exposing the background white paper. By allowing the butterflies, titles and other elements to extend beyond the blocks, Vicky has added a nice flow to her page.

Cindy is sharing these 3 samples with us.  In the first 2 she covers most of the page with her block design. Notice how she changes the interior shapes to fit multiple photos on each of the large blocks. In her 3rd example, she has turned the block to a more vertical shape. Yet she still includes both horizontal and vertical photos. This design left her plenty of space for a large title as well.

Dolores created this amazing shadow box style page digitally.  Isn't this so adorable? She has included beautiful photos. She has also created little "pictures" within the other shadow boxes.  By keeping the shadow box frame smaller than the limits of her page, Dolores was able to add style, color and pizazz to her page with the really cute scalloped edge.

This is a hybrid shadow box wall art that I created. I used a wooden photo tray as the base. I used both traditional and digital papers and elements to decorate it.

In one of the boxes, I created a book that opens to include more photos and journaling.

Blocked style designs work really great for themed or mini-albums. These 2 pages are from an album I made for my folks. We took a family trip to Walt Disney World to celebrate their wedding anniversary. By keeping all the pages with the same basic design, it made for a cohesive look to the album. It also helped to speed the process of laying out the album.

We hope these projects give you some inspiration for working with blocked designs or shadow boxes.