This week's amazingly talented guest designer is Norway's Ingvild Bolme. Her work leaves me breathless every time I see it! Ingvild designs for Prima Marketing,The Color Room (a new inspirational blog), and Onirie.
I’m a scrapbooker from Norway, have a huge passion for this amazing craft, and love everything within photography and design. Besides being a mum to our 3 year old girl Iselina, I study graphic design and I hope that I can work within design for a long time. I discovered scrapbooking for the very first time in 2006, but started up for real in March-April 2007 and have been totally addicted since.
I’m not sure if I have a specific style when I scrap, because I always try to let the picture I’m going to scrap to lead me to choose the style of my design. I think it’s important to create a design that can strengthen the story behind a picture and the impression of it. I love vintage and romantic styles, to tear and ink on papers, using a sewing machine, hand stitching with cords and so on, but that isn’t always the right style for every picture. Sometimes I have some specific products I’m going to use and then I always try to find pictures that can fit the style I’m going scrap in. But you will usually find a lot of details in my work, because I love to put on tons of embellishments and try out different techniques. I think it is important to enjoy the process of creating. Just have fun and do what you like most and never forget that you scrap for yourself and your family. It never matters for me how much time I use on each layout, because every hour I use on it, is a fun hour and well invested time for pages to a family album that will be treasured for always.
My biggest inspiration is my daughter. I’m glad she’s my natural inspiration, after all she is the reason why I started to scrapbook. She is the one that will inherit my albums one day and then she will find the whole story of her life.
But I do also get inspired by everyday life; small things around us that give me ideas I want to try out. Some mornings I can just wake up with an idea in my head I just have to try out. I also find a lot of inspiration out on the internet, there is so many great and talented scrappers out there! It’s even difficult for me to just mention a few favorites, because there is so many. But I can mention the first ones I discovered and still like very much, and that is Cotè Scrap from France and Iris Babao Uy from the Philippines. They both have rich and detailed styles that I love very much!
My favorite colors can be everything, because I can love everything from the very rich and bold colors, to the more soft ones. I really love colors as yellow and orange, but find myself scrapping a lot with blue, teal and turquoise a lot. Love to add white/cream, black and brown, no matter what main colors I use. In real life I do love rich colors, even my car is orange. But when I scrap I do often choose more soft colors, because that allows me to add more details without being “too much” after my taste. For the same reason I always choose to use lots of airy spots on my works, places for the eyes to rest before moving on to detailed areas.
Remember, have fun creating, that’s when you’re inspiration flows and you get the best ideas and designs! ;-) Never be afraid to try out new things, someone always has to be the first one to discover new techniques and the next technique can be discovered by you! If you do something wrong or something you are not happy with, you can just undo it or cover it up! At least you will always be an experience richer and always be able to find out what works and what doesn’t, and it’s often these experiences that are the most fun ones in the process of creating.
