Usually I have several December Daily posts published by now, but 2020 has been anything but “usual,” right? Even though I have already been sharing this year’s pages on my social media accounts already, I wanted to go into a little more detail here about my approach this year. If you make it through the entire post, there is a freebie waiting for you at the end!
So my 2020 December Daily Album. Some of my processes are staying the same: I will only be using December Daily Digital Products by Ali Edwards. All of my digital supplies are stored in iCloud Drive. My pages are being created in Affinity Photo on my iPad. Storing my supplies in iCloud Drive makes it easy for me search for, and drag/drop exactly what I am looking for into Affinity. The size of my album is the same as in years past, 6x8. When the book is finished, it will be printed through ZNO. Their quality is amazing, and as far as I know they are the only printer around that print hard bound 6x8 books in landscape or portrait orientation. Several months ago, I did a walkthrough of these albums on my Pixels to Pages Facebook page. You can watch it here when you get a free moment!
The big change I am making this year is how I am creating my pages. When I did my 2016-2019 I was using Ali’s digital templates. I think I have every single one of her December Daily templates. But this year I didn’t purchase them. While I LOVE the templates, I wanted to do something that was a little more “organic” this year, as I felt that my albums were all starting to look the same. So what I decided to do was attempt to recreate or “interpret” Ali’s 2020 physical pages in digital format. I’ve been waiting to work on my stories until Ali publishes her December Daily pages on her blog. When I see that she has posted, the wheels immediately start turning, figuring out how I can mirror what she created, but digitally. I have REALLY been enjoying this process. It’s been so much fun. Let’s take a peek at what I’ve done so far:
But first here is my cover page. Now I did not mimic Ali’s cover page (although I loved it). One of my favorite shapes I’ve seen in her collection this year is that little tree from the 6x8 Tree Stamp Set. I wanted to incorporate it into my cover and did so by duplicating it three times on the page and combining it with the “Make Magic” card from the 2020 December Daily Digitals Transparency Journal Card Set. I added the “twenty-twenty” text on top of a red rectangle.
Story One
You can view Ali’s Story One here if you’d like. It will give you a better idea of how I took some of her ideas from her physical pages and applied them on my digital page. I used “around here” word art from her Product Play class on the left hand side. Ali used this on each of the photo tags she created.
I interpreted the page on the right in this way: Ali created a pocket page using a printed star transparency. If you look at the back of those photo tags she created, one of them has the black patterned paper from the 2020 December Daily Main Kit. That is what I used to create the “pocket” on my page. The red stripe behind the pocket is a digital paper from one of her previous kits. It represents the ribbons she used on her tags. On top of the pocket I used the Large Felt Number 1. While the digital felt numbers are white and have the gold stitching around them, they do not have a felt texture. In Affinity, I clipped a high-resolution photo of a felt texture to the number and applied a 3D effect and drop shadow to it. I love the way it turned out! I used a digital cork star and the gold star from the main kit and placed them on the top of the number, just as Ali did on her physical page. I added the tag with the photo, which I guess you can look at it as representative of those individual photo tags she did.
Story Two
Ali’s Story Two is here. Looking at Ali’s spread, the left side of the layout is actually the backside of her pocket page from Story One. The “Joy” background is from the 2020 Prep Day downloads. I played around with several color options, but they were too bold next to the black and white photo on the right. I ended up applying a very light gray color overlay to the digital file and sprinkled some stars around.
Now for the page on the right: I took a photo of items in my cart while at Target. But the lighting in the store cast such a glare on the cellophane wrap on the products, I felt the need to change the color to black and white. And while I love the colors of the wrapping paper and wooden houses, I knew I would be telling individual stories about these two things later in the month were there will be full-color photos. Black and white for the win.
I’ll admit, I was a little intimidated to recreate those shaker boxes in digital format that Ali used on her page. But I was up for the challenge and couldn’t be happier with the results. The first star I created is the one placed near the center left of the page. During my process of creating this, I was a little OCD, and while working in Affinity, I had a second window open on my screen with Ali’s blog post be refer to it for placement of the stars in the shaker box. That first star shaker box took about an hour to create the other two went a lot quicker as it was just a matter of copy/pasting the different elements, again, referring to Ali’s blog post for star placement.
In Ali’s layout she created a pocket to hold her journal card using a a piece of a page protector and the “Let Your Heart Be Light” fabric half-circle. I made mine by just using the digital version of those half-circle and clipped a fabric texture to it to make it look like the physical piece. I used the same journal card as she did although I did manipulate it a little bit to make it longer. I created my own “number two” brad in Affinity Photo.
By the way, I love these little star shaker boxes so much that I want you guys to have them. Click the photo below to download. Enjoy!
