Welcome Scrapbookers to The Hunger Games Kiss and Tell Scrapbooking Challenge #1: Main Characters. Let the Games Begin!
Over the past week, I've been fully immersed into the dystopian world of Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games. I couldn't help but notice that there were so many similarities between the main character, Katniss Everdeen, and myself. Our nuclear family units growing up were identical, even the personalities of the family members, like our late fathers were hunters, our mothers worked in healthcare, and our little sisters had a fondness for stray cats. The similarities didn't stop there, we went from a small town to the big city all by ourselves, we are claustrophobic, and we both love scrapbooking. Yes, scrapbooking. Apparently there is a little hope in dystopian District 12 in the form of some post traumatic scrapbooking and gratitude journaling. I had to create something that showed the commonalities I noticed while I was engrossed in this trilogy. Then I started thinking of all sorts of scrapbooking themes and ideas related to The Hunger Games and I thought it might be fun to host some scrapbooking challenges. I don't have any prizes to offer but I do think you will have a lot of fun playing along with me. {Pssst. If you know of any scrapbooking companies that might like to sponsor some prize give-aways on my blog for this series, please leave a comment and send them my way.} With or without prizes, I can't wait to get started.
Let me explain my dystopian-scrapbooking concept, first watch The Hunger Games Scrapbooking Challenge #1 Video:
Want to play along? Here's how:
Step 1. CHOOSE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER AND COMPARE WITH A REAL LIFE PERSON. I chose myself and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. You could choose yourself or another person you love and pair them up with a fictional character,it doesn't have to be from The Hunger Games. For example, if I were to do this for members of my family, I might compare my son Mac with the No, David books by David Shannon; I might compare my daughter Allison with the ever creative and social Olivia; and I might compare my husband Charlie to (hmmmmm) I'm not sure, maybe Jimmy Buffet or Alec Baldwin or I'm not sure; I know those aren't fictional characters - but I think celebrity personalities could count. If you are having a hard time figuring out who to choose, probably start with yourself - you know yourself best and think back to a character from a book, movie, or tv show, or even celebritiy personality, with whom you really identified with or felt a connection to, or even someone you aspire to be like.
STEP 2. CHOOSE COMPARISON PHOTOS: I found some photos of The Hunger Games' main character, Katniss Everdeen, on the internet and some photos of myself at about her age from the 80s. I picked one full body shot with weapons and one head shot with a more serious face for each of us. I scanned in my old photos. Then I created a photo collage in Picasa. I would have put Katniss all on the left and me all on the right except that I wanted our faces to be facing in and I don't think Picasa has the mirror flip feature so I mixed them up, I actually think it is a bit more interesting this way. If you are playing along, find some photos of yourself or the real life person you are using for this comparison challenge and then do a google search for the fictional character you are comparing with your real life person.
Step 3: COMPARE AND CONTRAST: This part of the process sort of reminds me of high school English class when we had to write an essay comparing and contrasting something, anything, my senior English teacher Mrs. Rideout was always giving us these types of assignments. I remember creating a yearbook where we used characters from the stories we'd read and fit them into senior superlatives like "most likely to succeed" and "most popular" etc. I created a table in word perfect listing the similarities between the main character of The Hunger Games and myself, it really was funny to see our common threads. If you have a computer available, create a table to compare your real life and your fictional character; if you don't have a computer handy, just hand draw a table and handwrite in the blanks; in the alternative, you could go the high school "compare and contrast" essay route,but trust me, making a table with bullet points is much quicker and easier {and you are less likely to get all those red marks on the page when some persnicketly grammar policeman sees it} .
STEP 4: CHOOSE SCRAPBOOKING PRODUCTS TO SUPPORT YOUR THEME.
Once I had my table and photos printed, I knew I wanted to create a 8.5x11 page rather than a 12x12 page. Because my table and photos were 7x7.75, I knew I didn't have a lot of space for embellishments or even the title. I wanted the photos and the table to shine and for the rest to support my theme. I looked through my black patterened paper and found some patterns that I otherwise thought were ugly but seemed to work for these theme. Then I went about finding letters to create a title with, the main focus there was that I needed smaller letters. I couldn't find my white or black smaller letters, so I used bright blue and green mostly because they fit, but also because they were a bit discordant with the rest of the layout, which in this case supports the theme, and I used alternating colors mainly because that's all I had left, but I think that the use of two colors also supports my comparison of two people. I didn't want to use a big flower or arrow or butterfly or other typical scrapbooking embellishment, so instead I chose to "jazz up" my page with some machine stitching. That game me the idea for the title: "Common Threads" so I stitched over my title letters as well and along the bottom of the photos with the zig zag stitch under the head shot photos. Not every scrapbooking paper, embellishment, or letters have to have a meaning, but it is sort of awesome when they can support your theme visually. Don't over-think this process, use what you have. Often times, the real meaning of the embellishments or design of the page that I have used doesn't really hit me until after I have made the page; That's OK, because I really believe that at some gut level, my subconscious was making connections that my thinking brain hadn't caught up with yet. Just go with it. Don't fret over the embellishment part of the page, if you've already done the thinking about the story of the comparison, the rest of the page is going to come together easily. Remember, this part is supposed to be the fun part, so have fun!
STEP 5: SHARE YOUR WORK! I would love to see what you create with this challenge, please leave a comment with a link to your page. I have set up a Flickr Group called The Hunger Games Scrapbooking Challenge. Please feel free to join and upload your project and/or leave a link in the comments to your blog or online gallery.
If you wish to support this blog, then please click on one of the following links for cool scrapbooking and The Hunger Games related products at Amazon:
