My favorite layout!

Thank you to everyone who came to my blog "unveiling" yesterday! What a party for me!! While I still have a few readers, I thought I would share with you what I consider to be my best layout. I had so much fun making it but it did take me a very LOOOOONG time to create. It is all digital. I used my pen tool in Photoshop to cut out all of the people! I originally created this layout for my Heritage Challenge at Scrap Artist. The theme that week was "Montage of Memories."

A montage is a composition of many pictures or designs, put together in a way that conveys a particular mood, such as joy, sadness, enchantment, magic, fear, romance etc. Another web site defines it as: A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or overlapping many pictures or designs. Two of my favorite scrappers are Denise Docherty and Anna Aspnes. Both are masters of montage. Click on their names to see their galleries.

All of these people on this page are my direct ancestors. These are my parents, grand parents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents, great-great-great grandparents and even one great-great-great-great grandpa! I learned an interesting fact while doing this layout. I have exactly 50 pictures of my direct ancestors. Pretty cool! Hopefully someday I will have more!

I am the baby in the title and the two color pictures are my parents. Point to any other person on the page and I can tell you (without cheating) who they are! That's how much I have stared at these pictures over the years! LOL!

The journaling reads: What are the ODDS of me? Have you ever really thought of everything that had to happen to even be born? For generations, everything had to happen exactly as it did for you to be alive. Your great-great-great grandparents had to decide to emigrate from Germany, your great grandpa had to decide to work at that mill so that he could meet your great grandmother. Every detail of the past had to happen exactly as it did or you would not be alive. The odds of anyone ever being born are really astronomical. I have truly won the lottery a million times over by even being born. If every person on this page had not made the exact decisions they made, I would not be here. I owe everything I am to these people ... my ancestors. ~Robyn Marlyn England February 14, 2006

I hope this layout inspires some of you to try my heritage challenge and if not at least to try scrapping outside of your comfort zone a little.