 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today we're going to talk about the rule of thirds. It's an art and design concept that is not a rule necessary, it's more of a guideline and we're going to talk about how that plays out. The rule of thirds basically says take your piece of work and draw a grid over top of it like a tic-tac-toe so that you can see where your elements are. Most of us want to put everything in the middle. Dead center are symmetrical brains, we want it to go in the middle but it's a little more pleasing and a little more creative of action if we can put it in one of the thirds on the outside. It can be the left third, the right third, top or bottom but it creates some movement so your eye is pulled over from one side to the other and I'm going to have a bunch of examples to show you how that works and you can do the top, the bottom, you can do a combination of them and they can crisscross over too just because I'm drawing this little grid doesn't mean everything's going to fit perfectly into those grids. Let's take a look at how that plays out in a scene card using some stamps from Purple Onion Designs. They have a lot of new stamps in the Stacey Yakula collection that are background stamps so this one is called Town and we tend naturally to just want to stamp in the middle of the page. I trimmed off the left and right so it's snugged in from the edges a little bit but it's basically in the middle. The most intense, the brightest color is in that center one with center building and in the grid you can see it's just really collected there in the middle and the get happy is in the center but at least it's in the bottom third but what happens when we move it to the upper right corner? It has a little more air, it has a little more life to it, draws more attention to the get happy rather than hiding it down there in the bottom would be even better if we colored that road and left more space out there for it. I then took the stamp and lowered it. I made it down a little bit lower on my card. I colored that road so it anchors that whole image to the bottom of the card and then gave myself lots of sky space. Now you could leave this blank but I put clouds in there because I've been obsessing about coloring clouds but it gives my sentiment that birthday sentiment just lots of room in that upper section to just float and have lots of attention drawn to it even though I still have the intricacy of everything left on the card and I get a similar effect when I turn it the opposite direction and I do a vertical card. I've dropped the image down below that center square and left lots and lots of room for the sky and colored that road so that the rest of the card has lots of impact. Another one of the new scene elements is mountains. It has these mountains and trees pretty simple and straightforward. It can be used in a lot of different ways and one of which is to just make it really simple just color the mountains themselves and leave empty sky. Like I said you don't have to color the clouds but if you leave that space up there and then allow your sentiment to set off to the side you still get that curve of your eye moving around the page without it just being dead center in the middle. This one I moved the image the the background image way up high so that those mountains feel like they're off in the distance and I can create a scene with some of the other new images in the front and I have no idea if that little bike could tow a motorhome but it is that's just the way I decided to color this one and my sentiment is off on that left hand side. The country road background stamp is similar to another background stamp they do have if you like these round trees which are so much fun. This one has a road that curves two different directions so if you have different vehicle stamps or different little critters that are walking different directions you can make them walk along this path. I wanted to use this VW with the little critters in it but it didn't match with the way the road was so I just added only the portion of the background stamp that had the trees in and I masked out the bottom section so I could draw my own road in and did that so that the center quadrant just has one of the little critters in it and everything else spills out from the middle and here's a card where I wanted to force things into the middle because I really wanted to force the idea of looking down that road so I lowered the stamp so that it was in the end of that road was right in the middle and did all my coloring so that the brightest color was in that center that left me with the ability to use that outside third for my sentiment but not really do that for my image itself so you don't have to use all of a background image in order to make a really beautiful card. Some of the other new images that work really well together are the ocean waves with a bunch of different images but in particular with the sailboat. The sailboat has these little critters in it already and I've stamped this one right in the middle so the mast is right dead center in the card the image itself is weighted a little bit to the left because it's got more in the front of the boat than the back and the critters are in the front and I've used the fact that you've got all that detail in the critters and then your eye moves down to that life ring and then to the sentiment so I've pulled your eye across the image by connecting the most interesting parts of the image you don't get lost in the sky and the water you just kind of see them but you're drawn much more to the elements on the card specifically. Now if I were to take that image and move it over and move it down a little bit which I've done with the boat I have room now to put my sentiment more integrated into the image it's not just hanging off the bottom and I also have room to add another image behind it I thought I have room for a little dingy and a little mouse in the dingy so why not because that makes it fun right and I also incorporated connecting the water in the background to the sky so instead of having my water just stop at the water line where the bottom of the boat is I created an atmosphere around the card where it encompasses the whole scene and not just letting it float on the tippy top of water which generally both set into the water when you look at the two of them in comparison you can tell that the water line comes up much higher on the boat on the right I did that by when I put my ink on it I wiped off with a damp cloth I wiped off that bottom edge and was able to set the boat down deeper in the water I did the same thing with the little dingy in the back that's actually a wagon it's not a dingy it's it's a wagon stamp and I wiped off the bottom of it so we could also set down into the water and look like it's really floating in water rather than floating on top of water the ocean waves can also work well with something like the sand dunes to create scenes and there's lots of other elements that you'll see in these next couple cards too on this first card I stamped the sand dunes masked them out then stamped the lighthouse masked it out and then stamped the waves behind it I gave the ocean a horizontal line in the background rather than just letting it be wavy so that it would give that impression of distance and the lighthouse is colored more realistically you could also make this look like it was made of sand just color in the same colors as you would the sand but on this one I actually added some little gray bricks to it that sort of thing to make it seem a little more realistic and the one third rule you can tell the main part of the portion of the image is down in the bottom that weight is down in the bottom so my sentiment can just float up there in that sky a variance on that is to stamp them in the same kind of order the dunes and then the ocean behind it but move them up a little higher so I have room for a foreground scene where I stamped those two little critters from the new collection and I made my own grasses and my own fence the waves I left a whole lot of white so that I could actually make them look like they were cascading and crashing and again I made them soft in the distance where they meet up with the sky because if you look out the ocean you sometimes can't really tell where the ocean waves end and the sky begins and this created a whole atmospheric scene around which those two little elements the dunes and the ocean were the beginning now this card is another one where I tried to force the attention into the center and I did that by the way that I colored it as well as the way I laid out the images so I stamped my sand dunes first and then did my chair and the palm tree and the palm tree is in the right third the chair is a little bit below the center but I wanted to make sure that my focal coloring was toward that center area and a little bit below it and when I colored everything else in the outside edge is really dark it pulled the attention into the middle so wherever your focal point is if you want to create a dramatic card like this just let your coloring elsewhere really dictate where you want people's eye to go you want them to zoom in on that center portion if you found this educational please do click that like button you can subscribe by clicking on my face or watch some other videos here there's supply links in the doobly-doo down below all those stamps from purple onion designs and there's more information on my blog if you would like to go pin these images for future reference and I'll talk to you guys later