Behind the Scenes: Inside the Creative Process
When it comes to the creative process, there really are no rules. Every designer has their own preferred method of bringing to life the images they first envision in their imagination.
For me, I typically use a brainstorming method that starts with placing onto the canvas any elements that might fit what I am looking for, then using a process of elimination to get rid of the non-contenders one by one until what remains is the design that fully expresses my initial vision. This is how most of my designs are born, whether for t-shirts, hats, mugs, posters, book covers or anything else I am working on.
In this example, I am designing section divider pages for an e-book I am working on. For the Part 4 divider page, I am looking for a country road photo to use as a background image. Using Canva, I started by doing an element search for "country road." As I scroll the available images, I place any that I like directly onto the canvas. In this case, I chose three images. Sometimes I start with as many as six to eight, especially if my idea is still developing in my head. Here, I had a pretty solid idea of what I was looking for, so I only used three images to start with.
Once I see them together, I then use a process of elimination to remove the ones that aren't really speaking to me until I get it down to two images. Here, I got rid of the one with the blue sky background. I was now left with two similar images to choose from.
Next, I usually go ahead create an extra canvas, one with each image on it, so I can place each image into the design to see how it works with the overall layout. The idea here is to do a side-by-side comparison to see which one really resonates. In this case, since the image will be used as a full-page background image, I stretched each image to fit the full page size. Seeing them both in the overall design layout, I quickly knew which one I wanted to use - the one on the bottom.
Finally, I simply adjusted the transparency and moved the image to the back layer so the rest of the design would sit on top of it, then deleted the page with the image I was not going to use. And voila - a newly designed section divider page is born!
And now you know a little more about how many of the WaterSong Creations designs come to life.