Brandi Kincaid is a true artist! She can draw and illustrate like the best of them and I am so thrilled to introduce you to her in today’s spotlight and share some of her favorite layouts and projects!
Name: Brandi Kincaid
Location: Bellingham, WA
Blog: brandikincaid.com/blog
Instagram: @brandi_kincaid
Shop: the-shiny-bits.myshopify.com
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started crafting: I’ve been crafting since I was very, very little, coming from a long line of seamstresses, knitters, painters, and quilters, but I didn’t start scrapbooking until 2013. I began Project Life in the fall of that year, just after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, in an effort to capture more of this everyday life that changes so quickly. As of July 2016, this crafty adventure is now my full time job, trading in my cubicle for illustration work, and designing for my own shop, as well as other awesome businesses. When I am not drawing or playing with paper, I am usually outside with my nose in a book, spending time with the incredible birds who visit our yard, or inside watching re-watching old, but amazing episodes of “Murder, She Wrote”.
Favorite thing to create: Right now, I’m really loving super simple mini books, and layouts with multiple photos used in creative ways.
What do you love about this hobby? I love that memory keeping encourages me to slow down, pay attention, and then tell about it. It’s so easy to get caught up in the daily flow of life and not always see what’s happening and changing around us, but the act of telling those stories requires that we notice more than just the big, flashy events; memory keeping has the power to make even a Monday magical.
5 fun facts about yourself:
1. My legal name is spelled with a “y”, but I wanted to be unique and special in 6th grade and started using an “i”, and it just kind of stuck. (I also dotted my “i” with a star for the remainder of middle school, so in case there was any doubt about how cool I was, or wasn’t…).
2. I ALWAYS have gummy bears handy when I’m crafting.
3. I know all of the lyrics to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and I sing/rap them as loud as I can while listening to the song very, very loud through my wireless headphones every time I am working on a major deadline.
4. I once dressed up as a Picasso Painting for Halloween in fourth grade, and won an award for best costume as “trash”. To be fair, it was during a very big anti-littering time in my elementary school, so I guess it was easy to think I was going for “don’t be a litter bug” and not “this is my cubist period”.
5. I could eat bread and jam for every meal.
YOU ARE THE GLITTER TO MY GLUE by Brandi Kincaid
I knew there was no one I could choose just one of my dear friend’s photos for this layout about her, so I decided to use them all by “clipping” them into the glue bottle shape I used digitally, and I am so glad I did! This layout paired these printed digital elements with some floral die cuts and lots of glitter, the last of which is a little out of my comfort zone, but it was so much fun to pull together.
WE BECOME STORIES by Brandi Kincaid
It’s really important to me to tell ALL my stories, the good and the tough ones. Using bright, beautiful colors and interesting shapes help create a balance on the page when the story I am telling is a little bit harder to tell. I used a repeating label pattern for both the photos and and journaling in order to create this layout. A mixture of very old photos and new ones made this page such a gift, telling one story with both the past and the present.
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT by Brandi Kincaid
I love documenting the very small, seemingly silly pieces of life, so figuring out how to arrange a bunch of photos of my feet as I learned to get a good shot over time, as well as my illustrated instructions for how I made it work, was a fun challenge for this layout. Making the shapes of the photos work together really helped create a layout that could hold a lot without loosing track of its story.
ON THE PLAYLIST by Brandi Kincaid
To capture a story about all of the mystery podcasts I was listening to, I thought about how pieces together the parts of a story are not all that unlike the quilting my mother and grandmother were always doing, so I echoed that connection with the little paper polygons, rebuilding the photo out of the shapes.
DRIVE by Brandi Kincaid
I love making my photos work for me, and because I don’t have a wide format printer, pulling this image of a lovely bouquet over two standard 8.5×11 pages offered room to journal, too. I love using my electronic cutting machine to create large, simple titles to put it all together
WOW right?! Thank you so much to Brandi for letting me shine the spotlight on her and I can’t wait to continue following along in all of her adventures and endeavors!
Great pages! Love the glue bottles, and the We Become page is so meaningful. Thanks for sharing.