Designer Spotlight with Paige Evans: Jenn Picard

It’s Wednesday which means another designer spotlight! I’m Paige Evans and today I’m so happy to feature talented designer Jenn Picard!

Name: Jenn Picard
Location: BC, Canada
Blog: anewinkonlife.typepad.com
Instagram: @jennpicard76
Pinterest: @jpicard

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started crafting: I am a mom to three children; Abby almost 16, Logan almost 12, and Isabelle 8. I am married to a chef and so grateful for his culinary expertise as I really dislike cooking (I find it stressful) but I love to bake. I am a freelance makeup artist and mostly do weddings and photo shoots. I started paper crafting almost 8 years when a friend invited me to a “home party” to learn how to make cards. I was terrible at it and messed up the sample I was making; crooked stamping and all, lol. But I completely fell in love with the idea of stamping and making handmade crafts. I was hooked from that day on and determined to make my own Christmas cards that year and start scrapbook albums for my three kids. Boy was I ambitious! I ended up being a Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator for five years and during that time won their Artisan Award (a creative competition) and made many wonderful friends within the paper crafting community. For the last several years I had become primarily a card maker and made the occasional layout and pocket page. This all changed January of this year as I made a commitment to record our family’s stories using Project Life in a monthly format; it has totally reignited my passion of memory keeping and scrapbooking.

Favorite thing to create: Hmmmm that’s a tough question as I love creating layouts and cards, so both?

What do you love about scrapbooking/card making? I have always been a visual person so to be able to combine my love of taking pictures with my desire to preserve our family’s memories by scrapbooking is a total win for me. There is nothing better then flipping through an album with my kids or even by myself and remember a certain time when I see a photo and read the journaling. With card making I love how a handmade card can brighten anyone’s day; I know I love to receive a little happy mail. Now I just need to get betting at actually mailing them!

Five fun facts about yourself:
1. I am clumsy and have been known to fall up stairs and walk into walls.
2. I have a 5 month old basset hound puppy that probably has more photos taken of him than my children.
3. I am obsessed with watching any type of crime drama; seriously I could watch Criminal Minds and The Forensic Files all day long. Oh, and 20/20 Murder Mystery. In reality I don’t watch very much TV.
4. I have an annoying habit of talking too much, as in being too wordy and trying to over explain something (gee, like you couldn’t tell that from reading this!).
5. Paper crafting is truly my therapy. (And no, I will not say it is cheaper than actual therapy, as my husband would strongly disagree with that statement when walking into my scrap room.) It is my happy place and I have “met” some really amazing people by being involved in this industry.

Here is the fabulous page Jenn created for her spotlight:
YOU & ME by Jenn Picard

I love mixing black and white photos with colour photos. I tend to use lots of patterned paper on my layouts and for this page I just kept with blacks/whites/grays and two colours that complement them well; yellow and blue. When creating layouts I usually keep with an uncomplicated design and have the photos be the focus along with one bold element, which in this case is my title work. By using such large letters I didn’t have much room to journal and didn’t want to clutter the clean aesthetic so I created a small pocket behind the photo square photo and slipped in a tag with hidden journaling.

TRICK OR TREAT by Jenn Picard

This page was created several years ago but still continues to be one of my favourites. Not only because those photos of my son are adorable (right?) but because I did a lot of layered stamping to create unique embellishments like the tickets. I also find it fun that I could pull off adding ribbon to a “boy” page.

THANKFUL CARD by Jenn Picard

I love adding layers to my cards and almost always use patterned papers on my cards as well. This card has all the things I love; pretty patterns, stamping, a little fussing cutting, small amount of stitching, and mist. I also tilted my main image panel to add a little more interest.

YOU’RE SO SWEET by Jenn Picard

One of my absolute favourite things to do with large line art stamp images is to “paper piece” For all of the fruit images, I stamped them on patterned papers then fussy cut them out. This is such a fun way to ‘colour’ the image but add a little more texture and interest.

PROJECT LIFE by Jenn Picard

This is a more recent Project Life page that I created for my album and it focuses solely on my oldest. I had a fun mini photo shoot with her recently just in our backyard. Normally she is dodging my camera so when she agreed to snap a few quick pictures I jumped at the opportunity. I decided to do a full 12×12 pocket page because I really wanted to capture who she is right at this moment. I have a feeling this will always be one of my favourites.

Thank you so much for sharing your talent with us Jenn!