Three New Layouts from last summer -- Vegas and San Diego

We made a stop in Vegas on our way home.  Here's my layout of the iconic sign.  I'll probably add some handwritten journaling to the bottom right.

This was from a sketch from Paper Secrets:  Their twist is to use dots and stripes.  The stripes are obvious, I'm hoping they'll see the dots in the photo around the Vegas sign or consider the turquoise horizontal piece as blobby dots.  

I loved the sketch -- it looks so Halloweeny, but I like how it came worked for my summer "night lights" photos also.  I put together three pps from 2 manufacturers and 3 stacks  -- the striped is Colorbok, the labels and horizontal piece are K & Co.  Wasn't sure about mixing them (I have such a hard time mixing patterns -- especially the labels and stripes together was hard for me), but I like how it looks all together.  The cs pieces are just scraps. I tried coloring in the lettering on the title to look like neon more -- but it got muddy and you couldn't read it.  There's a lot of white space -- more than I'm used to and it's Really white!  But I think it's effective.   

The next is a 2-page spread about Ben's Dancing in the Luxor lobby.  

We were standing around, trying to decide what to do, and he just started dancing all over the open area.  As I say in my journaling, not the be-bop in place, but the arms and legs flailing, high-energy, all over the place dancing.  We were laughing.  Nobody else seemed to notice -- guess it's Vegas.  Then he threw a shoe and stopped.  I ran across a quote from Nietsche about dancing:  "Those that were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music."  Which led me to two more Nietsche quotes:  " We should consider lost any day in which we have not danced at least once." and "You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."  Beyond the quotes, I was inspired by Devra's challenge at Scrappin-Peeps to use a different palette than we usually use.  I love color -- and tend to use the deeper colors more often.  I started to use pastels on this, but it just wasn't working.  So I went with neutrals -- I use them even less than I use pastels.  Black, white, grey, brown.  The only color in this layout comes from the dancing.  Symbolic, eh?  I thought it was clever LOL.  And -- there was this cool sketch at Bird is the Word with the word -- Dance: 

I used it as inspiration for the left side.

Last, is a layout I did about the guy who stacks rocks down in Seaport Village in San Diego.  It is incredible to see.  Such a fun trip.  I used a sketch from Let's Scrap, but didn't get it done in time for the challenge.  I'm so slow these days.

Thanks for dropping by -- love to see your comments.