Gold Rush ~ brand new templates by Amber!!
 

These are absolutely gorgeous! And they might make clustering a little bit less intimidating. I'm always so nervous about piling on the elements, but seeing how you do it here in these templates really makes me want to go for it! Stunning.

Thank you! It makes me so happy that others love my designs! I absolutely adore clustering elements and was doing it on my CT layouts long before it became a "thing." I like to consider myself an expert at clusters and I really think that you'll find my templates make it very easy to pile the elements onto your page and love your end result! You can replace any of the flowers or other shapes in my clusters with any flowers and other fun elements the designer includes in the kit you're using.

The key to clustering is layering your items in a way that makes sense to actually layer them if they were actual physical flowers and elements. So like, you want to put the bigger and more flat things in the back and smaller more fluffy or bulky things towards the front. And you don't always have to put the smaller things in the center either. Think of the way things grow in nature, or the way a flowering bush would grow. You want to build your cluster in a way that sort of replicates that, if that makes sense?

And another trick is to use your flowers and greenery and layer in a way that you can tuck those fun elements like a bicycle or an animal, or whatever other fun item you love, into the cluster and hide the parts that look weird or make it look like you just shoved a random bike into a bouquet, LOL!!

Really it's all about playing around, adjusting and layering and shadowing every single item so whats in the back looks closer to your background paper and the layers look increasingly proper in depth as you pile them up. Anything that is laying CLOSE on top of another item requires a smaller shadow. Anything that is laying ABOVE or AWAY from the item underneath it, requires a larger shadow. And keep ALL your shadows the SAME DIRECTION.

Hopefully those are a few tricks that might help you feel a little more confident in clustering. And don't forget, you're working digitally.. that means you can play and pile and DELETE and start again as many times as you want until you get it right!!

Blessed Be!
Amber <3