Cropped Round 4

I made it to Round 4! So I've made it further than last year, yay! Here is the 4th challenge:

"Round Four is Entrée, and many would say this is the most important part of your meal... It's where you get your sustenance, and most of the time, the rest of the courses are planned out just to complement it. So, in the world of Cropped!, that can only mean one thing: JOURNALING! Whatever your subject, we want you to tell us all about it, in all it's glory."

And, of course, to use the mystery basket.

I went with something lighthearted, and my journaling is fantasy based, just for fun. I "discovered" Star Trek in the last couple of years with the new movies. Netflix has the first three seasons from the '60s in their streaming service, and we've been watching that as a family. I had the idea for this page stored away in my "Things to Scrap" folder. I even had a photo collage already picked out.

This is my favorite of the four pages I've made so far. One of the things I like about it its minimal use of scrapping supplies. Besides the four mystery basket ingredients, there is only a single additional paper used for the background. Technically, there is one additional thing - the gold foil effect, but that only changed the look of things, it didn't add any pieces.

I applied a radial blur filter to the starry background paper to give that sense of fast motion, similar to the effect on the TV show. I also applied some kind of warping or pinching (I don't remember exactly what I did) on the brocade overlay. I think it nicely reinforces the "warp" idea, also taken from the show. I applied an angle gradient to its layer mask, which I thought had a retro modern feel.

Normally, when I use full justification on text, I use the "Justify last left" setting. With that setting,  the last line of the paragraph is left alone. On a whim, I tried the "Justify all" setting which caused the words to be spaced out to fill the line. I thought it actually looked good and again contributed to that feeling of movement.

There are great pages in the Cropped gallery. I really hope I make it through to the next round. I feel better about this one than I did last week, but you just never know. It is kind of "out there." Here's hoping.

Thanks for stopping by.