Artsy Layered Template 274 https://www.oscraps.com/shop/Artsy-Layered-Template-No.-274.html
Bravura Artplay Palette https://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Bravura.html
Multimedia Flowers 5 https://www.oscraps.com/shop/MultiMedia-Flowers-No.-5.html
Labels: Pumpkin Patch Artplay Palette https://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Pumpkin-Patch.html

Photoshop Elements 14

Journaling:
"The light in Iceland never ceases to amaze. Our little apartment had a big bathroom with an operable skylight, and we would find ourselves sticking out our heads and snapping pictures at all hours of the day and night. Comparisons with our Autumn visit and especially our Winter visit--when the sun rose around 10:30 AM and set around 2:30 PM--were inevitable. But each seasonal rotation has its own beauty. Iceland in any season has the kind of light that makes you feel porous, like all you want to do is sit around and absorb, absorb, absorb. Its hard to see in the photos, but our bathroom view afforded us a view of a glacier as well as a ringside seat to sunrise. In the second photo, the glacier is just to the right of the building with the brown roof. --Reykjavik, July 2018"

This was a great template for my compare-and-contrast layoutas soon as I flipped all the layers to the right so that the frames were horizontal and matched my photos. I clipped in my pictures, then figured out the background. I wanted a deep black, and to achieve that layered Artsy Solids #4 over #1 on multiply blending mode. Once the title was in place, I added the labels, then sat back to figure out how I was going to balance out the warm colors in the photos. Somewhat counterintuitively, I started by recoloring the title blue, which is complementary to orange on the color wheel. Then I used an orange fill on the template layer called recolor and also tinted one of the template transfers with orange. Gotta love templates for making things easy! I found that with just a little brushwork, I was happy with the balance of colors on the page. To fill out the left side, I added a little blue brushwork, a multimedia flower, foliage, and buttons, changing the color of one of the buttons by clipping on an orange brush.