What is in a scrapbooking kit?

If you are new to digital scrapbooking, you might have some questions about the supplies that you can purchase, download or create. Let's have an overview of what is a scrapbooking kit.

What is a kit?

The most common reason why one would want to download a ready-made kit is that all the parts of that "kit" will be made around a common color palette and theme, which gives a more cohesive look when you want to pick and chose elements from that kit. Of course, you can also create your own kits and it will follow similar rules.

Every kit will include some paper and embellishments. That is the basics of every single kit you can get. Papers and embellishments are essential. In addition, you will often find other types of elements, like alpha, wordart.

Let's have a look at this kit from Marisa Lerin (you can get this kit HERE). This is the kit preview.

Papers

Obviously, a scrapbook project will need some papers to use, at the very least, as background support for your photos. A kit can include as few as 3 papers or as many as 100 or more. They will follow a color palette and will usually mix and match well together. Some kits will include mostly solid papers, others will combine solid papers with patterned papers.

Embellishments

These elements used to add some decoration to the project. The various embellishments in a kit will normally be consistent with the theme or be somewhat generic, yet using the same color palette. Embellishments can be quite varied and can include fasteners, stickers, ribbons, buttons, frames, flowers, tags, scattered elements, and much more. The type of embellishments included in a kit will depend on the theme but also on the designer's style.

Alpha

Some designers will include alphas in their kit so you have themed characters to use for titles and other large text. Just like the other elements of the kit, the alpha will match the color palette and might even use some of the same patterns as the papers. Sometimes, an alpha will be provided on a single page, and the user will have to "cut out" the letters as needed, or they will include individual files for each letter, digit, and character. Both types of alpha can be used in PaintShop Pro.

Wordart

Although not every kit will include wordart, some designers are very skilled and love to showcase their abilities, which is always welcome for the user. Wordart will be a combination of text and images or text shaped in a certain way. Typically, they are monochrome, although some will have colors to match the palette. If a wordart is only black, and you want it a different color, you can easily change that in PaintShop Pro. There is even a tutorial HERE.

Others

Other supplies that can be included in some scrapbooking kits are journaling cards, masks, templates, quick pages, and more. We'll have a look at some of those in future posts.