Scrapping off-theme from a kit

Often, you could find some wonderful ready-made kits. You can purchase, download, or earn them. Kits will commonly have a general theme that you can identify with the colors, the designs, and the name. This is great when you want to scrap in that theme, but sometimes, you may want to scrap photos that are off that theme. Can you do that?

Look at the content

Although some kits can clearly have a definite theme, it is mostly obvious in the elements, wordarts, and patterns. If you ignore those obvious elements, what do you have? You probably have a series of solid papers, and possibly some generic patterns (stripes, polkadots, plaids, and such). If you have ribbons and bows, they might also be quite generic. They fit the kit because of the colors, but they can be used with any other theme. Fasteners can also be fairly neutral and generic.

Let's look at this large kit from Marisa Lerin. The name of the kit is This is spooky. Although it does not say it in the name, it is themed as a Halloween/fall kit.

What does it contain? At first glance, we can see that some of the designs are very obvious but others can be used with other themes:

The word elements can also be a giveaway for the theme and might not be suitable if you were to use them for a different theme. However, some of them can be used in other themes:

Use the non-themed elements

I had a nice photo of a sun pillar and wanted to showcase it. That picture is not Halloween-related, and it was actually taken in January. Since the photo included some orange tones, I felt it was suitable to use this kit as-is to start. Here is my initial version of the page.

I mixed some light and dark color papers, and mostly-solid and patterned. Other than the orange tones, you could not tell that was initially created as a Halloween kit. In addition, some of the word elements were fairly generic. The Sweater Weather wordart was very appropriate for this January photo, don't you think?

Modify what you have

With PaintShop Pro (and other graphic programs), you have a lot of options to change colors as needed. Using different colorizing techniques, I changed the color for most of the papers. I first changed the color of the background to yellow and then used the color harmony tool in PaintShop Pro to find a triad of colors, which included a blue and pink. Now, the result looks very different.

Use other supplies

Although you might find it convenient to use papers and elements from a single kit, you don't have to limit yourself to only using what is included. In fact, you can also find another kit with a similar color palette, or just pick some other supplies in your stash. It is often easy to find some other generic elements, like buttons, staples, flowers, or ribbons. If you need to, you can also adjust the colors to fit your page. Even more, in your stash, you might find some elements that would match your theme. In my page, I found a plain white alpha that I used to write a title. I also found some snowflakes to decorate my photo.

To show a comparison, I used the original colors of the kit (and the initial page) with the extra elements from my stash.

Looking at the combination of elements and papers, you could not tell that they were from totally different sources, could you?

An opportunity to reuse your supplies

Seeing how you can use a kit in an off-themed, you can now reuse your supplies in a wider variety of projects. We all know that digital scrapbooking allows you to reuse the same supplies multiple times, but when you use them creatively, off-theme, the possibilities are endless (and you get more than your money's worth!).