Scrapbooking is all about expressing your creativity in various ways. Creating your graphics with Paintshop Pro to use as elements to add to your story is one way to do it. But how about personalizing your titles with your own text? Not using fonts or alphas, but actually making use of handwritten words and phrases and using them to decorate your digital scrapbook pages.
With easy access to digital photos from cameras and phones, we have the opportunity to collect a large number of images on our memory cards or hard drive. It can be fun to have so many photos of the same scene, taken within minutes and seconds, capturing various facial expressions or movements. We probably don't want to use them all, but sometimes, we still want to use more than just one or two.
We all know of the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”, and we have certainly seen some of those; photos that are beyond words, photos that “say it all”. The truth is that not all photos say that much. In fact, most photos don’t tell anything to someone who was not there when it was taken. If you want to use those photos in a scrapbooking page, you will have to tell it yourself.
Digital scrapbooking can be an ongoing activity or revolve around a specific project. You might want to create an album for your last vacation, or simply bring out the old photos stacked in a box. Another new type of project has recently combined some photography goals and digital scrapbooking goals; it is called Project 365.
Considering that digital scrapbooking does not take up physical space and can be much less expensive than purchasing the same amount of paper, brushes, and other elements in paper scrapping, it is very easy to gather a lot of supplies. How many digital supplies do you have on your computer? How much paper do you really require for your scrapping needs? How many different flowers? We are all familiar with the 3R’s as in the phrase “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”. It is a great approach for “waste management” that can save money. But did you know that similar principles can be applied to digital scrapbooking? Let’s see how you can do just that.
Although digital scrapbooking supplies are naturally used for digital scrapbooking, you can surely give them a second life. I have found that every now and then, a project comes up and even though it is not scrapbook related, I will open my graphic software and dig into my digital supplies to complete it.
Are you taking tons of photos of people, places and events surrounding you? Do they always turn out great? Out of 100 photos, how many you would consider real keepers? How many you would immediately toss out? If you have that many photos, you probably can spare half of them to fill the trash and still have plenty to play with, but if you are only taking few photos, here and there, or if you are using photos that are in limited numbers, for whatever reason, it is hard to choose to toss out some of them. Even “bad” photos still hold memories, and tell stories. Maybe you only have one or two photos of Grandpa who passed away, or only a handful of photos that were spared from a computer crash. How can you choose if you have so few? Often, you can’t. Or maybe you don’t want to. And really, you don’t have to either as there are ways to use “bad” photos in your digital scrapbook layouts. Various tips here can give you ways to turn either bad or boring images into interesting and fun photos.
How do you scrap? Do you tend to scrap just one page here or there, or plan them around a theme? There is not one good and one bad way to work in a scrapbook project. There are advantages and inconveniences for each. Like many other choices that you will make in this hobby, it will be a matter of personal preferences.
Cassel is the owner and main instructor in the Scrapbook Campus.
She has been teaching digital scrapbooking for over 15 years.
Join us for our next live Master Class, on September 1st