Brought to you by Linda Harrison- your Independent Close To My Heart Consultant

Idea of the Month

Scrapbooking Secrets:  Simple Tricks for Making Your Scrapbook Layouts Look More Professional- Part I

Are you convinced you are simply not creative enough to design your own scrapbook pages?  Are your layouts "missing something?"  Are you always searching scrapbook magazines and idea books for layout ideas to copy?   If you answered, "Yes!"  then you've come to the right place.  Creating interesting, more-professional-looking scrapbook pages is NOT beyond your reach, and it does NOT have to be time-consuming (hey... if I can learn these things, you can, too!).  This month I want to share with you some simple design concepts that you can use to make your pages look more professional... without adding tons of time doing it.  

If you are/were like most beginning scrapbookers, your first scrapbook pages were pretty simple.  You probably didn't know too much- or perhaps anything- about color choice or page design.  Glue on a few photos, add a diecut, sticker or stamped image or two, and you were a happy scrapper.  As you got better, you bought all kinds of idea books so you could copy what you saw, but you still didn't have much confidence creating your own designs.  Well, this month I want to give you some  confidence by teaching you some design elements that can make any layout more eye-appealing and more meaningful.

We're going to use the following simple layouts as an example for our discussion.  I am going to walk you through the design concepts that are behind how this layout was created:

Step 1:  Choose Your Focal Point Photos

Scrapbooking is more than putting photos randomly on a page.  Ideally, you should choose 1 photo as a focal point for each page.  Usually, these will be your favorite photos, or the ones that best convey the overall message or theme of the layout.  My favorite photos are of Ian with the birthday cake on the left page, and Ian on the roller coaster on the right page.  You should have been able to pick those out right away when you first looked at the layout.  Why?  Well, we'll talk about that as we go on....

Step 2:  Choose Your Color Scheme Wisely

Ideally, your color scheme should accentuate your focal point photos.  It's nearly impossible to choose a color scheme that will accommodate ALL the photos you may want to include in a layout, so concentrate on the colors in your focal point photos instead.  After all, those are the ones that mean the most, right?  Of my 2 focal point photos, I love the birthday cake photo the most.  What part of the photo do I want to accentuate?  Well, Ian's smiling face, of course.  To do that, I looked that the colors in and around his face and saw the pretty yellow sky.  So, I chose Close To My Heart TM Buttercup Cardstock because it closely matches the yellow sky.  Matting this photo on Buttercup will accentuate the yellow areas of the photo, and thus the eye is drawn to his face.  (For much more about color choice and paper layering, SFTM Club members have access to a Past Idea of the Month, "Paper Layering").

This is a powerful concept!  If you are not convinced, try this experiment at home:  choose a photo that has several different colors in it.  Let's say they are red bucket, a yellow ball, and a blue sky.  Take turns laying the photo on red, yellow and blue cardstock or paper.  When laid on the red cardstock, the red bucket will seem to "pop out" of the photo.  When laid on yellow cardstock, you'll "see" the yellow ball more prominently, and so on.  Now try layering on 2 or more colors... you should "see" more of the photo as more colors are added.  This is an important concept to keep in mind as you are choosing colors!

Two or 3 colors is the maximum you should be trying to use in a layout.  Following our Reflections/ABC Scrapbook Program TM guidelines, I chose 1 other color to work with: Aspen Green.  Aspen Green is in the same Close To My Heart color "Season," so I know it will go very nicely with the Buttercup (remember, we have 60 colors divided between 5 color Seasons that you can choose from!).  Plus, it is a nice "boy" color for my little boy.  And the advantage of using stamps and inks in your layouts is that you can customize the colors to whatever color(s) accentuate your focal point photos. 

Step 3:  Create Your Base Pages

At this point you can create your BASE pages with whatever stamps, inks, papers or other supplies you have chosen.  Please don't add  photos quite yet.  Right now you are just creating the background or base of the layout.  That might be as simple as using a pre-printed sheet of paper like our Background/Texture paper, or creating a border along the top, side or bottom of the page.   For my layouts, I used  Close To My Heart Exclusive Inks TM in Buttercup and Aspen Green.  I followed 2 layout concepts in our Reflections/ABC Scrapbook I Program TM so I knew just where to stamp my images: the Bottom Border and the Front and Center concepts.  I love using Bottom Borders: just lay down a piece of our Background/Texture Paper, stamp a strip of stamped white cardstock, and layer it on top.  For the Front and Center concept, stamp a 6" wide strip of white cardstock (these measurements are for a 12x12" page) and layer it on top of a base sheet of Background/Texture paper.  You can't see a lot of my Front and Center design because I've chosen to include a lot more photos on this page than usual, but I think you can get the idea.

To be continued in December 2002...

Learn how to:

Happy scrapping!

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