digital scrapbooking

A while back I decided to get into a little bit of digital scrapbooking. It was actually more out of necessity as I was trying to make a photo book for my sisters birthday (a book celebrating her 20th birthday and all the great pictures we have from the past 20 years) and was really frustrated with the limitations of the templates offered by the book publishing companies. I decided that I would learn to use photoshop (something I also wanted to learn in order to design our wedding stationery) and I made jpeg files out of the pages I created so I could just put them in the software as full page images thus giving myself complete control over the creative process. I bought Digital Designs for Scrapbooking 2 so that I could learn some basics and pretty much figured out whatever else I needed as I went along. I then published through blurb.com and the book ended up being 76 pages (counting each side as a page) and it really came out beautifully. I was not trying to do true scrapbooking and really did not use embellishments or anything, just some words and quotes that I felt were relevant and a few decorative elements where I felt them necessary like on backgrounds and such. The color scheme for the book in an attempt to unify is black, white, gray and pink. I thought it would be nice to post a few of these pages that I am really proud of. The pages that I am posting are being displayed for layout and/or design elements, not for the photographs they contain. Of course the photo is always part of making a page good; being able to choose the right photo for a layout or design or vice versa is definitely important, but anyway, here are a few of my favorites:

I really liked the way the quote went with the flowers I put on and I also think the black shadow boxes really brought it together and gave it more depth.


This pages is dedicated to our grandmother who passed away and my sister was especially close to her (their birthdays were only a day apart). I managed to use the lyrics to amazing grace in the background and just emphasized the title words in red to make them stand out. It turned out to be a really nice way to use those lyrics while keeping the focus of the page on the picture.
This was an instance where I decided the background just needed something so I decided on an all over flower pattern with the pink to bring the pictures out and keep them in focus.

Perhaps my favorite thing about making designs is playing with the opacity. I love being able to make things fade into the background a bit and control which elements are more prominent. That is what I did with the year in this one. I thought it was important to preserve what year this particular halloween took place along with the happy halloween message and this seemed the perfect way to include it all.

This is actually what I made for the back cover. I thought it would be nice to reuse one of my favorite pictures of the two of us and try out some special effects the I learned using the digital scrapbooking book. It came out really well and ended up being a perfect back cover page.