Digital scrapbooking

Before Josh and I were trying to get pregnant I used to design and create digital scrapbooking pages and kits. I sold some in stores online but made only a few bucks a month. It was mainly for my love of creating things so that didn’t bother me too much. While I was focusing on trying to create a family I didn’t really have much desire to expend my creative energy on something that is so unimportant compared with creating a life! 😉 And of course now that our wonderful, perfect daughter is here I haven’t had much time or desire to work on scrapbooking either.

Occasionally the mood gets me again and I start creating when Lillian is napping on my lap or nursing. I am now so extra thankful for quiet days like this with her. Last Sunday showed me that some days can be extremely tough. I felt so badly for her!! I felt so useless to not be able to fix whatever was bothering her. 🙁 Thank God Lillian seems to be over whatever was troubling her last Sunday. That was so awful to hear my baby crying and seeing her so unhappy and not being able to soothe her with anything I tried. I am so grateful that she’s back to her happy smily self now!

A couple of weeks ago I created some digital scrapbook pages. I wasn’t sure which photo looked better with the first template so I used two different ones. I am thinking of maybe opening an etsy store to sell these templates and/or kits. We’ll see. For now, here is a rundown on how I made these.

A standard layout size is 12 x1 2 inches (or 3600 x 3600 px at 300 dpi) so that’s what I started with for these layouts.

Open a blank document of that size in your photo program (Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Paint, etc.). Then fill the background layer with whatever color you want to have as your main background. I used a soft gray here.

Next, create a new layer. CREATE NEW LAYERS FOR EVERY ELEMENT YOU ADD NEXT. That’s essential so you can tweak your placements and shadows and/or brightness and contrast on individual items.

Then decide what the main focus of your layout will be. A frame? Just a photo? A pop of bright color? For the one above, it is the baroque frame and photo within that is the main focus. The reason the frame looks so realistic is because it IS real. I took a picture of an old frame we have here at home. I then edited the picture in photoshop by extracting the frame from the background around it leaving just the frame and a blank space inside it. (I will go into an in-depth tutorial on extracting sometime because that is a whole post in itself!)

Resize your frame element to a suitable scale for the page. (Always resize down, never up! Don’t want any grainy or blurry elements!)

You can add a drop shadow if you want. I wanted this page to have a very three-dimensional feel to it so I made large drop shadows on most elements. (Another tip: try to keep your drop shadow angles consistent on your layout. You want everything to have the same “light source” for the most realistic look. Sometimes it’s ok to mess with it a bit though!)

Now for the butterflies, bushes, and flowers, I didn’t create these particular elements. The butterflies came from another designer (Outlaw.by.Design). Years ago I had written to her asking permission to use some of her elements in commercial applications. She graciously agreed so I’m covered if I ever DO decide to sell this or any other page using her butterflies. I could have taken pictures of butterflies and extracted them myself but I was already taking too much time on this project in my opinion! The bushes and flowers came from royalty-free picture tubes in PSP. Just throw them around on the page and see where you like them best.

I added twinkles and sparkles around the butterflies to add a magical fairy-like feel to the page.

I also added a sunburst to the back of everything for added effect. The sunburst is a filter in either PSP or photoshop. You can change magnitude, brightness, and placement.

The quote is one from Louisa May Alcott that I altered a bit to give it a slightly more positive vibe.

Then I created a circle paper tag using one of my digital scrapbooking papers, and chose a font and labeled my page/photo “Lillian Eve October 2011”.

 This next one is a bit more simple. I used Picnik for the most part. I again started with a blank 12 x 12 page in photoshop. I saved it as a blank white square.

I then uploaded it to picnik and did some effects. I think it was under Seasonal, then holiday, then holiday textures. That is the snowflake edge to the page.

Then you can use whatever picture you want on your layout and upload it to Picnik and add the postage stamp frame.

The glitter snowflakes I created using custom snowflake shapes in photoshop (should come standard with the program). I filled them with glitter I created digitally using another program called artrage.

Then just add text and play with angles and opacity on all your different layers.

That’s it!