Digital Scrapbooking Tips

Yesterday I went over some of the why's of moving from conventional scrapbooking to digital scrapbooking. Today I thought I'd ramble on about what makes up a digital scrapbook page.


Papers - In conventional scrapbooking we go to Michael's or a scrapbook store and plunk down 59cents for a colorful piece of 12 X 12 paper which becomes the base of our scrapbook page. With digital scrapbooking you have many more options. You can download papers that other scrapbookers have designed, or you can download ANYTHING that appeals to you (as long as it can be sized to a 12 X 12 format. I recommend always using the 12 X 12 because if you want to resize your pages you can easily resize to 6 X 6 or 8 X 8 to fit into an album or picture frame.
The paper for this simple Clay page was actually downloaded from a graphics design place I found. It's really fabric. I couldn't find the site again if my life depended on it, but if you search around you can find lots of ideas for paper. Search on graphics and textile. This is what the base of the Clay page looked liked before I added anything.
Be on the lookout for patterns that appeal to you. Most images on the internet can be downloaded. Or, you can photograph tree trunks and the stucco on a building to use as backgrounds, load them into your graphics program, resize them, play with color, etc. and when you are happy with results, save your new background paper. You can scan all kinds of things, look for texture by crumpling tissue papers - I haven't tried it yet, but place a tee shirt with a logo you like on the scanner and see what develops. Use your imagination (I usually fall way short on the imagination and creative design parts).


To make a heritage page for my mother I scanned an old Harpers magazine I had saved as it was from the month of her birth, May 1914. No, I didn't buy it new. It wasn't 12 X 12, so I resized it so the height was 12 inches. This left a gap on the left which I filled in by cropping a sliver of the right edge of the scanned magazine. Now, of course, that didn't fill the gap, so I just stretched it out to fit and I thought it was a nice texture and contrast to the magazine itself. I have another magazine from my dad's birth month and I can't wait to do that one.

Experiment with the background papers, it's a lot of fun and the possibilities are endless. Yesterday there was an ad on my e-mail page for Dover Publications inviting me to join to get free designs - I checked it out and this is one of the freebies - I will probably lighten it up a little, but I thought it was pretty. Love the colors.

Pictures - This one is self explanatory. I will say, viewing the internet sites and magazines I have purchased the trend seems to pick one picture and create the page with that picture as a focal point. I tend to overload the page with pictures, a holdover, I guess from physical scrapbooking. Visually, the one picture page is probably more effective but I have SO many pictures, lol. In the end, the choice is yours - it is your scrapbook!!

Embellishments - What scrapbookers call embellishments translates to clipart when you cross to the digital side. Maybe the "clipart" has been embellished a little, but it is just a picture, in the end. It can be something as simple as a staple, a brad or a piece of ribbon. In the case of the Clay page above, the raffia and buttons are the embellishments. You can create tags - such as this one or just something simple like this - These last two I printed on cardstock and used in my conventional scrapbook.
These are examples embellishments/clipart that can be used on your pages.















On the sidebar to the right I posted a link to the top 50 scrapbooking sites. You will find lots of useful information, freebies to download, galleries of completed pages to give you inspiration and lots of nice kits to download at reasonable prices. Look for the freebies to get started, tho!! Have fun.

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Clay Aiken
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