Archive for the ‘Digital Scrapbook Layouts’ Category

Courtesy of Biograffiti we have a fantastic giveaway going on right now at DigiScrapQuickPages.com’s Facebook page! It is a 33 page album with 26 papers! It is designed for a new baby’s first year. But, the journaling inserts are completely customizable! So, the album can be used for anything. She has two versions of the album, one with white stitching and the other with brown stitching.

Check out what I’ve done with the templates for non-baby pages and then go register to win! I’m accepting entries until midnight Friday night and will announce the winner Saturday morning!

Credits–Templates by Biograffiti other items:

• clouds and spider web-MK Designs
• plaid paper, tree-Kitty Chen
• birthday things-Julie Bullock
• pumpkin and owl-Laura Deacetis

The last template I made was functional, and straight from a beautiful layout but the template itself wasn’t pretty. So, I thought I’d work on making a prettier template the next time. Only when I finished it I guess it was too pretty, because I decided to use it as-is for one of my own layouts!

I love these photos of my girls on an early spring day. This was the first time Raeleigh rode in the Jeep. Danielle was finally getting good enough at driving that we let her take Raeleigh for a ride. Although I think Danielle just knew how to drive in circles!

Anyway, this template was created especially for my Facebook Fans! You can get it by clicking on “Fan Offer” in the left column of the page. You can even use the frame over again on other layouts! I hope some of you will link up your layouts using the template or the frame!

I also created a Quick Page for those of you that want to use the Template as-is….you’ll just need to drop in your photos behind the Quick Page. And of course delete the parts of photos that overlap another frame.

Credits: Flower; heart and leaves: Hawksmount brushes; Distressed edge: Amanda Rockwell; Paper texture: Miss Tina; Dots background: Just Jamie; Frame template: Luiza Garay; Shadows: One Little Bird; Swirls: obsidian dawn; Painted edge of frame:atomic cupcake; Styles: Miss Vivi

You know, I never would have thought I’d “need” to get some stacked background templates. But, I’ve found the ones in Scrapping with Liz’s Recyclables II surprisingly nice to have on hand. So her “Frames, Frames, Frames” pack of page starters is now on my wishlist!

Can I just say again I love using templates. Templates in digi-scrap land are oh so much more of a time saver than “sketches” in paper-scrap land! Using this template my layout was started in a matter of about two minutes! It is nice to eliminate some decision making to speed things along.

And working with kits eliminates more decision paralysis, because you know everything goes together. The papers, word art, frame, and splatters are from an Oscraps collab that you can get on sale right now for only about $5. It has 55 papers and 91 elements, that is quite a deal!

The rest of the elements, flowers, heart and grass are all from a kit by Kitty Designs called “Thy Nature.” It happens to be on sale right now for only $1!

I couldn’t be happier with the way this little layout turned out. My daughter was being a ham, she loves it when I do her hair in springy ringlets! As you can tell the photos were taken in early spring and I think the layout really evokes the mood of Spring Fever!

I’ve been wanting to do one of these snow scenes since last winter when I saw a few similar layouts. The great thing about building a snow scene is that you don’t have to do a tedious extraction. The key is to take your photos in a wide open area with nothing but snow around your subject. This layout actually uses two separate photographs. In fact my five year old does not like the layout because she didn’t want her photo taken with her sister. She was none too pleased to see I managed to mysteriously put them side by side anyways!

I used a mask by Natali Design with fantastic snow flakes around the edges to extract the photos of my girls and place them into the snow scene. The only real trick was painting black into the mask to make sure their precious little faces stayed intact! For those who are new to clipping masks…essentially you place them on the layer immediately under your photograph and then clip it to your photo. Black areas in the mask show the adjacent area of your photo, the rest magically disappears.

The first layout below uses another template from Scraping with Liz’s Recyclables II set. And the second is a Biograffiti “Gridlocked” template. I was happy to find this kit by Tracey Monette and Gina Miller at 9th and Bloom. I loved the bright colors and thought it tied in well with the hodge-podge of mis-matched snow clothes my girls are wearing! Plus I love the felt designs!

You can’t go wrong with picking up some blocked photo templates, they let you pack a lot of photos in and finish scrapping an event in a snap. I really like pairing an artsy layout of my favorite photos with an opposite page like this. In fact, I have quite a few layouts that I’ve done for various CT’s that I plan to go back and finish out the event  with a blocked photo template. I blogged about using Quick pages this way, and gave several examples of how to do it at the Simple Scrapper blog last summer.

Other credit: the grey paper is by TADA.

Let me start by saying I’ve decided that Mobile Monet’s definition of “higher resolution” might not meet digi-scrap expectations. As with the layout in the last post I created the parrot “painting” with one of my own photos using the Mobile Monet HD iPad app. More testing will be necessary to see how big of a file I can bring into the app. But, this bird graphic came into the layout way too small. I hope it prints ok…and I’ll let you know. I blended the parrot as an overlay on a painted and textured paper, so I think the lower resolution will look painterly and not pixelated.

I love this template from the set, “Recyclables II” from Scrapping with Liz. You can get it today at 25% off at her Super Bowl Sunday sale!

Credits: MK Designs Blur of Color and Garden of Plenty, a Pickleberry Pop collaboration.

I tried a new app on my iPhone the other day, “Mobile Monet.” It is a really fun little app, I put it on my daughter’s iPod and it has kept her very entertained today. It will turn photos into a sketch and then let you paint the color in. The controls on it are really nice. You can adjust the line widths, the amount of grey and black. It is truly much better than using Photoshop to create a sketch! The great thing is that the paid version of the app (only $1.99) will save at high resolution. Something I have not found in any of the other artsy apps I’ve tried.

What is so great about that? We Digital Scrapbookers can actually use Mobile Monet HD to do fun effects on photos and use them in layouts! You can use the app on your iPhone as well, but, I’d have to play with them both a little to decide if fat fingers would get in the way of true art! Anyway, if you were needing another excuse to buy an iPad check this out!

Here is the layout I did using a photo manipulated with Mobile Monet. It was from a zoo trip in 2008, the bird exhibit was an amazing temporary event. My then three year old loved it but my oldest who was six was afraid to feed the birds!

Here is the photo before I “painted” it:

Credits: MK Designs Blur of Color and Garden of Plenty, a Pickleberry Pop collaboration.

A Christmas Light photo shoot at Rhema Bible College has always been on my To-Do list. This year everything fell in place! Perfect weather to take pictures without coats, cute outfits that Daddy bought on a business trip, and everyone was in a good mood…kind of. Raeleigh promised to trade smiles for a trip to QT for candy…until she saw the glow necklaces! I didn’t want them in the photos so I promised to get her one afterward. It took me a while to coax the smiles out of her!

I tried to read up on how to take portraits in the dark with great Christmas Light Bokeh. I didn’t really find a great tutorial. The best tip I found was to use manual settings and adjust them until the background lights look good. Then turn the flash on to photograph your subjects.

It worked pretty well except I had two problems. First, my auto focus is broken on my Nikon. (I forgot to send it in for repair before the Christmas season so I had to make-do.) Second, it is impossible to focus in the dark! So, here is my tip, and what I’ll try next time. Bring an assistant and have them hold a flashlight to shine on your subject while you are focusing! My best photos were taken when I was standing in the lighted walkway. At least I didn’t walk away empty-handed!

Credits: Christmas Ornaments, stitching and string bows are from Dunia Designs. Paper and Word Art are from Anne-Made.

I made a template of this double page spread! You can find it linked up in the rotating box under the log-in at my website DigiScrapQuickPages.com! Anne-Made’s paper really made my layout but there are lots of hanging strings/ribbons that you could use with ornaments to get the same effect! There are some hanging snowflakes and ornaments in this kit…Or you could do some hanging bird houses with birds flying around using this kit! And here is some stitching that has been on my wishlist for a while, there is a great blanket stitch which would be perfect for this layout!

I love simple quick pages that you can customize a little with embellishments to fit your page! This Ohana Quick Page by BioGraffiti is a perfect example.

I added a yellow paper and painted bracket element by JoyceB and some tooth fairy elements from Victoria Feemster & eNKay Design. The layout only took about 40 minutes including shopping time to find  coordinating tooth fairy elements!

Simple Quick Pages that are flexible enough to let you make them your own are a dream come true! They put a smile on my face just like the one on my daughter’s face when she wakes up and sees money from the tooth fairy!

So its Sunday afternoon, the weekend is coming to an end, the dishes are caught up, size 6X-7 clothes are in the attic, the car is washed, and the house is clean. More than I usually get done in a weekend, I have to admit. So what’s a girl to do before the daily grind starts back up tomorrow? Scrapbooking of course! But since going back to work I’m leisure time constrained and therefore LOVING templates!

This layout was done using Take-Two No. 1 by Biograffiti. And the double page spread seriously took me half the time! Check out the selection of Biograffiti templates featured at DigiScrapQuickPages.com.

Credits: The kit is Strange Days by MGL Scraps and the shadow styles are by MicroFerk.

If your scrapbook stash is getting as piled up as mine, it might be getting a little hard to find your fun!

I started out my digital scrapbook adventure organized, as with anything new! It was easy to manage my stash with Adobe Bridge…until I hit my first iDSD! I’m not sure I ever fully caught up again with all the item by item tagging after that!

So, I came up with a new plan…save scrapbook previews into a folder together. Just make sure the file name convention matches your folder name so you can find what you are looking for! I have Personal Use, Scrap For Hire, and Commercial Use preview folders.

Even then, I fell behind. So, in case anyone else out there has this delima … my back-up to the backup plan is to make sure there is a copy of the preview named as “folder.jpg.” Now, you can’t see these nice and big in Adobe Bridge. But, you can view the folder in Windows Explorer using the extra large icon views.

Without some system, it can get very frustrating when trying to scrap your stash, and impossible to find your fun! So, each time you unzip a kit, make sure and check that the preview graphic is also named as folder.jpg.

This weekend I did find my fun and scrapped my stash! Even better, I finished a carefree, loose, and fun double page spread!

Credits: All of the items used in these layouts are from Tracy Ann, also known as TADA.