Guest Author - Vivienne Oestergaard
This is a papercraft that took the US by storm about 15 years ago and has continued to grow and evolve throughout the world. It stems from old books created by individuals that showed a little more creativity and expressed more of the author’s personality than others. A scrapbook can be little more than a notebook filled with images and writings. It can be a full sized bound album with quality art papers and used for painting. Most importantly, it should be about who you are and where you are at and what you wish the album to be.
There are two things to consider. If you are filling the scrapbook with paintings, images and writings, it doesn’t necessarily have to be acid free. If you are using the scrapbook for photographs and memory type storage, think about the acidity and archival quality of the materials you use. You can obtain many things with archival quality. In this way, your photographs will last for posterity.
There are adhesives specific for photographs as well as corners to hold your photographs. You can find them in photography stores as well as art and craft stores. These last two stores will also carry scrapbooking supplies such as background papers, stickers, epoxy elements, metal clips, journaling helps, pens, glues, templates, and cutting tools. Anything counts for scrapbooking. If you plan on inserting memorabilia, there are acid free plastic pockets to insert or adhere in your books. It will protect the memorabilia as well as your photograph.
Scrapbooking can be really expressive. No two people will put a page in the same way. Even with using a template or sketch, it will end up looking different. There are many templates online that you can utilize for your artwork. You can copy it exactly or use it as a jump start to your page.
Digital scrapbooking is coming into its own in this day. Back in 2005, several graphics designers realized that this was the way of the future for scrapbooking and opened online shops full of digital scrapbooking kits. Now, there are scores of stores with these kits. What is great is that you can use these supplies over and over again, since it is digital. Also, since most everyone take digital photos, it is easier to just open up a page in your layout program and do your scrap page on a screen. The mess is less. You can shut it down at anytime. Digital scrapbooking involves using a layout program such as PaintShopPro, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, CorelDraw, Gimp, or PhotoLumix. Each kit is full of papers in jpg format and elements in png format (a transparent type of format so that each element has no background). Then it is just a matter of dragging each piece into your layout along with your photograph.
You can take a look at the Scrapbooking section of BellaOnline (http://www.bellaonline.com/site/Scrapbooking) for more projects and techniques in traditional paper scrapbooking.
For digital scrapbooking, check out DigiShopTalk (http://www.digishoptalk.com/boards/) or the DigiChicks (http://www.thedigichick.com/shop/) for more information and ideas.
