How you can create a Summer Background for your Scrapbook

Don’t miss any opportunities to capture yours and your loved ones’ experiences this summer. Summer is a great time to scrapbook because of all the adventures many people go on during this time. The sun is shining, the grass is green and children are off for a couple of months. You may dash off for the water parks, or have birthday parties to enjoy. Spending a day at the park, having a picnic or going fishing at the lake are just some of the many subjects that people use in their scrapbooks. However, how do you get that perfect summer background to best suit your photos?

Be Prepared First

One strategy that Erica Hayes suggested in Scrapbooking Tips and Tricks (by Lisa Bearnson and Tracy White) is to create a checklist before each big event to ensure that you capture the biggest moments. She gives it out to other people, so she can still enjoy the event.

Tips and Suggestions to Summer Backgrounds

You should always create backgrounds that draw attention to the photos on the page. A clever use of layering and contrast can create some eye-catching images. You can highlight photos in a variety of creative ways. Some people use ribbon and flowers, while others use bold blocks and cut outs to create their perfect background. Consider the tones and colors in the photos and how you can use the background to direct the eye toward the photograph.

Create summer themed accents by hand to give a summer feel to different pictures. For swimming photos, for example, you can create a childlike feel if you make a wave out of some blue scrapbook paper and pair it with a patterned piece. Add some glisten with glitter to make the waves glitter like water. Use all the angles you can to give it some depth! A little bit of depth can go a long way to creating an eye-catching page.

You can give your page a ‘wet’ feel by using gloss or diamond glaze across the top of the background. It’s the perfect summer feel to add to the background. Of course, you need a pretty even hand to create the lines, but if you can do it, you’ll have an undeniably summer feel to the page!

If you’re aiming to scrapbook some of the beautiful, outdoor settings you and your friends or family come across, you can create a “green” themed summer background using different shades of greens for your photos! Using the same shade of green would cause the outdoors to blend into the page. You can mix yellow-green patterned paper with sky blue paper with a photo that has complex green colors to bring out the subject of the photo exquisitely. It’ll brighten up the photos, as well as make the greenery pop!

For pure green colors and darker photos, you can use a contrasting green-blue color to bring them out rather than cause them to fade in from using darker colors. Pair the photos with bright oranges or yellows to create a childlike, playful feel. If the main focus of your photos is the subject, while the greenery is simply a gorgeous background layer, your goal is likely to compliment the green while keeping the viewer on the subject. You can incorporate paint into your paper, such as blues with a few strokes of green-yellow, to incorporate the green background.

Want to give your green a bluer effect? You can back photos that have vibrant shades in the greenery using blue, green and yellow in the background. Using all three of those colors ensures that the different shades of blues, yellows and greens are drawn out of your plant images, while still ensuring the non-plant subject is prominent. Of course, sometimes you may have lighter colors in your green backgrounds. You can pair monochromatic shades of green with a paint that matches the shade of the second color (for example, yellow-green). By pairing them, you can make the green look gorgeous, lush and pretty.

Creating the perfect summer background depends a lot on the subject of your photos, as well as the different colors that are incorporated into those photographs. Using varying shades of colors that are involved in the main picture, or pictures, can ensure that your scrapbook page is colorful, well-suited to the photographs and adds to the images, rather than taking away from them. You can create art by scrapbooking, just be prepared for the various photo ops that come through day to day life!