Surrender to your scrapbooking desires

Today I sat back and thought about all those moments of my life that I wished I’d have documented somewhere, somehow. I have that one photo that speaks a thousand words and I have a thousand words for one photo. With a world full of technology today it is possible to store, save and share all those great moments and all those meaningless photos.

Now with the possibility of digital scrapbooking, it’s even free to do and won’t cost you a penny unless you want to invest in fancy digital backgrounds and embellishments. If you want to eventually get your scrapbook professionally printed then it’s a nice idea to spend some cash on it. What are you waiting for, get your hands on that free gold glitter digital paper on offer and line up a great photo to start the first page of your scrapbook.

How to Crop your photos

Instead of having a scrapbook page with four photos all of the size, crop three of the photos into the same size squares and cut a little off of the fourth photo, leaving it rectangular size.  As you design the page, you can run the square photos straight or upright and use the large photo on the contradictory end of the page. The viewer will first be drawn to the large photo and then to the three smaller ones.

Try experiment cropping with diverse shapes. For the most part, you’ll want to stick with the elementary oval, rectangular and square shapes. Nevertheless, sometimes for special effects, you’ll want to cut a photo into a specific shape. 

For example, if you’re putting together a design of a trip to Marine Land and have lots of photos of fish spinning around, cut three of the photos into the shape of fish. Use an ocean mottled background for the photos. With basic cropping and a few accompaniments, you can get super artistic with presenting your photos.

Overlay onto picture frames. Choose two or three pictures that you want to show together. The pictures should have a mutual theme, such as flowers, animals, children playing, etc. Using a square pattern and a pencil, choose the percentage of the first picture that you want to crop and begin to trace the template. 

As you’re tracing, find a section of the picture that you can actually trace around instead of cutting it off with the template. For instance, if you’re cropping a photo of your dog and part of his tail doesn’t show within the template, trace around the tail. 

When you cut out the picture it should have three solid straight sides and one side with the tail coming out of the side. Crop the other two pictures in a similar fashion. Out of stock card create one frame with three open panels to frame the photos. Carefully lift the extra sections (i.e. the dog’s tail) and put them on top of the frame.  When you are through, this gives an extra fun dimensional outcome to your photos.

Highlight a portion of a photo. Sometimes instead of cropping all the fixtures out of a picture, it’s fun to zone in on just part of the picture. Let’s say your daughter is in the school choir and you have a photo of her with five other students in it.  Use a square template and crop around the upper half of your daughter’s body.  Sensibly cut the square out. 

Adhere the photo (not the cut out section) onto card stock. Then trim 1/4 inch off of each side of the cut out section. Centre and adhere the cut out into the center of the opening of the photo. Adhere four minuscule tacks into the four corners of the cut out. This gives the presence that you have specifically framed a portion of the picture. On the same scrapbooking page, contain a close up photo of your daughter singing.