Article written using Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 with Windows 7
Every 15th of the month when the new ScrapSimple Club appears, it’s like opening a birthday gift. I enjoy discovering each month’s theme, and I like to think about what kind of digital scrapbook layouts the designer envisioned when she planned the club.
It was a real treat to open Cherise Oleson’s October ScrapSimple Club products – Taking Notes, because it is filled with those wonderful supplies you find while browsing the office superstores. Seeing all the bulletin and chalk boards, notebooks, clips, push pins, and sticky notes made me feel organized before I even started a layout!
Lots of digital scrapbook ideas went through my head, including lists and records of all kinds, and even the visual diary scrapbook pages of Scrap Girls Project Life. We recently landscaped the front of our home, and I decided this month’s club would be perfect to use for a layout about some of our new plantings.
Bulletin, chalk, or cork boards make an easy design foundation for digital scrapbook layouts. Since Cherise provided board dividers, I decided to make a board using both cork and burlap papers.
The best part of any ScrapSimple Club is that we get to be our own color designers. When I chose the plain, natural wood frame and divider for my layout, I used my favorite way to digitally color natural wood. Let me show you what I do!
First, go to Enhance > Adjust Color > Color Variations to open the Color Variations window. Make sure that “midtones” is checked. Click once on Increase Red, then once on Decrease Blue. You should now have a lovely sepia tone. I also clicked on Darken to make my frame a little darker.
I opened the cork background, colored it in the same way, but made it slightly lighter by clicking on “Lighten.”
For the burlap paper, I used another of my favorite coloring methods by choosing a paper from one of Cherise’s most “inspiring” digital scrapbook kits. I opened a blue-green paper from her Inspiring Collection Biggie and clipped it to the burlap by placing the paper layer above the burlap paper layer on the Layers Palette. Then I used the keyboard shortcutCtrl+G to clip the top layer to the bottom layer. Next, I chose the “Overlay” Blending Mode so that the colored paper blended nicely into the burlap texture below.
Because much of the enjoyment of using ScrapSimple products comes from experimenting with different colors and coloring methods, I used a third method for the paper clips. To give them a shiny silver look, I opened the Effects Panel, selected Style, and applied a style from ScrapSimple Tools – Styles: Precious Metal 11201.
You might have noticed that I didn’t color the marking pen in my digital scrapbook layout. That’s because ScrapSimple products often look great just in their original black and white!
With the help of products from this month’s ScrapSimple Club, I could take an ordinary record-keeping task and preserve it in a visually interesting way. How are you using this month’s club? Be sure to upload your digital scrapbooking layouts to the ScrapSimple Gallery or other Scrap Girls Galleries and show us what you created!
Digital scrapbooking products used:
Commercial license versions of Inspiring Collection Biggie and ScrapSimple Tools – Styles: Precious Metal 11201 are also available.
Tutorial written by Diane Lardieri