We released today’s Quick Tip on adding vignettes to your photos. In this video, I show how to do it in in two different types of editing software: Aperture and Photoshop. So, even if you have totally different editing software, you should be able to figure out how to do it, having seen it in Aperture and Photoshop.
Today’s Quick Tip is for Members, so if you would like to have access to this video, and all the others, click here to find out how other people are watching them. 
Are some of you still struggling with the idea of scrapbooking about yourself? If so, I have an easy topic to start you off: make an account of your day. Here are three very different versions of this concept…
Over-Inflated
12×12
I took my camera around with me one day and snapped just a few pictures. I also recorded all of my activities and their times.
A grid-type layout is a simple solution for this type of page, but if you’re feeling artsy, consider a free-style approach. I gave a step-by-step tutorial on how to make this background to the Premium Subscribers.
Main journaling reads: I must have an over-inflated sense of how much I can accomplish in 24 hours. My to-do list is always too long and I never come close to checking all the items off, even though I really pack it all in as tight as I can.
Journaling in the cloud-like spots: (a schedule of everything I did one day–same day as the pictures).
***A note on acidity: I am pretty sure tissue paper is highly acidic. I would never use it on a layout with old photos, or any I can’t reprint. On the other hand, I have no problem using modern photos, such as the ones on this layout. Since there are so many pictures of myself and my children that are on safer papers, and since I back up my digital photos, I won’t mind if photos like these reach an early demise.
5am To 5pm
12×12
Whether you work full time or stay at home, some of us have a typical schedule. This was my regular Monday schedule last year. Instead of listing the schedule with words and times, I placed pictures (and a few words) onto the clock according to the time I did them.
The day starts at 5am and circles all the way around and ends at 5pm.
Note: I elevated some of the circles with foam dots and some with a double layer of foam dots. This is great for dimension.
Semi-Transparent Acrylic Mini-book
2-28-08
Some of you may remember when I took the challenge from Illustrating Stories to take a photo every hour for one day. I decided to turn this project into a minibook. Each hour and it’s picture gets their own page. The tabs tell what time it was when I snapped the photo. I will share the entire minibook soon. This is a sneak peek.
There are so many ways to document an average or typical (or even an atypical) day: lots of words, lots of photos, on a layout or in a mini-book. If you struggle to get comfortable scrapbooking about yourself, this concept is an easy non-threatening one. What are you waiting for?
We have a free episode that is almost ready to post and it will be up soon!
Is there anyone else that still hasn’t started or finished their back-to-school layouts? We’ll end the series this week after a few more posts. I hope this series has helped you identify how to make pages repeating events more meaningful and more enjoyable.
I am someone who loves, adores–thrives on–having lots of time alone. Yes, I am very social, but I have also always needed to have a lot of time to myself and my attention-demanding thoughts.
When I was younger I could shut away the world and go to my room for hours at a time. When I got my first car I loved to take long rides down winding Kansas roads and fed off the eerie feeling of being totally isolated with a horizon that seemed to stretch to eternity.
Then I had kids.
Almost eleven years later, all three of my children are in full-day school, and I am once again enjoying long stretches of quiet, wonderful, alone time. Last week I took advantage of the chance to tell some of my own stories and explore my more artistic side. And that will be the focus of the next series.
Toward the end of the week, we will begin a “Reclaim Yourself” series. Not only will we scrapbooking layouts about ourselves, but we’ll dig into some art, as well. I am so excited for this and I have enough content that we could take it way into October, so I’ll probably have to save some of it for a different focus-on-the-self week.
Are you ready to pay attention to you?
Even though we are technically still in the Back-To-School series, we’re going to kick off the Reclaim Yourself series on Tuesday night for Paperclipping Live. I will lead you through the beginning of a layout about YOU. To participate with me, you need to identify a story about yourself that you want to scrap. Be ready with a picture or a set of pictures. The photo(s) does not necessarily have to have you in it.
If you don’t already have any photos to work with, you might want to try one of the following:
1. Take a picture of yourself in your bathroom mirror.
2. Take a picture of your {insert modest body part here}.
3. Crop yourself out of a group photo.
4. If your story is about something you typically do or enjoy, take a picture of an object with which you do that activity.
5. Set your camera up with the timer and take a picture of yourself in action. This involves some trial and error, but it’s fun.
Here is an example of each of those (in the same order)…
For our live event, you do not need to choose paper ahead of time because choosing will be part of our process during the show. Just have your papers and products easily accessible, if possible. You will probably also need scratch paper and a pencil or pen to make notes.
We will not take a layout to completion. The point of this Paperclipping Live is to get you to go inside yourself and analyze what colors, patterns, or other visuals, will help you create the feeling you have about your story or layout theme. We’ll be focusing on the process of preparing the layout, but won’t necessarily finish it during the show.
We’ll also be depending a lot on chat-participation, so please register and be ready to share! The show starts at 6:30 pm, PST, on Tuesday night. Click here at that time to participate.
Don’t forget that we now have monthly challenges to help you use the principles and techniques we discussed the month before. Some of you have uploaded your layouts and projects to our Flickr gallery. Others of you are still working. If you haven’t started anything, there is still time. You must post your layout by the end of the day on September 23. That’s a whole week away.
I will choose one person who I think most exemplified their chosen topic and highlight them on the Paperclipping blog. Maybe that will be you? =)
You can read the details of the challenge by clicking here.
Do your first day of school layouts look basically the same, but with updated products? Or perhaps, you’re still using the bounty of school-related stuff you bought three years ago? Are you tired of attaching the same title, “First Day,” every time?
Do your layouts reflect the pride you felt at your kids’ good looks in their brand new outfits? Or your dismay at how big they’ve grown? Or the chaos of trying to take their first-day photos and get them to school on time? Do you relive feelings again when you look at your back-to-school layouts?
The journaling reads: This year’s first day of school felt extra-special. Not only did all three of you start at the same school for the first time ever, but Daddy got to join us–again, for the first time ever…which led to the very best first day of school photos ever. And, he brought his great video camera to conduct first-day interviews with each of you. We loved sharing the excitement-including the music and balloons and energy.
I knew I had accomplished my goal when Israel looked over this page for the new school year and said, “Oh my gosh, this totally makes me remember being there and what it felt like.” He got to see the kids off with me for the very first time. This year we have lots of good pictures and lots of good stories.
I took note of the different stories I wanted to tell, and then I looked through my photo manager to view and choose photos. Rather than trying to fit all of the good pictures on one back-to-school page, or choose just my favorite one or two, I identified which photos best told which stories, and allowed the number of stories I held in my heart to dictate the number of layouts I would make, and the number of photos on each one.
Last week you saw one of those layouts–the story of my oldest child, Blake, growing into a young man. This week you will see the rest of the stories, as well as one from last year. Today I’m sharing the one that celebrates Izzy’s being able to join us, and the overall excitement we enjoyed as we all entered the school grounds together.
Notice how the photos in my layout each show a part of the story in the journaling: the three children posing for Dad; the kids entering the school, balloons in the background, Aiden receiving a high-five from a teacher; Izzy interviewing the kids; and of course, the focal-point photo and the focus of the story: Izzy with his camera.
I didn’t have a good experience the last time I purchased school-themed products. They didn’t reflect my actual stories and I couldn’t work them into my layouts. I decided this year and last year to only get things that I could easily use for other topics as well. So you won’t see many school-specific items on Paperclipping this week. What you will see are elements that reflect my own view of my stories:
1) Energy: Energetic red.
2) Time: The face of an old vintage watch alongside other time-related symbols.
3) Elementary School: The “D is for” prefix to my title, evoking an elementary alphabet lesson.
4) Feelings of Stability With Dad’s Presence: Strong, clean lines between the reds and cream plus strong shapes around the photos.
Note: I did not consciously think, “Dad brings feelings of stability, therefore I will use strong lines and shapes for this layout.” If you will get in touch with the emotional and personal aspects of your story, and focus on trying to reflect them visually, you will often choose design elements that reflect those ideas in a sub-conscious way.
Ask yourself, what is different about this year’s first day of school? What stories, incidents, feelings, or reflections dominated the day?
Journaling
How can you translate that into words? Be specific. Talk directly to your kids, or the subject of your layout, in your journaling. If you have more to say than one or two simple sentences, write it out ahead of time so you can make adjustments before you commit pen to paper.
Photos
Which photos best tell your story visually?
Products and Design
How can you translate the ideas on which you reflected into your design? What colors, papers, and embellishments will help support that story and those feelings? Don’t be bound to your school-themed products. If they support your story, use them. If they don’t, then leave them off.
Relax and tell your stories. That’s all this is. Someday you’ll have a collection of back-to-school stories that, as a whole, are a colorful memoir of a parent who watched her kids grow from year to year–of her children as they experience the excitement of walking into the unknown and entering a new phase of relationship, challenges, joys, and learning.
So many of you have been asking for tutorials on Photoshop, especially for digital techniques for photos, so today’s episode is one version of a technique I use all the time.
This one is for Premium Subscribers. You can learn more about the Premium Subscription by visiting the Membership Information Page.
Not that you need an excuse to spend more money, but if you want some ideas to take advantage of this outdoor season, here are my picks for layouts and good photos.
I love this paper by Cosmo Cricket. I love the fun, bright colors and the happy shapes. It just feels like being outside.
If you have kids in sports, a telephoto lens
These are the kinds of things that inspire me–good colors that match my mood and the season, and great photos. I hope you’re all enjoying the summer and bright outdoors.
Does the amount of digital photos on your computer intimidate you? In today’s episode for the Premium Subscribers, you’ll see my system for getting photos from my camera to my computer and then to print. Maybe I have a few tips you can implement to make the process easier for you.
If you’d like to learn more about the premium membership so you can have access to all of the videos, click here.
In this episode I’ll show you an easy technique that will give your photos dimension and a more professional look.
This episode is in the archives. To learn how to access the archives, please visit the membership information page.
You may also read the show notes for this episode.
Liz and Jackie at IllustratingStories.com just issued a challenge to take a photo every hour. Later on they’ll post a project idea using the pictures.
I’ll be posting my hourly photos today on Flickr and attaching notes to document the day-to-day parts of my life. If you want to join in and you post your photos online, leave a comment with a link to your photo page.
Note: Start this tomorrow if it’s too late to do today!
Update: I saw this quote on Ali Edwards’s blog and had to add it here. It’s’ so applicable:
Nathalie Goldberg: Learn to write about the ordinary. Give homage to old coffee cups, sparrows, city buses, thin ham sandwiches. Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it. Promise yourself, before you leave the earth, to mention everything on your list at least once in a poem, short story, newspaper article.
…or a scrapbook page.
Today at breakfast the kids started reminiscing about a time when I used to take them to “the gym.” I realized immediately that they must have been referring to the exercise room of our old apartment. That was so long ago and I only have a very vague memory of taking them with me.
I said, “I wonder why I can’t really remember that.”
And Israel answered, “It’s because you didn’t scrapbook it.”
What’s missing from your scrapbooks? Lately I have been trying to identify those little things that are so much a part of our daily lives that I don’t even really think about them. One that I thought of recently was the fact that Fridays are Aiden’s and my favorite day right now. He gets to take a toy for Show-and-Tell and then stay an extra hour at school for Lunch Bunch. And that’s the reason it’s my favorite day, too!
This morning I made biscuits. We love homemade biscuits that are so fat they almost split in the middle. Israel encouraged me to start making biscuits a long time ago because it was one of his regular breakfasts he enjoyed while growing up. Weekend mornings seem to feel a little happier when I make biscuits.
What are some of the little things you haven’t thought much about before? What are those things that don’t seem significant at first thought, but in actuality bring little bits of joy into your everyday life?
* * *
Pals
2-Page 12z12 Layout
Journaling reads: Someday, I hope to have a backyard that is cozy and relaxing with lots of plants. But for now it is a place to play ball * draw with chalk * roller blade and bike * play “rock star” on the retaining wall * have water fights * run through sprinklers * blow bubbles * throw parties * develop your own imaginary world.
Supplies: Cardstock (Bazzill) * Patterned paper (Daisy D’s, other unknown) * Wordstrip, metal tab (7 Gypsies) * Chipboard (Scenic Route) * Brads (Making Memories) * Pen (American Crafts) * “Pals” clothing tag and ccircular running icon (re-purposed “found” item).
