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Heidi Swapp released a massive new line full of lots of different products. There were two completely different types of products that deserved demos and Heidi demos them both for us in this video. First off are the various Color Mist products, from paper to banners to letters to file folders.
Second is a fringe ribbon that is made of a special material that you can heat to make the fringe curl up without ripping at all! It’s super fun!
One trend that’s been building over time is the use of stencils! Julie Fei Fan Balzer has released a huge amount of stencils with The Crafter’s Workshop, including stencils that are intended for layering! In this video she demos how these layers can work together.
We’re so lucky to see Dyan Reavely art journal a complete page, start to finish! She’s a new signature designer for Ranger and shares with us the fantastic new supplies she designed!
Tim Holtz gave us an exclusive (early!) morning tour and demo of his new markers. You might be wondering why or how or IF these markers are any different from other markers out there. Just watch and see!!
Two embossing folders in one! If you love embossing, you’ve got to check this out!
I have some beef with something we keep saying on the Roundtable.
Have you heard us say on the show that your family doesn’t expect a Monet or a Picasso?
That your kids just want to see their pictures and read their stories?
That they’ll have no idea whether the paper is on trend this season or released in 2005, or that you didn’t make a visual triangle?
Is the advice true? Yes.
But did it help you feel better about pages you make but don’t like?
Probably not.
And why is that?
It’s because we’re not just sharing our pages with our children. We’re also online sharing our pages with other scrapbookers. So let’s be real — the pressure is still on.
And it’s also because a huge part of our motivation is the joy of making beautiful stuff.
Because we value aesthetics and skill.
When did it become wrong to want to gain or improve skills?
It didn’t.
So how do you gain and improve your scrapbook design skills?
You cycle through these steps over and over again:
And on and on…
Learn design principles from good explanations and lots of examples. That’s what I’m trying to give you with my videos.
And what about the analyzing? This means you look for the principles in action on great pages. Or you look for the missing principles that would have helped a page out.
Then you try it on a page.
And as you continue to learn more principles, you’ll get it more and more.
It’s a cycle.
You ready to roll?
You can jump onto that cycle of improvement today with a Paperclipping Membership.
Start with any of my video tutorials, get lots of explanations and examples from me, see how to analyze a page, and then continue the cycle with each episode.
Did you know there are almost 175 videos in the membership to learn from?
Asymmetrical layouts are much more tricky to put together than symmetrical ones. You must have a good sense of balance to make them work.
And to understand balance, you must first understand the very thing that either throws it off or keeps it on: visual weight.
While general weight is about pounds and ounces, visual weight has to do with how heavy something feels to our eyes. Part of it is the amount of attention certain visual qualities demand. Part of it has to do with our natural way of interpreting.
We naturally interpret larger items as heavier than smaller items. That’s the easy part. But for varying reasons, we tend to think of other visual qualities as heavier, and these have nothing to do with actual physical weight or size.
Here are just a few examples of the weight of different qualities:
You can use this knowledge to create balance on your pages. If you have an item that puts too much weight on one side, you can balance it with items on the other side that are heavy for different reasons.
This way you get a very interesting and dynamic layout.
I’ve made a video tutorial on how to place embellishments in order to balance an asymmetrical layout. I’ve also made a tutorial on how to take a layout that’s looking symmetrical and boring in its foundation stage, and spice it up with some asymmetry.
But how about building an asymmetrical foundation from the beginning? What are some different approaches you can take to create a balanced layout without resorting to symmetrical tactics?
The newest Paperclipping episode will give you five different approaches and they vary from one-page layouts to two-page layouts. If you’re not a Paperclipping Member you can view the video trailer by clicking below, and then enjoy the layouts you see here as examples.
If you like what you see, there are 170 more! Find out what you get when you join our membership by clicking here.
(By the way, anyone who is a member on Friday morning, 8am PST will get my brand new design course for free! It’s worth $55 and will not be free to Members after that time, so hurry quick)!
(Click on the layouts to see the journaling of the layouts).
(The left side of the page is a direct lift from Ali Edwards and a layout she shares in her Yesterday & Today Class. The right side is my own addition).
After my post on printing in unusual sizes, someone asked me how you can print the smaller sizes at a place like Costco. If you invest in Photoshop Elements (I think it’s around $70), you can actually recoup your expenses in the long run if you print lots and lots of small pictures.
Why is that?
Because after you re-size your pictures, you can drag those smaller pictures onto one canvas and print them on a single 4×6.
For example, you can crop six photos into 2×2, create a 4×6 canvas, and drag the six photos onto the canvas. You’ll print all six photos as one 4×6 print. Six photos for the price of one 4×6 print!
Pretty awesome.
Sometimes I want a very unusual size, like I might digitally crop a photo to 3×6.5. When I do this I’m not looking for that specific size, necessarily. It’s just that when I’m working on the cropping, that’s the size that I happen to think looks cool for that photo.
Here’s a 4×6 print I developed most recently. The white gap in the middle is the extra space on the print. The photos on the left are 3×2. The photo on the right is 2×4.
The other two photos for the layout fit on one other 4×6 print. I cropped them into individual photos and put my layout together:
It’s most economical to print on 4×6′s, because they cost significantly less than the enlarged sizes.
But I’ve also found I use much less product when I have enlarged photos, since they take up so much space. So that extra cost for enlarging may end up a wash when when you factor savings in scrapbook supplies.
Here are some of the more typical sizes I tend to print in…
You can fit six 2×2′s onto a 4×6 print using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
You can fit four 2×3 photos onto a 4×6 print.
Place two 3×3′s, or one 2×3 + one 3×3 on a 4×6 print.
I place one picture of these sizes onto an 8×8 print.
Or I like to do grid collages like the one above in the 8×8 size.
These sizes would both go on an 8×12 print. If I’m doing a 9×9 photo, that still leaves me room for quite a few 3×3 photos all around the edges of the print, so I often add photos of that size to the print, whether they’re for the same layout or a different one.
I would not have been able to showcase the beauty of our desert to the same degree, nor the fun of being out there that morning with 4×6 photos. Both the focal point photo and the collage on the right are 8×12′s.
Costco prints in all of these sizes, plus larger ones. Non-local printers, such as Persnickety also prints and even more.
I have a tutorial that I made for Paperclipping Members a while back that shows how to drag photos onto one canvas as a collage, and then make the digital round-corner frame on top of it that you see in the Tea Time layout above.
Here’s another one:
Member’s can find this tutorial in the Member’s Area or on iTunes. It’s Paperclipping 108.
Or, if you’re not a member, you can hop over here and sign up! What have you been waiting for?
Other related tutorials in the archives that Paperclipping Members can watch are:
You can learn about a Paperclipping Membership by visiting our Membership Information Page.
Long, wordy, rambling titles can add a certain personality to your layout.
They can also leak out just enough of the story to compel a person to read more, because few of us can leave a story unfinished. Once we’ve started, we have to finish it right? When we’re looking through layouts, we usually register the title, but whether we look at the details or read the journaling is hit and miss.
If a hint of your story is in the title, you leave the viewer with little choice but to find out the rest of the story.
In My Car. Outside His Apartment. Steering Wheel in My Hands.
You can set an immediate tone for your story by the way you design those long titles. Most scrapbookers don’t think about the visual message the title design communicates. Instead, we usually design the titles for one of these reasons…
There’s nothing wrong with any of these reasons for choosing the style of your design. But how about choosing a style that will help tell your story and set an immediate tone at first glance?
Compare the tone that the title below communicates with the tone of the two layouts above.
The Joy of a Painted and Decluttered Room
Note: To see a larger version of a page, or to read the journaling, click on any layout. The journaling is below the layout. Then, to see a larger version, click Action > View All Sizes.
I was thinking of The Joy of Cooking cookbooks when I chose this title because of its associations to homemaking, order, and organization — not because I liked the style, but because that’s what this story is about!
Now look at this layout with its jagged title…
You Swallowed Your Bitter Pill
While making this layout, I was channeling Alanis Morrissette and her song, The Jagged Little Pill. Life is full of jagged crooked roads that bump and toss and lead us in all kinds of directions, not just for adults but even for innocent six-year-old girls who have to learn a few of life’s lessons early because of medical issues, like epilepsy.
This story is about the literal pills she had to learn to swallow twice a day, as well as the larger metaphorical pill of dealing with a seizure disorder.
Paperclipping Episode 170 is a video tutorial for Paperclipping Members that…
If you’re not a Member, you can watch the trailer by clicking on the video player below.
Members can also watch my tutorial on title designs in general, where I show how to think of titles as lines or shapes within your design, and how to use the principles of contrast and variation in your title-work. This episode shows both digital and traditional titles as examples.
Ready to start your membership so you can see this week’s video tutorial? You’ll get immediate access to 170 video tutorials, plus you’ll get two new ones every month.. Learn how to get your Paperclipping Membership here.
Will You Take Me to a Street Corner so I Can Tap Dance for Money?
Two of the more common questions scrapbookers want to know are:
Someone asked me one of these during my True Scrap class at the end of my presentation and I felt like I let her down because I really don’t believe you can give an adequate answer in just a few sentences.
The most common answer I hear to the question, “How do you know when to stop?” is “When you feel like you’re done, take one thing off the page.”
This answer may be adequate for certain scrapbookers, but it’s definitely not a principle that applies in general.
How does that help someone like me, who had to force herself to learn to add the first embellishment? (I have many old scrapbooking pages that have a background, photos, and photo mattes. And that is it!).
Or anyone who tends to use too few items, rather than too many?
Which of the item do you take off?
What if the page looks off-balance when you remove an item?
As scrapbookers, we’re fortunate to have lots of beautiful and amazing embellishment options at our fingertips. You can’t say the same thing for paint or charcoal pencil artists.
On the one hand, we’re very lucky. On the other hand, our embellishment obsession distracts us from learning overall design composition. This is the problem: We’re so engrossed in the wonderful details of the embellishments that they’re the first and main thing we want to learn and focus our time on.
If you master three concepts, which I cover heavily in my video tutorials for Paperclipping Members, you will never have to worry about where to put the embellishments, or when to stop because you’ll just know. Here are the three concepts:
Beauty is just a by-product. If you’re overly focused on how beautiful the embellishments are, you’re in danger of…
If instead, you focus on using them only to meet the design needs of your layouts, you will know exactly…
Gathering embellishments — in other words, layering them or clustering them — is a particularly good way to draw people into your page and make them want to stay and look a lot longer. Some of the ways to do that are to…
Gather embellishments into a frame around a photo.
Make a cluster of contrasting embellishments on a line or in a space that needs more visual weight or color.
Soften lines and form an implied directional curving line with your embellishments.
Today we’ve released a video tutorial to the Paperclipping Members that demonstrates all of these things and more. You will get to see me gather and place the embellishments for three of these four scrapbook layouts. You may watch the trailer by clicking the video below:
Are you ready to watch the entire tutorial? If you are Paperclipping Member, please login to the Membership Area to watch it there, or find it in your iTunes library.
If you are not a Paperclipping Member, you can find out about membership by clicking here!
