As an early Valentine’s Day gift to Bria, I spent a few hours tonight assembling some pics we took this week of her and Clifford (THE Big Red Dog, of course!). He’s actually not so big in his present incarnation… a stuffed animal from her kindergarten class at Longmont Christian. Every kid in her class gets a chance to take Clifford home for a week and do things with him… then journal or scrapbook about the experience for that week’s “show n’ tell”.

Well, I don’t “journal”… I blog. And I’ve never scrapbooked in my life (my Mom does all of ours *yeah!*), so I decide to try to scrapbook with Photoshop… e-scrappin’ I guess you’d call it. And who knew it would be fun! I Googled “Photoshop scrapbook backgrounds” and you should see the hits it came up with. There’s a lot of scrapbookin’ being done in PS out there. Who knew?! Anyways, I bought a little “girlie” page pack for $2.99 (yes, just three bucks!) that had a bunch of nice hi-rez papers, cutouts, and objects… some in JPG some in PNG from this place. They have a ton of papers, themes, and do-dads out there on the Net. Impressive!

A little drag-and-drop with their artwork, then I made some paper frames myself with the noise filter, quick mask a few brush stroke selections to “tear” the edges, stroke some rounded edge frames on the other page… and I made two pages in two hours. Not bad for an e-scrapbook newbie. Check ‘em out…

The secret to the “look” of most e-scrapbook pages I’ve seen, just like with much of the “grunge” look vector work that’s trendy in motion graphics right now: use a lot of non-orthogonal layers, create some separation between them with drop shadows and bevels, and make everything as organic as possible. Plan to look un-planned.

Tomorrow I’m going to e-mail these to the Walgreens photo lab down the street and get some nice glossy 8×10’s to insert into the notebook full of other kids’ experiences. And Bria will take Clifford and these pages back to school on Valentine’s Day. Scrap on!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 2:38 am and is filed under family, photoshop, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.