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!