There are many different definitions of a scrapbook, and ideas about what a scrapbook is supposed to be. The main thing to remember when thinking about your scrapbook is that there will always be one thing central to a scrapbook- keeping memories.

Just like photos, scrapbooks are keepers of precious moments that you would always want to return back to. The moments that you have captured in photos and the moments of your creativity are deeply embedded in every page, note, captions and journals in your scrapbook. One day, you’ll take a look at the scrapbooks you have created and they will deliver you back in time.

The hardest part of scrapbooking might be starting from scratch. Everyone has their own scrapbooking style and you will want to find yours. This can be challenging when just getting started but there are many ways to do this, and with time and practice you will refine your personal style.

Let your personality shine through your scrapbook. If you are not sure what your preference is when planning the design or the layout of your scrapbook, it is best that you analyze yourself first. Know your personal tastes and refrain from following the hypes and fads as presented in the scrapbooking industry. This way, you will be more likely to produced original and personal ideas that will work best in your own ways. Of course starting with someone else’s ideas or layouts, or even pre-printed pages is a good way to discover your style when starting out.

Many find great uses in other people’s designs. For beginners, it is often easier to follow someone else’s ideas than to try to create your own. Along the way you will find your own methods and style. You can start by looking at scrapbooking books, magazines, websites and blogs to find ideas. Most of these will include dimensions used for a layout and what papers, embellishments and other items were included. Remember that any layout can be adapted to your colors and style. Do not feel like you have to follow the layout exactly; just use it as a guide to get you started. Once a good inspiration breaks out, you may find yourself immersed in the confidence of doing things your own way.

Another idea for getting started is to create your own mood board.

Mood boards are commonly used in the fashion industry as testing grounds for new ideas. These are boards wherein cutouts, drafts of designs and fabric swatches are portrayed to provide initial impressions of the new trend. In fact, anything that will help the viewers see the direction and concepts of the designers are placed on the mood board.

By making use of mood boards, you can easily find your style. Placing concepts into more tangible mediums will construct foundations for your layouts and intentions. Cut out pictures in magazines that you like, print pictures off the internet, you can also include paper scraps, fabric scraps and ribbon in your mood board. Anything that you think may provide good inspiration for a layout can be included. Think, color, texture, and design when searching for things to include in this board. Look at layouts others have done and if there is a specific paper you like ask them if they have a small scrap piece of it so you can include it. Crops are a good place to gather ideas and samples.

Don’t be too critical in this process. While gathering ideas, you need not know why a picture or an image attracts you. If it produces positive reaction then go ahead and include it. This is one good test to determine your style. Just include everything that you like, later you will mix and match to plan color and texture combinations. You can even get inspiration for embellishments from these cutouts.

Second, you would want to check on color combinations. Some of us have already set definite grounds on what our favorite color is, and what we will most likely not use. Using a single group of shades is good if you can manipulate and mix them into varying combinations.

Many people find it hard to detract themselves from a single concept. Make sure you experiment with different color and texture combinations. You may be surprised with colors that complement each other well. Also keep in mind the colors of a photo when planning the colors for a layout.

When inspiration turns bad and there seem to be no color available for you, look at the butterflies for inspiration.

Sabrina Scheerer is a scrapbook consultant for Close To My Heart and runs a website for scrapbookers. She also does cardmaking and some other forms of paper crafts which she touches upon in her website and blog. http://www.sobystamps.com and http://www.sobystamps.blogspot.com There is currently a free scrapbooking e-book on the website.

A cricut is a great product for scrapbooking. Want to create art projects that make people say, “Wow!”–it’s quite simple with this machine. The Cricut cutting system is based on the cricut cartridges system. The blade is guided with precision by electronic means. The Cricut can handle basically any paper stock. Cricut uses cardstock and designer paper pads designed to work with the Cricut and Shape cartridges.

If you’re wise enough to go with a cricut there will be an enclosed set of shapes and fonts. There are hundreds of lettering and shape options that come when you purchase different cartridges. All of the cartridges also include the ability to have a shadow function. In addition to a shape or font cartridge, you’ll also receive a creative ideas leaflet in your cricut cartridges packet along with it.

Children will love seeing the effects of the Pooh and Friends Cartridge. All the different fonts and images will make it exciting for them. It’s a shame that this wasn’t available when you were a kid! Thanks to these cricut cartridges you’ll feel like you were creating your own Winnie the Pooh book.

Let the Creative Options Spark Your Mind: These cartridges are really for people of all ages, not just the young ones! All the options here really run the gamut. Give cricut your own individual touch and make different crafts.

The Blackletter cricut cartridges are great for formal occasions.

Very nice pictures of Christmas in the winter can be made with the Christmas Solutions cricut Cartridge. For all the kids who want to go to never-never land, let them have the Tinker Bell Cartridge. The Teardrop Cricut Cartridge allows you to adorn the edges of letters with a magnificent “drop” effect.

The color Cartridges are able to switch out the cricut machine and its regular cutter, creating colored styles. This adds versatility to your images. This is extremely easy to do – though we wouldn’t recommend children do it. The Cricut color cartridges come as primary, basic, fashion, or sophisticated colors.

Are you in the habit of keeping a scrapbook or diary? Would you like to start? Keeping a personal scrapbook has become immensely popular in recent years. Scrapbooks are a great way of preserving your memories. Did you know you could combine your scrapbook with photos into a permanent, professionally bound keepsake? It’s easy, really. Many online photo gallery websites allow you to create photo books. You can use this ability to create photo books to put together your scrapbook or diary.

The first thing you have to decide is what sort of photo books you want to create. Is it going to be more of a visual diary, or more of a scrapbook? If you want to make a visual diary, it’s simple. You write your diary entries, take photos, and load them into your computer. If you wrote the entries by hand, you will need to type them up. Once they are in the computer, you must organize them into diary pages. The next step is to upload them to an online gallery site that allows you to hire them to print photo books for you. Then, you arrange the pages as you want them, and order the photo book. You now have a professionally printed photo book version of your diary.

If you prefer a scrapbook to a diary, you must approach it differently, but it is still quite simple to make. The first thing you must do is assemble the various tidbits you want to include in the scrapbook. Then you must write any text that goes with them. You must also organize them into individual pages, and decide on both the words and text that will go on each page. That done, you do must next digitize all the stuff you want in the scrapbook. Digital photos are easy; they’re probably already in your computer.

For all those little tidbits and scraps that make a scrapbook what it is, you must now decide how you want to include them in your scrapbook. For example, you can paste them into the printed pages, maybe even attaching them to the pages with the photos on them. You can also leave blank pages when you plan out the book, so that you have spaces for each of the scraps for your scrapbook. You could also approach it the high tech way. You can take whatever scraps you intend for your scrapbook and digitize them.

There are two ways of digitizing scraps for your scrapbook. The first is pretty obvious—you take pictures of them with your digital camera. This is easy and you can load the pictures directly onto a gallery site for purposes of printing the book. The other approach, less obvious but also pretty easy, involves scanning the objects. You can buy a simple but high quality flatbed scanner at any computer store very cheaply. The process of scanning is simple, and after you scan you basically have a digital photo of whatever you put on the scanner bed (the flat part where you put what you want copied).

MJ Johnston writes for a variety of websites, including Hoorray, a photo sharing site that offers the quickest and easiest way to build a free online photo album, as well as free online photo storage.

This article offers some practical advice on scrapbooking.

Theme
Your scrapbook should have a theme It can be as simple or as complex as you want. Your theme could be a special event such as a birthday, a graduation, a wedding, may include favorite colors, sports, favorite television programs, music, the outdoors, or cultural influences.

The answers to the following three questions are all issues in choosing suitable theme.

What is the overall purpose for your scrapbook?
Who or what is the scrapbook about?
Who is the scrapbook for?

For example, the scrapbook you are giving your son as he graduates from medical school will probably be very different from the grandparent book you send to your mother. Your son will probably appreciate a scrapbook with photographs, poems, journals, and more masculine embellishments. Maybe, the theme of the scrapbook could be medicine. You could create embellishments that looked like scalpels and tweezers around various pictures of your son during his college years.

Your mother, on the other hand, will love a multitude of baby pictures fancifully embellished with flowers, ribbon, and baby fingerprints. The theme of this book will probably be your baby. Photographs could include baby and grandma with the baby. A nice journal about your baby’s day could also add a nice touch.

Title
Remember to create a title for your scrapbook page. Though adding a title might seem to be obvious or unimportant, a title explains the whole basis of your scrapbook. The title immediately tells the viewer what your pages are all about. In one word or one short phrase, the title tells the reader the theme and purpose of your scrapbook.

Titles may be as basic as the date of an event, the name of an individual, or a specific event.

Titles can also be more interesting and exciting. They could include quotes, sayings, fillers, or simple phrases. The best places to look for title inspiration are in greeting cards, advertisements, and commercials.

Color
Color coordination and contrast will highlight and accent your scrapbook. A well thought out color scheme can help define the theme of a page, attract attention to specific items, or detract away from mistakes. Poorly chosen color schemes, on the other hand, can cause your scrapbook page to look gaudy or mismatched.

Background colors can either be matched, coordinated, or contrasted with the colors in your photographs, mementos, or embellishments. Matching colors add to the continuity of the color scheme. Coordinated colors add depth to scrapbook pages. Contrasted colors focus the eye. In this way, color can be used to create the effect you want.

A great way to see how colors look together is to collect and compare color wheels from your local paint or hardware store. Paint wheels are normally available free for the taking in nearly any paint department.

Face painting is a fun hobby that you can combine with scrapbooking. For a Halloween party I created a face painting design on each of the guests. Then took photographs. The resulting Halloween scrapbook was certainly one of my most eye catching creations - even a little scary too! Well, there were lots of vampires about!
Face painting instructions
Children’s face painting ideas
vampire face painting design
These articles are packed with tips and advice on face painting. Believe me, learning to face paint is not as difficult as you might think. And you’ll never be short of volunteers to practice on.

When opening a digital photograph on your computer, the displayed image appears in one of two ways. Sometimes the image will appear larger than your monitor can display. But most often the entire image is viewable because the software “scales down” or displays a smaller version automatically. The original image file still has not changed in any way.

Here is where it becomes confusing for anyone just beginning to do digital scrapbooking. Is my image too large? Is it too small? What should I do next?

Remember that pixel dimension (width x height) is stored as part of the digital image file. However, “pixel” not only refers to a point of light inside your stored digital photo. The same word is used to describe a point of light on your computer monitor. Many people are easily confused because the word pixel actually refers to two different technologies.

A monitor pixel is really made up of three subpixels in the colors red, green and blue. The number of pixels in your monitor depends upon your monitor hardware and your monitor resolution setting. Early computer monitors were limited to displaying at a single resolution only. Today monitors are capable of displaying multiple resolutions starting on the low end at 600×480 pixels and going up way past 1900×1200 pixels. If you don’t know at what resolution your monitor is set, ask the nearest computer nerd in your household.

If your original picture was stored digitally with a dimension of 1900×1200 pixels, what happens to your picture when your monitor resolution is set to 800×600?

Nothing!

Image software will typically display either the whole image scaled down to fit the screen or will use a one to one mapping of image pixels to display pixels. When changing to a higher monitor resolution, pictures will appear smaller but the image file remains unchanged. A lower monitor resolution makes pictures look larger. Most people never change their monitor resolution once set to their own preference but may notice this effect when viewing the same image on another monitor with a different resolution.

The point is, the resolution of your computer monitor has absolutely no relation to the final size of the printed digital image.

Just as pixel is defined by two different technologies, so too is resolution.

As defined above, resolution refers to the number of horizontal and vertical pixels in a computer monitor. But resolution is also the degree of sharpness of a computer-generated image as measured by the number of dots per linear inch in a hard-copy printout. This is referred to as DPI or Dots Per Inch. Good quality output on any print device requires the DPI be set to 300.

The important thing to remember here is resolution. Why? Because that’s how computer software labels this setting. The pixels/inch setting is controlled from the photo editing software image resize dialog. Look for the grey outlined section labeled Document Size or Print Size. There you will see the image settings: Width, Height, and Resolution. When the resolution is changed and saved with the modified image file, this information is communicated to the hard-copy printer.

The image resolution default is 72 pixels/inch, far below the print standard of 300. The resolution defaults to 72 because of standards that were set in the early days of computer monitors and are still followed today.

If you take your flash memory card directly to the local photo processing center without editing any of the photo image files, the photo centers know how to adjust for the discrepancy between 72 and 300 to give you the final printed product. All you have to do is select the size of your photo prints and they take care of all the rest.

However as a digital scrapbooker, you are now editing your photo digitally before printing and if you don’t pay attention, the final printed image will turn out wrong. Avoid any print errors by making sure your digital layout with any photo images therein has a resolution set to 300.

There is one other usage of the word “resolution” when referring to digital cameras set to take pictures at a high pixel count. Many people refer to this setting as the resolution of the camera. The word “resolution” used in this way refers to the quality of the camera, as in the greater the resolution, the better the picture.

Is it any wonder why you were confused?

So let’s wrap this up by reviewing each of the definitions explained above for pixel and resolution.

pixel

1. Short for picture element.

2. A single point of light stored in a photographic digital image file.

2. A point of light on your computer monitor made up of three subpixels: red, green and blue.

resolution

1. The number of pixels across and down on a video display screen or computer monitor.

2. The degree of sharpness of a computer-generated image as measured by the number of dots per linear inch (DPI) in a hard-copy printout.

3. The amount of pixel dimensions at which a digital camera can capture an image; the greater the resolution, the higher the pixel dimensions, the more data captured per picture.

Paul Lindberg is a freelance writer and co-owner of toNoodle.com. Learning Photoshop is fast, easy and fun with their Photoshop video tutorials. toNoodle will show you how you can become a digital scrapbooking expert!

Get ready to learn digital imaging terms and the basic steps to get a digital image from a camera into a digital scrapbook layout.

Digital scrapbooking, sometimes called virtual scrapbooking, is so easy because the scrapbook page layout is created, simulated, or built by means of a computer. All the visual information that is built into the final digital layout is captured somewhere in digital memory as bits and bytes.

When a picture is taken, a digital camera stores all of the photographic information on a small computer memory chip known as a flash memory card. Digital cameras store digital images in JPEG format which uses data compression. More expensive cameras also use TIFF and RAW formats that use more storage space but give experienced photographers more options in processing the image.

Megapixels is a measure of how many millions of individual photon capturing elements are inside the digital camera sensor. The sensor replaces the film in a traditional camera, as each light element of a picture is translated into thousands of bits per picture or pixels.

Each digital camera has its own settings and firmware (software built into the camera) which determine how the digital picture is stored, that is, how many pixels are used per picture and in what format the picture is saved. A digital camera set to capture images at the best quality possible will use more pixels per picture and therefore more data storage memory. Cameras with greater megapixel capacity produce higher resolution photography.

A pixel is another computer term which is short for picture element. In a stored digital image file, a pixel refers to a single point of light in the photograph. In a digital camera that takes 1600×1200 pixel photos, each image contains 1,920,000 pixels or approximately 2 megapixels. Similarly, a 2560×1920 pixel photo stores 4,915,200 pixels or roughly 5 megapixels.

Digital cameras typically come with a USB cable to connect it directly to a computer. This allows the camera’s ability to read the flash memory card to be used in conjunction with computer software.

Alternatively, the memory card can be removed from the camera and placed into a card reader already connected to a computer. Some computers come with internal card readers that have multiple slots for different memory card formats. For my SD memory card, I bought a cheap USB device that allows me to plug my flash memory card into my computer USB port.

Using either method above, you can now open digital image files from where they are stored on the flash memory card and save the files on your hard drive. The copied images on the hard drive becomes the original source for all future work done with these digital images. Once you are assured that you have successfully copied the images to the hard drive, the flash memory card can now be reused to take more photos.

I have a folder (or directory) on my hard drive called camera downloads. This is where I keep all of my original digital image files. When I want to do more work with a particular photo, I make yet another copy of the digital image file into a second folder which is my working directory. This ensures that I always have an original copy because I never want to alter or destroy the original in any way. This is like hanging on to the original negatives from processed film only now it is done in the computer–virtually. That’s another plus for digital scrapbooking.

Most important to this entire process is to always make regular backups of all your personal data and digital images from your hard drive to another type of storage medium, be it CD, DVD, tape, online backups or a redundant hard drive.

So let’s recap. We took a picture that was stored digitally in the camera’s flash memory card. We connected the camera to the computer or we moved the memory card into the computer card reading device. Then we copied the picture from the memory card to the camera downloads folder on the computer hard drive. And for future processing, we made another copy of the picture into our working folder. Finally, we’ve made sure that all our original photos are being backed up on a regular basis to another storage medium.

Paul Lindberg is a freelance writer and co-owner of toNoodle.com. Their Photoshop video tutorials make learning Photoshop fast, easy and fun and will show you how to transform your digital photography into digital scrapbooking works of art.

If you’re a scrapbooker, you owe it to your craft to try digital scrapbooking!

It’s an easy way to expand and enhance your creativity in new and exciting ways. Some traditional scrapbookers are hesitant to “go digital” because it seems so different from what they’re used to.

But don’t fear – scrapbooking digitally, while it might take a little extra time to learn, is well worth the minimal effort. Plus, it’s not as if you have to become an expert digital scrapbooker overnight. Start small by making a simple, small digital photo album, then work your way up to a full-fledged storybook.

1. Saves you time. In the long run, once you learn it, digital scrapbooking will be a great timesaver. You can turn out wonderful looking keepsakes in no time – keepsakes that you’ll be proud to share. And when you do share them, you can email links to your photo creations.

The beauty of digital scrapbooking is that all the resources you need are at your fingertips – literally. And if you want to scan in a special design, poem, writing style or any other embellishment, you can. Then, what you’ve scanned will be available to use again and again.

2. Saves you money. Of course, you love paper, scissors and glue scrapbooking. But all three cost money – especially the paper embellishments and albums. And of course, you are just brimming over with creativity, which can also get expensive when you try to bring all your ideas to life.

With digital scrapbooking, all you need is your computer, your photos, some artwork to scan, backgrounds and layouts to work with … and voila, you can have a lovely keepsake for a fraction of the cost! And when you consider the money you’ll save on gas driving to and from the crafts stores – well, that alone may make it worth your while to learn how to scrapbook digitally.

3. You can scrapbook more. Combine Nos. 1 and 2 above and you get to scrapbook more than you ever thought possible! Rather than spending hours on just one paper and scissors scrapbook that has to accommodate a whole vacation’s worth of photos, you can create individual scrapbooks for each person who went on the vacation with you!

Rather than spend time driving from store to store looking for materials, you can simply upload your photos, scan in your embellishments and quickly create a thing of beauty you and others will cherish for a lifetime.

Of course, digital scrapbooking will never replace traditional scrapbooking. No one would want that to happen. The beautiful scrapbooks you create with your own two hands are special, unique and hold an enormous amount of value.

But digital scrapbooking does have its place in the scrapbooking world. And as you learn new techniques and tricks digitally, that’s sure to spark your creativity with your traditional scrapbooking.

So go ahead – give digital scrapbooking a try today. And get ready to be surprised by all the fun you’re going to have!

Matt Smolsky writes for a variety of websites, including Hoorray, a photo sharing site that offers the quickest and easiest way to build a free online photo album, as well as free online photo storage.