Happy Monday! Carey Bridges here, and I'm excited to spend the week with you sharing ideas to get more from your sketches and digital templates!
There's no doubt that sketches and digital layered templates are a must-have scrapbooking tool. Many scrapbookers don't start a layout without one. Even if you prefer to design your own pages, sketches or digital layered templates can provide a starting point when your mojo is gone, when you're in a hurry, or when you just want to focus on selecting the photos, pretty papers and embellishments rather than the basic design structure.
As much as we love sketches and templates, all too often we use them once, then file them away. You liked them enough to purchase or download them, why not get more than one use out them? Each day this week I'll share a different approach to get more out of your stash of sketches and digital layered templates by using them multiple times to achieve very different looks.
Follow the Basic Design
Today, I'll present some ideas for creating different layouts without changing the original structure or design of the sketch or template. By changing small things while staying true to the original design, you can achieve varied yet amazing results from the same sketch or template.
To illustrate, I'll use January's sketch as an example (download the digital layered template):
Add a photo as the background instead of paper. Amy Sorensen used a gorgeous scenery shot as her background:
Replace a journaling block with a paper. Jennie McGarvey used some fabulous vellum with gold dots in place of the long text block:
Add or remove page elements such as photos, paper and embellishments. Marnie added some patterned paper strips to the top of the long journaling block and also removed some of the embellishments:
Fill a journaling spot with a photo, as I did in the following layout. Note that I also replaced a photo spot with a cropped journal card with journaling.
Each of these examples still closely resemble the original sketch/template, but they each look quite different from one another.
Some additional ideas to try:
- Fill one or more of the paper or photo spots with digital word art or a pocket page card.
- Fill all the spots with photos - a great way to get more photos on your layout.
- Switch the placement of photos and papers.
- Fill a photo or paper spot with journaling. While many sketches or templates have spots designated for journaling, you can shift the focus or balance of the layouts by placing the journaling within one of the photo or paper spots.
- Place the title in one of the photo or paper spots. Instead of placing the title in the area designated by the sketch or template, or outside of the photo/paper cluster if a title spot is not indicated, you could place the title directly over one of the photo or paper spots. This can help shift the viewers' eyes to an important photo or help draw the eyes across the page.
- Fill some photo spots with paper, especially patterned paper.
- Replace thin paper strips with ribbon, bunting, stitching or border brushes.
- Use solid paper vs. patterned paper.
- Use black and white photos instead of color or use black and white photos with one photo in color.
- Go photoless! Fill all of the photo spots with paper, embellishments and/or journaling.
By simply changing the placement, number or style of your photos, or by substituting paper, ribbon or other embellishments, you can give a sketch or template a whole new look and feel without changing the layout or structure of the design. Make the template work for the number of photos you want to use to tell your story. Customize the amount of embellishments and papers used to support the story and to fit your own scrapbooking style.
I hope you'll look back through your stash of sketches and templates with new eyes for ones you can use again (and again). For more examples on using the same sketch/template in different ways, check out the monthy sketch post for January 2013. Find more great sketches right here at write.click scrapbook by clicking on the category sketches on the left sidebar. To learn more about using a layered digital template, check out this previous post.
Join me tomorrow as we continue to explore additional ways to get more out of your sketch and digital template stash!
