Welcome to Jumpstart Week here at Write.Click.Scrapbook.! This is Christine and I’m your host this week. I will be taking you through five ways to jumpstart your scrapbook layouts. We're all inspired by different things at different times to make a layout. The "Jumpstart" is that sparkle of inspiration that leads to a page. This week we will talk about five “jumping-off” points to use to jumpstart your creativity and your scrapbook pages: Photos, Colors, Design, Technique, and Stories.
To start off the week, today we will look at how scrapbook pages are inspired by the photos we use. This can include layouts that are inspired by photos or are photo-centric. There can be a very large photo or many photos. The products used are inspired by the photos.
Sometimes we have several photos with a common theme and want to include them on the same page. For my “Day In The Life” layout, I took photos every hour on a particular day and put them all onto my page.
I printed out all my photos first in a collage, then I trimmed them. I also picked most of the products I wanted to use, based on my photos and theme of everyday life.
After that I figured out where to best place the photos so that they all fit onto my 12x12 page!
For this digital page, I wanted to create a “year-in-review” type of page for 2008. I fit as many tiny photos as I could into the “08” shape! This page was definitely inspired by photos, and the sheer quantity of them.
Sometimes we have one large photo that really speak to us and we want to make it the focal point of the layout. In this “hello girlie” layout by Celeste, she filled 3/4 of her page with a large photo of her sweet cat Lulu.
This “Summer” layout by Jennifer also features a big photo as the focal point of the layout. I love how the papers she used play off of the colors in her photo!
Amy's page about her daughter's recital uses a long photo of her daughter as the focal point. I love how her color choices (black and pink) key off of the photo.
Sometimes we have photos that were taken at different times, but a theme or similarity emerges. In my “In-N-Out Burger” layout, the three photos were all taken at different times in different places. The commonality? We were all eating In-N-Out Burgers!
Celeste also used similar photos on her layout “This Photo Reminds Me of This Photo”. She had taken a photo of her son (left) holding his trophies, and noticed that it looked very similar to a photo of her husband 35 years prior! They were both nine years old, in scouts, and holding trophies. I love the connection between these two photos!
Sometimes the shape of the photos can inspire a layout as well. I had printed a few photos from our Hawaii trip into a polaroid format. When I went to scrapbook the photos, I decided to cut my papers into the same size and fit all my embellishments onto them. The colors I used were also inspired by the photos.
For Laura's photo-centric layout, the top photo was taken from a distance. There was a lot of sky up top and water below. She wanted to crop it to be a panoramic when she scrapped it. She found a grid style digital template with room for a panoramic so she was able to feature the photo and add a few more.
Pocket style pages are a great way to feature all the photos from an event. Laura had a lot of photos that she wanted to include from her daughter's 8th grade graduation so she did a Project Life insert using the front and back of a Becky Higgins A page to fit them all along with a few journaling cards.
Some photos really show the subjects’ personalities. In Jennie’s layout “Silly Boys”, the photo really reflects their silliness!
Aliza likes to say that her photos are not technically "good" photos, but I totally disagree! Her photos capture her boys' personalities and they inspire her layouts because of the moments they capture. In her layout "Remember This: We Laughed A Lot", she captured a moment of pure joy with her photo.
Aliza captured this photo of her boys hugging while saying goodbye. Such a sweet moment and it inspired her layout.
And let’s not forget the “selfie”, especially the meaningful ones. Sometimes that’s the only way we get ourselves into our scrapbooks. In Celeste’s “#selfie” layout, she had just emerged from being ill and laments that she hadn’t taken many photos as of late. Her simple selfie jumpstarts her page and her story.
These are just some ways in which PHOTOS can jumpstart your scrapbook page. We hope you are inspired by some of these ideas and try them out yourselves!
Stay tuned for the rest of this week as we show you more ways to “jumpstart” your page!
