The Beach

For these scraps I used the same background photo but altered it slightly each time.
I also chose to 'mount' the photos differently for each layout.

For 'Cold Day' I darkened the top and bottom of the background using a gradient application. I beveled the photos with a smooth edge and put a drop shadow.

The background 'Independance' is unaltered. The photos have a sharper bevel and a lighter drop shadow.

For 'First Day' the background actually appears to be more of a foreground. I applied inner drop shadows and edgings to make it seem the foreground has been cut and the photos placed behind. I also applied a texture to the text blocks to make it look like sand. Then I applied an embossing style to the letters to make them appear as though it was written in the sand.

Cage Match

This picture was taken the last time we visited dear friends - then their lives got crazy busy. So I did this scrap so the girls could have a memory to share.
I tried to make this look like an event poster that you might see posted downtown.
Was I successful? I used different layers with varying opacity and I applied styles from the softwares menu to the images as well as the words.

First Birthday

Happy First Birthday, my little monkey!
May 22, 2006
While out for a walk one day, I took pictures of various "textures". The background for these layouts is from a picture I took of a stone walkway. I made all the photo edges appear to be etched into the stone. The photo of baby within the "O" of the word "one" was a bit time consuming. It involved several layers, extracting, and erasing. I got the idea from "Digital Scrapbooking Magazine" but there weren't any instructions for this one. I had to figure it out for myself. But I think it works.

First Year

Okay, so I got a couple out of order. These are all scrap pages I did up to just before her first birthday.

This was a pile of totally useless photographs - from the regular photo album point of view. In trying to catch a pivotal moment with my daughter that I could send to her grandparents far away, I managed to document an event. I combined the pictures on one layout and used colours from the background photo to edge the thumbnails. It was a quick and easy scrapbook page. But I get comments from people about how it really tells the story of watching her learn to stand. They say they feel like they were there. Sometimes it's best to keep it simple.

I created the background paper by using a web image of a ducky, repeating it on the page, then brushing around the stamp in an antiquing sort of way. Really time consuming. Layers are your friend!!

Slide

For this layout, I followed instructions in "Digital Scrapbooking Magazine". It was quite involved. I created the gingham paper, one strip of pink at a time. I created each cut out letter. All background colours were pulled from the original photo.

Swing

One beautiful day at the park turned into an incredible photo opportunity. A friend took several pictures of her son and our princess. For this layout, I extracted baby from a duplicate of the photo, used a radial blur filter on the original layer, then layered the extracted baby on top of the blurred layer.