Your First Layout

I'm on a roll (make hay while the sun shines, or at least while the girls sleep!)

Whether you're a seasoned paper scrapper thinking of trying digital for the first time, or you've never made a layout in any form, digital scrapbooking (I'll usually call it digiscrapping) is a great way to go. I'll give you my little bio at some point down the road, but for now, I'll just say this. There are plenty of scrappers who do more polished layouts than I do, but I have enough experience that I should be able to at least steer you in the right direction toward this addictive, awesome hobby!

Ready???

How to start
1. Find a kit you want to work with. (for this tutorial I'll be using Tamra Burwick's Hippy Hippy Shake kit.

2. Find picture(s) that you’d like to use. (these first two steps are interchangable).
3. Once you’ve bought and downloaded your kit, unzip it and put it somewhere you’ll find it again. We’ll talk about organizing your kits later, but for now: I wouldn’t recommend breaking up kits by the components (i.e. having a “ribbons” folder) because not all designers include their names/the names of the kits for every single element, making it very difficult to figure out where something came from, when you go to write the credits. I don’t know how many kits (thankfully freebies) I deleted because I had lost their information!

4. Open a new document. This should be 300 dpi, and you can do it any size you want (8x8, 12x12, 11x8.5 are the standards) Virtually all papers are made at 12x12, but can be resized to 8x8 if you want to work with that size. (I'll discuss this at a later date)

5. Open up the papers and pictures. At this point, I usually put all the papers and pictures into the new document, making one large file, and SAVE it. It may take awhile with all those layers, but at least it’s all together!
6. Here’s where the fun starts. From here, you can cut shapes out of your paper* , move layers around, and eventually find a look you like. (*important note: if you want to resize something (in photoshop you can do this with Edit>Free Transform or Control-T), make sure you hold down your shift key when you resize, so it doesn't distort your picture. Unless you like the distorted look ;)

7. Add a title (either typing or using alphas), type in some journaling (as desired) and add embellishments (as desired).

8. Add shadows** to paper, embellishments and pictures. Don't add them to text! It makes it hard to read and doesn't look realistic. (alphas are fine if they look like they would have shadows in real life)

9. Next is to show it to everyone...next tutorial I'll show you how to resize for galleries without losing too much quality!
*to cut rectangles, squares, circles or ellipses, use the marquee tool
and make a rectangle (hold shift while you do this to make a perfect square) and let go when it's the size you want. Do the same thing with the circle marquee (click and hold the square marquee for a second and you'll see other options, including the circle) to make an ellipse or circle. Once you have your shape (you'll see "marching ants") you can delete the paper around it (in photoshop, right-click on the shape in your page, select "select reverse" and then hit the delete button on your keyboard.)
It sounds complicated, but really happens very quickly when you actually do it.

**shadows will be covered in the next tutorial. For now, you can use them if you know how, but at least you'll have a page you can look at!


One last thing. I'd love to see what you do with this. If nothing else, know that if no-one shows me their layouts or tells me they're doing it, I'm not very likely to keep updating this. So if you know how to post to galleries, please do so, and then come here with a link so I can see! If you don't know how to post to a gallery, I'll show you next tutorial, so for now, tell me how it's going so I know what I need to spend time on in future tutorials. Sound good?