I started digital scrapbooking in April of 2005. Digital scrapbooking had really just started becoming “known”. It was growing a “following” online. Designers were starting to emerge! It was an exciting time for me! I had just a year earlier had my daughter Braelyn, and so my first digital experience was working on Anna Aspnes’ Baby Daze album. The templates/quickpages really helped me to learn the art of digital scrapbooking without having to worry about the design of your page. I have all three girls 1st years documented in a hardbound Shutterfly book done with that album! Over 5 years later I still love using templates and quickpages. There has definitely been controversy over the years in the digital scrapbooking industry as to whether templates and quickpages are “real” or “art”. I have a real problem with that argument because to me scrapbooking, digital or paper, is all about preserving my families memories. Telling our story. This is not about art to me. Sure…it is art, but that’s not the reason I do it. So I will continue to use templates and quickpages! I just wanted to give a quick little informative post about the differences between templates and quickpages, and how they are each used.
TEMPLATES:
templates are basically a design of a scrapbook page. The basics of the page are all laid out for you. You can take your own papers and elements and “clip” them to the design.
This is an example of a set of templates that you could buy. You will notice the grey boxes on these are general guidelines for where you would put pictures. The flowers are general guidelines for where you would maybe place elements. There are usually places for a title and journaling too. Templates are fun because you can pick all of your own papers/kits and elements to use, and you can also twist turn and rotate the whole LO or just some of the pictures or whatever you want, but I love that it is a design starting point for me! I use a “clipping mask” command in Photoshop to “clip” my photos and papers to the boxes/shapes. There are many tutorials out there for using templates! Here is my page using the template in the upper left LO in that preview:
You will notice that I rotated the template and I also made the whole cluster of things a bit larger than in the original template, by linking all of those layers and enlarging them.
QUICKPAGES:
quickpages are fun as well, and they make creating a scrapbook page even a little quicker! A quickpage is a scrapbook LO (layout) already made for you, papers, elements, the whole thing except for the photos!
Here is a quickpage pack ready to buy and make those back to school layouts. With quickpages you can ADD things on top of the quickpage layer like a title and journaling, but you cannot take things AWAY from the quickpage. Here are the two pages I have made with these quickpages:
Here are a few resources for templates:
The-Lilypad albums and templates section
Shabby Miss Jenn templates
Shabby Miss Jenn Quickpages/albums
Janet Phillips templates
and of course there are SOOOO many more out in the digital scrapbooking community and often you can pick up freebies on people’s blogs and stuff!
Go, explore, and embrace the template/quickpage method of digital scrapbooking! I am sure you will love it, and if nothing else it’s a great way to become a little more familiar with your photoshop program!
MandaKay
