Many people ask me what is the best way to create a scrapbook page from scratch. Well, there are many answers to this question. The best way to create impressive pages is to plan. That’s right PLAN! Planning is the key to developing beautiful scrapbook pages. Enjoy my basic 4-step process for creating great scrapbook pages.

Step 1: Select photos

When you’re getting ready to create a scrapbook page, whether on paper or on your computer, you first need to decide which of your images you want to use. The photographs you select to work with will often have a theme within them. For example, photos of your daughter’s first dance recital or your son’s victory in a soccer game, definitely sets a suitable theme for a layout of one or two pages or possibly more, depending on the number of images. that you want to use.

Step 2 – Determine the Theme or Color Palette

Once you have selected your photos, you should look at them critically to determine if they have an underlying theme. Are they all photos from a trip to the zoo? Or are they all baby photos of your children? Perhaps they are photos of a special family member or momentous event. Maybe they are just photographs of an ordinary afternoon. Regardless of what the photographs represent, they will almost always have an underlying theme or colors that stand out from the photographs. You can choose to create the pages with the underlying theme (for the trip to the zoo – you can use zoo animal papers and embellishments) or you can look at the colors in the images or choose your favorite colors to commemorate your photos in your own way.

Step 3 – Plan Your Layout (Especially If You’re Using a Traditional Scrapbook)

Next, you’ll need to determine how you want to distribute the photos. In general, you want to focus on 1-5 photos per page, anything more than that can be confusing to viewers. This is especially important for traditional scrapbooking, because if you skip this step and just start pasting your photos together, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with pages you don’t like and photos that can’t be reused.

Step 4: Put it all together

You have the photographs, you have determined your theme and/or color palette, and you have decided on the design. Now is the time to put it all together. Be creative and have fun. The planning you have done will help you complete your pages fairly quickly with great results.

This 4-step process is the best way I’ve developed to create beautiful scrapbook pages. Although I tend to create mostly digital designs, these tips will work with both digital scrapbooking and traditional paper scrapbooking. For digital scrapbooking, layout planning concerns are less important because you can simply move the item or photo at any time. For digital or computer scrappers, the main benefit of using scrapbook sketches is the fact that it will save you a lot of time in the long run and help prevent you from experiencing the dreaded “scrapers block”.