Scrapbooking Technique: Creating background template

Heres an a cool easy Scrapbook technique for creating a background template from a photo.

Our 6 yr old boy , wow he's going to be turning 7 in just under a week, amazing how time flies, is in hockey now YAY we're hockey parents now !!

So we were thinking about doing a hockey scrapbook. Following a previous post - 3 easy scrapbooking techniques
We fill our digital camera every game he goes to so we have quite a few (hundreds now) of photos of him on the ice.

So I thought it would be very cool if we took a few of the photos and selected one of them as a background template photo for the hockey scrapbook.

New scrapbook techniques to keep your pages unique and fresh can be tough to find. If you have taken a particularly good scenic shot, have it blown up and use it as a page background. You can have the image enlarged as is, or you can have the image washed out so it fades into the background. Mat other photos or a smaller version of the same photo over the top.

As you can tell we're big users of digital scrapbook techniques. We like to use Adobe photoshop as our digital tool of choice, I use it mostly as a lay out tool then I print off the cropped photos and generally follow the digital photo template I have created.
I have a cool tip I got from our 6 year old about using velcro!!! I'll save that for another day though.

5 easy scrapbook page layouts tips

Heres a scrapbook page layout tip, that I've found works very well for me and my girlfriends sister.
As you can see from the scrapbook layout above there. We've designed this scrapbook page digitally. We don't typically do digital scrapbooks, but it is another way of sharing your scrapbook pages with friends and family who are in other parts of the country or even the world.
You can share these in email or flickr, or which ever online photo sharing site you like.

In this example my sisters girlfriend has used the gimp (a photo editing software package - it's free) I prefer using adobe photo shop, to do this scrapbook layout.

Whats great about using digtal scrapbooking tools is that you can do a quick page layout so you can get a feel for how the project is going to look before you commit anything to paper and get messy with glue.

Once you have your general scrapbook layout in mind you can then decide:
1.) upon a scrapbook theme,
2.) what type of materials you want to use,
3.) how you want to organize the scrapbook elements on the page.
4.) Which scrapbook font you want to use.
5.) A good scrapbook title.

In this example: Some Beautiful silver and gold accents make a wonderful touch to lettering or tags on this scrapbook page.
This would also add a very elegant touch on gift scrapbooks or invitations.

To make these accents, stamp a piece of vellum with embossing ink and heat and stick powder. Next, Heat the item.
Then, using a small paintbrush, paint this piece of vellum with gold leaf. Brush off the excess powder with a brush. And bingo you're done and you have a very beautiful and elegant scrapbook layout