Hi everyone! Amy here and this is the first in a series of blogs where I am going to walk through different techniques that I used to complete my most recent scrapbooking album. This album documents our most recent family trip to Hawaii, but the techniques I plan on showing you are universal and can be used to create many different types of layouts. Today, I am focusing on using layered templates for scrapbooking.
I like using layered templates as a jumping off point to creating a layout. They can help give structure, especially if you get intimidated by a blank page and need SOMEWHERE to begin. Elif has several collections that include layered templates, and for this layout, I used two different templates from the Anecdote Traveler’s Notebook collection. If you’ve never used layered templates before, (or need a refreshers), I’m going to walk you through how I added photos, embellishments and changed the background to create pages that are uniquely my own.
Step One: Downloading and Opening
Pick one of Elif’s wonderful collections that includes layered templates. As I mentioned before, I used the Anecdote Traveler’s Notebook for this one.
Download your new collection to your computer.
Choose the size template you want to use. I am working in an album that uses the traditional traveler’s notebook size, so I chose Standard 4.25×8.25inch.
Click directly on the template icons, which look like Photoshop icons. This will open them directly into Photoshop. For this page, I used template 6.
Step Two: Adding a Photo
Next, I added this fun photo of my husband, Tom, and our son, Henry, playing in the pool. My journaling is on a separate page, so this page is all about the photo.
Open the folder with your photo, and drag the photo onto your Photoshop layout. The photo will either hover weirdly to the side, hide under the large rectangle, or cover the rectangle, that’s ok.
Grab the photo layer and drag it to the layer that says “drop your photo here” and let go. This should push your photo behind the rectangle, creating a frame around your photo.
Step Three: Adding a Background
The steps here are very similar to adding the photo, except we’re going to replace the striped background frame with a digital paper from the Making Waves kit. I am using other elements from this kit for the companion pages so I wanted to coordinate.
Click on the Background layer, then delete that layer.
Now, grab the paper you want to use, and drag it into your workspace. If it plops somewhere unexpected, don’t be alarmed, you just need to shift it to be the last layer in your layer list. This will put it in the background. Look for the red arrow in the second photo down to see where it should go.
Finally, enlarge your paper to fit the size of your layout.
Step Four: Adding Elements
Now, you can add any elements you want either digitally, or printed and glued down to your heart’s content. I decided to remove the “Week in Review” element because it didn’t fit my story. This is easy to fix by clicking on the layer, and then deleting that layer.
Lastly, I added some digital water droplet elements to the top corner of the photo, and tucked two under the bottom circle element.
The layout still needed a little something, so I decided to add some of the blue spray elements to the background, as they matched the water nicely and tied the whole page together!
I hope this was helpful and maybe inspired you to try layered templates yourself! I think you will really like using them once you play around with them more! Have a great time and happy crafting!
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