3 Great Scrapbooking Templates - How To Use Them To Emphasize Your Theme

When you're creating a scrapbook, you'll want to use a scrapbooking template that reflects your overall theme. If you're not sure what theme to apply, then here are some ideas that may help you find a ready-made scrapbooking template or create your own.

1. Environmental

Environmental themes are very popular these days. Scrapbooking templates with an environmental theme include natural motifs incorporating plants, animals, and the basic elements - soil, water, and air. They portray the natural beauty of our planet and are perfect when your photos and memorabilia are related to outdoor and environment-related activities. Perfect embellishments for your environmental scrapbooking template could include that small pebble you found at the beach, a dried leaf or twig, or an Earth Day button or decal. This template is a perfect to present your nature trips, safaris, hiking and camping adventures, and wildly successful fishing trips.

2. Technological

Using a technological scrapbooking template are a great way to illustrate the passage of time and how much things have changed. They incorporate images and memorabilia related to any number of technologies - computers, cell phones, microchips, vehicles, space travel, and gadgets. A scrapbook with a technological scrapbooking template is perfect for that techno-geek in the family. It can document his or her evolution through different stages of techno-geekness. Or you can use the technological theme to showcase the houses you've lived in, moving up from a black-and-white portable television to a giant plasma wall-mounted screen. Your technological scrapbooking template will prove how tech-savvy you are and make your friends envy your modern attitude.

3. Athletic

One of the most popular scrapbooking templates reflects sports and fitness. Often selected to document a man's life, it makes a masculine scrapbook free of ribbons and lace. Most sports-oriented scrapbooking templates reflect one of three elements:

Persona - A very popular scrapbooking template, this type of template showcases sports personalities popular to avid fans. You create a scrapbook for your favorite player or team. You can track their career, including photos, newspaper articles, and game reviews. If your man has a favorite sports celebrity, this scrapbooking template will make a great gift that you know he doesn't have.

Team - This sports scrapbooking template can be based on the team's symbol or mascot. You can showcase individual team players and stars. Demonstrating support for your favorite team or college, the team scrapbooking template is embellished with ticket stubs, treasured pieces of uniforms, and a color scheme based on team colors. This scrapbooking template is a great gift for team associations, alumni groups, and school classes.

Equipment - Based on the type of equipment used in sports, your equipment scrapbooking template can be designed around equipment for many sports, relying on the equipment for a more general sports theme, or the equipment for a specific sport with that sport as your focus. Cut-outs and die-cuts in the shape of the equipment makes great frames for photos and documents.

3. Emotional

Scrapbooking templates designed to represent the emotional nature of events rely on color and design to complement your photos and memorabilia and tell the whole story. Wedding-oriented scrapbooks tell a story of love and married life. Career-oriented scrapbooks describe challenges, struggles, and successes. Memorial scrapbooks express grief and sorrow for the loss of a loved one. You illustrate the emotion with color or characters.

Color - Bright and dark colors express different subtle emotional intensities that you can't usually describe with pictures or scrapbook embellishments. And specific colors represent different emotions. Red denotes passion, courage, and action. White denotes innocence, love, and purity. Yellow represents energy and enthusiasm. Blue speaks of inner peace and spiritual love. You can use different shades or saturations of the same color to express different intensity of emotion.

Characters - Using characters is an effective way to express emotions. Facial expression is an easy way to communicate feelings. You can have your characters involved in different activities related to the photos and memorabilia on the page. Complementing your characters with background illustrations is also effective. For example, showing your character taking a walk in the rain could communicate solitude, sorrow, or sadness. Showing the same character on the beach in full sunlight would speak to joy, playfulness, and adventure.

Abhishek is a Scrapbooking expert and he has got some great Scrapbooking Secrets up his sleeves! Download his FREE 73 Pages Ebook, "Scrapbooking Made Easy!" from his website http://www.Fun-Galore.com/821/index.htm. Only limited Free Copies available.

Free Scrapbooking Templates - How To Find Them Online

Using templates to create your scrapbook pages can be a great timesaver. Scrapbook templates help you be consistent in cropping your photos and in creating a more organized look. You can place them over photos, and they're good tools for all your pages. Examples of the types of templates available include templates for journaling, cropping, and layout. And many templates are available without charge. Here are some reasons to use free scrapbooking templates.

1. Save Effort. Selecting a theme for scrapbook is no simple feat. Choosing colors, designs, and layout takes time and thought. Free scrapbooking templates save you from that chore. They also save you the task of researching different ideas and finding the right ones for your scrapbook project. By using free scrapbooking templates, things are already coordinated, and the pieces fit together well without work on your part.

2. Save Time. While great fun, scrapbooking is a time-consuming activity that many of us can't afford today. Planning layout, design, and color schemes comes first. Assembling photos, mementos, and embellishments comes next. Then assembling everything into an attractive package requires a major time investment. We look everywhere for ways to save time, and free scrapbooking templates are a great time-saver. When you use free scrapbooking templates, you already have the basic page for your pictures. All you have to do is add your personal elements, and you're done!

3. Save Money. You can spend a good deal of money creating your own template. Scrapbooking supplies and materials aren't cheap, as any trip to the craft store will prove. By using free scrapbooking templates, you don't have to invest your hard-earned dollar in a quality design. And you don't have to buy new tools to create your own.

Can I find free scrapbooking templates on the Internet?

Yes. There are several websites dedicated to arts and crafts. They offer a variety of resources on home crafting projects, and they're the most likely places to find free scrapbooking templates.

* Craft and Scrapbooking Websites

In addition to free scrapbooking templates, these sites offer valuable tips and advice for some great scrapbooking ideas. Many of them include photographs they've assembled into related sets to support various themes. You can search their sites for your theme or browse the designs they display. Although this is not a complete template, it gives you free building blocks to build your own templates. Rather than tying you down to someone else's idea of what your scrapbook pages should look like, you can use these free resources and your own creativity to develop exactly what you want.

The websites offer groups of images and other elements focused on specific themes. You can browse these materials to find a theme you like. You can also search for a specific theme using a search engine like Google to find a site that may be dedicated to your theme. Many of these websites are designed specifically for people who want to use a theme for their scrapbooking project, and they may contain additional hints and information prepared by the person who created the specific template.

For scrapbookers who prefer that look of organized chaos, getting individual scrapbook components is also possible. Just remember that free scrapbooking templates help you organize your work around a single unifying theme and makes your scrapbook more attractive. After all, we usually create a scrapbook to memorialize a single event or idea, making templates ideal.

* Group Websites

Several sites provide free scrapbooking templates for their group. Members can create scrapbooks reflecting their group experience. Using these free scrapbooking templates gives you an opportunity to meet others with your interests and helps you build relationships with other group members through your scrapbooking project. You can compare each others' work and get new ideas.

These are just a few ideas about using free scrapbooking templates for your next scrapbooking project. Whether you want a complete page template or elements, you can find them at one of many websites dedicated to scrapbooking. Not only do they offer the template, most of them also offer careful instructions that show you how to use it. Adding your own touches, of course, makes the design yours and your scrapbook more interesting and unique.

Abhishek is a Scrapbooking expert and he has got some great Scrapbooking Secrets up his sleeves! Download his FREE 73 Pages Ebook, "Scrapbooking Made Easy!" from his website http://www.Fun-Galore.com/821/index.htm. Only limited Free Copies available.

Digital Scrapbooking Templates - Saving Time and Cost?

Digital Scrapbooking Templates - what are they, and how can they save you time, reduce your hobby costs, and liberate your creativity all in one go?

In just the last few years there has been such a huge surge in computer use that many people now have an internet connection, and use it.

To keep in touch with friends and family, by email, social networks,
For entertainment - music, videos and TV online, and, of course,
For crafts such as scrapbooking.

In fact, the internet is changing our lives in many ways, and for scrappers, that provides the opportunity to get into digital or online scrapbooking in some form. Going online to scrapbooking websites provides fast and easy access to the work of expert designers and crafters, bringing a wealth of high quality scrapbooking ideas and resources, as well as downloadable digital products, into the home of the average scrapper.

Instead of having the expense of traveling to your local scrapbook store (LSS) to browse products, see a demo or participate in a workshop, you can now view scrapbook sketches and example layouts online, watch streaming tutorial videos, and even more conveniently, use downloadable scrapbooking templates. These you can open in your favorite digital scrapbook software (such as Photoshop Elements), adapt the design as you wish, then drop in and adjust your digital photos. Just as when paper scrapping, you need to personalise the page layout by adding your embellishments, journalling, tags etc.

If you're not yet up to speed with computer scrapbooking, you can create paper pages by printing off your downloaded template, and either use these as the basis for building a traditional scrapbook page, or to store in your ideas file for later use.

Digital scrapbook templates and supplies save you time and money by reducing the amount of stock you need to store, and make scrapbooking possible conveniently without having to get all your supplies out to work on your projects. All you need is enough space for a laptop computer and you can scrapbook anywhere.

Another benefit of digital products is that they save you time by eliminating many of the usual repetitive tasks as you create a series of pages for an album, and save you wasting photos through cutting errors. Also, its easier for your computer to search for that elusive embellishment, saving you the frustration of hunting through paper stock for that special paper or tag...

Digital scrapbook products are usually less expensive than their physical equivalent, and they can be used over and over again. With so many internet scrapbooking templates available at little or no cost, you have access to as many sketches, templates, papers, and embellishments, as you could possibly need, so you'll probably spend much less than you would normally spend on your stash.

Here are just a few more benefits of the digital approach to scrapbooking:

Easy to find and share layout ideas
You can re-use digital "papers" and embellishments many times over, with zero replacement costs
Very much easier to duplicate your scrapbook pages or completed album. So if you want each granny to have the same album, with extra copies for a couple of aunts and a favorite uncle, you just create the album once.
You have easy online access to resources for every season and every kind of life-event

You can think of your digital scrapbooking templates as a fast start to page layout designs. You can use them either in your paper-based projects, or you can create pages and albums completely on your computer, then share the finished project with friends, family and fellow scrappers easily and freely across the internet.

Genie Balfour is a paper crafter and scrapbooker for many years, Genie is well-versed in the ins and outs of paper and digital scrapbooking. As the founder of the popular website ScrapbookingGems.com, she writes regularly on paper and digital scrapbooking topics.

You can get Genie's sketch designs and downloadable digital scrapbooking templates, or click here and check out her free exclusive scrapbook sketches and layouts series.

Free Digital Scrapbook Templates

Digital scrapbooking presents a unique way to capture special memories for posterity. Whether you are a computer veteran or a novice, you can create digital scrapbooks that go a step beyond conventional photo albums. You can add to the photos: small notes, embellishments, and stickers to tell the story more fully.

Free digital scrapbook templates can make the job easier for you. The scrapbooking paper, frames, titles - even embellishments or stickers are already placed for you. You don't need to find or prepare each element. Just slip your photographs into place, add a journaling note or caption, and you have finished pages. Free digital scrapbook templates are, in a sense, scrapbooking kits.

Free digital scrapbook templates are a great way to learn digital scrapbooking. They are also a great way to see, before you invest money, whether you enjoy digital scrapbooking. Templates show you what you can do, and take the work out of it.

These free digital scrapbook templates are often provided as samples, with themes that appeal to a large number of people. The hope is that you will enjoy your experience and return to the website to purchase more materials.

Understanding Free Digital Scrapbook Templates

Free digital scrapbook templates are nearly-finished scrapbook pages. Some call them pre-made pages, or pre-made layouts. To use free digital scrapbook templates, you follow a few easy steps.

1. Download your free digital scrapbook templates. They should be in "png" format. Many will be zipped to reduce size. Unzip your downloads, and place them in a computer folder.

2. Open the software program you will use with your free digital scrapbook templates. Many programs you may already have will work well. Microsoft Word, PhotoShop, and similar programs are good. You may have purchased digital scrapbooking software.

3. Scan photos for your digital scrapbook pages.

4. Open the free digital scrapbook template you want to use. Open photo files, and place your photos on the page. Crop photos, if necessary to fit the opening. Send them to the back layer, and slide them into place.

5. If the colors of the papers in your free digital scrapbook templates do not complement your photos, simply use your

paintbrush" tool to change the colors.

6. Add a small box on your page, and type in a note about memories that go with the photos. This "journaling" might be as short as a caption, or a paragraph that will help viewers understand the photos.

7. When you are satisfied with your page, flatten all layers, and save it as a new file.

8. Now you are ready to print. Use acid-free paper so your colors will remain bright and true for years. Print it as a page of a larger scrapbook. Or print your page as a scrapbook card.

9. Optionally, you may want to save your pages to a CD - or send a finished page to a friend or family member. You might even want to send your completed free digital scrapbook templates to a "print-on-demand" company to have them bound into a permanent book.

Free Digital Scrapbook Templates Changes

As mentioned above, you may want to make changes to your free digital scrapbook templates. At first, those changes may be as slight as changing the color of the scrapbooking paper. As you learn more about digital scrapbooking, the changes may take in other elements.

You may want to add digital charms to empty spots - or place charms across corners or edges of your photos. If you have a photo of a child receiving a skateboard for Christmas, you might want to place a couple of skateboarding embellishments on a page. These extras add a personal touch to the themes of free digital scrapbook pages.

Helpful tip: Even if you are a veteran scrapbooker, you will find free digital scrapbook templates a help in getting fresh ideas. Start with downloads of free digital scrapbook templates, and customize them to your creative satisfaction.

©2007, Anna Hart. Anna Hart invites you to read more of her articles about free digital scrapbook stuff at http://www.scrapbooking-for-fun.com. Anna is posting new articles regularly on that site. You won?t want to miss her recent articles on digital scrapbook free downloads.