The Journey: Where Are You Going?
Nikki offers a few suggestions for moving forward in your Scrapbooking Journey this year.
When I first began Digital Scrapbooking way back in it’s early days circa late 2004, my goals were simple. Create a scrapbook to document my son’s first year. As my love for digi grew, my goals changed. It was slowly becoming my favorite hobby, my creative outlet, and a way to connect online to other people who shared my feelings and interests.
It took me a few years to nail down my own personal style. I experimented and followed the trends, and like most of you, I look back at my early pages and can’t imagine what I was thinking. But those pages are part of my journey, and they brought me finally to where I am now. I’m comfortable with my style. I’m a traditionalist, and although I love to get grungy and artsy sometimes, mostly I love to mimic paper pages as closely as I can. The best compliment I can get is when someone can’t tell if my layouts are digital or paper.
So as 2013 begins, I find myself setting different types of goals for my personal scrapbooking, and I think no matter where you are on your own journey–whether you’re just starting out or have been scrapping for years–you can benefit from a few of these ideas.
Simplify
By this I don’t mean to simplify your layouts. If you love layering and clustering, then keep piling it on. What I mean by simplify is to think of all the projects and ideas you’ve seen or thought “I need to do that” and determine which are the MOST important to you. For example, I would love to do Project Life, but the past few months my scrapping time has had a huge dent placed in it and I don’t have nearly the time to commit to a big project like that as I used to. So I decided to continue with p365 the way I’ve always done it, and I’m happy with that. The point is to get the memories saved.
Work on a Technique
Shadows need some work? Photos looking blah and need some tweaking? Choose one thing you really want to improve with your scrapping and work on it. (Our Tutorial Blog could be a great place to start!)
Photographs
I always feel like the photos make the page. Now I’m all about scrapping ALL those photos, and lately I scrap photos I take with my phone as much as I do my 7D. But no matter what camera you’re using, you can always improve, right? Work on it. Figure out what works best with your camera and practice until your photos are just popping off the page.
Journaling
I know sometimes there just isn’t much to say on a particular layout, but try challenging yourself this year to journal more on your pages. I myself used to be much better at this than I am now, and I’m definitely going to try and get back to that this year.
Sometimes we all get caught up in the current trends and the enormous amount of amazing products out there that we get away from the real reason we all love Scrapbooking.
This layout was one I did many years ago. Obviously the shadows are not so great, the photo is slightly overexposed and kind of blah, and the design really needs some work.
And here is a recent one from me. Over the years I’ve worked really hard on my shadows and especially my photographs. They still aren’t perfect, but they’re much improved from when I started out.
Sometimes we all get caught up in the current trends and the enormous amount of amazing products out there that we get away from the real reason we all love Scrapbooking. Maybe this day is a good day to step back and reassess what you’re doing and where you want to go with it.
