Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

It’s time for another installment of “One Template, Many Ways” – where we challenge the creative team here at the Sweet Shoppe to use one single layered template in as many ways as they can dream up. The idea is to show you just how versatile one layered digital scrapbooking template can truly be!

This month, we’re delighted to highlight the paint-and-layers artsy goodness of our very own Tracie Stroud. Tracie has a line of layered digital scrapbooking templates she calls her Artisan Templates. They’re “messy, grungy, painty art journal templates” available in PSD, TIFF, and PNG files, and they’ll turn absolutely any digital scrapbooking kit into an art journal kit.

The latest entry in Tracie’s Artisan Templates series is Number 8, which will be released to the Sweet Shoppe for Digital Scrapbooking Day on Saturday, October 5th. Just check out this gorgeous template pack:

We challenged the Sugar Babes to play with the lower right template from this two-pack.

It’s got lots of whitespace, numerous layers of paint, a portrait-oriented photo cluster with lots of clustery layers, and a smaller element cluster along the upper right edge. How many different ways could they use this one layered template to create unique layouts? They all achieved an individual look not only by using different digital scrapbooking kits, but by taking different approaches to the template itself. I’ll walk you through them one by one and point out how they did it.

First up is Sugar Babe Trina, who took a straight-forward approach and used the template exactly as-is. She clipped photographs to the photo masks and patterned paper to the paint masks. She replaced element layers with elements from the digital scrapbooking kit, and replaced the Title block with a fun piece of word art. The result is a bright and happy layout full of lovely artsy texture.

Sugar Babe Mary has proven that even an artsy, grungy template can be used to create a “clean and simple” style scrapbook page! By hiding all the paint layers and using a simple grid- or quadrille-style paper as her background, Mary keeps the focus on the element clusters. I just love all the bits and bobs she has tucked into the photo cluster, and her shadowing gives her digital page a realistic, dimensional feel.

If you’re part of the “I like big photos and I cannot lie” school of scrapbooking, then you’ll want to take a closer look at Sugar Babe Jaye’s layout. Instead of using a sheet of paper as her background layer, she clipped a large photograph to the canvas. The paint layers that sit atop it allow for a lovely blending effect when clipped with the wooden-style paper, and it gives her layout such wonderful, natural texture. I love this approach to getting more photographs on each page, especially when it’s a standout image like this one!

Speaking of standout images … Sugar Babe Jill created a perfect example of how to highlight a great photo in a template like this one. Just because the photo cluster is a specific size doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Have a great shot you want to see a little larger? Select all the layers in the photo cluster and make them bigger! Jill kept the overall design balanced by increasing the size of the element cluster along the right edge as well. Beautifully done!

What’s a scrapbooker to do when the photo you need to scrap is landscape but your template is portrait? Why, rotate it, of course! Sugar Babe Charlene took the entire template and rotated it 90-degrees counter-clockwise; not only did this turn the photo cluster into a landscape orientation, but it moved the smaller element cluster to the top edge of the canvas. I love how she expanded that cluster to hold the scalloped pennant that appears sewn onto the page. It’s a creative spin (pun intended!) on the template as Tracie designed it.

Even if the photo block is in the right orientation, you can still give it a spin. Sugar Babe Carrie began with the same template but rotated it 180-degrees. That moved the photo cluster to the upper right quadrant of the page and left ample room for her journaling. I absolutely love the little bits of word art she tucked into the photo cluster!

Speaking of journaling, that seems to be one of my top challenges when it comes to using a digital template. I always have so much more to say than the template is designed for. So what’s a storyteller to do? Well, start looking at the whitespace as a blank canvas for journaling instead! I hid most of the paint layers and, instead, created two columns of text along the background. It gave me ample room to tell the story behind this photograph and still let me include all that clustery goodness thanks to Tracie’s original design.

While we’re on the subject of “words”, what if you want your layout to feature words rather than photos? Sugar Babe Amie demonstrates precisely how to do this by replacing the photo block with a journaling card. It gave her enough room for a short list and she didn’t have to make any other adjustments to the design. Love it!

And for our ninth and final take on this template, Sugar Babe Esther gives us this gorgeous artsy collage featuring bits and bobs and figures as well as word art and more. No photos? No words? No problem! Esther replaced the photo block with a large element sticker – the little boy sharing a bag of potato chips with his dog while seated in a wagon – and then built the rest of the cluster from the template’s layers. It’s absolutely gorgeous!

---

So, there you have it – one layered template used to create nine uniquely lovely digital scrapbook layouts:

Whether you love everything about the template exactly as-is, if you prefer things a little more clean and simple, if you want to highlight your photographs or focus on your words, or if you need things rotated just a bit, remember … with digital scrapbooking, we can do it all! So give a layered template a try for your next layout, and see just how creative you can be.