Whole Page Matte - With Patterns!

Well, as often happens in the digital scrapbooking world, when a new technique is shown people are always anxious to learn how to do it and make pages themselves. That's definitely what happened with my last blog post about how to create a matte effect using the PL app.

Now that we've all had a chance to play around with that technique, some people are taking that to the next level! Meagan Johnson, part of the Project Life Creative Team for 2018, who I've only ever met online via the Simply Project Life Facebook Group, has blown me out of the water with her take on the matte effect - using patterned filler cards from the PL app!

I've looked at her page creations online, and have written up this tutorial on how I went about creating a pattered card matte effect.

You can either create a whole page as you normally would in the PL app, or just use a single photo as the focal point. I'm going to demonstrate with a single photo here to start with, then end with the same process for a whole page as the focal point.

Find the photo you want to work with, and pull it into the center card slot of the Squared Away 16 Template.

Next, find a card collection that contains the pattern you want to use. You have a lot of options on how you do this. You could choose cards that have a pattern throughout the space on the card, or cards that just have the pattern along one edge--though with those kinds of cards, you'll have to export and rotate them and bring them back into the page as photos so that when you put them the card slots, the pattern is on the edge that's right up next to your photo. For this page, I decided to make it easy on myself and just use a fully patterned card from the Modern Wedding Edition kit.

Then I changed the background color to a pink from that kit.

That was it for this first part of the process. So I exported the page as a 12x12 and saved  it to my phone's camera roll.

For the next steps, I needed to bring that page back into the app as a photo, using the Collage section of the app...

I used the 12x12 square template and brought in the whole page I'd saved as a photo. 

Then I had to pinch and zoom so that I had the photo and as much of the patterned cards (now acting as my border) that I wanted. I opted for a little bit thicker of a border, so I didn't pinch and zoom quite as much!

Once I had the photo and border how I liked them, I exported that page as a 12x12 as well. 

For some people, if you like how this all looks, this might be the final step. But if you want to add text on the page, you'll want to keep on reading :) 

I brought the page back in as a photo via the 12x12 collage step outlined above, so I could add my FFT (free form text).

Once the text was added, I saved it one last time as a 12x12 image, and filed it away in my ever growing "To Print" folder on my computer. (I seriously need to win the lottery to afford all the pages I've got stored there--going on 700!)

Finished  product!

Now like I said at the get-go of this post, you can use this process for a single photo focus, or you can create a whole page to put in the middle of your patterned border.

The same process applies, you just start off with your full page completed first...

...then export it as a 12x12, bring it into the center slot of Big Shot 16 Template and add your patterned cards all around...

...export that as a 12x12 and then bring it back in through the collage section, pinching and zooming to get the thickness of border I liked.

Voila!  From here you could add a layer (or two) of a solid color matte--for those instructions read the post before this! You'd get something that ends up looking like this if you did.

*Disclaimer* - Since there is a whole lot of exporting and importing as a photo going on, you may want to initially create your whole page with a blank journaling card, and then when you've gotten the matte borders all finished up, THEN go in and add your journal as FFT. I don't know how well the journaling will print with all the pinching and zooming and exporting that this process takes, so adding that at the very end may be better.  Meagan  Johnson has printed pages made with this method (adding journaling first) and said there is a little bit of blurring that happens with all the exporting.

This whole new method is a lot of fun. Try it out and let me know what you think in the comments!

Getting that Layered Matte Look in the PL App

A couple of days ago in the Simply Project Life Facebook group, one of the ladies there (Hi Michelle Leisten!) posted a page she had made that looked like those old paper pages I used to make, where the photo was matted on several different colors of cardstock. Of course, in the PL app, there isn't any cardstock--but she had still made those colored layers behind her photo. She explained how she did it, and I tried it out....and am going to share my process for the readers here.

The first thing I did was to choose a page template that had a square card slot that was surrounded by other cards on all sides. For me, that template ended up being Squared Away 16.

Then, I put my chosen photo in the middle square.

Next, I changed the background color of the page to the yellow/gold color from the Midnight Edition kit. Then I exported the page and saved it to my camera roll. When you have a page with empty card slots (like this one with all the outside edge card slots empty and just the one in the middle filled with a photo), the empty card slots get auto-filled with the solid background color you selected. So when the photo is saved to your camera roll, it will actually look like this:

But, when you go to export the page, you'll see this message.

This is just a warning from the Project Life app letting you know that you have card slots that don't have anything in them. Yes, we know! Go ahead and tap Yes.

So, now I had the photo surrounded with empty yellow spaces saved to my camera roll. 

Then I repeated all of these steps with the two other photos I wanted to use, just changing the background colors for each.

This solid blue is from the All About Me Themed Cards kit.

This solid red is from the Americana Themed Cards kit

So now I had these three "pages" saved as images on my phone, ready for the next steps.

I knew I wanted to bring these into a new page, so I needed a template with three square card slots. I chose the Design I template.

For each of the square cards, I would bring in the whole "page" I created above. I started with the yellow page going into the bottom card slot.

The only problem here, is that it pulled in the entire yellow page as I had saved it, but I wanted that black and white photo to still be as large as possible. So I used my fingers to pinch and zoom on the picture until it filled the card slot, with just a small yellow/gold border all the way around--which mimics how you'd matte a photo on cardstock.

Then....you guessed it! I repeated these steps for the red and blue photo pages. And for a little bit of visual difference, I changed the background color of the whole page to a neutral gray.

Now, I had used up all the card slots on this particular template, but knew I wanted to journal somewhere in the gray area, so I used the idea that I shared a couple of weeks ago in my Making the Most Out of Blank Space blog post. First I exported this page...

...as a 12 x 12 image, and saved it to my phone's camera roll.

Then I opened up the Collage section of the PL app...

..and pulled up the 12 x 12 square template.

And I brought the red, blue, yellow page into the template as one big photo.

Now, I could add my journaling using the FFT (Free Form Text) feature. Then I decided which font, color, and size I wanted my journaling in.

Once I figured all that out, I was done! And ended up with a digital scrapbook page that "looks" like I layered my photos on cardstock!

Think of the possibilities! You could even get a double-layered matte look by just repeating a few of these steps! It's a lot of exporting and saving pages as photos and then bringing them back in, but just think, you didn't have to pull our your glue-stick once! :)