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! :)

Making the Most Out of Blank Space

If you are like me, when the time comes to choose a template for your PL scrapbook page, you'll most often skip by the Design G - Design J templates because "Why would I want all that blank space around my photos?"

But with a little outside-the-box thinking, these templates are GREAT to use! Here's how you can make the most out of all that blank space! (Shout out to a Simply Project Life Facebook group user, Annaliese Katharina for first demonstrating this idea on one of her pages).

First, put your photos and journaling cards into the template as you normally would, and then adjust the background color to your liking.

Then save the page and export it as a 12x12 image.

Then open up the orange Collage section of the app.

Select the 12x12 template option, and bring in your page as a photo.

Once you have your page brought it, you can use Free Form Text in the "blank spaces" and add your text there!

Rotate and position your text where you want it, choose your font color and size, and there you have it! A template you will actually USE now, with just a couple extra steps!