Picture Perfect? Not Really...But That's OK!

People may have varying opinions on what I'm about to share, and that's okay. To each their own. So here's the question.

"Do you scrapbook photos that are unclear, blurry, grainy, half/overexposed (from back when you actually developed film), etc?"

I say yes....to an extent. I personally don't want a whole album full of pictures you can't really enjoy, but sometimes, those blurry, tip-of-the-finger-covering-up-half-the-frame photos are the ONLY ones you have!

Now this isn't such a problem nowadays. You take a quick look to see if the photo turned out on your phone or digital camera and retake a quick one if needed. But for those old photos in a box in the attic, or in my case, hastily glued on a paper page a dozen or so years ago, you need to make a decision about how and IF you'll used them.

Here's a two-page spread I had scrapbooked on paper, with less-than-stellar photos---but they are the only ones, AND (most importantly) they tell a story all their own.

My wife wrote a couple of cookbooks in the early 2000s, and did the whole local news and talkshow circuit promoting them. She'd take her digital camera with her to the set and snap a couple of pictures (as seen in the page above). And when she would appear on television, her cute little grandparents would watch and then take pictures of her while she was on TV. How freaking cute is that! (see page below)

So this is what prompted this whole blog post today. Are they professional quality photos? No. Do they tell a story and therefore worth preserving? I say, whole-heartedly, YES!

So here's how I took these two pages and made them into a PL app scrapbook page, because let's face it, the paper pages, even have remained in this partially finished, no-journaling added state for far to long! :)

I wanted a template with fairly large card slots, so I could feature the photos I have prominently. So I opted for the Design Q Template.

I placed the photos from the pages into the card slots, and found that I had two square slots and the top 4x6 slot available for filler/journaling cards.

I decided that I really like the "Every Picture Tells a Story" saying that was on one of the cards in the Capture Life Themed Cards kit---but I wanted to save that last 4x6 card slot for my journaling.

So I put the card in, and then tapped and dragged (drug?) it to one of the square slots. 

But it was now sideways. I quickly rotated it using the rotation button. 

Then I added another card from the same kit into the other square slot (using the square card options from that set), added a journaling card, and wrote my memories down! Then I changed the background color on the page to match the journaling cards, and called it a day! :)

Let me know in the comments how you incorporate less-than-perfect photos into you pages!

I added journaling to the camera card first, then used a FFT box to add the heart (from the UniChar keyboard).

CAUTION....Page conversion ahead!

Ok, who's ready for another page transformation? Well, I don't think you are here reading this for your health, so let's jump right in.

Here's the old paper page. I thought it was a cute, original idea, and a nice play on words. It was fairly easy to create, just some big pieces of scrapbook paper trimmed to squares and rectangles, some rubber stamped letters, and a little magic marker action to frame the sign. Oh, and adding the picture of that cute curly-haired kid in the corner. 

But what's missing, folks? Say it with me: THE JOURNALING!  And I'm kind of wishing that my picture was the focus and not the (albeit super creative if-I-do-say-so-myself) road sign.

So, let's walk through the process of how I transformed this page. First of all, let me just say this now, so that you Android users don't have to read on if you don't want to. I used the Free Form Text feature for most of this. Plus I used another app...kind of.  I added a new keyboard to my phone. First I downloaded the UniChar app. It is an app that let's you add a new keyboard to your phone (duh). It has a LOT of different kinds of characters (money symbols from other countries, shapes, arrows, etc.) Some of the shapes sets available in the app cost an extra fee, but the app itself is free and so are a bunch on useful shapes. I haven't paid for the extras......yet. I'm trying to make due with what's free.

Once you add the app and keyboard to your phone, when you click the little grid circle button on your phone keyboard (like you do to get to the emojis), it will cycle through your added keyboards and UniChar will be one of them.

So I started off with a card pocket that I pulled the road-looking card from the Textures Themed Kit into. Then I used the FFT feature to add the road sign "pole" using an enlarged capital "I" using the Raleway font (because in that font, the "I" is just a straight line), changed it a grey color, and positioned it on the bottom of my card.

Then, I used the UniChar keyboard to add in my "sign" shapes. First I pulled in a solid diamond shape, enlarged it, positioned it on my "pole" and changed it yellow. 

Then I added the diamond outline, changed it black, and enlarged it just smaller than the yellow background I was placing it on. Now, You'll notice in the image below, that the black line is rather thick for the sign. I wanted just a thin black border on the sign, so I had to add another, slightly smaller yellow diamond on top, and enlarge it little by little (and boy was that tricky with my fat fingers and my small phone screen) so that I covered up that thick black border until it was thin. (You'll see what I mean when we get to the end and the final product image below).

Then, I added my curly-haired boy pic. I wanted that to be the focus, so I chose to use the Big Shot 14 Template.  I also then added a plain yellow card (from the Textures Themed Kit, also) into the bottom slot, and added my text. I wanted to kind of mimic the black border on my homemade road sign, so I looked through the different Overlays kits in the PL app, for ones that had a black option, and finally found one I liked in the Little Picasso Overlays kit......with one little hiccup.

The overlay that I really liked, had the text "this is my favorite weather" on the bottom of the card (see above).  But I just used another FFT trick, which I've called "the masking technique" and pulled in another capital "I", rotated it horizontally, changed it yellow to match the card, and just covered up that unwanted overlay text!

Then I used FFT to add text to my road sign (I used two different font sizes, bigger for CAUTION and smaller for the rest), then added 2001 to the bottom of my journaling card, and whamm-o! Done.

Hope you found some little tid-bits you can use in your future PL pages. Tell me what you think in the comments. Seriously, lots of lookers and readers, but hardly ever any comments!