Rub a Dub Dub - A Paper to Digital Conversion

It's been a while since I completed a paper-to-app scrapbook page conversion, so here's one I did recently.

Plus this conversion features some NEWLY AVAILABLE FEATURES in the PL app, so keep an eye out for those!

Here's how the page currently sits in a binder on my bookshelf:

Notice anything missing.....like in just about every other paper page in my albums....no journaling! I'm not saying that you need to have a "story" for every page, but at least some names, locations, dates--that sort of thing. But as simply as that would have been for me to add to the page...for some reason I didn't. And now, the kids in those tub pictures are 20 and 15 years old!  Time to make amends!!

The first thing I did was to scan the page and save the photos individually in Google Photos (click for a blog post all about how I use Google Photos), and then from there, save them on my phone's camera roll.

Then I pulled those photos into a PL app template with three photo slots down the middle of the page: Design O.

I added the photos to those middle slots, and then added a journaling card from the Baby Edition for Him card set, that kind of looked like bubbles. I wanted to use this journaling card, because the design element on the card was on the left border, and when I used that same card repeatedly in the slots on the right side of the page, it created kind of a border.

Then I added plain white filler cards from the Neutral Cards kit, and kept the background color white,so that the whole page had a white backdrop. *Note: I always use No Drop Shadows on my pages, so that when I do use the same color background color as my blank filler cards, they blend in seamlessly.

So when I got to this point, I knew that I wanted whatever kind of writing I would add to the page to span across card slot borders, so to do that, I had to save my page as it was, and export it as a 12x12 image to my camera roll...

...and then bring it back into the app as a 12x12 photo using the Collage section of the app.

Tap the orange section of the app to bring up the collage templates.

The first option is the 12x12 square template which will fit your page perfectly.

Then tap the photo icon and bring in your page from your camera roll.

From there, I used the Free Form Text feature to add my journaling. I knew I wanted to have the phrase "Rub-a-dub dub, two boys in a tub!" going up one side of the page and down the other, so I typed that into my Free Form Text box, changed the font color to match my "bubbles", and rotated the text box so my writing was sideways.  I repeated the phrase twice so that it would stretch the entire height of my page, and added a little bathtub emoji in between.

Now here's where a NEW PL APP FEATURE comes into play! I didn't really like the fonts available in the app for my writing, so....I uploaded my OWN FONT! Yep, that's a new feature in the latest update in the Project Life App. You can purchase the ability to add your own fonts to the app (for $4.99)! Mind-blowing, right? (*This feature available for Apple NOW, and coming soon for Android).

I just copied some the fonts I already had on my computer into Dropbox, and then followed the steps within the app to add them to Project Life.

Once my custom fonts were uploaded, I just changed the font on my "Rub-a-dub dub" like usual, and I was all set!.  Then I added a line of dashes (------) in another couple of Free Form Text boxes, and arranged them underneath my writing for an added visual, and then added my names and dates.

Here's how the page looks, all finished up!

Trick or Treat...

I really don't know how many people even read this, but here is another paper scrapbook page (a two-page spread) that I have worked to convert into a digital, Project Life app page.

The original pages were created waaaaaaaay back at the turn of the century! LOL And they are pretty representative of what scrapbooking was like back then: stickers, cardstock matted photos, and per my usual, NO journaling!

Getting the pictures into slots was pretty straight forward. Even though they were originally glued on the page at an angle, they still worked in the slots (which you'll see in the finished product further below).

In looking through the possible PL app kits to use for the page, of course I looked at the Halloween set, but it was all blacks and oranges, and I knew I wanted to bring in the purple and green colors from the pictures and cardstock matte.  So I sifted through the available kits, looking for the perfect purple and green, and preferably, both in the same kit! 

It didn't take long for me to settle on the Awesome Edition kit. Right shade of purple. Right shade of green. Score!

I was using Design Template D, which has the four 3x4 card slots right down the middle of the page, so I decided to alternate purple, green, purple, green going down, with just plain color cards.

I knew I wanted to duplicate the "title" of the original page that said, "Halloween 2000" but wanted more than just my usual skinny font (I tend to do everything in the Amatic font).

So I picked the Mouse Memoirs font, because it was a little "chunky" and added the word "Halloween" and put it at a 120 font size to take up as much space as possible on the card.

I decided to do this in a FFT (Free Form Text) box, instead of the normal journaling box so I could move it around within the space at will. I put it in white and then moved it to the middle of my purple card. Then I added a second FFT box, repeated the word "Halloween" in the same font, same size, but changed the color to green.

From there, I carefully positioned the green word over the top of my white word, but then just slightly shifted it so that I got a 3D layered effect! This really works well with the chunky fonts--which is the reason I chose it!

Then, I added another FFT text box, and entered a slash ( / ) character and used the little dot button in the bottom right corner to rotate it until is was no longer diagonal, but straight up and down! Then I moved the slash so that it looked like it was a strand of spider web attached to the bottom of one of the "e" letters!

And then I added yet another FFT text box, pulled in a spider emoji, and positioned it so it was dangling from my "web strand" !

One journaling slot down, three to go!

For the next card, I started out with a FFT text box and added the spider web emoji, enlarged it a little bit, and put it in the corner of the card. Then added another FFT text box with a spider emoji and placed it on top of the web. Using emojis in this way is kind of like using digital stickers!

Then I added the journaling onto the green card like normal (no FFT text box) and typed it out, putting in manual hard returns whenever the text was going to run into my web/spider images.

For the next journaling card, I typed out my text, enlarged it to fill the space, and then looked it over. I wanted to accent a couple of the words in the text, so I used a couple of layered FFT text boxes, put a purple (to match my card color) letter "I" and masked (covered up) the words "Mummy" and "Deady" in the original journaling.

That left me with just blank purple space where those words used to be. Then I added two additional FFT text boxes, added the words "Mummy" and "Deady" back in, in the Mouse Memoirs font, and enlarged them to fit the blank spaces!

For the last journaling card, I repeated the 3D layering trick for the year "2000", and wham-o! Another page done!

Now to decide if I like the white borders best...

...or the black? Let me know what you like best in the comments!

Watching the Olympics and Feeling Nostalgic...

As I was watching the 2018 Winter Olympics on TV over the weekend, it got me thinking back to 2002 when the Olympics were in Utah. I knew I had at least one page that I created back then in the pages I had scanned, so I went through my scanned files and found these bad boys (emphasis on BAD!)

Holy sticker overload, Batman!

Wow. Just, wow.

It's like I felt I needed to use every single sticker in the package. And why that huge zamboni sticker? It's not like we went to the Olympic event to see the zamboni!

Well, thank goodness I could make up for some of these mistakes when I remade the page in the PL app, right?

When I scanned the pages, I got a scanned copy of the entire page, but then also had a scan of each of the individual photos on the page. That gave me the "meat" to work with on the page.

I decided to use the Design D template, and to focus the large 4x6 pockets for three of the images: the tickets, the German face painted guy, and for the one of me and my friend Nathan. And then I'd use the smaller pockets for the horizontal images from my original pages: the hockey team, and my wife and I with the hockey rink behind us. I opted to not use the picture of me next to the Olympic themed fence. It's not the best picture, the wording on the fence is backwards, and it just isn't part of the "story".

I decided that I wanted to use emojis on the page for the flags of the countries. For those, I just pulled in white journaling cards from the Neutral Cards Set, and then centered the flag emoji on the card, and increased the font size as big as it would go.

I added my journaling to the remaining 4x6 pocket and tried for like an hour to find a plain journaling card that matched the color of the tickets. It's not quite purple, but not quite blue either. I finally gave up and just decided an a gray color. Then I matched the background color to that, and I was done.

Two super-busy looking paper scrapbook pages condensed down to one PLapp page!

Feels like a gold medal to me! ;)