As I mentioned in my earlier post on digital scrapbooking, I’m a newbie when it comes to the world of clip art and embellishments. My first digiscrapping adventure was with my collaborative cookbook/year end photo book project created on Mixbook with my friends last year. There were a lot of fun clip art embellishments to play with and I think it came out great.
I have been finding lots of good digital scrapbooking freebies and I thought I’d share some I found with you. Not all the free stuff I was finding was attractive looking, but I did find some high quality free goodies from the following sites. Some require you to sign up for their newsletter in order to download the freebies, but not all. Naturally these sites offer freebies in hopes that you’ll like their stuff and come back to buy, but this is a great way to test out if you like digital scrapbooking in the first place before buying any scrapbooking kits. I personally didn’t want to invest in buying stuff that I wasn’t going to use.
You can find some great freebies here:
Shabby Princess – lots of good quality freebies
Digital Divas Designs -14 freebies currently
Digital Freebies – a few nice designs with alphas too
Digital Scrapbooking Freebies lens on Squidoo – a list of a lot of great resources for freebies
CraftCrave – a site that finds freebies and generates previews with links to various designers’ and scrapbooking sites
This last site led me to a freebie by Lily Designs, which is a part of a unique set of winter themed collaborative kits designed by three artists: emeto designs, Lily Designs and Jofia Designs. I played with the freebie first which had a background and a few elements. I found their kits to be so unique and different from what I’d seen on other sites, I decided to buy all three kits and started playing with them. Much of the uniqueness of their designs is the “paper doll” like aspect to them and the fantastical settings you can create with the kits. It really did remind me of those punch out doll figures and their outfits with tabs on them from my childhood, but in this case it’s all digital. Admittedly I was a little intimidated by the creative layouts created by the users but it was good to look through them for inspiration. Most of them featured a trimmed out figure of their child which I knew would take a bit of prep work via outside program like Photoshop Elements or Adobe Photoshop or some other external design software. Basically you take a photo and then erase the background so you’re left with only the main subject.
There are several ways to remove the background on a photo. Here’s a tutorial on clipping paths in Photoshop. Another way is to erase the background using the eraser tool in Photoshop.
It took a bit of time, but the work was worth it. Once I had my Photo Book Baby clipped out, I dressed him up in all sorts of cute hats, mittens, scarves etc. and put together a number of cute scrapbooking pages. You can also use these layouts in a more traditional sense without clipping out a photo too. Here’s one of my creations thus far. No snow on the ground yet here, but we’re ready for it!
I like the designs of these kits so much, I may blow them up and make a few canvas prints to hang in Photo Book Baby’s nursery! They’d also make cute custom holiday cards too! The possibilities are endless…
b/t/w I hope you’re all having a fun Halloween. Not only have I been dressing up Photo Book Baby on the computer, I’m going to be putting him into costume in real life too!
I already subscribe under name Kestrel
opps posted in wrong place 🙁