Scraps Of Mind

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 303–312

William Shakespeare

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Transparent scrapbook layouts have been a feature of the paper scrapbooking world for a year or so.

They’re a cool scrapbook idea. You make them by creating your scrapbook layout using a transparent plastic sheet as your background. Like the ones used for overhead projection slides.

And there are a few things you need to consider when you plan your layout design.

First you need to think about how it is going to look from the back. Remember with a transparent background, the back of all of your elements can be seen on the reverse.

One of the ways around this is to think about doing a reverse layout on the other side of the transparency. To make this successful, it’s probably a good idea to keep your layout design relatively simple with large shapes dominating, that are easy to work with when you design your reverse layout.

And make sure you exploit the transparent aspect by leaving plenty of space to see through.

Transparent layouts can look very cool and there’s a certain sense of satisfction in creating one, because they present challenges that are different from ‘normal’ scrapbook layouts.

But can digital scrapbookers create transparent layouts too?

Answer: Yes!!

The real value of the transparent technique is in it’s physical form, not it’s digital form.

It’s easy to just colour the background of your layout white and it looks like a transparent layout on the screen. But once you print it out, there’ll be nothing transparent about it.

The trick for digital scrapbookers is to save the layout file as a PNG rather than a JPEG. That way you can print it onto a transparent sheet and all the transparency will remain intact.

In fact you can even take it one step further and add a couple of ‘real’ elements to your printed digital transparent layout. Say a ribbon or a border of buttons. Brads are not so good as they look pretty ugly on the reverse side.

Once again digital and paper scrapbooking techniques come together to result in great scrapbooking.

I love Hybrid Scrapbooking.

And don’t forget, if you are interested in getting started in digital scrapbooking, there’s a bunch of information and videos to get you up and running over at Step by Step Digital Scrapbook – the site that’s especially for the beginner to digital scrapbooking.

Other Related Articles:

Hybrid Scrapbooking - the best of both worlds

Black and White Scrapbook Layouts

Learn How to Digital Scrapbook

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We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure.

There is no end to the adventures we can have

if only we seek them with our eyes open.

Jawaharal Nehru

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