I was recently asked how I learned digital scrapping. The answer to that question is rather unglamorous and uninformative, I'm afraid - I just started doing it. The thing is, I had already used Photoshop for years (mainly for photomanipulation), so doing layouts was no big thing. When you know how to work with layers, you know how to digiscrap.
But the question made me think about how I actually got even started with digiscrapping. I've always been photographing, ever since I got my first camera when I was sixteen I think, but not with great artistic intentions - my aim has been to record, to capture moments. However, I've also always been very bad at arranging photos into albums, which rather spoils the idea of preserving the memories.
One day in 2009 I saw some layouts somewhere on the net, was fascinated by the idea and just started browsing through the net for examples, and realised this might actually be something for me! I soon discovered there is a multitude of freebies, templates, papers and full kits floating around, and I collected rather a nice library of resources to start with. (Here I could preach about keeping your resource library well-ordered, but that deserves its own entry!)
And yes, then I just started using them. Trial and error is - for me, at least - a good way to learn. There are, of course, tons of tutorials, too, if you prefer to learn that way.
My first project was to create layouts for every day for a month, December 2009. It was unplanned to start with - I didn't take photos to scrap them, I never do - I just realised I had a photo for almost every day for that month, and started putting them into layouts. When I was done with the month, I printed the layouts and pasted them in an album. Later in 2010, I bought a small album and created a birthday present for my ever active better half, showing many of the things accomplished during the year, from one birthday to the next. I'm still quite proud of the little album, and what a great thing it is to see for example what our garden looked like that summer... Recently I made some layouts into photobooks instead and was well pleased with the results, so that's what I'm going to do from now on.
Looking back, my first layouts were rather cluttered, although I even then dropped most of the embellishments that were suggested in the templates. Nowadays I have found my style, which definitely falls into the category Clean and Simple - I'm not really into embellishments, and word art often makes me slightly cringe. I've been brought up in the simplicity of Finnish and Scandinavian design, I suppose, and prefer using my own words, if indeed any.
