Working with Photo Templates

Happy New Year Everyone!  I hope everyone has recovered from the festive period and is slowly getting used to the fact it is 2015, I know I will still be writing the date as 2014 till at least March though!
I have spent the last couple of days looking at getting my 2014 albums all completed, which means journalling on pages and getting them in the album.  It also means I have been able to identify where their are gaps in my album, both within the narrative story, but also where I want to include more photos.  On my post last month, I included a LO with 36 photos, this month I thought I would show you another way to include lots of photo.  This time of year for me also means the annual back up of everything on my hard-drive, and I try to keep my photos in some kind of order using the  Photoshop Organisation tool.  It was whilst doing this that I used Photoshop Elements to create some photo collages.

My first LO contains 32 photo, this was very simple to create using a template for PSE that is available free , I found it on this  Blog, but their is also lots of other, Pinterest is a great place to look, YouTube also has lots of tutorials on how to use templates.  You could of course just crop and paste together photos that you already had printed, and they don’t need to be 32 images of your own face!!

I went with this paper from Maggie Holmes which I had been saving for a background paper and then decided to just go through all the separate bags and containers of half used die-cuts and embellishments.


The eclectic look of embellishments works well with all the different colours and tones in the photos, and adds to the chaos of the page, which I love.  I finished it off with a sparkly title, I do love glitter Thickers and feel everyone needs some extra sparkle on their pages.  A video of this LO up on my YouTube channel today, and a videos for the following LOs will be up this week.  I also have over 200 videos for you to watch, where you can learn more about my style.

In looking at the blank spots in my album, I found some photos missing from Halloween, so although scrapping these in December felt odd, I am glad that these photos are in the book. I have always struggled using circles on my pages, and would never think to use circular photos, but these templates found on Pinterest gave me a way to scrap circular photos without the curves.

 

I again used lots of old embellishments on this pages, some dating back to 2011, but I am glad to have them used up.  I used this lovely Simple Stories paper as my background and included some Chickaniddy cut-a-part pieces too.

I used the last few bits I had from the Kelly Purkey and Jillibean Soup which worked in well with the Halloween colour theme I was going for.

The last Page again is using a template from the Blog I mentioned earlier, I really liked this layout and decided it would work well, opposite my 36 photo from last  month.  I will have these photos all in a separate album, but like I have been able to include some in my main chronological album of the year.

I went very simple on this LO as I wanted the photo to be the main feature, I used this lovely grey tone on tone patterned paper from Heidi Swapp.  The canvas heart and wood veneer came from the Heidi Swapp Colour Magic Project Life set.  It was perfect to cover up the part of the template I did not have enough photos to fill.

The other embellishments were kept very simple, these were from , Heidi Swapp, Shimelle and Jillibean Soup, and I used Vellum to add to the understated effect.
So my 2014 albums, I have 4, are now nearly complete with just a few more festive LOs to add in.  This way of getting your photo printed and in your album is just one way, of course their is always the project life method and also mini-books.  I urge you all however to get your photos backed up, whether on a hard-drive or on a online cloud, although as memory keeper we have all our photos in albums, it is still great to have the original available.  So that is your homework for this month and I look forward to seeing you in February when I am sure love will be in the air.