Making Digital Scrapbook Paper

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Making Digital Scrapbook Paper

I am trying to design my own digital scrapbook paper, and am having a very difficult time in finding colors that go well together as well as overlays or patterns that work well together. I feel completely lost when it comes to making a nice paper. I'm hoping someone here who does this frequently can give me some tips and pointers.

Google color theory for help with colors that go together. Paint chip samples can also help with colors that go together. I have also looked at interior design for ideas like a cream, teal and gold living room. Wedding colors and bouquet images also show colors that go together.

I've mixed dots, stripes, gradients, solids and many other patterns together and it works as long as the colors go together and I try to stick to a smaller number of colors as my main colors, like 3 and then add in a couple accent colors. Like Pale plum, Dark plum, Olive green and then throw in some buttercream yellow.

It's so much fun to create! And don't be critical of your first tries, we all start out questioning how well our designs are. They are better than you think - I promise! You'll learn a lot just by doing it! Have fun and show us some of your designs when you are done - I'd love to see them.

Thanks for the info. I think maybe trying to use too many colors to start was my main problem. I plan to google color theory and see if I can get anywhere. Thanks again!

You're welcome. Have fun!

Okay, not quite sure how to do this, so I am just going to provide the link for the paper that's on my blog. I hope I have done this right!

Our colors come from art pieces or sometimes, wedding swatches. We pick up colors from photos as well and use Kulur, https://color.adobe.com/kulur-color-theme-6984202/

or, we use Design Seeds,
https://www.design-seeds.com/

Thanks so much for those helpful sites! I really appreciate it.

Jo, the papers are really pretty... I love the text you have worked in! Thank you for sharing it with us!

Thanks so much, Madge smiley

Just left a comment on your blog for you! Lovely job Jo!

Thank you, Jessica smiley

Jo, the papers are lovely!

Thank you, Liz. I appreciate you checking them out!

Love your pages Jo, thanks for sharing.

Color palettes are not copyrighted, I sometimes use kits already created for color inspiration. You can make a completely 100% different kit based on the same colors. Or find a picture that you love the colors in, and there are many online color swatch sites that will make a color palette based on your photo after simply uploading the photo.

Also Just Jaimee over at The Lily Pad has these for free:

http://justjaimee.com/49-free-new-photoshop-colour-swatches/

You can use them as an actual loadable swatch if you have photoshop or photoshop elements or just simply use the pictures to gather your colors manually.

Great papers! I like to look back at old blogtrain or kit palettes when I'm at a loss for colors. I used to go to Pinterest or Google to look for color palettes, but there is such an overwhelming choice there that I stopped doing that.

Thanks so much, ladies. I really appreciate the input and kind words!

One thing I do a lot when creating digital paper is to have a solid color background on one layer, and then drawing the pattern in white and/or black on top of it (sometime with some transparency). Then I can easily change the color of the background and see what the paper looks like in any color. You can do that either in vector programs like Inkscape and Illustrator, or bitmap software like Gimp or Photoshop.

Thanks for the helpful hint, Stephane smiley

I have a whole pint rest board devoted to pretty color schemes! Definitely just search for something along the lines of color swatches and once you start to find a few you get down a rabbit hole and have hundreds of ideas.

But I also will use https://coolors.co/ It'll show you a set of colors. If you don't like it hit the space bar, but if you like one or two you can select those and it'll replace the colors you didn't like with new possibilities. It's a lot of fun!

I haven't used Pinterest in a while, and certainly not for this, but I like that idea. I may have to give it another go!

Such beautiful papers, thanks so much! smiley

You're more than welcome, Bina, I'm so glad you liked them smiley

Hi Jo...just downloaded your paper mini! I love it....& since you are asking, I feel it could have been more shabby chic, since...were you aiming for a victorian shabby chic?
But if you were not, then the papers are perfect! Thank you for your generosity.

Chitra, I'm glad you liked them. I was just trying to make some papers with a soft feel that I myself liked.

Those are really pretty!

Thank you!

I highly recommend Design Seeds. Another one is ColourLovers (I think that's the name of the site lol).

Looks like you did an amazing job!

If you have a decent camera, go out and find some things that would look really good as a background paper, or as a texture, look at everything you see as a potential paper. take photos and play around a lot with the layers panel in photoshop.

I have used as backgrounds (with editing of course)
a greasy pizza box bottom
rust stains on an oven
bark of a tree
concrete rain tanks

get the picture?
then find free watercolour papers or free textures and overlay them.

So many possibilities

Thank you for sharing! These are simply lovely and I can't wait to use them in a project.

That's a GREAT site, thanks for sharing Christianna

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