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Collages in Design & The 5 Months Layout

So the next thing we wanted to do is kind of shift gears a little bit. The next layout that we create is going to be a month in review page, and I really like to include these in the baby books that I've done because it's a way to quickly summarize those milestones that happened each month sometimes you don't want to do a whole layout on the fact that they tried peace for the first time, but you may be one of included somewhere in their album, so this is a great way to use a collage and then to dio kind of like just a bullet it numbered list of here's what baby was doing at this time? So I wanted to show you how easy it is to make a collage because I know people who are proficient and photoshopped know howto with these together, but if you don't have photoshopped or you're not sure how to do it, we're going to look on the computer and I'll show you exactly how easy it is with a program turned out a program a website called pick monkey. Has anybody heard of pick monkey before it's reall...

y awesome because it's free you can use it for free, you don't even have to register if you don't want tio if you want to upgrade, I think what was it like five dollars or something and then you get rid of the ads and then you get teo there's a few more collage options and things that you can do a couple other design elements that are available to you if you upgrade but you can use it as is that's free. So you just go to pick monkey dot com and click on the collage button okay? And it's going to ask you where do you want to get your pictures from? You can choose to take them from facebook so if you have photos already uploaded to facebook, you can get them there. And denise, I know that's appropriate for you since you have facebook pictures of your grandchildren, I, um and then it will just ask you where you want to get them from. These are going to be from my computer or the computer here and you're just going to choose them. I'm gonna put all these on and it's gonna upload them to their site a little slow here goes. Okay, so here are my pictures that's what this kind of mountain escape image I iike honest force for your images were going to then go to the little collage of the layouts option and then it gives you all these different layouts for how you want your collage to look there's ducks in a row, which is just a series of pictures in a row there's one if you're making cards like holiday cards there, the appropriate size for that square deal is just a bunch of, you know, square grids, we're going to go down tio elegant click on that, and then I'm going to pick this one that has eight pictures, and I believe, yeah, ok, so that's eight photos I'm going to get to put on one layout, and the nice thing about this is you're not printing them out, trying to figure out the size, cropping them down, putting them on, you know, white card stock and trying to make the clash this program's going to do it for us? Um, and then you can just have it printed wherever you normally put your pictures, ok, so the first thing we need to do that is change the dimensions because this is obviously a square, and we want this to be able to be printed as an eight by ten, so to do that, we're going to change the dimensions down below to twenty, four hundred by three thousand, and you'll see when I clicked on it, it defaulted to twenty, four hundred again, that's, because I have to go over here and unlock it so it's not kept proportional because it wants to make a square by the fault so hit three thousand and there we go so now at eight by ten and that's the right dimensions and the right pixels to be able to print a nice eight by ten and if you're not sure if you're using pick monkey and you're thinking I want to do a five by seven collage but what pixels do I need or what two mentions a resolution or whatever you can go on I think they have like a frequently asked questions section and it will tell you you know if you want to print the size make sure you do this I'm dimensions so that's helpful okay so now I have my temple it all set up and I'm going to go back to my photos and then it's just dragging and dropping so this is how easy this is we're just gonna track and drop area so all social media I think it gives you the option of facebook I think that was at facebook or dropbox drop off with another option if you have them saved there I don't know why I keep saying I think my mouth on you in the mouth the wrong way or something background is great drop it yeah it is not great don't drop it seems like there's a maybe a little bit of a delay there you go okay and so you get the idea what's I did it again it's really much easier than I'm making it look all right so there's there's a basic just of what we're doing so you have once you have all your photos there anything is that you can then edit things so you could take this photo and you can edit it individually if you want um which lets you kind of change the size of its you could make it bigger we're back out a little bit you could change the direction of it if you need it too and this is great you could even you know up the exposure a little bit it would be a little bit brighter so if you have some photos that are maybe darker than you want you could easily do that here you know lets you brighten it or bring it back down so that's nice and then you can also go over here to this background and you can change the spacing on your clothes so if you like more white space in between your pictures versus less you can kind of customize it if you want the corners of your photos to be rounded you can do that okay so there's all different things to dio then they give you two options you can share it so you could share it right to facebook if you want it tio or wherever else you'd like to post things I think flicker is even an option also but what we're going to do is save it so I would hit save and then you can rename it, and I would go with the sean gives you the different qualities for printing, and I would just pick the highest one just because I normally do that so I can printed a different sizes, ok? And then you can tell it where to say that I'm gonna just save to my computer and I had saved, so within minutes you could just create a whole collage of your pictures and then save it to your computer and then send it off to be printed or printed it home. If you have a home printer so it's really easy to do, you don't need to know any photo shop techniques or half photo shops, and so it's an expensive program. This is all free and available on pick monkey there's. Also some options if you maybe don't have a lot of pictures that you upload it to your computer aa lot of people just keep photos on their phone. They use their phone as their main camera now. And so if that's the case and all of your photographs air there, you might be interested in knowing how to do this via an app on your phone, and this is great cause again, if you're only have one hand free, you could do this on your phone. So there's a program called pick stitch and this is available for both iphone and for android and I believe it's free actually I think there is a ninety nine cent upgrade or something if you wanted some war options yeah a cz faras collage sizes and things like that but they say you just open up the app and we're going to select you know look at all these different collages you can use and you see the little walk sign these are ones that you need to upgrade you know, for ninety nine cents or something to you so I'm just going to select this one again there's less photos on this but if you want it more you could upgrade if you wanted tio ok, so we need to change the aspect and we want to do an eight by ten's hugh just slide down here pick eight by tone ok and then you just click on the photo to add it and you can see when you click on the block and I'll ask you where you want to get your photo from if it's already on the photo album on your phone you can click that if you want to go ahead and take a picture right away you can use the camera you can get it from facebook or you can use a drop box and I haven't on dropbox which is a nice way to store a lot of photos let's see, ok, I'm just going to select that. And there it is. Okay? And so you would just go through and click on each block and rearrange them a little bit. Um, and then you could hit export when you're all finished. And then I what I love about this app does it give you a lot of places to export it to? So you could facebook at you, can instagram it you could just email it to yourself so you have a hard copy on your own computer. You can save it to your photo album on the phone or you can even send it right to have have it printed. So that's a nice option to all right? Anyone think that's useful? Yeah, yeah. Any other ladies here, you says, chris turney said, your potential of all of you. Oh, change the dimensions. Like, I guess I just didn't play around with the buttons. Yeah. That's a great way three by four I sent them and just kind of write down exactly. All right, so once you do have, you know, this was actually the collage and I may not pick monkey. So here it is, all printed out, and we're going to go ahead and make a lay out with its claws, and I know some of you might not have a whole collage, so you can kind of just get the background started. I kind of designed this page so that if you didn't have the collage ready and set to go in class, you could add it when she got home. So I'm going to trim this down and the papers you're going to need are the black and white kind of wonky stripes, so you could get that one out first. Well, I'm trimming this down, okay? So papers we need for this one. Is this really cool? When it's called urban planner? It's got lots of different colors on it, and then this one is called bravo and it's got the pencils across it on one side and then on the b side it's this kind of lined paper, not perfectly line, but it's got some words on it as well. So we're going to cut this down to nine by twelve, the white lined paper, okay? And we're going to say that blues that tear strip again, so don't get rid of that, but nine by twelve, basically you're just cutting off three inches. We had a question from elizabeth online. Because I'm sure this is something that's true for so many of our viewers are saying I sometimes want to save my supplies because I just love him so much and I want to use them in the perfect layout do you have any advice on how to get past this particular block? You know, I've always said if you enjoy if you enjoy the embellishment, you enjoy the pattern, the paper use it because the perfect photo might never come along and this is, you know, in your stash and once you get it, if you really get into scrap booking, new stuff is constantly coming out and so, you know, you might just use it because you're bound to like something better a few months so better on your pages and just in your stash. The other question a comment actually came in from the shell being michelle's a regular with us, we welcome back and she was saying how thrilled she has to see this course about practical scrapbooking and she was fearful that everything was moving towards digital she's lovely she's really enjoying seeing traditional scrapbooking coming back that's great, good, yes, I don't I don't know much about digital scrapbooking I can do it few hybrid things, but that's about it okay so far on the urban planner, I'm just gonna cut off this branding strip is well all right, so the fun thing about this paper is that there's all these different colors and we're only going to see about a three inch strip across the top so you can kind of start turning it think like him which colors do I like the best? I liked the green because I have a boy that I'm scrapbooking and he had a lot of green on in these pictures so I chose to keep this part as the top but if you have a girl and maybe you want it more the pink you could rotate it and let this be the top okay? So I like I said I like the green to show a little bit so I'm going to keep mine that way and this white paper is just going to get it here to the bottom lay out and I really like whenever I have to pattern papers meeting I always like to have a little strip of something across them almost toe like bridge the gap between the two designs. So for this one I'm going to use this green with the polka dot again I like the green and conceivably could also use them take their as well you don't necessarily have to cut the paper right you could use your washington very good idea where you could do that as well case once you have your the branding strip kind of across the top and it's all set. We're gonna just hear this photo again. This is something you can do at home if you want it. Tio, make your collage on pick monkey. I'm just gonna off center it a bit to the right and put it there and for the title for this page, we have these wonderful principles and these are perfect for these monthly review types of pages. So these airmen to be punched out with a circle punch. These are two inch circles. So this is a page from when will was five months old. So what you need to do is just cut out the month that you're going to use. And again, you might not know if you want to wait to do this once you have your collage. That's fine, too. I'm just gonna cut that out. Then I can use my circle punch on it. And they're designed to work with a two inch punch. So that's, really lovely. And we need some he's found. And I'm just going to kind of stick that. So it's overlapping my picture a little bit that on your table, you should have some buttons. And these were not in the kit, but I just felt like this page. He did a little bit of something else to go with it, and the buttons go with the baby theme of the layout and I like to be able to pick the colors that picked up the colors along the top of my page so there's some twine also or some string that you can tie those off with? I'm not going to do that right now because it can be a little bit tedious mind I'm just gonna kind of lay them around my title ok like that, then we're going to take a member of the stamps that came with a bunch of numbers the one, two, three, four, five and a good to use for these would be to make a list of five things that he was doing when he was five months old, so I'm going to take that off and stamp that in black ink onto maybe one of the scrap pieces of white card stock that we have and again, you might wantto use your racer on it since he's a brand new stamps I'm actually just gonna stamp it on the edge of my principal safe from paper because I only need a little bit, then you can just use scissors to cut these apart, and what I did was just to kind of scatter these along the side here in this margin so it looks like a the end all right, so here's the layout when it's all finished and what I did with those stamp numbers that I just like I said scattered them along the margin and then I typed up and printed out little strips actually didn't put it on the little strips it printed it on a piece of, you know, normal size card stock and then just cut into strips and they're just five little fax about what will was doing at five months of age, and I just kind of put one underneath each number and you can see here I did tie off the the buttons on that later on this way out here, maybe questions about this one. Does this seem manageable to do kind of like a page and review each month? I mean, you could follow this exact to design even for each month of the first year if that was all that you wanted to do all that you felt like you had time for and it was manageable you could just kind of copy the same sketch again and again each month use your punched out month principles and a few facts you know that what was going on in that month and you'd be good to go that be a great start for a baby album he's doing here in the studio got theatrical some slight variations here is what is really cute just taking some of the different things, you know, just emily, you actually cut the paper to the size you want him and joined them together rather than put less pink because I'm doing it for my son. So so it will cover the pink so it's only like the red and the green and blue that's. The really great thing about that paper isn't you could tell this is jazz. Nicole was saying I wanted to just kind of wrap up the segment was talking about what are some time saving strategies for scrap booking, and we kind of covered some of them in the completion of the two pages that we did. The first tip I have is just having your photos printed and ready to go is a huge time saver. It can seem like a tour of the time when you have to sit down and kind of go through them and send them off to be printed. But it's so nice when you feel inspired when you actually have time to kind of how them right there, ready to go. I have started printing at home in the last few years, just for convenience, and so I can size my pictures and I have to say that it's. It takes me longer now than when I used to just order a month worth of pictures at a time and just have them there to scrap book so I kind of go back and forth which one should I do? Should I just go backto ordering a batch of photos so it really does save time when you have them off it to go? The other thing we talked about as a big time saver is using kids so that you're not digging through your stash each time looking for the perfect alphabet looking for the perfect embellishment it's all right there and ready to go starting with sketches is a great way to save time again they're wonderful starting point a great tool especially if you're feeling a little overwhelmed with the design part of scrapbooking they can really help and actually the more you use sketches you start to learn some design principles as you go kind of give you some practice so that later you can create your own pages and not really even have to use them anymore and then creating with collages of course enables you to get a whole bunch of photos on one page and just kind of ticks off a whole bunch of things you want tio remember especially wonderful for events or things when you have a lot of photographs on dh there really fast to make using pick monkey and the ap the pick stitch up and then finally having a dedicated scrapbooking area and this is really hard for a lot of people you just might not have space or room to actually spread out your stuff. Maybe you don't have a desk, but having a place that you can leave your supplies out really saves time. When I first was scrapbooking, I you know, my twins were born and I obviously couldn't scrapbook on the floor anymore because they would get into everything. So I started to scrap book on the kitchen table, which was fine, but I always have to clean that up at the end of the scrapbooking session. So it's nice if you have an area where you can kind of leave it out, so if you're working on a page and you only have twenty minutes, you work on it's not quite finished, you can walk away for a day or two before you have a chance to come back and start right back in on it. If you don't have a desk that you can use at home, some other ideas are tio use one of those rolling carts you know you can get them at different places, you could keep all of your supplies and there may be even leave the top space for kind of works in progress and just roll that in and out of a closet somewhere when you want to scrap book another great ideas to use those under the bed storage bins you know, the ones that have wheels on the bottom? If you have room under your bed that's not filled with other storage things, you can kind of even leave one end that's open just to put your your layout in progress in and when you're finished for the day, you can slide it back underneath your bed and the kids don't get into it and that's a great way to do it, or you can kind of give yourself permission to say, all right, for a few days every month are a day. Every week I'm going to let the dining room table get taken over by scrapbooking, and then I'll clean it up after those few days, because I know we don't always want to look at all the junk spread out in the middle of your living space, but you kind of give yourself permission for a few days, so let it there and then clean it up afterwards. So saving something that's challenging to our online audience or you have a question for you, nichols saying, I love your idea of scheduling scrap booking, scrapbooking time, just like you would do for any other priority, but how much time do you recommend blocking off so it feels manageable but still allows you to keep up? You know, that would really vary from person to person it kind of depends how fast of a scrapbook you are. I'm like I said kind of a slow scrapbook er so it takes me a little bit longer, but I would say even just an hour a day whether it's at naptime or it's at the end of the day and some of that might not be actually scrapbooking some of it might be using the aps on your phone to order some pictures or jotting down some things in a journal, but if you do a little bit each day and you have a plan, I think that it makes a lot more manageable a question from angela p who's joining us online and angela, I guess this is her questions really for the ladies in the in the audience and maybe they cannot so this because do any of the students that are going back and scrapping their baby's first year have any suggestions for new moms to be? And of course we do have a new month to be with christina here anything you wish you would have done pictures you wish you would have taken wait, go straight in the hamlet think you'd regret pregnancy pictures of the belly I always just too big girls I don't want to take a picture and now I look back and think that we have won probably each child and I'm probably in the background and I think that's one of my regrets I have a personal regret that I actually just even though it's weird because I'm working broadcast in front of the camera I actually hate having my picture taken and I always have so I actually deliberately or less ruined every family photo that's ever been taken I'm actually not in half of them now few years ago my sister went back and scrapbook everything that my mother still had into trunks and everywhere and I don't feature on now I sort of regret that but there's not much you can actually do you have any advice for reluctant children who really don't want their picture taken who really toned deposit anything? Have you encountered this now I think taking like candid pictures you know not every picture has to be taken straight on with a perfect smiling face. Some of the best pictures are more candid when your child doesn't realize that you're taking their picture or you know when they're having a conversation with a sibling or with dad or something and you can kind of sneak in there and take a picture. Some of those that show relationships are even better than the cheesy grins that they give the camera I think all kids go through that stage where you say smile, we take your picture and you get that weird kind of like force strange looking expression on their face, especially if you take a lot of pictures like I do, my kids get tired of it sometimes, and I don't want to cooperate, but on, yeah, some of the candid ones I think end up meaning the most in the end because you're seeing relationships and you're seeing kind of will peek into what real life is like. That's great jessica any you know, your new mom, the annual new mom, any recommendations? Something you already thinking? Gosh, I wish I've taken pictures of that I've been doing the at his one month birthday like making sure you take a picture of him next to a little stuffed animal, and that has been because my my family is very far away. So that's been pretty helpful just to make sure you get a picture each month because I'm already feeling even only at six months like, oh dude, we take a picture to be have we documented this this month because he does look so different every month? I've just started scrapbooking my and I definitely have way more photos of just her and I wish I had more photos of her with family members and with my friends every time someone came to visit, I should've been taking pictures of that, so I'm going to be doing that more going forward