As a scrapbook artist - and make no mistake, scrapbooking is an art form - your background page is your canvas. It has edges and borders, corners and lines, and all that wonderful space in the middle you fill with your pictures, papers, and other adornments. Many of the same principles that apply to other concrete art forms also apply to scrapbooking.
Not all space is the same. In this week's lesson, I'll be discussing two different notions of the use of your available scrapbooking space: strength and density.
It is common to try to push everything toward the center. To just take that one, perfect picture and stick it right smack in the middle of your page. But in fact, that is not the strongest area of your layout. Draw an imaginary tic-tac-toe board on the top of your layout. The intersections of the lines are the strongest areas you have to work with.
Whenever possible, plan your layouts to optimize the use of those areas, whether with great photos, creative titles, or eye-catching embellishments.
Corners tend to be the weakest areas of your layout. Visually, they are unsupported on two sides by any background, and so elements placed in the corners have a tendency to aesthetically "drop off" of the layout, leaving too little impact. If you place something in a corner, try leaving at least a narrow border of the background page between the element and the actual corner of the background.
When you start off with a blank background, all of it is "white space" (even if the background is, in fact, another color), because it is unfilled. As you begin adding photos, tags, journaling, titles, and other elements, you will gradually replace some of this white space with "dark space" - filled space.
Some scrapbook artists like a lot of white space in their layouts, fearing that too much dark space causes the layout to be too "busy." Other scrapbookers like for their layouts to have a great deal of "eye-candy", so that the roving eye finds new things of interest. You will find your own style over time - perhaps largely by imitating the layouts of other scrapbookers who appeal to you - but in the short term there are a couple of potholes to watch out for. As always, please think of these as suggestions and tips, but not as rules.
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With only cropped photos, a title, and journaling, this layout has far too much "white" space. The bright green background is especially hard on the eyes, and needs to be toned down. |
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The simple addition of some patterned paper helps to break up the expanse, but there still isn't quite enough here to make the layout feel balanced and pleasing to the eye. |
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A much-improved layout, with the further addition of tags and matting both the title and the journaling. Turning the title and large tag on diagonals gives a sense of movement to the overall layout. |
Scan through a few layouts in scrapbooking magazines. Evaluate their use of the strong and weak areas of their backgrounds. Notice their use of white space (remember, it might not always be white in color), and see how this affects your impression of each layout as a whole. Keep a journal of your likes and dislikes, including sketches or copies of the layouts you see.
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