I am in love with this collection. Not only because of colors, which are my favorite, but especially for the feel of “joy” and the artistry touch.

I’d like to propose you a few design tips for this scrapbook collection.

If you want to get the maximum creative impact, be sure to use monocromatic photos. Since we have already a very colorful base of embellishments and papers, if you want to stand out the photos and emphatize them, you’ll want to desaturate them to create a strong contrast between them and the environment.

Also, be sure that the “global light” of all your embellishments is coherent. In other terms, if you’re creating fall of shadows in the left direction, be sure to do that for each element. But it may happen that the original shadows of the element don’t match with your choice. If the elements have been photographed in a dfferent light situation than the one you’re trying to recreate, then you’ll notice something weird and innatural. How to solve that? Try to apply a layer effect on the elements and make the inner shadows and the highlights as needed. You may do that by adding a gradient on soft light blending mode, where the white color is the highlight and the black color is the shadow. Does it make sense?

Think about it: if you have photographed a flower in top view and you had a very diffused light, with no harsh shadows, at the moment that you’ll extract from the background as PNG and you’ll go to add a lateral shadow, you’ll notice by instict that something is wrong. If you want to keep that lateral shadow though, you may recreate artificially a different light situation matching with that shadow effect. You’ll add the “inner shadow” in the direction where the shadow falls, and the highlights to the opposite side, where the light source comes from.

If you’ll follow these tips your layouts will do aan extraordinary jump to higher quality level. I hope to have helped!

With love,
Val.