Technique: Doodles as Background Paper

The photo on this page was taken about a year ago. Seeing this photo reminded me how fun it was to be pregnant :). I love all the doodles that are popping up all over the scrapping world! Below, I used some to create a one-of-a-kind background for my page. Doodles are a very hot trend in scrapbooking right now, so you can find them everywhere - or just draw your own . Today’s technique can be used by traditional, digital and hybrid scrappers alike – my page is digital, but below I will show you how you can get the same look on a traditional scrapbook page as well.

Credits Everything is by Gina Marie Huff of Weeds & Wildflowers Design: doodles and cardboard elements: Everything Cardboard No. 2: Flower Frenzy; title: Doodling Days #1 – Curly Q Alpha; green paper: Little Seeds Collection -Being Me Papers. Font: Fancihand.

Tips & Tricks

• I used the cardboard flower stems to make a photo frame, and the doodles I used for the background are actually made to coordinate with the cardboard flowers; but as you can see, they also work great on their own! With a little creativity, you can find lots of uses for the elements found in digital kits.
• Thanks to an awesome tip I learned at Sprague Lab , I was able to quickly and easily make multiple copies of flower doodle layers.
• The colors I used to paint all the flowers were selected from my photo using the eyedropper tool in photoshop. I also selected additional, coordinating colors by adjusting the saturation and brightness of the original colors (just click directly on to color box using the eyedropper tool to pull up the color picker window).
• I mixed and matched the cardboard pieces from Gina’s kit to create my own, unique flower embellishments and recolored the pink and green paint a bit to match my page.
• I have been experimenting with making my own drop shadows. I used a few ideas from Misty Cato’s drop shadow tutorial (as well as some of my own) to make these. I also used the brush tool set on the screen blending mode to add a little highlight to the center of my title to make it look even more realistically like a curled paper. 

Technique: Design With Doodles

Creating your own background paper with doodles is SO simple, and there are limitless possibilities to this technique! The doodles that come in digital scrapbooking kits are almost always in .png format, with transparent backgrounds. This means that they can match any photo, because you can make them any color, either by changing the color of the actual doodle, filling in the doodle with the paint bucket tool, or by simply placing them over a colored paper or element. To me, it always looks best if there is a variation of sizes and shapes; you can either use different sized doodles, or simply re-size the doodles yourself. I also like the look of layered doodles. If it starts to look too messy, just erase the portions of doodles that are overlapping. Be sure to place some of the doodles so that they are hanging off the edge of your page, it will look more natural.

When using doodles in paper or hybrid scrapbooking:  You can use digital doodle files for non-digital pages too. Simple shapes can be printed and cut out with scissors. Try printing them on colored cardstock.  Or, if you print them on white paper, you can have fun coloring them in with paint, colored pencils, chalk -you name it! If you really want a custom look you can always dream up your very own doodles, or at least mimic another design, as I did on the page in this post.

No matter what method you use, incorporating doodles into your scrapbook pages will get your creative juices flowing and just might bring out a bit of your inner child !

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