I wish I had known about scrapbooking classes when I first started scrapping; it would have saved me some money on tools and other things I would never have bought! Some of the loveliest pages I’ve ever seen were created with little more than paper and creativity – it’s the assembly on the page that makes all the difference.
I did this two-page layout after attending a class on “Color, Layout, and Design.” Notice how the combination of colors used picks up the colors in the photos themselves; and how the photos are arranged to maximize the eye’s tendency to track from top left to bottom right. I have used these concepts in most of my pages since attending this class, with similarly effective results.
(I also tried another new favorite trick: using the computer to compose my journaling, then handwriting it on the page as usual. This allowed me to get the text exactly as I wanted it, but still have my own handwriting on the page, which is very important to me.)
Below is a one-page example of these techniques: