Using a Quickpage

Hello, I'm Angela to share a tutorial with you again and I'm going to show you how quickpages work. These are scrapbook pages that are nearly finished, you just add your photos and any text you want and it's done. Quick and simple. Perfect for beginners and very busy scrapbookers. Some designers provide albums of co-ordinating quickpages for making a full scrapbook in next to no time. Usually a quickpage has holes in to put the photos behind. Some are backgrounds to place your photos ontop of.

I'm the designer, Toucan Scraps, who sponsors this tutorial blog. I make a few standard sized (12x12) quickpages. However, my quickpage speciality is what we call hybrid. I design mini albums (e.g. 6x4 bragbooks, CD albums, and tag albums) and photo cards, calendars and other projects. Today I'm going to use one of the pages from my Roo's Robot Bragbook Album. The method is the same for any shape or size of quickpage.

First open up your software and create a page the same size as the quickpage (for this one 6x4 inches)

Add the quickpage

Create a layer below the quickpage layer and place your choice of photo in it

Resize your photo if needed and move it to the desired position in the frame.

On the layer above the quickpage, add any text you might want to add.

Crafting for a Colour Blind Person

Hello, I'm Angela and I have some hints and tips to share with you today on crafting projects to give to a colour blind person.

In our wonderful world of paper, stamps, cards and gift boxes we have a wonderful wealth of colour and pattern to play with. We make use of colour, texture and shapes to make amazing cards and other paper crafting gifts for our friends and family.

However, some people are not blessed with the same ability to see such a wonderfully colourful world as we do. Some people are colour-blind. There are 3 main types of colour-blindness making it impossible to see the differences between certain colours, the most common form being red-green. And a fourth, rare type where no colour can be seen at all, everything is grey-scale.

Making use of strong contrast, and mixing dark with light colours is the key to creating fabulous, wow factor cards etc to give to a colour-blind person.

If you are unsure about a patterned paper, a selection of items you want to use together, or even a finished project, you can use a free online site to check it for you. Take a photo of the item, or items, then visit vischeck and use their free online service to see what it would look like to a colour-blind person.

Colouring Printed Digital Images

I've had a number of people ask me for tips or help with colouring printed digital stamps.

Once printed, digital stamps can be coloured in the same way as any rubber stamped or hand drawn image. However, there is one important fact to know. Your printer's ink is water based. If it gets wet it will smudge. Therefore colouring the image with water based markers or watercolours or acrylic paints (those are water based too) will cause the printed ink to bleed.

Suitable products to use for colouring in printed digital stamps are:

• colouring pencils
• wax crayons
• oil based paints/inks
• chalks/oil pastels
• alcohol markers

There are a number of different alcohol based markers on the market e.g. Copics, Promarkers and Tria Markers. The beauty of these types of markers is that they are blendable for producing artist quality, and with practice, realistic colouring. My personal preference is for Tria Markers by Letraset, each marker comes with 3 different nib types and they have lovely co-ordinated sets for getting started with.

Over the coming months I plan to share a few hints and tips for using alcohol markers and a some step by step projects.