My Baby Photos!

With all the holiday shots you’re bound to have right now, it’s a good time to create some festive layouts for your scrapbooking. The best way to ensure that you don’t get a backlog of baby photos is to put them into an album as quickly as possible. With digital scrapbooking, that can be very simple, just whip up the page on the computer and print it out.

Christmas Brushes

There are literally hundreds of different Christmas themed papers and accessories available, so you can take your pick of items to create a base for your holiday themed scrapbook pages. But to really add a special touch, you’ll need a little something extra.  That something means collecting some fun Christmas brushes to add décor to the page.

You can create your own brushes to use with your photo editing program, but it’s usually easiest to simply download them. You can find quite a few free ones online by searching for your software name plus “brushes” for example, “Photoshop brushes”. This should yield some great results. If you are using Photoshop, then I recommend checking out Obsidian Dawn, where you can get some free brushes for use. That’s where the brushes used in this article came from. There are quite a few Christmas brushes available there at the moment.

Christmas Page with Snowflake Brushes

When using a brush, you can choose the color and opacity. In this example, I’ve used the preset opacity and chosen a green to compliment the frame from the smaller photo, as well as a more traditional white. Then I simply clicked around the scrapbook page to create the effect I wanted. All the papers and borders are from Scrap Matters.

New Year’s Brushes

When it comes to getting great photos of your baby, you’re probably an expert by now. Snapping shots of fireworks is a little more difficult, so let’s make this scrapbook page super easy. Just use a brush to add in fireworks wherever you want them!

New Year Layout with Fireworks Brushes

Here, I’ve chosen to go with a  solid black background so the fireworks will show up better, but you can choose any background you like. Then pick a color for your fireworks and simply click where you want them to appear. You can use as little or as many fireworks as you want. As you can see, I’ve chosen to fill most of the background with them. By selecting the background layer for your brushes, you can stamp at random without worrying about getting any on the picture.

Other Uses

Custom brushes can be used for other things besides just decorating your holiday pages. In fact, you can select them when erasing, as well, or to burn. So, for example, you could use a snowflake brush to delete sections of a border, giving it a creative, lacy look for a winter wonderland layout. Or create a very subtle texture on a plain background by using the burn feature to make the shapes slightly darker, but the same color as the background.

Use your imagination. Holiday brushes can be used to create some very unique scrapbooking layouts for your holiday photos.

Similar Posts:

• Layering Papers for More Exciting Scrapbook Pages
• When to Use Patterned Scrapbook Paper
• 15 Places to Get Free Digital Scrapbooking Stuff
• Using Special Effects for Your Scrapbook Pages
• Creating a Two Page Scrapbook Spread