Get Started Scrapbooking | Why Canvas Shape and Size Matter

by Debbie Hodge

The canvas is the piece of paper (or digital background) upon which you build your page. It’s what holds all of your elements, and it defines the space within in which you’re working.

One of the first scrapbooking choices you’ll make is of canvas size and shape. This choice is primarily driven by how you want to print, store, and present your scrapbook pages. Read more about common scrapbook album formats.

Your canvas defines visual space

Putting together a visual design (and a scrapbook page is a visual design) means combining elements within space.  Space is where your page elements coexist. Your canvas shape and size are what define the space within which you create.

Canvas size

An 8″ square canvas (layout on left) presents a 3.5″ x 5″ photo with smaller accent photo well. For a page with more photos, though (the page on the right), a 12″ x 12″ canvas provides the space to get more elements onto the page harmoniously.

Canvas Shape

Combining your page elements in a non-square rectangular shape offers different design opportunities and challenges than those that come with filling a square-shaped canvas. One is not necessarily better than the other — they are just different. The rectangle is a familiar visual format, and there’s lots of design inspiration to be found.

non-square portrait-oriented rectangle

Most books and magazines come in non-square, portrait-oriented rectangular formats.

non-square landscape-oriented rectangle

Movie, television, and computer screens are usually non-square, landscape-oriented rectangles.

square

While we are less likely to view print and electronic media in square formats, the square is, nonetheless, widely used by scrapbookers. Albums and papers for both paper and digital scrapbookers are widely available in 12″x12″ sizes.

Who says a canvas has to have corners?

For eye-catching impact, use a full-size die-cut once in a while. Because Tami Taylor usually leaves generous white space on her pages, she approaches a shaped canvas understanding that she’s only filling a portion of it. Dina Wakley has more ideas for using die-cut papers on scrapbook pages.

 

 The Two-page Canvas

When scrapbook pages are presented in physical albums, two pages sit along side one another — like pages in a book. Many scrapbookers like making two-page layouts in order accommodate their photos and story and, frequently, because they like the look of matching pages facing one another in their albums.

One approach to scrapbooking two-page layouts is to consider the two pages combined as your canvas and consciously create a design that works with this combined space as one. May Flaum took the approach on “Pumpkin Love.” The orange print that backs up most of her photos spaces the two pages and unites them.

 

Another approach is to consider each side its own “canvas” or space to be filled, but to coordinate product and design so that the two side-by-side canvases complement each other.

Tell me:

What’s your preferred canvas size and shape. And, most importantly: why?