Scrapbook Page Starter: Arrange Your Page Elements Using a Sprawl Approach

There are several layout configurations of combined elements that scrapbookers use again and again when making scrapbook pages (blocked, clustered, shelf, cross, band and more). These foundations are used again and again because they work well for housing the most frequently encountered combinations of elements (1 to 5 photos with title and journaling) and they consistently yield well-designed pages.

We’ve covered many of the basic foundations in past articles (and Scrapbook Coach classes). Sometimes, though, you just want to break out and fill the canvas. Scrapbook Coach 16 is about a foundation we’re calling “sprawl.”

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Debbie Hodge says, “This is one of the four pages I made for the Scrapbook Coach 16 Sprawl Class. Each of the four layouts are accompanied by a step-by-step video that you can scrapbook alongside.”

“This page is about our Thanksgiving celebration, in which we hosted with no electricity. I made everything the day before, and we heated it with the woodstove and grill.”

“The elements FILL the page, but there’s an order to it, with three underlying rows providing a foundation. With Scrapbook Coach, you get a pdf quick guide to each layout, and a video lesson, and a sketch and template. Click here for the template for yourself.”

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Deborah Wagner says, “Casey is an incredible dancer, and each of these photos show the beauty of her movements. I used a photo-dominant approach on my layout. The background photo takes up most of the canvas, blending into a neutral paper. The smaller photos are cropped in both landscape and portrait orientations and are layered on top of the large photo. I edited all the photos (and the background paper) using the same filters so each one would have a similar dramatic feel and give the page a unified look.”

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Kiki Kougioumtzi says, “My daughter never really liked cute dolls, and when she got her first Monster High doll she was thrilled. She loves them, actually plays with them, and she started collecting them.”

“To compose my layout I started with rows: two rows for my photos at the upper and lower places of the page and a row for journaling and title in the middle. I added three blocks of the same paper to create anchoring points.”

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Audrey Tan says, “This page is about a Harvest Market that I attended in Pune, India. Such events are common here, and I love visiting the stalls to see what they offer. Most of the time, I end up meeting friends and we get chatting. It’s also a great way to meet new people too.”

“I made use of the patchwork block approach from Scrapbook Coach 16 for this page. I scanned the sticker that we were given to wear and added it as the page title. ”

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Heather Awsumb says, “I’ve used three years worth of photos from my favorite holiday tradition–a Christmas singalong–to document just how much I love this event. I’ve used a combination of the patch-worked blocks and clustered approaches here. To make the clusters cohesive I layered the same patterned paper behind each grouping.”

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Marie-Pierre Capistran says, “This page is about my daughter’s Christmas show at school and how she was the only one of her class not knowing the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, because at home we sing in French.”

“I used the photos-dominant approach from Scrapbook Coach 16. I used small labels as well as one journaling card to write my journaling. The journaling card holds the bigger story while the small labels tell other little bits of the story. Also, to emphasize which picture represented the bigger story, I not only used a bigger photo, but I also framed it with strips of red and white patterned paper.”