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Digital Scrapbook Flourishes

Thursday, April 15th, 2010


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A digital scrapbook is an exciting project. With minimal mess, you can gather photos and memories into an electronic scrapbook. From there, you can share individual pages or the entire digital scrapbook via e-mail. You can save the digital scrapbook on CD. You can print your digital scrapbook – as many copies as you desire.

Digital scrapbook flourishes make your work look professional. Well-placed and limited in number, digital scrapbook flourishes can soften sharp corners and add feeling to any page.

Define Digital Scrapbook Flourishes

Digital scrapbook flourishes are decorative touches added to photos on the page of a digital scrapbook project.

As in writing, a flourish is an ornamental embellishment, added to make the page showier. Such embellishments appeared frequently in Victorian writing, but are now reserved for things such as certificates where calligraphy appears.

A digital scrapbook flourish might be a sweeping stem of flowers placed across the corner of a photo. It could be a circular “doodle” of intricately interwoven lines. Sometimes, digital scrapbook flourishes take a free art form, flowing loops of color or black sweeping onto the photo from opposite corners.

Brushes or Rubber Stamps

The forerunners of digital scrapbook flourishes are done with “brushes” in conventional scrapbooking. The term “brushes” can be misleading, however, as no artist’s or painter’s brush is involved. These decorative touches are added with rubber stamps in conventional scrapbooking.

Since digital scrapbooking is done solely on the computer, the “brushes” or “rubber stamps” may be previously created designs placed on the electronic page atop the photo. Another way of producing digital scrapbook flourishes is to use a digital brush to doodle or swirl a design onto the finished page.

Advantages of Digital Scrapbook Flourishes

Many advantages can be gained through the use of digital scrapbook flourishes. A page that is other wise little more than a simple photo album page gains interest, and tells a more complete story through the addition of flourishes. How do flourishes accomplish that?

1. Digital scrapbook flourishes give cohesiveness to a page. For example, a page that features two similar photos can look bare if the two photos sit alone on the background. Look at what a digital scrapbook flourish can do. A flourish can sweep between the photos, crossing one corner of each, and tying them together. A flourish can be echoed from one photo to the next. Place identical flourishes across matching corners to show the photos’ relationship. A few small flourishes can flow between the photos, overlapping each photo slightly at one or two spots. All of these, and more, are ways to pull page elements together with digital scrapbook flourishes.

2. Digital scrapbook flourishes can also be used to convey emotion. A photo of a young girl, just home from her first dance, can become wistful and nostalgic if a spray of flowers floats across one corner. A photo of a boy’s first baseball game recalls his excitement when a flourish of a trophy is added.

3. Finally, a digital scrapbook flourish can simply make a dull page showy. Think of an official royal decree. It would carry as much power on a plain piece of paper, provided it had the proper seal. But a flourish or two makes it showy – gives it importance. Digital scrapbook flourishes can do the same for your electronic page.

Sources for Digital Scrapbook Flourishes

The best source for digital scrapbook flourishes may be your own skill and a good computer graphics program. If you are comfortable with using such a program, and know your way around it, you can find many built-in flourishes, as well as tools to create your own flourishes.

If you do it yourself, you can create digital scrapbook flourishes from a bit of your digital scrapbook paper design. Simple capture the flower or design element you want for a flourish and “clean” it, removing unwanted background colors. Place the finished flourish on your page and see how well it ties in with the background. Change its color, if desired, for more contrast.

Most digital scrapbook software includes flourishes and embellishments. If you are using such a program, look for “brushes” or “stamps” to use.

Websites that retail digital scrapbook supplies will also have digital scrapbook flourishes. Look at their samples to get ideas. Purchase packages of digital scrapbook flourishes from them.

Helpful tip: When you come across a term such as “flourishes” in your digital scrapbook work, pursue it until you understand it. Understanding the “technical talk” is a big part of making a great digital scrapbook.

©2007, Anna Hart. Anna Hart invites you to read more of her articles about digital scrapbooking at http://www.scrapbooking-for-fun.com. Anna is posting new articles regularly on that site. You won’t want to miss her recent review of digital scrapbook software.

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Photo Scrapbooks

Sunday, April 11th, 2010


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Imagine life before photo albums – when you had to rely on your memory alone just to tell you what a relative looked like. Since the beginning of photography, people have kept photo albums, and for many they became cherished objects.

If you look at an old photo album, you’ll find that it’s a very well-made book. They often have leather covers, engraved titles, and all the photos within have been very carefully placed – even if the photos themselves are in black and white and hard to make out. There’s something about the amount of care that people put into their photo albums that has encouraged people to keep the craft alive, even in this age when your computer can keep your photo album for you if you want.

While plenty of people still put their photos in a real photo album – that is, a book with plastic sleeves inside that you can put photos into – there are also a growing number of people who prefer to do it in the form of a scrapbook. Scrapbooks are more freeform photo albums, where you can stick the photos in at whatever angle you feel like, write captions for them, and maybe stick in other things too, like newspaper articles about family members, or leaves, or basically whatever you feel like. A good scrapbook can become a living family history, made out of anything and everything that can be stuck down into a book.

Scrapbooking has become very popular lately, and you can subscribe to scrapbooking clubs that send you things to use for it – different coloured paper, glittery things, stickers, pens and so on. It makes your photo album so much more personal. You can even use a scrapbook as a gift, for a family member who lives far away, for example, or you could even scan it on and put it online.

John Gibb is the owner of photo album resources [http://www.photo-albums-guidance-and-info.info]

For more information on photo albums check out [http://www.photo-albums-guidance-and-info.info]

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The Story Behind the Documentary Behind The Album – Metallica’s St. Anger

Thursday, April 8th, 2010


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The book that is the subject of this review is Metallica: This Monster Lives: THe Inside Story of the Hit Film Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, written by Joe Berlinger with Greg Milner and published in 2004. The subject of the book should be obvious by its various titles and subtitles, but it is an inside look at the film in question by one of the two directors of the project. Joe Berlinger, along with his partner Bruce Sinofsky, spent nearly two and a half years with the band Metallica, documenting their struggle to undergo therapy and repair their broken relationships, record a new album, and face their inner struggles.

Berlinger focuses on three main themes throughout the account: Metallica’s story, the story of the documentary film, and his own personal story . The book is told in a mostly chronological sequence, but many discussions necessitate a simultaneous looking forward and backward for the reader to understand the context. This is, of course, quite logical, as the film came together from Metallica’s story, which was put together by the directors months after the actual scenes were shot. A short look at each theme should give a potential reader a taste for what the book contains.

Metallica’s story in the film Some Kind of Monster, in a nutshell, is the story of an immensely popular rock band being shaken to its core as its bass player of fifteen years leaves, the members realize they have never taken the time to overcome the emotional and psychological walls they have built, and the struggle to “clean house,” all while employing the help of a full-time performance coach/therapist and trying to write and record a new album, and then beginning a world tour in support of said album.

In the book, Berlinger elaborates on many of the most important and moving scenes in the film, including the infamous confrontation between James and Lars soon after James returns from rehab for alcohol and other addictions, in which Lars actually shouts the F-word in James’ face. Other scenes that are examined closer in the book include Lars’ meeting with former guitarist Dave Mustaine, the Ramones cover songs and their context of Dee-Dee Ramone’s death, and the first gigs that Metallica played after getting back together, including the show on the back of a truck in a parking lot at an Oakland Raiders football game.

Many of these scenes were gems of Metallica documentary film making, but they did not fit the context of the movie’s story arc. With thousands of hours of film that the directors had to sift through, many scenes were pared down, intercut with each other, or simply dropped altogether. Berlinger also takes the reader through the “back end” part of the documentary, from its initial concept as a historical commercial piece, to the threat of it appearing as a mini-series on VH1 or Showtime, to its final product as a two hour and twenty minute documentary film. These themes were absent from the film itself, as its subject was Metallica, not the making of a documentary about Metallica, but Berlinger adds more interesting context to the making of the movie.

Berlinger also examines his film-making history and his relationship with his partner Sinofsky throughout the book. At the beginning of filming, the two were not on the best terms, and Berlinger was attempting to overcome the disgrace of being involved in the movie Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. As they become involved in watching Metallica sort through their personal and professional relationships, though, the two begin to gel as a team again, just as Metallica come together in the end to complete their album and begin a tour. Sinofsky offers a brief forward to the work, echoing the same problems the two were experiencing, but the very fact that he wrote such an endearing forward should go to prove that the two are on much better terms. They both attribute much of this conciliation to their work with and observance of Metallica.

For Metallica fans, one of the most intriguing aspects of the book is the use of various quotes and transcriptions of conversations among the members of Metallica, producer Bob Rock, and performance coach Phil Towle. Nearly every chapter opens with dialogue that sheds more light on the dynamics within the band culled from the thousands of hours of film that were shot for the movie. The final Appendix also contains snippets from interviews that Berlinger conducted with the band in regards to their feelings on the movie. They provide valuable insight as to their intentions to produce such as personal documentary, and its effect as a mirror that they can always look back to in the future.

Metallica: This Monster Lives provides the reader with a very personal inside account from one of the few people ever to get this close to the biggest heavy metal band in the world. It provides a unique perspective of the band as seen from the eyes of a professional documentary film maker, who focused his attention on the much larger picture of the band’s story through its fracture, near-dissolution, and renewal. For anyone who has ever sought to understand Metallica’s album St. Anger, the film Some Kind of Monster is absolutely essential, and for anyone who has seen the movie, Berlinger’s book is absolutely essential to understanding the structure and making of the film, as well as its context in the history of Metallica.

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