My Scrapping Workflow

I'm about to get on a plan on my way to Vegas for Digiscrapaplooza, but before I go I thought I would share with you my new scrapping workflow. I'm hoping to be doing some major scrapping this weekend and I think with this new workflow that I've got going I'm going to get a lot of pictures scrapped.

I've been scrapping A LOT lately. Since I've been spending more time scrapping I've changed up my workflow a little bit and it seems to make scrapping much faster and more relaxed for me. Not to say this is the only way I scrap but it's what has been working for me lately and maybe it will help you. Here goes.

1. I start with my pictures. I'm usually inspired by current pics and I want to scrap those right away. It seems like when I scrap the photos I really want to scrap first then I'm inspired to scrap some of my older photos as well.

Here are some pics I just took last week. It was a beautiful day and we decided to take our schoolwork outside on the front porch.

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2. Once I have my pics chosen I pick out my template. I'll have a good idea of what kind of template I'll need since I already know what pics I'm using. I'll know if I'll want lots of photo spots, journaling, big photos, little photos, a lot of elements, or just plain and simple. I decide to go with my new Fun with Envelope Templates because I'm thinking I want to kind of tell a little bit about what our homeschool day looks like, and I can do it in a letter-writing format. (Plus I really wanted to use these new templates!)  I'm going to take the bottom right and the top left template and kind of combine them so that I'll have 3 photo spots and a journaling spot.

3. Once I have my pic and my template, I'll edit my pics and then add them to the template, just like so. You can see I combined the templates a bit.

4. Now that I have that done I'll usually put together a few more pages like this. Photos, template, add pictures, save my .psd file....photos, template, add pictures, save. You get the picture. I usually do this in one night. I'll get about 5 pages started. Is that weird?

5. Then once I have a decent amount of pages started I'll go find the perfect kits to use with my pages. Usually, when I scrap a bunch like this I have a good excuse to go buy some new stuff....there's always an excuse, right? So I'll go shopping and find the stuff I want to use.

6. Then comes the fun part of actually placing paper, elements, journaling, etc... on my page.  Once I have everything where I want it I'll go through and tweak my shadows and save it and then I can start on the next page that I had previously started (see the photos and template have already been chosen and the page laid out for me). This way I don't have to think about what photos or template I'm going to use next. I just have to open my kit and page and finish it up. For some reason, I think doing the pages in batches like this helps me be a faster scrapper.

Here's my finished page.

I've already gotten 5 pages done for March 2012 (yay, I'm on top of things this year) and I've scrapped all my May 2011 photos as well (which was one of my goals at the beginning of the year - to scrap the previous month's photos). So this system of picking photos, then a template, placing photos in the template, and repeating that over and over again before I finish the page seems to help me stay on top of my goals. 

What's your scrapping workflow? Do you have one? Do you need to work on a system to get those pages scrapped? Hope this helps you and inspires you to find a system that works for you.

I'll be back next Wednesday to show you all of my March 2011 and March 2012 pages.

Liz