Color, Pattern & Design

Color, pattern and design are key scrapbooking techniques. Yet coordinating papers with different colors and patterns can be a bit overwhelming. After all, you don’t want to overwhelm your photos— but you do want a little color and texture, right?

Expert advice to the rescue!

Those who mix and match papers and colors have a mantra: The Golden Rule of Patterned Paper says to mat your photos and page elements with a coordinating solid paper to make each element “pop” off the page. Notice how Shauna matted Olivia's photo multiple times, varying the widths of each mat and including a vellum and metallic silver mat.

Another designer tip from Shauna: “Don’t feel like you have to use all of your photos on one page,” she says. “Choose one or two of the best photos to scrapbook. This will help your pages look cleaner and less cluttered.”

Want a fool-proof way to mix patterned papers? Reach for tone-on-tone patterned papers. “Tone-on-tone” simply means one color patterned with a lighter or darker tone of the same color—here, it's light teal and dark teal. A white vellum overlay mat and metallic silver matting add another touch of dimension.

Colors that lie opposite one another on the color wheel (such as red and green) give your layout a dramatic effect.

“When combining 'opposite' colors, I keep the paper patterns small and subtle so the effect is eye-catching but not overwhelming,” says Shauna, who chose two tone-on-tone patterns, alternating them with solid gold paper and sheer white for an effect that's colorful but not overpowering.

Is it possible to achieve a subtle effect with five different patterned papers on one page? It is when you follow a few guidelines from designer Arlene Peterson.

Arlene chose a coordinating “family?of papers with subtle, all-over designs. The paper with the largest pattern is her background; her photos are matted on white, then on the paper with the subtlest pattern (the scuffed faux texture). The other three patterns (wildlife animal check, stripes and leaves) are cut into color-blocked squares, then matted on the same scuffed brown.

Technique #5: Trust Your Instincts

The last trick we offer is this: Trust your instincts. What paper combination looks best to you? What appeals to your eye? Your sense of color and balance will continue to sharpen as you work with patterned papers. (And we’re betting that you’ll soon be addicted to this versatile scrapbooking technique!)

For fabulous families of patterned papers, turn to the Paper Pizazz?“Mixing?series, or Paper Pizazz? collections of coordinating “companion?papers. Because the papers are grouped in book form, you know the colors and patterns coordinate.