Ok, so it’s probably no secret to the majority of scrapbookers that Becky Higgins finally released the Project Life app for iPhone and iPad. It’s not the first scrapbooking app out there (Martha Stewart Crafts, Rhonna Designs, etc) but I know tons of people, myself included, love Becky’s style and were waiting for her to develop an app where we can create Project Life pages on our mobile devices. The release of the app was perfect timing for me because I had recently watched Social Media Scrapbooking by Megan Hoeppner on Creative Live and had already started playing around with other apps that are a great compliment to the PL app and I incorporate designs from those other apps in my PL pages.
This is one of my first PL pages from the app. I just wanted to play around with the app and get acquainted with it. I have a bunch of photos of me with my friends’ pets so I thought that was a good place to start. Since there aren’t any PL kits for scrapbooking pets on the app yet I decided to make my own card to add to the page and here’s what I did…
First, I used a fantastic app called Studio (madewithstudio.com). This app is absolutely amazing!!! And it’s 100% FREE!. Its main purpose is to create decorated photos and meme’s for Instagram but you can do so much more. The main downfall is because it’s designed to upload to Instagram it creates square images. This isn’t necessarily that bad because there are plenty of square pockets on pages in the PL app. Also, because the app was designed for Instagram and social sharing, by default your designs are shared on the Studio network for others to remix. But don’t worry, if you select the little person icon on the bottom right of the home screen then select the gear icon in the top right of your profile you can find the option to make your designs private. This is also the place where you can select to automatically save your designs to your photos on your phone.
After you download the app you can go through and choose several themes of digital stamps to install! There are over 40 themes (I have most of them) and each theme comes with word art stamps and image stamps. Once you choose a theme then you can start designing. You choose one of your photos or a digital paper you want to embellish. I choose this lovely polka-dot background that I had uploaded to my phone via DropBox. After you click next a list of the themes you have will appear. I opened the Dog Lover theme and chose the paw with the heart. It appeared on the screen and from there I can change the color, opacity, shadow style and color as well as size, move and rotate the stamp. After I clicked done I went into the Cat theme and choose the cute kitty face outline. I choose the same color, resized it about the same size and then rotated it the opposite direction and moved into the top left corner.
After that, I added two separate text boxes. I could have added the text (stacked one line above the other) in one text box but the app doesn’t have as many options to reduce the line size as it does to increase and there would have been a lot of space between the two lines. By creating two separate boxes I was able to stack the lines closer together. This will also allow you to rotate one line or change the color of one line. There are dozens of really fun fonts to work with that are very scrapbook friendly. For the caption on the bottom right card “Piggy in a blanket” I used Sniglet for “Piggy” and Sacramento for “in a blanket”. Using two text boxes allowed me to overlap the bottom line on the top. One of the coolest things about the Studio app (besides that it’s totally FREE) is that you can layer things and move the layers around.
So after you have your design the way you want it you click finish and the app will ask you for a comment. You can enter a brief description or even some hashtags if you plan to share your design on Instagram. You can also save your design with no description. You have the choice at this point if you’d like to email the design to yourself or a friend, directly share the design on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Now the design is in your photos and ready to use on the next page you make on the Project Life app.
I have a few other apps that I use to layer elements from digital kits and save them as 4×6 images. I’ll be sharing those other apps with you soon!