Whether you are just starting out as a scrapbooker, or you've finished twenty albums... yeah right, it's often fun to learn a new technique. Attempting to use one color can be challenging, but fortunately there are examples all around us. The trees growing along your neighborhood street may all at one time be green, but it is guaranteed that the leaves upon the branches span an entire spectrum of that color. The sunset can contain multiple shades of red or orange, the fruit at the produce stand, the hairs on our heads. Examples are plentiful and can inspire dozens of layouts, or an entire album. I began my attempts by simply matching cardstocks. I picked through all of the red I had and found a few that looked well when placed together, removing from the stack reds that had what I thought was too much of an orange undertone, or a red that looked like there was some purple in it. My stack ended with three shades of red, which was enough for what I wanted. This was the easiest step for me in beginning this process that proved it could be time consuming and sometimes frustrating. Just stick with it!!! You may find yourself wanting to run to the store to find that perfect blue (which may not even exist). The trick is to train your eye. It becomes easy. If you have an afternoon to yourself, you may want to just run down to Memories and sit on your knees holding up all of the colors and dreaming of the clever things you can do.

Once I had a few color groups picked out, I created three of the easiest layouts ever! I began with the darkest shade and adhered to it the next darkest shade of paper which I had trimmed to be one inch smaller on the top and side, or 1/2 inch smaller on each side. To that sheet I adhered the lightest shade with two inched trimmed off of the top and side, or one inch smaller on each side than the darkest shade of paper. Once you have the basic layout, you can vary layers by rounding corners or using a punch.



These layouts make great backdrops for photos mounted on one of the cardstocks used in the layout. I thought of creating an entire album using these layouts as if they were one piece of paper and building on top of them. For example using monochromatic red and blue pages for a patriotic album, or my old school colors for my high school album. The possibilities really are endless and can help to create the continuity in an album that we all strive for, but can have difficulty doing if we have not yet found our "style". Come back next week to learn how to take your color matching skills to a new level by creating more backdrops and borders.