Thanks to the 171 entries in our Bloggy Giveaways contest. That’s amazing! I hope to visit each and every one of your blogs in the coming days - but it will definitely take me some time. I do appreciate your stopping by, though, even if it takes me a while to thank you personally.

Congratulations to Lee of www.creative2xmom.blogspot.com, who was the winner of the Ali Edwards book A Designer’s Eye for Scrapbooking! Lee, I’m sending you a comment via your blog so you can get in touch with me and arrange shipping. I hope you enjoy the book. I have learned so much from it myself.

Welcome to the DigiScrapDivas Bloggy Giveaway contest! Since the purpose of this site is to help people who are new to digital scrapbooking become - well, scrapping divas - what better to give away than Ali Edwards’ book, A Designer’s Eye for Scrapbooking.

And great news! If you’re not a digiscrapper, this book is still for you since it actually features traditional paper layouts anyway. The information found inside is equally useful for both paper and digital scrapbookers! What I really love about this book is that it’s a perfect combination of countless inspirational layouts along with design secrets used in the layout explained in such a way that anyone can understand. You can find out more about Ali, along with her project ideas and publications, at aliedwards.typepad.com.

If you’d like to win this book (and who wouldn’t), please leave a comment on this blog entry (and make sure I have a way to contact you if you win, please). Entries will be accepted until 11:59 PM ET on Friday, April 25. A winner will be randomly selected and announced on Saturday, April 26.

Enjoy!

One of the features you’ll be seeing soon is a showcase of some amazing newbie layouts and their creators. The galleries are full of them; it’s hard to pick just one. If you have seen a layout from a new digiscrapper that deserves public adoration, please leave a comment with a link to the layout!

What exactly is a new digiscrapper? There’s no need to be legalistic about it; if the artist still thinks of herself as a beginner, that’s good enough for this blog.

Can’t wait to see what you find!

This is an entirely personal decision. However, it seems logical to start with any program you might already have installed on your computer.

If you don’t have something pre-installed, Adobe Photoshop Elements (referred to here as PSE) would be a good first choice. It is a sort of “entry-level” version of the much more robust Adobe Photoshop (PS).  It’s widely available for less than $100, making it an affordable option. Plus, without all the advanced options that PS boasts, it has a much shorter learning curve and seems more accessible to beginners. Learning how to complete basic tasks in PSE serves as a good stepping stone if and when the time comes to upgrade to Photoshop.

One other consideration when making your choice is the availability of support materials. Though Paint Shop Pro certainly has its passionate followers, the tutorials and extra “goodies” available in the digital scrapbooking industry for this program are few and far between. Finding good digital scrapbook-specific support materials for PSE is a walk in the park!

Perhaps more important than any of these considerations is this: if someone close to you is already proficient in a specific graphics program, you might want to start there. There’s no better way to learn than one-on-one tutoring with someone who knows what they’re doing!

The beauty of digital scrapbooking is that you can begin with some fairly basic (or common, at least) supplies and upgrade to more complex tools as your skills improve.

In its most basic form, all you really need are a camera, some digital photographs (or scanned copies of traditional photographs) and a graphics program. There are more graphics programs than you can imagine, but most digiscrappers use either Adobe Photoshop, Adobe PhotoShop Elements, or Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Corel PhotoImpact and Microsoft Digital Image Pro (now being discontinued). Recently, an open source program called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) has gained in popularity as a freely available alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

There are plenty of additional tools that can make discrapping easier, such as an external hard drive for storage, a photo organizing program like ACDSee, a large-format printer, a scanner, and much more. But we’ll cover all of that some other time; for now, just some pictures and a graphics editor are enough to get you started!

As an industry that is only a few years old, it’s kind of funny to talk about the “history” of digital scrapbooking! 

Though it has existed in some form (however primitive by today’s standards) for as long as graphics software has been around, most agree that it began to grow exponentially and became its own industry sometime around 2003 (give or take a year or two, depending who you ask - how’s THAT for specific??).

Many of the key players in the development of digiscrapping as we now know it have contributed to the History of Digital Scrapbooking thread on this topic at DigiShopTalk. In particular, see post #53 by Maya  from Scrapbookgraphics for a nice summary.

A better question might be, why NOT?

There are so many great reasons people choose digital scrapbooking. Here are just a few:

To save money. Yes, just like traditional scrapbooking, there are still supplies to purchase (those some can be had for free). That’s where the difference ends, though. The beauty of digital scrapbooking is that you can purchase a paper, element, or kit one time and use it over and over!

To save time. Many traditional scrapbooking techniques have a counterpart in the digital world which can usually be completed in just a fraction of the time. For example, in the time it takes you to dig out your sewing machine to add messy stitching to a traditional layout, you could add digital stitches to your layout and still have time left over to grab a cup of coffee and put your feet up!

To save space. This may be the most popular reason of all! Most scrapbookers take over the entire kitchen table (or more - even a whole room of the house!) when they are scrapping. Then, when it’s time to make dinner, everything has to be packed up again even if the project wasn’t complete. With digital scrapbooking, your supplies are all neatly stored inside your computer. You can stop right in the middle of a layout to make dinner, come back afterwards and start scrapping again, stop to put the kids in bed, and start scrapping when the house is finally quiet - all with no messy cleanup!

To make sharing layouts faster and easier. Now you have the ability to create one layout and give it to multiple recipients - both sets of grandparents, for example - and keep a copy for yourself. You can send them electronically to anyone with an email address or even post them online to share with friends, family, and your cyber-buddies.

To make changes easily. When you scrap with paper supplies, many times you cannot undo a mistake or an unwanted effect. Even when you can, the process can be time-consuming and tedious. On your digital layouts, just click “undo” and all your gigantic mistakes pesky little booboos are gone for good!

There are many more reasons; those are just a few of the ones we hear about the most. Which of these reasons appeals to you most about digital scrapbooking? Or, what other reason can you share?

Digital scrapbooking is a modern way to preserve family memories. In traditional paper scrapbooking, your supplies might include photographs, background papers, die cuts, stickers, and adhesives. In digital scrapbooking, your supplies are your digital photos, a graphics program such as Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements, your mouse, and digitally created embellishments available for download online. When your digital layout is complete, it can be shared online or even printed on paper for inclusion in a traditional album!

To find out more, you can visit Wikipedia’s article on scrapbooking. Can you believe they don’t have a separate entry for us??