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October 7, 2008 |
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Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
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by Kim Brady |
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The Portrait. For this page, I’m starting with a formal wedding portrait of my Aunt Rose and Uncle Bill, two very important people in my life for whom I wanted to do something very special.  Although I’d love to make my aunt and uncle a complete family album, I realized some time ago that it wouldn’t be possible, especially since I haven’t completed the books for my immediate family. Therefore, I decided to make a scrapbook page of their wedding portrait, and mount it in a white frame they could display on a table. The frame I found for the project measures 9 3/8 W x 10 3/8 H, so I had to trim a 12x12-inch sheet of background paper to fit within the frame. Using my metal graphic arts ruler, I marked the dimensions on the back of the background paper, checking the front to make sure I liked the locations of the cuts. Normally, I would make a tiny pencil mark for each cut on the front, so I could see where I was cutting, but in this case, I knew the edges had to be perfectly straight (with no going back to fix mistakes), so I measured twice for each side and drew full-length trim lines on the back of the paper.  Tip: To make sure your cut is straight, hold the sheet with your left hand and line up the left edge of the paper against the lip of the cutter (on the left). It’s designed to give you a perfect, 90-degree cut.
 To make sure I had the best possible framing, I printed the wedding portrait in both 5x7- and 8x10-inch formats and laid the pictures on the background to see which one I preferred. While the full-frame, 5x7-inch portrait is beautiful it’s difficult to see any detail in the subjects’ faces. I knew I wanted to use the larger print, but I would have to crop it to make it fit. The cropped 8x10-inch print on the right still takes up a lot of space, reducing the amount of scrapbooking area around the portrait, so I’ll have to keep the matting and embellishments to a minimum. Originally, I planned to use three papers — the background and two color coordinated mats to frame the picture (visible next to the paper cutter above). Instead, I chose two mat papers below.  The paper on the left is a dark maroon cardstock I’ll use as the bottom mat and the paper on the right is a lilac print that matches the color and tone of the background paper. It will serve as the top mat. By layering the light paper, dark mat, and medium background, it should produce an attractive combination and make the portrait stand out from the background. The lilac mat paper has a stippled texture that blends visually with the flower pattern in the background, but it loses some of that texture when it’s cut with a straight edge, like the sample above. Therefore, it seemed the obvious choice for paper “tearing,” which should enhance the stippled texture rather than cutting it off. The pictures below demonstrate three methods of paper tearing and how they look when finished.  A. Hold the mat paper down with the printed side up and tear the strip of paper you plan to discard toward you. This leaves a white edge along the tear that you can leave white or color lightly with chalk dust or a colored pencil.  B. Hold the mat paper with the printed side down and tear the strip of paper you plan to discard away from you (or toward you if you start from the far edge of the paper). This leaves a colored edge on the main sheet, with no white edge.  C. Hold the sheet of printed mat paper down, with a sharp-edged metal ruler positioned along the edge you want to tear. This gives you a “controlled” tear with a straight, but slightly jagged edge. You can obtain different results by using a bulkier wood or plastic ruler, or tearing the paper over the edge of a table. I used the third “controlled” method to tear the inside mat for the wedding portrait. Once I was sure the mat was correctly sized, I prepared the photo for attachment by placing adhesive photo stickers around the edges. These handy little stickers come in a box of 250 or more tabs. You simply peel them off the roll and position the tabs (with the protective covers still on) around the edges of the photo. If possible, hang the round ends of the covers over the edge so they’re easier to pull off. After removing the blue covers, turn the picture over carefully and center it on the printed side of the mat. Follow the same procedure with the bottom mat. For this layout, I cut the edges of the bottom mat with the paper cutter instead of tearing them.  My original plan was to put the subjects’ names directly under the photo, so I left a small space of mat under the picture to accommodate a line of type and a small embellishment. I also wanted to include a decorative tag with a romantic phrase I thought would appeal to my aunt and uncle.  To prepare the decorative tag, I pulled out my bag of 2x6-inch cardstock “bookmarks” (sold in packets of 36 strips by Paper Reflections). The long, thin format is perfect for creating tags that have to fit in small spaces, and there just happened to be a lilac colored strip I could shorten to create a three-layered tag: Cardstock on the bottom, printed paper in the middle (matching the mat), and a lovely Shakespearean quote on vellum from one of my DCWV Quote Stacks. All I needed was the right ribbon flower on the end of the tag.  My original plan to position the Shakespeare tag at the top of the page didn’t work. No matter how I tilted it, it covered one of the faces, so I placed the tag at the bottom of the page, hiding the unused caption space, and created another small tag with my Aunt and Uncle’s names along with the month and year of their marriage. Placing it in the upper right corner of the page balanced the two tags on the page.  The completed page is simple, elegant, and a fitting tribute to more than 60 years of marriage!
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