When the craft of scrapbooking began, you needed to buy a ton of stickers, tape, glue and pretty papers, just to stick on the first photo of your kids! Now days, more and more frugal and happy scrappers are taking full advantage of the technology available to them. With digital cameras and the internet, scrapbooking has become a hobby that anyone can do, and without a huge amount of expense. There is a world of free images, clip art, fonts, borders etc. that can be downloaded or saved to your computer and printed out for your scrapbooks.
To find the wealth of scrapbooking freebies online, just do a simple Google search for ‘free scrapbook graphics’ or ‘free clip art’. There are many other search terms to use that will reveal the different scrapbooking freebies you can find. You can get entire scrapbook themes with all the free matching clip art, borders and fonts that you can use in just about any scrapbook.
Here are a few tips and ideas of the scrapbooking freebies you can find online:
- Clipart makes scrapbooking easier and fun. The internet offers various original clipart graphics for any theme or occasion, like holidays, music, religion, animals, people, sports, and more. Most often, the graphics will be cropped to fit any scrapbook pattern. A crafter can select from many designs that are usually grouped by themes to make searching easier.
- Scrapbook enthusiasts love to journal in their creations. There are tons of cool and interesting fonts available online that make the art of scrapbook journaling even more fun. These wonderful, unique fonts, are very often designed by other scrapbookers and come in an array of colours, styles and sizes. Implementing different fonts can bring out the creativity in anyone!
- You can also find different photographs and pictures online to add to your scrapbook theme. Often, photographs and pictures will be animated, making them perfect for different occasions like weddings, birthdays and holidays.
- Avid scrapbookers will tell you how much they love to add vintage graphics and images to their scrapbook pages. You can easily download free vintage clipart images depicting different people, times and places in history. Vintage advertising art or greeting cards are a popular downloadable scrapbook item, along with public domain book art.
Take advantage of all the internet has to offer you for your scrapbooking projects. Many of the items mentioned above are available free, while some are for sale. Regardless, the items can be just what you need to make your pages unique and beautiful. You will not only save money by using free clipart and then tweaking it on Canva (or Adobe Photoshop) to make your own, but you’ll save time by shopping or acquiring items online in the comfort of your own home.
Have fun creating the perfect scrapbook!
Article by Sherry Frewerd
kewlkiwi - 16 years ago
I don’t do scrap booking myself, but my sister does.
She recently purchased a few font sets, one being a set of animal shapes. Being fonts, they simply print out as black ‘silhouettes’ and sis wanted just the outlines to use for cutting out paper shapes and then colouring to suit.
Using CorelDraw, it was easy to import each font as large as required (we standardised on what would fit in an 80mm square) and I then removed the fill, increased the line width of the resulting outline (since it was only a ‘hairline’) then saved the result as a jpg file (making both normal and transposed versions for convenience)
There are thousands of free fonts in the wild, with lots of them being shapes rather than letters.
This technique lets you use these shapes for scrap booking.
Bob