Hi OA fans! It's Amy here with you today on a easy and effective way of printing on your album pages that come with your Here & Now album and Chapter Insert pages.
I have big plans with these adorable albums. I plan to create one for each of my kids and create a birthday album with just one favorite photo from each of their birthdays inside along with a page or two of journaling about their special day. I will go through their current birthday, then continue to add pages to it over the years, so by they time they are 18, they'll have a full documentation of all their birthdays in one album.
The idea of handwriting everything I want to write seems a bit daunting to me, plus I want to make sure that 9 years down the road that the look is still clean and consistent, so I want to print my journaling in my album. There are a couple different ways to do this.
First, because the pages are 5x7", I can easily feed each individual page through the photo paper feed in my printer for that size and simply type everything up in my word processing program, measuring how much to indent for margins. This works for many of the pages that are simple grids, and lined pages. But what do you do about the pages that have artwork on them, and are diecut and may not feed properly through the photo paper slot? I know my printer can be finicky if it detects something is "off" in size or shape of the paper. I certainly don't want to take a chance that my adorable paper is ruined by chance. So, I'm going to take extra care by taking a few more steps.
To do this, you will need a scanner, nothing fancy, just one that will scan at the exact size of your image. I'm going to scan my image into my computer, making sure that you crop your image to size, this will eliminate scan time and the size of your file.
Next, import or place your file into your preferred software. This can be a word processing software, a photo editing software that allows you to add text on a separate layer, or page layout program. Just make sure you place your image somewhere on your 8.5"x11" document where you will have enough room to tape down your original page on top of the print out.
Next, because these pages sometimes have artwork that will require that you write your text around an image, you may have to re-define your default margins. I like to set up my own margins so I can visually see where I need to keep my text within. (I am using Adobe Illustrator for this demonstration).
Next, begin typing your text. Play around with your font choices, sizes and line spacing now, because you don't want to print out on your actual page, and not like how it looks. Print it out a couple of times if you need to.
Next up we are going to print out a full version with the typing that we just placed on top of our image. With the scanned image still in place, print out the page. Above (left) is my print out of my scanned page, along with my typed journaling. You'll noticed I highlighted a typo, I'm glad I caught it then! Above (right) is my actual page that I am going to print on next.
Take the actual page, and using a small piece of washi tape (which I LOVE for this, because it comes off so easily and without residue, just make sure to do it slowly), and adhere your page DIRECTLY on top of the printed image. It needs to be perfectly aligned with your print out.
Go back to your computer and DELETE the scanned image under your text. I've learned the hard way many a-time, that if you don't do this, your print out will come out very funny, because it is printing your image on top of your original piece and that is not what you want (it's only to be used as a guide for your typing.Making sure that you have your paper in the correct way in your printer, send your paper through the printer. It should come out perfectly (above and below, right), the exact same way your print did (below, left).
Gently remove your washi tape, and you are good to go!
Now I'm ready to write up the other 5 journaling pages for my son's book then insert 5x7 photos and we'll have a mini album together in no-time!
I hope you enjoyed learning how to use your computer to write your journaling on these fun Here and Now page inserts! Thank you so much for joining me today! I hope you have a wonderful week!