When Creative Sketches for Scrapbooking was first published in 2003, scrapbooking idea books were a dime a dozen…and that's about what most of them were worth! Time and again, I bought one, sure it would be useful, but none of them were ever used more than once or twice. Nearly all of the pages were amateurish, or else totally impractical! After all, how many single photo spreads can one person use? Small wonder some of them I never actually used at all!

But seven years later, Creative Sketches is still in my library. Like all the idea books of its day, it's full of visually appealing pages. But unlike the others, its usefulness doesn't depend upon the trends of the moment.

Creative Sketches focuses on creating your own pages, using basic thumbnail sketches as a guideline. (That's the way we were taught to plan out pages in art school, actually!) It's divided into sections, depending upon the number of photos used in the layout. Each "recipe" is accompanied by several very different pages created using the formula.

I'm a designer by profession, so before buying this book (and its follow-up), I spent far too long on each page. With this, I pick a starting point from what's in the book, then work from there. Finally, I was able to get a reasonable number of spreads completed in a sitting!

Highly recommended for both beginner and advanced scrapbookers. ( )

More great layouts, but again looking for more ideas for 1 and 2 pictures ( )