Scrapbooker's Creativity Kit Book Review

The latest from the collage world’s darling Claudine Hellmuth is The Scrapbooker’s Creativity Kit: Prompts and Ideas to Jump-start Your Layouts. While it is marketed towards scrapbookers, the kit is useful for any type of journaling or painting really. In fact, many of the examples in the book aren’t even scrapbook layouts. There are also several of Claudine’s signature paintings as examples throughout the book.


In the kit you receive two decks of double-sided cards. One is a set of color cards and the other is a set of word cards. The trick is to draw two color cards and one word card and let those be the inspiration for your project. It’s not necessary to stick to the word precisely as you’ll find when you read some of the thought processes of the design team.


Speaking of the design team, Claudine has assembled some wonderful artists inside the 80 page book that’s included. They include Genevieve Simmonds, Donna Downey, Christina Lazar-Schuler, Rhonna Farrer, Ashley Calder, and Kal Barteski. Then there are many more artists in the gallery.


I wish the kit hadn’t been pigeonholed quite so specifically for scrapbookers. I think that will keep a lot of people from buying it that could really benefit from it. It’s a wonderful word prompt exercise that gets your juices flowing. Whether you use it to do a whole painting or journal page or just a quick ATC as a warm up, it’s comparable to one of those lessons they teach you in expensive art classes.