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.

We Dare You: Scrapbook Challenges About Real Life

We Dare You: Scrapbook Challenges About Real Life
by Kristina Contes, Meghan Dymock, Nisa Fiin, and Genevieve Simmonds

I am not your traditional scrapbooker. In fact, I haven't really touched one since my sixteen year old was in her crib. But I wandered into a new scrapbook store in town to see if they had any supplies for "real" art. I'm snooty that way. ;) Where have I been for 15 years? There was so much fun to be had! And I had to have one of each.

So I came home and turned to my best friend, The Google, and researched scrapbooking. After doing a messy visual journal for years it didn't take long to find the kind of personal scrapbooking I like. If I find it a bit challenging it's only because it feels a little self-absorbed to be scrapping only about myself. However, the finished product is something my children will love to have someday.

More and more people are documenting their stories, their daily lives, sometimes their own minutiae. And they're not doing it in nice neat orderly rows, either.

While searching for scrappers online, I came across Kristina Contes and was blown away by her stuff. One thing led to another and I ended up on the EfferDares website. Naturally, I had to order the book.

This book is filled with many one and two-word idea prompts to get you started. Each prompt is explained. Then each of the artists' interpretations is shown. The chapters are titled The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, The Silly Wacky Funny, The Random, and The Best. There are a couple pages about the contributors and several detailing the supplies used and sources to find them.

The dares do more than scratch the surface. They encourage you to document your inner dorkiness, your inner loveliness, your collections, your regrets, fears, and guilty pleasures. Put it all down!

If you're looking for prompts and eye candy, this is your book. Being a beginning scrapper I still need other sources for how-to and sketches. We dare You is not marketed as a technique book so I wouldn't count this against it.