Choosing Colors for Halloween Pages

Everyone knows that the traditional Halloween colors are orange and black. The scrapbooking industry has taken this a step further by adding fun shades of green and purple to create great products for our Halloween scrapbook pages. These colors are wonderfully appealing when your children dress in traditional Halloween costumes such as pumpkins, witches, and goblins. They also work nicely with some of the newer costumes such as Buzz Lightyear or the Incredibles. However, what if your little superhero chooses to be Superman or Spiderman? Personally, I think that the color combination of red, white, blue, orange, black, green, and purple is too busy and not very appealing. What if your little princess decides to be a little princess? Those bright Halloween shades will just overpower her lovely pink princess costume.

In other words, what if the traditional Halloween colors don't work with the photos that you want to scrap? I faced this problem last year, when both of my boys decided to be Superman. Following are some ideas on how to deal with this problem.

1. Scrap the costume rather than the holiday

If the costume doesn't match the holiday papers, why not scrap the holiday to match the costume? Use your imagination and you can have a lot of fun with this. For a patriotic hero like Superman, why not use your Fourth of July paper with a title such as "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" or try a silly variant such as "Truth, Justice, and the Great American Chocolate Bar" if you happen to get a photo of your little Superman enjoying a Hershey bar.

We couldn't wait for Halloween last year, so we did a photo session a few days in advance. My younger son knew that Superman could fly so he ran around flapping his wings like a bird and I made this non-traditional Halloween layout:

If your child is a princess rather than a superhero, you can use princess papers or elegant papers (such as those intended for wedding albums) to create a page as beautiful and elegant as she is.

2. Scrap groups or use a lot of photos

This technique will work well for photos of a Halloween party, school event, or trick-or-treating with friends. In this case, there will be so many colors with all the different costumes that you might as well use the traditional Halloween colors. If you are worried about the page being too bright, then use plenty of black. I used a blocked sketch to include several photos for this trick-or-treating layout:

3. Print your photos in black and white

Many scrappers chose to print photos in black and white for their scrapbook pages. This technique will allow most photos to match nicely with the bright colors on the Halloween papers. Black-and-white photos will work especially well if the costumes in the photos are even slightly old fashioned. (I would consider both Superman and Cinderella to fall in this category as many of us watched them in the 1960s on our black-and-white television sets.) For a really old-fashioned effect, try sepia photos paired with some old-fashioned Halloween papers.

Whatever you choose to do with your Halloween photos, just remember that Halloween is a fun holiday and your pages should reflect the joy of dressing up as your favorite character and getting free candy.

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