Croptober Lesson #6: Poloroid Perfection

In the age of Instagram, Poloroid's, those dark-ish instant photos from the 70s that streamed from the front of the camera instantly and offered a white outer frame with a large bottom edge are back in, 2012-style!

Poloroids have made it BACK - they are definately cool again.

At Croptoberfest 2012, I challenged my traditional customers to create poloroid-type frames to add a vintage look to the photos on their album pages.  I showed them some easy ways to create the frames, and then showed them how to use the chalking inks and a few other techniques to make them look aged, as polorids often do...

Here are the basics for creating a poloroid traditionally:

1.  Cut your photo into a square shape.  Any size square will do.  With a 4X6 photo, a 4X4 inch square is your biggest size.  Then, cut a photo mat that's 1/4" bigger than your photo square on the left, top and right sides.  The photo mat should be between 1-1.25" on the bottom side.  The photo mat should be white.

I created samples for 3 standard photo shapes.  The colored paper represents the size of a square-cropped photo.  The size is written on the colored paper.  The size of the white poloroid frame is written in the lower right corner of the frame. 

However, you can cut your photo to any square size and simply add the measurements as stated above.

Now, to make your photo look a bit aged.  Here are a few ideas.

1.  Wrinkle and straighten.  This method works best with our thinner/printed paper.  If you have any old scraps, when printed paper was white on the back, this is a great use for them.  Just wrinkle the paper by balling it up loosely, then straighten it back out.  Old poloroids often seemed to have wrinkles and folds.

2.  Rough up.  To rough up, you can rip or tear the edges OR if you have this little tool (sorry can't remember the name) - it was a gift from a previous specailty event,

you can run it along the sides of your paper making it rough.  This tool works better on the cardstock than the printed/thinner paper.

3.  Dis-color.  Here's where the chalking inks come into play.  Anything you've wrinkled or torn or roughed-up will be the most affected.  Blot and rub the red and the olive chalking inks on the outer edges of your distressed poloroid frame to age and discolor them and to highlight their wrinkles and rough spots.

Voila - perfect retro poloroid.


I also challenged my digital customers to add poloroid frames to their photos.  Creative Memories offers poloroid type frames in some of their digital artwork packages.  Look for one in the Rugged Outdoors Digital Art Kit

I also taught digital clients how to easily make their own poloroid frame. 

AND I provided them with a digital png of a frame that I created.  I save my digital poloroid png in a Personal Ark Kit I called frames.

I am offering the png file of the poloroid frame here for FREE.

The page I made using my poloroid frame is at the top of this post - another future pet calendar page! 

This is the last of the six lessons I taught at Croptoberfest.  Of course, all these lessons went with a game as well.  Stay tuned for another post where I describe the game we played.   I hope you enjoyed the lessons and were able to use them at your Croptoberfest for at any upcoming workshop.

Happy Croptober Scrapping!  Sher