Generate custom hi-rez digipapers

ScrapColoring.com has been a favorite site of mine ever since it came on the scene, as I’ve been fascinated with what French developer Stéphane Gigandet has been doing with SVG. I immediately saw the potential, but the site had limitations preventing my extensive plans for using it from becoming fully realized. 🙂 So naturally I began bombarding Stéphane with suggestions and requests. I am happy to report that he has come through on everything I asked, and the site has gone from very fun toy to digipaper powerhouse.

ScrapColoring’s Pattern Generator features 36 patterns from tartan plaid to zebra skin and any of them can be rendered in your choice of colors and at any of 5 pattern sizes, so you can pick the one that works with your project. Even though there are thousands, maybe millions, of free patterns available on the net, scaling them is always a problem, so this is a wonderful feature to have. Solids and gradient fills are available as well. The recent addition of a full color palette and the ability to download the results in a .png file large enough to print a 12 x 12 page at 300 dpi makes this a dream come true for digipaper enthusiasts.

Not only can you download printable full sheets, but I’ve come up with an easy technique to generate multiple swatches on a page using ScrapColoring’s “Convert images to coloring pages” feature. For instance, to generate a set of 4 matching patterns on one page, I simply uploaded a .jpg with lines dividing the page into 4 equal quadrants.

Why is this so cool? Cricut owners will quickly recognize the 4 quadrants as a useful way to load different colors of paper on the mat. Well, now you can print your own solid, gradient or patterned paper for each quadrant onto a single sheet of paper! Sometimes I just use the quadrants to see how I like the different patterns together, as in the image below.

And we’re not limited to full sheets or quadrants but to any custom configuration we can imagine and upload. Not only that, but once you upload your custom template, a link is generated so you can go back to it or share it with others if you like (copyright restrictions apply, of course). My mind is racing with ideas for how this capability might be used:

• Generate “fabrics” for paper doll clothing, or patterns for scale modeling, in the scale and amount needed.
• Layout small areas of a pattern or color to do the intricate layered pieces of a Disney cartridge Cricut cut on one sheet of paper. Perfectly scaled gradients in the right hands would be spectacular for this.
• Easily color a coloring-book style digistamp or lettering digitally, or just preview/plan your colors before coloring by hand.
• Make custom paper so that each panel of a card, box, purse etc. would have it’s own color or pattern.
• Upload a digital card or layout sketch and fill with colors or patterns as a proof sample or to print. (For these last 3, a workaround to remove or tone down the black dividing lines may be necessary.)

The only drawback I have found so far is that ScrapColoring.com’s new color picker has no numerical reference for the colors, so it is impossible to use a Kuler color palette (which non-artists like me rely heavily on), for instance, or to recreate a color you used earlier.

So head on over to ScrapColoring.com and see what ideas you come up with. Don’t forget to leave a little love for Stéphane while you are there.