Digital Collage Using Picasa

I'm very interested in learning digital scrapbooking for a lot of reasons.  Firstly, I don't want to devote quite as much space to scrapbooking supplies as I currently do.  Secondly, I have TONS of digital pictures.  (No surprise there.) And finally, I hear that making a digital scrapbook page is pretty quick- much quicker than a traditional one.

My problem is that I don't have Photoshop on my computer.  I also don't know how to use it.  When I use a computer program, I just tend to play around with it. I don't necessarily explore every option.  I downloaded a free version of Picasa by Google, and I use that to edit my photos nowadays.  I like Picasa because it's easy to use, has lots of options, and it interacts with my Google Account and Blogger!

I like making collages, both by hand and digitally.  One thing I've thought of doing is taking a bad picture and working it over in a picture editor until it's cool.

Unfortunately I didn't keep the original picture, but this is pretty close to what it was.

Here's one of the collages I did.

And here's another.

But this one is probably the best.