How to make your own printables

Hey hey! Hope you had a lovely weekend! Our temps here are unusually high for this time of year – today we took a long walk and even played at the playground. Crazy! It’s supposed to be in the 50’s again this week!

I still say we’ll be paying for this soon enough. I have no doubt we’ll be under five feet of snow in a few weeks. We shall see. :)

So if you have looked at oh…a few blogs lately, or surfed Pinterest for ohhhh…a few seconds, you’ll see a TON of fun printables. They’re fun graphics or sayings and they are all the rage to print out and frame right now.

I think they are too fun and I pin pretty much any free one I see anymore. ;) So I was psyched the other day to see someone pin a post on how to make your own printables:

(source)

In my old life I did a lot of graphics work – I worked in marketing and whenever possible, I created the advertising, annual reports, brochures – all that good stuff. When I had time and could really concentrate on it, I really enjoyed that part of my job. (I used Quark – is that ancient now or do people still use it?) So when I realized I could make something fun with only Picnik.com (which I use to edit my photos anyway) – I was hooked!

I made a super easy, basic printable for my office today and then recreated my steps to show you how to do it! Did I mention this is totally, completely FREE? Booyah!!

I’m sure this has been shared a meeeellion times in blogland, but that was the first I had seen it, so I wanted to share it with you too. First, open the Paint program on your computer. I had to search mine out because I never use it. Just open it, then save the blank screen as a document:

Open up Picnik and download the blank page into it:

To pick a background color, go to the Effects tab and then pick the Duo-Tone option:

I just pick the same color for both since it asks for two colors (this would typically be used for a photo, hence the need for two colors).

Then, because I wanted this one to run vertically, I went to the Basic Edits and rotated the image:

And then it’s time to have some fun! You can add graphics by going to the Stickers tab and pasting them in. I just wanted text for this one, so I chose the Text tab (duh) and then picked the fonts I wanted:

You can send the text back or forward (to layer) by right clicking on the text box. I didn’t do anything fancy schmancy on this one so it wasn’t needed.

Because I knew I wanted to print this out in an 8 by 10 size, I finished it up by going back to Basic Edits and cropping off the bottom:

Save the file to your computer, then open it in MS Word (or whatever program you’d like) to resize it and print it out.

I ended up printing mine at home and it came out beautifully. I used a ton of ink in the process I’m sure, but I really didn’t want to make a run to the printer today. ;)

I used the lyrics from the song My Life by Robin Thicke – I love that song and it’s used in the movie Dispicable Me (light. bulb.), which is one of our family favorites.

The lyrics are totally hokey but they say how I feel:

I wanted to print it out on some pretty cardstock but didn’t have any. So I cut a paper-size piece of the stuff I use for my fake photo mats and stuck it in the printer. It worked great!

I use these large pieces of poster cardstock all the time to do “mats” for my art and photos. I just laid the paper that came in the frame on the paper and cut around it to get the size I needed:

Then used double stick tape to stick the printable on the paper. I just eyeball it but you can measure if you really want. :)

I picked random fonts that I thought were fun – they  have no rhyme or reason to them. The whole thing makes me smile. :)

I LOVE how it turned out:

Aaaand it’s impossible to take a good photo of a glass surface. For real. If you look close you can see my not washed hair and glasses and pj’s still on. Scratch that -- don’t look close.

;)

It’s hanging in the office, which I will share this week. I will. Even if it kills me. :)

I just have to do a TON of spray painting and then it. is. done. GoodNESS.

I love that aqua color and how it ties in with the lovely lady lamps:

Fun, eh? You can SO do this, even if you have zero experience with graphics or computers or whatever. I pay to get a few extras with Picnik, but you can do all of this with their free options – they offer a ton of free images and fonts.

The link I shared above shares how to add images and shapes to your project too! It’s super easy to follow – check it out here!

If you’d like to use my printable, you are welcome to it! You should be able to click on this image to get the full size. Then you can save it to your own computer:

I looks like butt on my screen for some reason, but hopefully this will work! 

And yes, I know there is a grammatical error error (its) but that font wouldn’t accept an apostrophe for some reason. I choose to overlook it, but I know some of you may not be able to. ;)

It took me a total of about 30 minutes to create this one, but I could have been sucked in for hours if I had more time. I find this kind of stuff fun cause it’s cool to play around with different images and fonts.

Hopefully this will work for you and you can create your own! The possibilities are endless! Create your own holiday cards, invites, birthday stuff like cupcake toppers, fun stuff for holidays…I could go on and on!

So have you tried to DIY your own printable yet? I’m feeling pretty behind, but now that I know I can do this fun stuff with Picnik, the world is my oyster! I may even create my very own blog button!! WHOOO!