PicMonkey Mondays: Creating Graphics and Printables

Edit: This is an old post with outdated instructions. The good news is that PicMonkey is much more user-friendly than it was way back in 2013. Have fun playing with your pictures!

Here we are at the end of our 4-part PicMonkey series. Today we are covering how to create a graphic or printable from scratch- totally free and 100% custom made to your fit your needs!

First you will need to create a Blank White Starter Image. If creating graphics is something that you will be doing with any regularity I suggest creating this image and saving it to your computer instead of recreating it every time you need to make a graphic. You are basically going to use a white Overlay to cover up a picture. This will become your Blank White Starter Image. You can use any photo but I would suggest that you start with a picture with a high resolution so that your final image isn’t blurry when you try to upload the graphic to your blog or website.

Open up PicMonkey and select “Edit a Photo.”

 

Upload any image you want. I snapped a picture of my son’s room and used that. Go to the 5th tier down on the left sidebar and select the Overlay menu (it looks like 3 stickers/badges).

 

Choose the “Geometric” Overlay.

 

Select the rectangle.

 

Drag the corner of the rectangle to cover up your entire photo.

 

Click on the Overlay and change the color to white (either by dragging the color selector to the upper left corner or by typing FFFFFF in the upper right box).

 

Save your Basic White Starter image to your computer! Check the dimentions and be sure the quality is high. Or save as a PNG file.

 

Now you have a Starter Image. You can do anything you want with it! Remember if you want to add custom images to your graphic you will need to have the image saved to your computer. Then choose the option to Insert Your Own in the Overlay menu. We covered using Overlays to create graphics in Part 3. You can see some examples of graphics I’ve created from a Basic White Starter Image:

 

When you want to make a new graphic you just need to open PicMonkey and choose Edit Photo. Choose your Blank White Starter Image and go from there. You can Insert Text, use Overlays, Textures, etc. The possibilities are endless. Here I opened up my Starter Image and covered it with an Overlay which I then changed the color to pink.

INSIDER TIP: After each layer that you add to your image be sure to use the Merge Layers button at the top of the screen. It looks like papers being stacked on top of one another. This is especially helpful when you are adding text on top of an Overlay for example. Also notice the undo and redo arrows along the top as well.

Also take note of the gear to the far right. I always work with my photos in the largest size. Here is an explanation from PicMonkey about best photo sizes for printing.

 

Speaking of Textures- we didn’t cover that in this series of tutorials but I hope you play around with them. Look along the left toolbar and click the 7th tier down. This will bring you to tons of Textures that you can add to your graphics or photos.

 

Here you can see how a “Weave” texture affects the design all with just a click of a button:

 

Remember how we talked previously about how to right click on PC (or Control +click on Mac) to duplicate text. Here I wanted to add a little emphasis on the word “own” so I right clicked and selected Duplicate Text. I changed the text color and offset it to look like a shadow:

 

INSIDER TIP: Bring up the menu again by right clicking (or control +click) and select Send to Back. This is a helpful tip when you are adding layers of Overlays and Text.

 

Can you see how it sent the teal text behind the white text?

 

Continue to add text, layers, overlays, etc:

 

Have fun creating your own graphics and printables! As always I invite you to leave questions in the comment section. Chances are if something is not clear to you someone else will have the same question.

Don’t forget to check out all of the tutorials in this 4 Part series.

Inserting Text    |    Creating a Collage    |    Using Overlays    |    Creating Graphics

 

 

Disclosure: I told the awesome people at PicMonkey.com that I was putting this series together and they gave me a free Royale membership and said good luck.  All opinions are 100% my own (and I had actually already bought and paid for my own membership because I heart PicMonkey so much). Everything I’m showing you in this 4 week series can be done for free without access to any Royale effects.