Make it Monday // DIY Photo Booth Inspired Valentine Wallpaper

I may have fallen head over heals with the free photo editor PicMonkey.  I've been so happy with the simple edits, filters, & clip art that PicMonkey offers since I first discovered it.  When I got an email with all the fun stuff you'd be able to do with PicMonkey for Valentine's Day I instantly thought of a sweet gadget wallpaper to make involving pictures of my love!

A lot has happened to us over this past year & I love taking photos to document what we do.  We don't get a lot of photos together so it's a lovely day when I can snatch a picture or two of us enjoying ourselves.  I used photos from different trips we've taken over the past year to create a photo strip under the collage feature of PicMonkey:

First find four (or more) pictures of you & your love for your film strip.  Got to PicMonkey & select the Collage option.  Use the Ducks in a Row collage option & rotated it by clicking on the rotate button (either left or right) at the bottom of the screen before inserting the pictures.  Click the picture icon to the left & upload your photos to fill in your film strip.  Save your film strip.

 Navigate back to the PicMonkey home screen & select Edit a Photo & upload you photo strip.  You can skip this step if you'd like it to be in color, but now you'll turn it black & white under the Effects tab.  Play around with the filter until the strip is to your liking.  You may want to adjust the brightness, shadows, etc.  Once again, save the film strip to your computer.

 I opened a patterned background I created with bgpatterns (there's some at the bottom of this post for you), but you could also create a collage with the Sweethearts Swatches (much like we did in the Holiday Card tutorial).  Navigate to Overlays & select Your Own to upload your film strip.

Move your film strip around, size it, rotate it, etc.  If you have more that 4 photos, you can create two film strips.  I only had 4 photos I liked so to duplicate my film strip I right clicked on the strip & selected Duplicate Overlay.  This added a second film strip.  Position your second one where ever you'd like it.

Part of the Valentine's Day collection are a fun set of new fonts & a few new overlays.  If you haven't signed up for Royale, don't worry....you can still use a lot of cool stuff: the banners, some doodle hearts, a cool cut out feature, & a few new fonts are free.  You'll be able to create a cool wallpaper with the free features (I did!)

I then proceeded to set all my gadgets with this background! In action:

TEMPLATES FOR YOU:

(click the images to make them bigger!)

 Pink Medallion Background

 Green Medallion Background

Pink Heart Background

Happy Valentine's Day!

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