Make it Monday // Create Journalling Cards with PicMonkey

Last Friday I mentioned my love of using Project Life cards for practical yet pretty uses in my planner.  Today I want to share with you how to make your own journalling cards for use in your scrapbooks, mini albums, or planners using the free photo editing site, PicMonkey.  I'm not going to be using some Royale features here in this post so if you can totally do this for free....but if you want a free day to access more of the awesome features through Royale, click this link <- that's the only link to the free Royale feature in this post.....so click there if you want the free day!

Let's get started:

First, head to PicMonkey & select your canvas.  I started with the 4x6 option since thats the size of the largest Project Life style cards.  These cards I'm going to show you are very, very simple...mainly because I'm loving black & white right now.  But please, make your cards fit your layout with colors, overlays, text, etc.

Now let's add some text.  I used some quotes from my Quotes board on Pinterest.  The best thing about PicMonkey is a new feature where you can use fonts already on your computer!  You can download a whole slew of free fonts all over the interwebs so this feature is awesome - especially because PicMonkey gives you amazing freedom to design!

Simply add the text, arrange & save.  I loved using the thin, bold font Bebas Neue for the quotes.  A fun font to pair with Bebas is Halo Handletter.  The bold lines and curvy swirls are really nice!

You can also create a texture with your text if you use a really scripty font, like in the example below.

In this design, I used the font Eight Fifteen to create a fun texture.  I stretched it out and copied my text of the best things in life aren't things to create a beautiful texture.  For this one, play around a bit....you might be here for a while finding the best layout.

If you start out with 4x6 cards you can crop the design down to the 3x4 (or 6x4 to 4x3).  To get the design to be horizontal rather than vertical, select the rotate option.  

Creating fun things for holidays is super easy as well!  I chose to create some halloween options because I'm wishing Summer away & can't wait for Fall right now!  But you can make Spring, Christmas, Back to School, etc themed cards.  When I was looking at Project Life style cards, I found that the themed cards - for certain holidays, seasons, etc - came in packs that had a lot of cards.  What if you only want to do one layout with them?  Or you're not using them for scrapbooking but for a mini album or your planner?  That's a lot of leftover cards.  If you're like me, you think well I'll use them next year but you know you'll be wanting to do something else or not into it at all.  So this is a way not to have a zillion cards in your stash!

Just as a little side note - if you make any cards you just looooove why don't you go ahead and make the canvas color transparent and save it as a .png file.  Select transparent canvas under the canvas color tab.  You can add your design before or after you make the canvas transparent.

Make sure you save it as a .png file because there will be another DIY using these little cards or images on your photos when editing them on your phone very shortly......

Now onto printing.

Now you can print your cards various ways - the easiest for the sake of this video was using Picasa .  Simple select your images using the control button (command on a mac) to only select the images you want to print with your mouse.  Hold down the control (or command) key while selecting each of your images.  If you use Shift+select option you will select every photo....including things you might not want to print.  Then from the bottom of the screen select the print icon.  On the next screen select 4x6 and two will print to a page.

To add guidelines for cutting, click the Border & Text Options button.  Ever. So. Slightly. Move the little guide under Border Width to the right.  Select a light gray color for the border, and uncheck even with border.  Now you have a light border around your card to make it easier to cut out.

Printing the 3x4 cards are bit tricky but still pretty easy.

The easiest I found to make two 3x4 cards fit on a page is to select the two 3x4 cards, create a collage, and then print two 4x6 to a page with the border.  Then you can just slice down the middle - either eye ball it (if you're that good) or make that your first cut by measuring to the middle & slicing.

The best way to cut these guys out is with a paper slicer & a fresh (or pretty fresh) blade.  The guides make it very easy.

I used a corner rounder on some of the cards but found out afterwards that the roundness of my corner rounder didn't match the roundness of my collection of cards.  If you're using these in Project Life layouts....you might need to find a smaller rounder to match the other cards.  But for my planner, the round corners were fine.

Other ideas.....

Use this post to create color palette for your cards/planner/mini album/scrap book.  Create a few and then decide which palette you're feeling.  You can also use the palette to go shopping for cards/paper to match your idea.

Use this post to create fun backgrounds to use on the background of your cards by uploading the image to PicMonkey, cropping it, and adding your text or overlays.

Use this post as inspiration to create a cover page for your planner or mini album with descriptive words all about yourself.

Hope this post was helpful and that you got some ideas for journalling cards!  If you are loving black & white or really want ones I've made you can click the links below & download the cards:

Happy With a Calm Life

4x6 | 3x4

If Your Dreams Don't Scare You

4x6 | 3x4

The Best Things in Life

4x6 | 3x4

Halloween Faces Light

4x6 

Halloween Faces Dark

4x6

xoxo, Moe