Tuesday, August 13, 2013

How I Edit My Drawings for Use as Headers

I'm going to give you the option to use the blank header I made using my 

You can also follow the picmonkey instructions I've given to create some of your own.
It's a fun way to add more of your personal style to your blogs and social media pages.

These, my friends... are my watercolour pencils..... I love them.


The very first thing I do is take a photo or scan the images I want to use into my computer. Once I have them in there, I can start to alter them. I usually crop the images in photoshop and store them in a file on my desktop while I'm working on them.


Once the image is cropped to size I load it into picmonkey by simply selecting the "edit a photo" tab on their homepage. Once the pic is in the workstation, I usually start by fixing the colours. I like to use the neutral picker. Just hit the neutral picker tab and position the little eyedrop tool over something on the pic that should be white. Then click the mouse and the pictures colours will be truer to real life.



The exposure tab will let you adjust how light or dark your picture appears. I play with the slide buttons until I'm happy with the brightness of the image. 


I go back to the colors tab and adjust the saturation and temperature slide buttons until I'm happy with the colour intensity.

Next I move from the editor page to the effects page by clicking on the little chemists bottle, second icon down in the side menu. There are heaps of effects to choose from here and you can play for literally hours experimenting with them. I use the frost option to clean up the edges of my image. My blog has a white background and I use just the plain white to help my image float. You can load your own colour in there and alter things to match your own backgrounds. I frost the edges and use the "original" option in the paint bar to erase the frost that has overlapped the main image.


Next I move to the text page. It's the fourth icon down, a capitol P. I click the add text tab and start writing. After I've written my text I can choose from a huge list of text, colours and transparencies. 


I added different sized text by adding a new text box. Then I changed the size, colour and text style for my subtitle. 
Hope this helps. I get heaps of questions about what photo editors I like to use and how I alter my drawings for use in publications. This, in a nutshell is how I do it.