Almost April

I've been keeping an eye out for a good kit to make my April desktop calendar with & I finally found one - it's by Gina's Gems Scraps & it's called "Orange You Glad It's Easter". I don't celebrate the holiday Easter because the pagan origins conflict with my beliefs (I do observe a celebration of the Lord's Evening Meal, an occasion most of you are probably familiar with as the Last Supper.) I chose this kit, however, because of its cheerful colour palette of oranges & yellows with some greens - springtime colours.

In addition to the April 2011 desktop calendar, I created a quick page for you, & made a simple tag.

I used Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 4 to create the tag, with 'show transform controls' enabled. Enable the equivalent in whatever graphics program you use & you can easily resize elements by simply manipulating the 'box' that forms around the element - I greatly prefer this option to calculating percentages by which to resize, because math has never come easily to me.

1. Open a new transparent canvas 700 pixels x 700 pixels & use your circular selection tool to create a circle. Fill the circle with your background of choice (paper 28).

2. Select the elements you wish to use. I used grassy knoll, baby duck 1 & 2, & daffodil 9. I also used a poser by Medievil Creations (Medi-Easter 4). Copy, paste, resize, & position each element as desired. I also applied a 'bevel & emboss' effect to each element & the poser.

3. Enter the desired text. I used a font called Havix HMK Bold for all the text, including the tag information, simply using a smaller font for the text I wished to be less prominent.

4. When you are satisfied with the tag it is a good idea to save in both your program's default format as well as a web friendly format like png. It makes it easy to make another tag with a different name.

Enjoy