Chalkboards - How I did it!

I have been saving quotes for most of my life. I have them stuffed into drawers, folders, and places I am not even sure where.  They are written on napkins, post its, the back of junk mail, torn pages, etc.  

check me out on Pinterest

I pin them on my own Pinterest board I named "Quotes" (creative huh?).  I follow lots of other pinner's boards who seem to be more creative than me and name their boards cute names like:

Wisdom and Wit
Letters upon Letters
Words
Words, just words
Inspire
Write this down

Have you noticed all of the

pretty chalkboards on Pinterest?

I wanted to learn how to do it.

Blogging is also somewhat new to me. I love to read blogs with tutorials, how to paint, how to decorate, how to make things, and more.  So today is my first attempt at a "how to" for my blog.  So... here I go...

Picmonkey is a FREE photo software that the blogging world calls easy, that is how I found it, I needed an EASY one.  I have no photography background so I started with just the basics. I found Picmonkey to be so much fun and easy to use, I upgraded and purchased the software.

Not quite centered, but a good try!

My camera is a very inexpensive but reliable 5 year old Kodak EasyShare C813 that our business uses to take photos of empty, vacant and most of the time "stinky" houses. It is a dirty job. Since the companies we work for require a date stamp, that option is always turned on (because I forget to turn it off).  Recently I had to learn how to go into  picmonkey and cover it up. You can see it in my previous posts, the date stamp is there in my photos, in bright yellow, in the corner, or it has been pasted over with a bright purple daisy. I was so proud when I learned how to fix that.

                                       Click here to go to Picmonkey!

I found a black chalkboard background on the internet by simply asking google to find me one. It gave me several to choose from. I then saved it to my computer.  I then resized it and made it bigger with a free resizer I use for our business to make images smaller (making images smaller makes them faster to upload to the web when quality is not an issue.) You can probably also find one on the internet, just ask google. Or you can use mine below.

You can right click on this image and "save as" to use mine!

Then I opened picmonkey and selected "edit a photo", then uploaded the chalkboard image. 

 I proceeded to place text in different fonts around the chalkboard choosing the text tool. I chose a light yellow color and then selected lighter from the blend option.  I played with it, using different fonts.

Then I went to the overlay option on the menu on the left and chose my overlays, you can see the tree I have chosen.

Then I moved onto the Textures option and chose the "smudge". 

This fades the text and blends it all together.  Be sure to select the apply button afterwards to save your work.  Then I saved it to my computer. 

Whew, my first attempt.... 
at a how to.... 
on my blog...
is now over....