PicMonkey Tutorial: Working From a White Background

EDITED: PicMonkey now has a feature called “canvas” that allows you to begin with a solid-colored or transparent background so these steps aren’t necessary, but here’s the tutorial anyway 🙂

I don’t own a graphics program, not even Photoshop, and investing in one isn’t in the budget this year. Instead I’m really enjoying learning to use free online programs to their utmost.

PicMonkey
is one of my very favorites. You may know of PicMonkey as a photo editing program, which it is, but it’s also an incredibly powerful tool for creativity. This post is part of a series of PicMonkey tutorials I’ve created. See the first one here. Enjoy!

Did you know you can use PicMonkey to create graphic elements that don’t involve photos? Figuring this out was a true revelation for me. And it’s super easy!

Ready? Here we go!

Select any photo at all and import it into PicMonkey. Don’t worry about the image. We are going to cover it up.

Now go to the “overlays” tab on the side panel (that’s the tab with the speech bubble, star, and heart icons).

Click “geometric” and select the rectangle.

Englarge the rectangle until it covers the entire image.

Now use the color slider to make the image white (the code for white is: FFFFFF).

Along the top menu select “merge” to combine the layers together.

Viola! A white canvas. I would suggest that you go ahead and save this image in a folder on your desktop. I labeled mine “white.” Now, whenever you’d like to create a graphic that doesn’t involve an image just upload your “white” file and get going!

A few notes:

• Choose a color other than white and see what you can do!
• If you need a graphic that is a certain size, to make a banner for your blog or a sidebar button for example, go ahead and resize your image before saving it. The “resize” feature is located in icon that looks like a molecule. Deselect the box for “keep proportions” so that you can make it any size.

Okay, now let’s bring in some graphics! There are lots of fun, free graphic elements available in the “overlays” menu we used earlier. I’m especially fond of “ordinary beasts.”

If you’d like to bring in your own graphics, head on up to the top of the “overlays” menu and select “your own” to bring in any files you’d like from your computer.

Clip art, scanned drawings, photos…the sky is the limit!

Here I brought in a scan of an elephant drawing from my sketch book. To duplicate it right click (or hold down the control key and click for Mac users) and hit “duplicate.” I made a little elephants on parade pattern!

You can create a collage of images this way that isn’t confined to the pre-set collage formats PicMonkey provides.

Guess what? Almost every graphic element you see here on my blog I made on PicMonkey using this technique! It has allowed me to redesign my blog myself, for free, and I can tweak the design any time easily. Hooray!

I hope you enjoy playing around with white backgrounds on PicMonkey. I can’t wait to see what you make!

Disclaimer: I was not compensated in any way by PicMonkey. I just love it with all my heart.

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