Julian Adams

Tried to make one as clean and simple as possible.

hope you don't mind stealing that font for October too!

Occtober

Yes, it does.

I figured out how to make a template for the boxes with rounded edges from watching Carole's Discovery Center Tutorial. After I deleted the square boxes and colored the rounded ones, I deleted the black outline of the boxes. I wanted no black on the upper left corner. You cant see it at this resolution but I also added an inner Bevel to the dates numerals!

Wow! Splendid! May I ask what font that is?

Thank You Donna for getting me started with bevels! I noticed yours have rounded edges. How did you do that? I had a heck of a time learning how to select the boxes to add the bevel. I eventually figured out the boxes needed to be filled with a color in order to put a bevel on them. I tried filling the boxes but it covered up the numbers. I eventually made two copies of the boxes with dates. I filled one copy with color and put the outline with dates on top so I could see both layers. Is there an easier way?

Thanks! I'll give that a try! FWIW there is usually a key on a windows keyboard called print screen. I took a photo of where mine is located. You press the key and the screen gets copied to the clipboard as an image. Then go to PSP and select Paste as a New Image and you have a copy in PSP. You probably will want to crop it, resize it, and save it as a jpg. It's really easy!

How did you get that lovely 3D effect on the dates Donna? I was aiming for something similar but yours looks much better.

I also wanted to print these borderless but I hadn't thought to fill in borders with a pattern. Carole laid these out to print 8"x10.5" at 300 dpi and I wanted to print 8.5"x11". I wanted to keep it at 300 dpi just because that's the standard resolution for printing. That meant increasing the image size instead of reducing it. I decided the image could stand a little increase because the elements were so high quality and I changed the image size from 2400x3150 to 2550x3300. Even at that size when I dragged it onto the page layout I still had to futz around trying to get the borders perfect. That was very time consuming! I decided to add a few extra pixels to both dimensions. That meant when I dragged the image onto the page layout I got the message my image was too big and I could sit back and let PSP resize those few pixels to make it fit perfectly with no time consuming futzing. If anyone is interested the final image size I came up with is 2556x3307. That prints 8.520"x11.023" at 300 dpi which gave me a tiny bit of wiggle room around the edges so it fit perfectly with no borders after PSP resized it in the page layout. I'm sorry this was so long winded. You can tell I work as an engineer! I really want to thank Carole and everyone else for this workshop. I learned a huge amount having never worked with layers, or masks, or gradients and a whole bunch of other new things before! Each new calendar month I learn something new. Here's my May Calendar resized to print on 8.5"x11" paper.

I always did use Epson ink. This was when inkjets first came out. Before that all you had was dot matrix. Thank you for the kind feedback Ann! There are so many advanced users here. I've used PSP for a long time on single layer photography but I am very new to layers, masks, transparency and all the other techniques we are using here so I am like a kid in a candy shop.

I have a hard time stopping tweaking these calendars. I have a new version of April. I'm curious which one people like better.

Maybe the reason I had problems with clogging is that I was buying them when they first came out and I was also buying the cheapest ones at the time. Glad to hear they are reliable now. I always thought they did marvellous color prints.

What size do you print? I used to have a computer generated fractal art web page and had a friend with a large format Epson print a few 16X12's for me which came out beautifully. Epson for many years was the gold standard. The one thing I didn't like about them is I found the heads got clogged and once they couldn't be cleaned anymore you had to throw the whole printer out. You are right using Epson ink helps, but I still went through several Epson printers because the heads got clogged and I couldn't use them any more. That was in the very earliest days of inkjet printers so maybe Epson is better now, but I switched to Canon and still use them. What I like about Canon is the print head is built into the ink cartridge and every time you change ink you get a new print head. The most harm that happens when you get a nasty print head clog is you have to buy a new ink cartridge.

March!

I think this is the final version. Thanks for the ideas everyone.

I gave it a try. I put the background image underneath the date boxes and experimented with different blend modes and opacity. I'm very curious that with some blend modes the image completely disappeared! Why's that?

I went here for vacation this year.

Absolutely beautiful textures! That and the effects on the numbers make this one really stand out. May I ask how you added effects to the numbers? Did you modify Carole's or used your own?

I love the images on the mask! Is that what you were talking about when yo mentioned blend mode. Which mode did you choose?

I see the menu but have no idea what it does! Which image(s) were they used on that people are commenting on?

May I ask what is a filter and where do I find them? T.I.A.

This is sort of a gag for my best friend Don. It rarely snows where I live but one year we got a good snowfall and while I was wandering in the park I saw this - a dumpster with the words "Don is Love" spray painted on it. What an odd thing to spray paint onto a dumpster!