• Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Resources
  • Media Kit – Sponsors
  • How to Start A Blog
  • Free Planner Printables
    • Erin Condren Planner
    • Happy Planner – Classic
    • Personal Planners – Pocket
    • Planners & Organization
    • Traveler’s Notebook – Art Journals
  • Free Printables
    • Cut Files-Silhouette Cameo
    • Project Life – Pocket Scrapbooking
    • Vintage Ephemera Printables
  • More Free Designs
  • Shop | Vintage Glam Paperie

May 21, 2013 By Dru Cortez

PicMonkey- How to Create Mini Instagram Like Photos

instagram-screenshot

Instagram is a very popular phone app that works either with android phones or iphones.  Using your mobile phone to take pictures, the photos can then be shared on social media and on the public website of your Instagram account.    It is very popular because, the Instagram photo app offers professional photo effects that enhance your everyday life photos into great memories.

Instagram also offers apps that allow you to download your photos or send them to online print shops which allow you to send the photos you have captured on your phone to be printed in hardcopy.  The instagram  images are usually in a standard mini instagram format of  2″ x 2″ square.  They are unique and popular products.  They have become so popular that they are often included in a variety of project life layouts as tiny photos that add additional , creative oomph, to memory keeping and digital scrapbooking.

All this is great, but the unique size of the Instagram photos poses a challenge for people who want the effect but don’t have the time and energy to invest in a photo editing program or additional software or phone apps they don’t use often.

Steps to Creating Mini Instagrams

Using Picmonkey, a free photo online editor, I have created this tutorial so that you can create your own Instagram like photos.  In a later tutorial, I will show you how to create a photostrip with 3 2 x2 photos.  The following steps will take you through the process of creating the 2” x 2” Instagram photo with vintage like effects.  Picmonkey provides a variety of vintage photo effects that you can apply to your photos.  In this tutorial, I am aiming for a 1970s throwback Polaroid look to my photos.

Caveat:  I have not been authorized by either Instagram or Picmonkey to provide this tutorial.  This is a tutorial that I developed using the Picmonkey’s free online editor and similar characteristics of Instagram photos.

picmonkey-instagram-pic1

Step 1 – Select Your Photo or Image

The first step is to upload a single photo from your computer, you might have stored this photo on your laptop’s  hard drive or a separate jump or thumb drive.  I usually work from my computer desktop, as it makes working with the photographs a lot faster and easier.

Using the Picmonkey “Edit a Photo”,  option upload the photo you want to work on.  (Tip:  I would suggest that you experiment with a free image from Microsoft’s free image databank or an image that you don’t mind experimenting with until you get the process right.)  Part of the trial and error process comes from the original quality of the photograph itself, for example, is it overexposed? Is there too much red, green or blue?

picmonkey-instagram-pic2

Step 2 – Cropping Your Photo Into A Square

Under the “Basic Edits” menu, select the “ Crop” function.  Under the drop down menu select the “square” function.  This step will make the cropping overlay grid into a perfect square. Expand the square, to the fullest extent possible and select the area best suited to the image you want to create and apply the crop.  In this photo, you will notice that the dimensions are quite large, but we will worry about the size later.  At this point, you want to get the best  square crop of your image, since most photos are in a rectangular format. [Read more…]

February 7, 2013 By Dru Cortez

5 Whimsical Free Fonts for Valentine’s Day DIY Crafts

 

If you are contemplating making any DIY crafts for Valentine’s day, (whether it’s greetings cards, tags or labels),  it helps to have great fonts in your decorating arsenal.  I have compiled the following whimsical free fonts from a great online site resource  for free fonts.

The styles vary and the terms provided for their use by the font author varies; however, all those that were selected for this blog post are free for personal or commercial use.  These fonts (or typography, if you want to get technical) are all from the same site or font foundry, Dafont.

Selecting Your Font

The font designer usually provides a visual template of how each letter of the alphabet will look, or if there are any characters that are missing or not included in the font file,  for example, punctuation or other symbols.  They also include information as to whether the font can be used for personal or commercial use or whether they are requesting a donation.

The Dafont site has a cool feature that allows you to print the word phrase to preview just what your greeting card, tag or label might look like with the word phrase you have chosen.

All these fonts were located under the Holiday > Valentine’s section; however, there are hundreds  more available. The whole site has literally thousands of fonts.  They have sans serif fonts, serif fonts and script fonts available for your use.

I selected these because they were the most decorative (and they were searched as to the most popular) for the holiday, but I would suggest you check out the site for additional cute or romantic fonts that would suit your style or fancy.

1. Krishart

kris-hart-font

2.  Fatty Heartfatty-heart-font3. Heartland

heartland-font

4.Times New Romance

Times-New-Romance

5. Queen of Hearts

queen-of hearts

The font files are downloaded via a zipped file and it will contain a font file usually ending with the suffix .TTF.

The instructions for the  installation of the font files vary per computer but they are not that difficult. If you have a Windows Vista operating system or a Mac, usually it requires just dragging and dropping the saved .TTF file into your fonts folder on your computer.

Otherwise, you might want to check your system’s operating “Help” file to find out how to install your fonts.

Once you get familiar with the site, and adept at loading your fonts the trick will be to see if you can stop at only one!

Update:  11/15/2022. Through a reader’s tip, the following website is also a great recommendation for getting great fonts in 2022,  70+ Best Free Fonts for Designers – Free for Commercial Use in 2022.

January 28, 2013 By Dru Cortez

How to Use PicMonkey to Kickstart Your Photo Editing Skills

PicMonkey-Main-Page

If you were disappointed when Piknik the free online photo editing site went offline and closed up shop in early spring of last year, you needn’t despair because one of the best free online photo editing sites has found a new life as PicMonkey. ( On their website, PicMonkey claims that former staff workers for Piknik moved to  PicMonkey and the others were absorbed into Google staff when they were  bought out by Google+.) [Read more…]

Subscribe to Blog via Email

desktop

Categories

Top Posts & Pages

  • Vintage Ephemera Tabs - Free Printable
    Vintage Ephemera Tabs - Free Printable
  • Free March Vintage Junk Journaling Mini Kit Printables
    Free March Vintage Junk Journaling Mini Kit Printables
  • Free Retro Moms Cooking Junk Journaling Printables
    Free Retro Moms Cooking Junk Journaling Printables
  • Free Vintage Typography ATC Cards Printable
    Free Vintage Typography ATC Cards Printable
  • July Monthly Layout - Classic Happy Planner
    July Monthly Layout - Classic Happy Planner
  • Erin Condren Planner
  • Happy Planner – Classic
  • Traveler’s Notebook – Art Journals
  • Planners & Organization

Copyright © 2025 · Fun WordPress Theme on Genesis Framework ·

 

Loading Comments...