Easy DIY Invitations Using PicMonkey

Do you use PicMonkey? If you don't yet, you need to be using this program. It's a(n almost) free photo editing and collage building website. Most of their content is 100% free to use, but they also have some great features for "Royale" members. The membership is about $5 on a month -to-month basis, or about $30 for the year.

I am pretty enamoured with all things paperie. I love invitations, birth announcements, holiday cards and all of their ilk. One thing I've come to realize is that these little pieces of paper can be expensive! Even just purchasing a digital file can cost as much as 75 dollars...and you still have to print them and pay for postage! Yikes! When PicMonkey came on to the scene last year, I knew it would be a game changer. It's so user friendly, and all you need to have is an idea. I highly recommend perusing Tiny Prints, Etsy, Minted, and Paper Source for inspiration.

Here are a few invitations I whipped up in just about an hour on PicMonkey:

I made this invitation for Lili's first birthday party. I used this watercolour ombré desktop wallpaper as my background. For more details on her ombré and gold party, check out this link.

Another sample invite. I found the chevron desktop wallpaper here.

PicMonkey has awesome holiday themed overlays (clip art, banners, text, etc) that make DIYing your holiday cards and party invites a snap. I made this invite using this chalkboard background.

Basic Instructions:

1. Find a background image that you would like to use for your invitation. This image should be high resolution, so I recommend a desktop wallpaper image. Save the image to your computer as a JPEG. 

2. Go to PicMonkey and click "Edit a Photo." Upload the background image you want to use.

3. When you have opened your image, select the first icon (it looks like a molecule) to do your basic editing. This is where you will rotate, crop and change the exposure on your background if necessary.

4. From here, you really let your creativity take over. I recommend taking some time to peruse the overlays (shapes, banners, labels, clip art, etc)  available on the site. Click the heart and speech bubbles icon to see them all. Choose which fonts you want to use as well by clicking the "P" icon.

5. When working with colours, be sure to mark down the RBG code (it shows up in a little box when you change the colour of a font or overlay). Then you can just enter it manually each time instead of trying to find the right one in the spectrum over and over again.  

Here are some more detailed instructions for two of my invites:

I made this birth announcement as a bit of a switch-up using the "Collage" feature on PicMonkey. This is a more labour-intensive process because it involves making each individual cell of the collage as per the instructions above (for the basic invitation) and saving them to your computer. Then you upload each cell you created as well as the pictures you want to use to PicMonkey and arrange them as you like. 



If you plan on using the collage method, definitely choose your collage configuration before you start to work on creating your cells. Detailed planning will make all the difference.

I hope this is relatively clear. Head over to PicMonkey and play around with it a bit to get comfortable. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments.

Linking up here:

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Hope Studios
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