How to Make a Calendar for Wallpaper

This tutorial was inspired by a Photo Impact tutorial written by Merlene at Gold Acres Calendars. Click here to view the tutorial. Thank you Merlene for a great tut!

Since I use both PI and PSP, I wanted to be able to make them as easily in PSP also. So here is the resulting tutorial.

You will need PSP. I use PSP 8 but I think any version will do. You will also need a calendar to look at. The font we will be using is Calendar Normal and you can download the zip here. Unzip it and put it someplace you can find it easily. It is NOT necessary to load it into your Windows fonts folder....as a matter of fact, please don't. The more fonts you load into Windows, the slower it will run. There is a limit to how many fonts Windows can hold before it crashes and you start losing fonts. Keep them available in a separate file folder for use in PSP.

A word about the Calendar Normal font: I suggest you open a blank canvas and play around with it a bit just to get a feel for where everything is. In the tutorial, I have NOT left you to guess. I have told you exactly what keys to click to get the desired results.

Let's get started. This will be the directions to make a December, 2004 calendar, but the same instructions apply for making any calendar for any month and any year.

1) Open the Calendar Normal font and minimize it. This will make it available in PSP. (Do this for any font you wish to use in PSP.) Some people tell me that when they are using PSP 7 that the font must be opened first for it to be available in the program. I do not find this so with my version of PSP 7 but if you can't see the font in the program you are using, open the font first.

2) Open a transparent canvas, 600x400 pxls.

3) Click on your text tool. These are the settings:

Create: Floating
Font: Calendar Normal
Size: 36
Stroke: 0
anti-alias checked
Style: bold
Alignment: center

Choose a color to compliment or contrast with your wallpaper, or make it a generic black for now. I will show you later how to use this same text box to make a myriad of colors.

3) Click near the top of your canvas and the text box will open. Make sure "save text" is checked (not available in PSP 7) as we will need this option later. Don't worry if it's not centered. After we make the calendar, we will center it.

4) In the text box, type the month you wish to create (you will need to hold down the shift key to make the letters work in this font) followed by the year. I like to use the abbreviations for the month, such as Dec and Nov as it seems to fit better. To type the year, release the shift key and type as normal.

5) Hit "Enter" to go to the second line in your text box. Look at your physical calendar to see how many blank or empty boxes you will need to add in this first week of your month. For example, December 2004 needs three empty boxes before we get to the first day. This key, the empty box key, is found as the second key to the right of the P key. It is the " ]" key. Type this as many times as you need to, to get to the first day of your month. Now, to get the rest of that week, the 1st through the 4th of December, depress the Q, W, E and R keys. Ta-dah!

6) Hit "Enter" to get to the third row, or second week, of your calendar. In December, 2004, we will need the 5th through the 11th. Depress the T, Y, U, I, O, P and A keys.

7) Hit "Enter" and we will do the 3rd week now. For December, 2004, that is the 12th through the 18th, so depress the S, D, F, G, H, J, K keys. Starting to see a pattern here? LOL!

8) Hit "Enter" (I bet you knew that, didn't ya?) and now we will do the 4th week in December, 2004, the 19th through the 25th. Depress L, the semi-colon key, Z, X, C, V, B keys.

9) Hit "Enter" and we'll do the last week now, the 26th through the 31st. Depress N, M, comma key, period key, question mark key and finally , to get the 31st, depress the key immediately to the right of the P key, the "[ " key. Now, make one more empty box (remember, that's the second key to the right of the P key).

10) Hit Apply and you will see marching ants all around your calendar. Using the Move key:

position your calendar in the middle of the canvass. Do NOT deselect the marching ants. Save this as a .psp file. I made mine in blue, so I saved it as dec_blue_600x400. This gives me a description, because we are going to make them in several colors.

11) When you go to use this calendar to put it onto your wallpaper, as long as it has the marching ants around it, you can give it an inner bevel if you wish.

12) Before you close out PSP, open a new canvas, and when you click on your text tool, as long as you had "save text" checked, you can make as many calendars in different colors, different months, etc as you want. Make sure the text is highlighted in the text box and make your changes, saving each one as you go. It will only take a few minutes now to change color, month, year, etc.

I hope this has showed you a fast and easy ways to make calendars for PSP. If you have any questions, please email me!