There is nothing better than getting up on a cold and wet December morning to open a new window in your advent calendar – right? Right. Unless it's opening a new window in your advent calendar and finding some chocolate inside it, but... that's outside the scope of this exercise. Anyway, here is my complete step-by-step guide to creating your very own custom-made chocolate-free advent calendar!
Here's what you will need:
1. Heavy duty inkjet paper or card
2. A computer
3. A printer
4. Photoshop
5. A digital camera, or a scanner, or, hey, the web (hugs web)
6. A blimmin' sharp Stanley knife, ruler and masking tape, and a surface you can cut on
7. Paper glue, double-sided sticky-tape, a pritt-stick or something like that
8. A cup of tea
| Step 1 Fire up the 'shop. Create a new document – make it the size of the card you'll be printing and 300dpi. In this case I'm using 'Letter' because you can't get normal A4 in this backwater, but in your case I'm sure you'll be using God's Own Standard Paper Format. |
| Step 2
| Find a picture that you'd like to use for the 'front' of your calendar. Whatever floats your boat. Me, I'm using this cheesy Fritz Baumgarten pic scanned and from a double spread in one of my nipper's story books and inexpertly stitched together (click the thumbnail for a larger view). Import it into your computer and make sure the size is at least as large as the paper you're going to be using for your calendar. |
| Step 3 Paste the picture into your PS document, resizing it so that it fits more or less the format of your card. You can always trim away edges later on, but this is going to be easier and work better if you go for borderless printing. Call this new layer 'foreground'. |
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| Step 4 Select the rectange tool. Select 1 pixel stroke 0% opacity from the toolbar menu (see the screen grab below). Drag and create 24 rectangles in new blank layers. You can do this any way you like – in grid format, or randomly, all equal size or all different sizes. Up to you. If you’re unhappy with the shape of a rectangle, select the vector mask in the layers palette (by clicking the grey square), hit Apple-T (CTRL-T) and resize it, then tick to accept.
| Pretty soon your layers palette will start to fill up like this...
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| Once you've entered all your rectangles, if you switch off your foreground layer, you'll end up with a group of rectangular outlines on a white background, something like this (click to enlarge): |  |
| Step 5 Group your 'rectangle' layers together (select them all and Apple/CTRL-G), and call the group 'rectangles'. Save your document and take a slurp of tea. Eww, cold. |
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