{Create a Personalized Lock Screen with PicMonkey}

Hey, y'all!  My blogging schedule is all off with school starting back.  I hope to be back on schedule next week, but we'll see if that happens.  Anyway, tonight I have a fun "tech-y" tutorial for you.  You know by now that I'm Southern, and we Southern girls love ourselves some monograms and personalization!  When I got an iPhone in November (I know.  It was about time, right?), I wanted to personalize it, so I created my own lock screen using PicMonkey, and I'm going to show you how to do it.

First of all, you need something you want to use as the base for your lock screen.  You can download free digital paper from Mel Stampz or Dreamlike Magic Designs to use, or you can simply use a photo and cover it up with an overlay in PicMonkey.  I chose to use {this paper} from Mel Stampz.  To begin, open your paper or image in PicMonkey and crop it.  (You can click on any of these screen shots to enlarge them.)

I have an iPhone 4s.  I did a Google search to find out what the size of my lock screen is, and I found that it's 640 x 960 pixels.  I cropped my image to that size.  (If you have an iPhone 5, the dimensions will be a little different.  Just google the dimensions of your lock screen like I did.)  To ensure I was able to use lots of the pattern, I checked the "Scale Photo" box so that I could enlarge my crop box without changing the dimensions.  Then I added a label.

Under the overlay section of PicMonkey, I found a label that I liked and put it in the center of my chevron background.  (I know it doesn't look like I centered it vertically, but that's because I cropped the screen shot.)  You can change the color of your label if you'd like by using the tools in the overlay box.  Once I had the label like I wanted it, I added my text.

Choose a font and center it in your label.  I like my text to have a shadow, so I used the text edit box to change the color of the text to a dark gray.  I then right clicked on the text and chose "duplicate text."

I changed the color of the duplicate text to white and positioned it over the gray text until the gray text looked like a shadow.  At this point I was happy with my image, so I clicked "Save" near the top of the browser. NOTE: I didn't choose to add texture to this, but you might want to.  If you want to add texture to your lock screen, you need to click the icon near the top of the page that looks like an arrow with two pieces of paper beside it.  This will merge all your layers of texts and overlays together.  Then click on the diamond shape on the toolbar on the left of the page, choose a texture, and fade it if you want a subtler look.  The textures are fun to experiment with!

Of course, now you're wondering how to get the lock screen to your phone, right?  All you have to do is simply email the picture to whatever email is connected to your iPhone.  Open the image from the email and long-press it.  Click "Save Picture," and in your phone settings, choose that image for your lock screen.

My phone now looks like this when it's locked.  Isn't that fun?  I created a few other lock screens as well.  It's really a bit addictive!

The background of the left one came from Mel Stampz, while the background of the right one came from Dreamlike Magic Designs.  I used a texture overlay on each.  The one on the right is my favorite of all three that I've created.  To personalize your phone even more, crop the digital paper you originally started with to the lock screen dimensions and set it as your phone wallpaper.  You will have a coordinating lock screen and wallpaper that everyone will be jealous of!  :)