Mary Pope-Handy's Silicon Valley Real Estate Commentary

When I started blogging a couple of years ago, my #1 concern was where to get images and graphics. How on earth did people find them without violating copyright????

One simple way is to make them yourself. Frances Flynn Thorsen opened my eyes to the easy, simple and amazing things that can be done with Microsoft Paint. It's not enough by itself, but it becomes awesome when combined with Picnik.

Let's say you want to make a button. For our example, it will be a "contact me now" button.

Go to Paint.

1. First decide what shape your button will be. For our purposes, let's choose the rectangular shape with rounded corners. Pull the mouse across the field to form the basic shape of your button. It does not have to be exact.
2. Then, click on the icon that indicates a paint bucket pouring out its paint.
3. Now you can choose a color. The palette will show up at the bottom of the screen (if the basic colors aren't enough, go to the toolbar above and click on "Colors" and then "Edit Colors" and there will be more choices).
4. After selecting the color, move your mouse into the rectangle and click the button. The color you chose should fill up the space. (If you don't like the color, just go to "edit" and "undo" and try again.)
5. Now save your colored shape. Go to "file" then "save as" and choose the type of file you want it to be. Jpg is easy. Put it somewhere in your pictures file where you can remember it.
6. Close paint.

Go to Picnik.com.

1. On your browser, go to www.Picnik.com
2. Click on the upper right corner, "start picniking".
3. Upload your colored shape. It will have a LOT of white space, but don't worry  - we'll crop that out next.
4. After uploading, go to the "edit" tab and chose the "crop" button. Drag your mouse so that the cropping screen covers what you want to work with, and then click ok.
5. Now you have your basic colored rectangle without all the extra white space around it. Almost done!
6. Click on the tab that says "create".
7. Click on the sub tab that says "text".
8. Now you can select your words, then font, then the color and size of the font. What is good about this (as opposed to paint) is that the words slip over the color as if transparent. If you did this in paint, you'd have a large white space all around your text. Very ugly!
9. More? You can then click on the sub tab for "shapes" and add stuff. Since it's almost Halloween, I'll add a few graphics for the season....
10. Lastly, click on the "save & share" button. It's intuitive from here!