 Welcome to Monet Cafe, artistic friends and visitors. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. I think you'll really enjoy today's lesson and art is definitely better with friends. Please click that subscribe button if you'd like to have more of these videos coming your way. Hello, artist. I wanted to share something with you because I know a lot of you guys are creating paintings and you're proud of them and perhaps you might like to make a calendar with your artwork like I've done. I just got finished updating my calendar for a 2021 calendar with all fresh new paintings, more current artwork of mine. And so I thought I'd share with you, of course, my calendar, if anybody would like to purchase, I will have a link to my calendar in the about section of this video. But getting on Zazzle is really neat because you can make your own products. I know I use Fine Art America a lot, but Zazzle has a calendar and Fine Art America does not. So it's kind of neat to share your paintings in calendar format. Now you will have to, if you wanna do this yourself, you'll have to get into Zazzle, create an account and you'll have to create a designer account. And it's not all that hard to do. And then when you get in, you will have to choose a product to design. Now I've used Zazzle primarily for some of the designs I can't get on FineArtAmerica.com, one being the calendar and one being the apron, the Monet Cafe apron that we have. But if you wanna check it out and look on there, there's all kinds of different things you can design. You can design business cards, little icons and things for Etsy. You can design things for Facebook, different, probably Facebook headers. I haven't used Zazzle for that purpose, holidays and occasions. So they've got all kinds of neat templates. If you need to design things for Instagram, invitations and oh my goodness, the sky's the limit. And basically when you create a Zazzle account, you'll see a create button in the very top bar up there. Ignore my mouse where I'm pointing there. But in the top where it says Zazzle on the top, go to the right, it says live create marketplace. You're gonna create, it's gonna ask you what you wanna create, you're gonna choose calendars. And I like this little two-page medium calendar. And then it will take you to this layout and you're going to have to design it. So what you'll do then, and I'm just showing you here, all of the pages with nothing on it. So that's where your artwork's gonna be. So we're gonna create our own and add image. When you click add image, now I have all these previous images saved, but you're gonna have to add your own image. Now you go down to that little layer section that the bottom left down there, and that takes you to your layout. All of your pages, you've got a cover, you've got the back of the calendar, and you've got all of the 12 pages. Now you can see there's nothing in there because you haven't added any artwork. So you're gonna have to add some artwork. You go to my files, you will have nothing there, and you'll go to upload images up top there. You can upload from your phone or your computer, but I'm gonna throw one of my images in here on the cover. Now you see it's too small, so I'm going to stretch it by the corners and make it fit. Now you've got a little preview to the bottom right there. You can see, you can move it around with your mouse, and then you can also add text. Now I'm just gonna add something. You add whatever you want, my art calendar. So then you say okay, it allows you to position the text, it allows you to choose another font if you like. They've got like a gazillion fonts in here, which is really nice. There's a lot of these self-designing websites that don't give you that many choices. So this one's really pretty neat. I tend to go for a font that is sort of fun, but not too childish looking. I also usually don't like ones that are too cursive or too fancy. I also like it clean, legible, easy to read, and sometimes they're just not. So you play around, find what you like, and also too, obviously I'm going to have to change the color of this one as well. So now I go back to the text. You click any item and it'll take you to its controls. And I'm gonna pick white. So now that shows up a lot better. So then you can click the little preview button and see what it looks like and get out of that. And once again, you wanna go back to design your page. You go to that lower left, where it says layers. I apologize if I'm going too quickly. You guys can slow this down and rewind it if you need to. I'm adding another image. I'm gonna go ahead and do the same image on the back of the calendar. I think it looks consistent when your front and back image is the same in a calendar layout. And then there you go. And I'll add text. You can add your website, your contact information, or just your name, whatever you like. And I'm just basically, it automatically by default puts it in the same font. But now notice how it's too big. I'm gonna shrink it with the corners there to the size that I want. Whoops. And then over there you can change the font size. I was thinking I could shrink the font size by just the corners, but you can't. And you decide where you wanna put it. I thought probably up better because sometimes you want it to be on a darker part of your image if you're gonna use a white text background. Or white text. Now we're gonna go to some of the pages. Now first when you click it, it's weird it doesn't show the dates at the bottom until you add an image. So let me just add one of my images. And then once, see now it added the calendar. And I see it needed to be a little bigger. You can always go back to preview and see if your image is large enough to fill the predetermined space. Go back to preview, take a look at it. When you're done previewing you just exit out. And also I'm gonna go ahead and play around with this a little more. Go back to layers. But I wanted to describe to you guys that when you add a file and you upload an image right there of yours, once again find it on your computer or your phone. The program fortunately, I'm gonna purposely do this. I'm gonna pick one I know is a low resolution. I'm gonna make it bigger. And up there at the top right you can barely see it. There's a little yellow, it's an exclamation point. Sorry I'm maneuvering around a lot. Let me see if I can point at it. And it is a warning that your image is too, right there, that little exclamation point top right corner, it's too low resolution. The print, the final print's gonna come out blurry and you definitely don't want that. Now the great thing is too, if you mistakenly missed that and you go to finalize your product it'll give you another warning and say one of your images is a low resolution and definitely don't go forward with that. They don't look good when they come out blurry and you won't be happy with your artwork looking that way. So I'm adding a few more images here. Now you can go back to preview. Look at what you've done and so you guys get the idea with that. And once you're done, you go to the done button that I just clicked, then you can go to sell it. If you want to give a link to sell your own calendar with your paintings. You have all these options, the start date. I love that. What if you wanna start it in March. You have this as neat, you can pick the culture. You know, I know we're all over the world with Monet Café. So you might be in another country and it allows the calendar to give you options. Also, even in the United States, a Christian events or Jewish events. So it's kind of neat that it's very customizable like that. And I like the two page layout. I like the wire binding in white. And then you get to choose what type of calendar printing you want. I kind of like the either the first two, classic frameless or classic grid. And then again, you can do the preview once you're in this editing option here or sell it option here. You can, I don't have all of my images in here so it's actually not gonna let me sell the calendar or it's gonna give me a warning again. All right, let's click sell it here. And again, you see those red boxes? That's my warning. It looks like one or more of your products is blank. Did you mean to do this? So you go back to edit and you add your images. And I think pretty much you guys can probably figure out once you have it all done and you click sell it, it's pretty user friendly to get through to it. It allows you also to share it in multiple platforms. This is my store. You can create a store if you want to make your own store of images and things people can buy. But sometimes you're just making a product for yourself, which is fine. This is what I use to make the Monet Cafe apron. And a couple of Monet Cafe coffee cups. So I again, use Zazzle more for the products that I can't make on fineartamerica.com. Mostly my prints and reproductions are on fineamerica.com but it is really neat to be able to offer a calendar. So I thought I'd just share that with you guys in case you'd like to just make one of your own artwork or make them, buy them, give them as gifts and share your artwork with friends and family. All right guys, I hope that was helpful. Happy painting and happy calendar creating.