Transcripts
1. Introduction: You're looking for a fun project
that combines working in Canva with some papercraft,
and this is a class for you. We are going to be
creating a desk calendar. It actually is right here. This is what the finished product that we're going
to make looks like. It basically lets you flip
through the different months, put it behind, and have it on your desk looking
just so cute. This is a fairly easy project in that nothing in it
is very technical. It does involve a lot
of repetitive steps. So as long as you're
patient and don't worry, I'm going to give you lots of tips to make it even easier. We're going to create
something really cool together. This is a great gift. This could be a
product if you run a stationary store or an
art business like I do, or of course, you can just
make it for yourself. Only materials you're
going to need for this class are a
free Canva account, a printer, and then
whatever paper you want to use to
print the calendar on. I'd recommend something a little heavier than standard
printer paper. Card stock would be ideal, but whatever you have
is probably fine. And finally, you'll
need some scissors or something else to
cut out the paper. I'm so excited to
share this project with you because I really
enjoyed making it. So if you're ready
to get started, then let's head into the
first lesson together.
2. Designing in Canva: Is what our calendar looks
like when it's all designed. I'm here working in Canva,
and just so you know, you can do this whole project
with a free Canva account, you don't need to have
a paid subscription. And I have all 12 of the months here for my little
prototype that I made. I'm going to hop into
the January 1 just to give you an overview of
sort of the design choices, and then we'll make
a whole new set together with a different theme. So first of all, I'm working on a five inch by
seven inch design. Do whatever size you
like, of course, but I did this because I can fit two on a page for printing, so I only need to print
six sheets of paper. Now, the white area at the
top is what gets cut out, and I did put a little
dash line along here just to indicate
where that cut line is, as well as you'd cut
right around the flower. Now, aside from the little
decorative element that's going to move along the top
as we go through the months, the only real
necessary elements are the name of the month and
this little calendar, which I will show
you a shortcut. We don't have to build these
all manually. Don't worry. Everything else is really
just a design choice, so totally up to you. So I'm going to head to a
new page on this document, and we'll make a
prototype together. The first thing
I'm going to do is add a guide as to where I want the top of the calendar to start. Have the
rulers turned on. If you don't see these little
rulers at the top and side, then you can go
into file settings and show rulers and guides. I'm going to click and drag from this top bar to give us a
guideline to work with. I'm going to put it at an inch down just to show where I want the calendar
to actually start, and we'll put the little
tab decorations above that. Now, the way that
you design this, if you have a printer that the ink is really expensive for, you may want to go
with a more, like, a white design and just use
borders or decorative things around the sides rather
than a full colored design. This is totally up to you and
your printer and ink costs. So I'm going to
design it, assuming that I don't want to
use a ton of ink. I'm going to start
with a rectangle. I just tapped R on the keyboard, and we'll just make this the size of the actual
calendar part. I think I'm going to
go with like a tan and neutral kind of
design this time. Now I will duplicate this and turn this
secondary one white, make it a little bit smaller, holding shift on the keyboard to heap the dimensions the same. And I'll lock that in
place with the guides. So there we go. Now we have just sort of a
border around our design. Go to select both of those boxes and lock them just so I don't move them
when I'm designing. Now, just a note
on color choices, if we look back at my
other design, obviously, I just kept the pink for all
of these different months. But you can certainly make every month a
different color that coordinates with the tab or
just fits a color palette. This project is a lot
of repetitive tasks, just modifying each month. So as many tasks as
you'd like to do, you can make it as
custom as you want. Next, we're going
to add the so in order to avoid having to
create your own calendar, we're just going to use a
template here in Canva. I'm going to add a new page. Then I'm going up into design, and I'm going to
look for a template. I already did here, but
what I'm looking for, I'm just going to type
the year, so 2025. And it brings up all these
different calendar options. If you have a Pro
account, you can use any of these that have
the little crown icon. If you don't, you
just want to scroll through to something that
doesn't have that icon. So, for example, this calendar right
here doesn't have it, so we can tap this
page to your design. So we're actually
only going to borrow these little month sections
from this template, and we'll just
start with January. So I'm just clicking
on this group. I'm just going to grab this
little box and scroll up, drop it in our design. The first thing I'm
going to do is just get the positioning right
and the sizing. As I'm making this bigger,
I'm going to hold Shift, and it will maintain I'll
scale the font, as well. Put it sort of centered, and then I'm going to go
and change the fonts. For my samples, I used this FF Providence Sans
font, which is very cute. I'm going to do more of a
neutral vibe for this one. So maybe I'll use
Liber Baskerville. Yeah, I think I like that. And then we will change the
color just to this dark gray. Now, you can modify this
as much as you like, but just because we're
taking it from a template, I like to just keep it
a little bit simple. Next, we're going to add
the month right above it, so I'm going to hit T on
the keyboard for textbox. We'll put it as
Baskerville, as well. I have this in all uppercase. I'm going to hit bold, and
then I'm also going to use the spacing to make the
letters a lot more spaced out. A little bit bigger. And also, I want it to be that
same, like, gray color. There we go. So I
like a little bit of white space around it
just for visual impact. You can also add
other things here. Typically, this isn't the kind of calendar that
you would write on, but there's no reason you can't. So you could add
a little section that's like a box for notes or just some lines at the bottom if you wanted to add a
space you could write, or you could add a
decorative element, which I believe is what I will do for this design as well. In the elements tab right here, I'm just going to search
for Boho to give me some little clip art things
that might suit this vibe. I kind of like this
little doodle. It was just cute, so
we'll put that there. Okay, so this is basically
calendar page number one. The only thing left to
do is add the top tabs. So in order to get
them evenly spaced, I'm going to use a grid
tool here in Canva. We're going to go to File,
settings and then add guides. Click on Custom, which
is the last option here, and we're going to use this
setting that I have here. We're using 13 columns,
zero inch gap. Those are the two that
you probably have to change and then hit Add Guides. We did 13 because we want 12
lines here in the middle. So it's 13 columns, but there's 12 lines,
and that's going to be how we center
our little tabs. And like I said, you can
do any shape you want. Like, I used the
little flower here, and I just made it
the size to fit in between two of the boxes. I'm going to just
use a half moon. There we go, a little half
circle shape for this one, just to keep it
really simple make this project really easy if you want to just
copy this version. We're just going
to shrink it down until it locks on
those grid lines. I'm going to use this center line as the point of reference. So line number one is January, February will be like that,
March will be like that. And then those tabs will kind of overlap and it'll be
a little bit pretty. You can also do them
in sporadic order. It doesn't have to be like
you could have February here and March
over here and May, what comes after
April over here. If you don't want them to be
sort of a cascading flow, if you want to be
a bit more random, that can look nice, too. I'm going to make it the same
color as the background. And there we go. There's our
first page in our calendar. After this point, it just
becomes a game of sort of duplicating and
adapting the colors and maybe the designs. So I'm going to
duplicate this page. But first, I'm just
going to rename it January, just to keep
things straight. Duplicate. I'm going to
change this one to February. And then go through
and modify everything. I prefer to create duplicates of all these first
and just worry about the tabs rather
because I want to get these grid lines off when I do the rest of the design work just because they're
distracting. But you can do it in whatever
order makes sense for you. So for February, we're
going to move this over. We're going to pick
a different color, maybe this orangy
brownish color. And then I'm just
going to unlock the background so that I can change that to the
same color, too. And like I said, I would save all this inside stuff after I'm done doing all the tabs and recoloring because I want
to remove these grid lines, but do it in whatever
order works for you. When you are ready to
remove the grid lines, it's super easy file settings, clear guides, and they're gone. So now I know that
this is February. We can go through and
change the title. For the calendar, rather
than just deleting it, I will go grab this one
first and drag it up, and I'll use the
January 1 there as a guide as to where to
start lining it up. There we go. So now it's
snap to the corner, holding Shift. There we go. And then I will change the
fonts, per Baskerville. Going to adjust it slightly
and the gray color. Now I can go in on position and just look for the lower
level is that old calendar, delete it, and there
we have February. Just layering the
months on top of each other will help you just
keep everything in line. You can also use grids if
you prefer to make it really visually obvious where
the corner should start. If that's more helpful to you. I'm going to go ahead and do the rest of this calendar with just a couple of variations to show you, and then
we'll jump ahead. You don't need to watch
me make all these months. And we'll talk about
the end result then. Okay, I have done
all the duplicating, so we have starting here with January down here to December. And I just picked six
colors that all kind of fit within the neutral palette and I duplicated that twice. So we only have six colors here. January and July are the
same, and they repeat. So I think that's okay. Half of the year matches the other half. I also changed the color of the little squiggles to match the background color
of each month. And I went through and
moved each tab so that it moves across the top as
we go through the year. At this point, we don't
need our little guard anymore from our template
friends, so we'll delete that. And now we are ready my
goal is to have two of these print per page just to save paper and to get
them the size I want. With my printer,
the easiest way to do that is to download all of these individual
images just as PNGs, and then I'm going to open a new Canva document and
arrange them two per page so that they can print out
properly rather than having one in the center of a big sheet of
paper and wasting. I'm going to do that
if you want to print a different way. By all
means, you can do that. I'm going to go up
to share and then download and just select
the pages that I want, which is going to be
the second project. I'll download them as
PNGs, and there we go. Now they're going
to my computer. I'm actually going to open
up a new Canva document. And we will make a custom size. I'm going to do 8.5 by 11 ", which is the size of a standard
piece of printer paper. That's what I'm going
to be printing on. So that's what I
will use. I'm just going to drag and drop all of these pages for the calendar into my Canva
account. There we go. Now I have January and
February on this page. I'm just going to
rotate them so that they fit onto the page. Now, these are a little bit bigger than I want
them to print at. So I'm going to just grab the corner and shrink them down. I said I wanted
them five by seven, so that is five by seven. You can see in that
little black box, it tells you what
size the graphic is. Make it the same size. And just center
them on the page. I'm going to hit Duplicate
for the next page, and then I can
easily just drag in the next month without having
to resize them every time. So there's March,
April, et cetera. Do this for all of your
pages of the calendar, and then you can export
as a PNG or a PDF, whatever you prefer and print. Then all you have to do
is cut out the extra and I'll just show you my finished
product once we do that.
3. Trimming and Finished Product: Here are the finished printed pages for our little calendar. They look pretty great to me. I have printed these
on 28 pound paper. So typical printer paper is
going to be 20 pounds or so. That's typically
the weight of it. This is a little
bit thicker paper. This is actually what I use
to print my notepads on. But I would even
recommend printing on a cardstock if your
printer can handle it because then it will be really
sturdy when you put it in its little easel or wherever
you are displaying this. So the rest of the project is pretty simple. As you can guess. You are just cutting
these out. Now, you can use a paper cutter or exacto knife and a ruler to get really straight edges
if you want to do that. I'm just going to use
a pair of scissors. These are actually
embroidery scissors, but I use them for collage work. So they have really fine, you can already see
really tiny little tips. So that's really good for
getting into corners. It's gonna take me a little
while, but that's okay. I'm not in a hurry and I kind of enjoy these sorts
of little projects. But if you wanted to be
much more efficient, I would say just, you know, use something to cut these
sides really fast. And that's basically the
rest of the project. So I'm going to get to work and then we'll look at the
finished result together. There we go. So there's
my first month cut out. I think I did a pretty good job. But you also had, like,
a cricket machine or some other cutting
tool. You could use that. I don't have one, so I can't give you
instructions on how, but you could certainly
have something automatically cut
these out for you. So I'm gonna go take
care of this pile probably while watching
a YouTube video, and then I'll be back and
show you the finished result. Alright, I am all done cutting and trimming
my little calendar. I think it turned out so cute. I love these tabs along the top. This is what it looks like.
All cut it and finished. The idea is that
January happens, then we can put it at the
back. Little tads continue. It keeps being adorable. As for how to display this, I'd
recommend getting, like, a little tiny easel or even, like, a plate stand, and
that's what I have here. So this is basically just a
little collapsible stand. That is meant for a
decorative plate. You can often find
these at thrift stores. I'm sure you can get
them at, like, $1 store. They're not expensive at all. And that is how I would place my little calendar on my desk and how I'm
going to, and I love it. I hope that you have had
fun with this project. I would love to see
what you created in this class and how
creative you got with it. So please do take a photo of it, and then you can upload it to the class project section of this course so
we can take a look, whether you want to copy my model and just do a simple thing with the circle tabs if you want something even
more complicated. It is totally up to you. I do have lots of
other classes that are papercraft or Canva based. Lots of fun DIYs that you can check out if you like
learning with me. I would also really
appreciate it if you took the time to leave a
review for this class. Not only does it help
other students to find out that my
classes are super fun, but it also gives me a
chance to get your feedback, find out what I could
be doing better, and see what you
like about my class. Any questions, you
can pop them in the class discussion and I
will chat with you there. All right, thanks
so much for being here and doing this
project with me. Hope you had fun, and I'll
catch you later. Bye.
Rebecca Wilson, Artist
