A new look for a new year and banner frustrations

I’ve spent the last week or so redoing my banners for ArtFire and Etsy  both of which required different sizes. It’s frustrating when various banners have to be smaller and will as a result either get stretched or cut off. Etsy banners are very small and this Blog and my ArtFire use larger sizes…or so I thought. When I created this one I thought it should fit straight across, but Blogger now uses fewer templates with banners because apparently it makes them easier for those with Mobile phones or gadgets that like to follow blogs. I didn’t like when discovering my banner was cut short here and too small, but finally figured it out.

How did I make this banner?
I don’t have fancy software on my laptop nor on my netbook. I can’t be bothered to learn the Photoshop on my Desktop and the hours I had spent on it wasted a lot of my time because I don’t understand how to make layers work. My husband said “I thought you are a geek!?” Well, I do now a lot of stuff, but obviously not enough.
This banner was created with the basic free Google Picasa photo application. It allows for cropping, red eye, retouching, colour correction and much much more. It also will let you create posters with text and different colour backgrounds. Very basic, but it also has a place where you can click on Picnik where you can further enhance your work.
I made this sunset with a mock set up in my homemade photo tent. Some sand…a calender and some of my beads. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it. I had to raise the sand as I couldn’t crop the background as it’s our Calendar for 2012, lol, so used a lid from a plastic container. I cropped the image, added text and Picnik allowed me add simple layers with the click of an easy button.

 How do you like my new banner? I think it represents my name Beadcomber quite well...I did add some Polymer clay bytes into it...