Elevate Your Holiday Feast: Mastering Canva's Artistry for a Picture-Perfect Menu!
Hi, Iām Valerie Englehart. I am a watercolor artist and surface pattern designer and today I want to show you how to take a piece of art, in this case some watercolor art I created, and use it with Canva to make a menu for the holiday season.
With Christmas coming up, I thought it would be fun to make a customized menu. So I've already pulled up Canva.com and I'm going to go on Canva's search bar and type "Menu." And I'll select "Food Menu." Next, I'm going to go to "All Filters" and it's going to bring up this little menu and I'm going to scroll all the way to the bottom and select "Free and Apply." This will bring me all of the free options.
Now, because I want to make a watercolor painting the background, I want to pick a template that has a pretty clean, uncluttered background. So this would work. This one over here looks like it should work. This one would still be pretty cool, I think. But I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to pick this white minimalist one by Gregorious and I'm going to pick this one just because it's very clean and the menu options are dead center. So that will work for borders and stuff.
So I'm going to click on it and customize this template. So now I can make any changes. So I want to make a watercolor painting the background. So I'm going to go to "Uploads" and "Upload Files" and I saved my painting on my desktop. So I'm going to go to my desktop, select my painting and upload.
And now I can see the upload's done. I want it on the background, so I'm just going to click and drag it over and drop it. And as you can see, it kind of already fit it to the menu and already moved it back behind the text. My painting file size is 8.5 by 11 and this menu is 8.5 by 11. So I picked something that was printer paper sized. You can always go larger with your image. I don't recommend going smaller because then you'll have to expand it to fill the page and then it could get blurry and pixelated. So make sure that your image is already large enough for whatever template you want to use.
And so now, this looks pretty nice, but now it's hard to read the menu. So I'm going to put in kind of a buffer shape just to bring in some opacity, make it easier to read. So I'm going to go to this side panel on the left and click "Elements" and there's a "Shapes" option. And I'm just going to click on this rectangle and it popped a rectangle right in the center. I'm moving to the top of the rectangle so I get that double arrow and I'm just going to drag it up. And it created a guide where it'd be a nice place to have a margin between the edge of the paper and my rectangle. So I'll leave that there. I'll grab the bottom, drag it down and oh, there it goes again. It gave me a guide. So I hope it does it every time. There's the guide. Oh, I don't see the guide, but you could almost feel it click into place.
To make sure that it is dead center, I'm going to click off of it to set the transformation. I'm going to click on it again and up here is three dots that says "More" or you should be able to right click on the shape itself. So when I do that, I go down to "Align to Page" and the center and middle are grayed out. So it is already dead center. If it wasn't, this option would be black and I would click on it to center my item. So I'll just click out of there. It's good.
And I could leave it like this. It looks nice. It's not a complimentary color, but a color that complements the background painting. But I've lost that beautiful poinsettia. So now I want to make it a little transparent, opaque enough that I can see the menu, but transparent enough that we can tell there's a lovely Christmas white poinsettia in the back.
So I'm going to click on that shape again, our light green rectangle, and up at this top menu where we see Crimson Pro and Numbers. I'm going to come all the way over to three more dots and click on that. And I'm going to come down to this checkerboard. So that checkerboard, as you can see, it pops up. It means transparency. So I'm going to click on that and I'm just going to drag this circle down and find what I like. So I think 65, let's bring it up to 70, see how that looks. I think I like 65. Maybe even 60? 60 works too. I'll just go right in the middle. So at 65, click off and click again.
Now we can see that lovely poinsettia coming through, but the text is much easier to read than if we didn't have this rectangle. And now all we have to do is change the lettering. So double click, I'll put my name, Englehart, and you can play with any of these. Get rid of the starter and say appetizer if you want, or obviously change any of these menu items to fit whatever it is that's going to be on your menu. So I hope that was helpful. This is how you can take a piece of art and incorporate it into a lovely customized menu. And happy creating!