Original Backgrounds for Your Devices

Whenever I get a new laptop, tablet, or smartphone, the first thing I do is put on my own personal background. Today I'm sharing with you some really fun ideas to jazz up your own computerized device in ways you may not have thought of.

In the image above you will see background samples for my cellphone, laptop, and my seven inch tablet. Sometimes I like to put family pictures on them, but sometimes I just like to put something fun and colorful. The top two photos on the left are photos that I took of my two favorite mugs, and the upper right is a greeting card that I got for my birthday this year. Those are on my cellphone. The three ovals in the center are simply a bowl of Christmas candy, a grouping of my mug rugs, and a bowl of potpourri. The rectangles at the bottom are a photo of my table runner (before I quilted it) and a the other one is a calendar page.

I simply crop the image so that it fills the whole screen. There is a place in the tablet and the cellphone to do that. You just simply download the image to your phone/tablet, open it up in your photo gallery, then choose set as "wallpaper" or "background." For the computer backgrounds, I take them into PhotoShop. 

Here is a tip, if your background is too busy where it competes with your icons, photograph something a little simpler in design such as a texture or light colors and save the bright and vivid ones for your lock screens (if you have one on your device).

Better yet, how do you like the background that I have my sample on? This is my favorite trick of all! I simply went into PhotoShop and opened up a photograph of beach sand. Then I added a layer on top of that in green. I put the transparency of the green layer at 70%. That was just enough so that the texture of the beach sand could peek through creating this great effect! This works great for so many photos you already have such as clouds, closeup of flowers or leaves, grass, water, sunsets, almost anything! Take pictures of your tile, carpet, wood doors, anything that you think would look great as a texture under another color. This would give you a stylish background that would be perfect and simple enough to not compete with your icons!

Just get creative! It's so much fun!!!!