Etsy Banner How To

After chatting with some of my friends in one of the Etsy Chat rooms there was a request for me to do a quick Banner how to. I am going to use Gimp to create the banner. Gimp is a great Photoshop like program that is free. It can be found at www.gimp.org.

First thing you want to do is create a new image. Once you click on the new image you will see a screen like this
















Remember that your Etsy Banner can only be 760 x 100 pixels at most so go ahead and set that as your image size as seen here. Go ahead and click ok then. Tada! There is your new Etsy store banner. Its kinda boring right now so lets spice things up a little.
















You can do just about anything here insert pictures, text, patterns. I am going to do a simple style banner with a simple background and text with a single picture. You can build on what I am going to show you and create much more advanced banners.

First thing I am going to do is decide what picture I want to use. Looking through my shop I found that my lioness picture has had a ton of views so that is the image I am going to use. Since the Banner can only be 100 pixels high I am going to open and resize my picture so that the height will be 100 pixels.

Resizing the picture once it is open is really easy. Click Image than Scale then input 100 for your picture height and hit enter. This will automatically set your width. As you can see here. Go ahead and click scale and your picture will now get smaller. Seen here.































Now go ahead and copy and paste the image to your banner. My picture is now in my banner as you can see. In order to move the picture around make sure there is a dotted line box around the image then go to the cross hairs in the tool box click and move the picture to the area you want it like I did here.































Now I am going to add a background color to my banner since I dont like the white. I want to use a color from my image I am going to use one of the blues in the sky behind the lion. In order to do that I need to go to my tool box and select the eye dropper and select a color from the image.































Once you have selected a color you should see the box in tool box change to the color you have selected. You can pick other colors if you dont like that color by simply using your eyedropper and clicking another spot in the picture.
















Now I want to fill my back ground with the color I have selected. So I am going back to my tool box and going to select the spilling paint bucket. Now because my lion image is still selected I cant spill my paint. I need to go back to the cross hairs and click on the white space so I can spill my paint in the background. Remember you need to go back to your paint bucket now. Ok now my background is blue rather than white.
















Ok I am happy with this look. Now I want to add some text to my Banner. Go ahead and get back into our tool box and find the big A which will allow you to entry text. This will end up showing you a box below with text options and will give you a new pointer that you can use to put text into your banner area. The tool box for text will allow you to select different colors, texts, sizes and some other advanced options. Go ahead and place your text as I have done here.
































You can move your text around to where you want it. If you want to add other text to your banner as I have done here.

















Dont worry you can go back and edit the text and move it around utilizing the dialogs box. Go to the layers menu and it will bring up the different layers that you have going on. Go ahead and click the the layer you want to work with then go and edit it.






























This is my finished product. As I said before you can get more advanced utilizing the tools that I have shown you. I am sure there are steps I have missed along the way. If you run into any issues just send me an email.