I often see people use images they found online as the wallpaper on their phone. This is of course perfectly fine but I thought it would be so much nicer to add in a personal twist and figured out a few different ways to do so.

Let’s start with the easiest, grab your paint, pencils or markers or and start drawing! Once you are happy with your design photograph it with your phone and save it as your background. You can if you want to play around on picture editing apps to make it look even better, my favourites are Afterlight and Fotor.  Watercolours are a trend I have been seeing everywhere, so I decided to go for some simple lines. Another great idea is taking a picture of fabric with an interesting print or texture.

If you are familiar with picture editing programs like photoshop you can use your doodles in whole new ways. Here I drew a piece of a pattern and used it to fill letters. To do this start by opening a new file that is the same dimensions as your phone screen, a simple google search will tell you what you need. Create a layer that contains the image you want to use, I created one layer for every letter and placed the image where the letters would be. In a new layer, type a word or phrase in your favourite typeface and apply a thick stroke to your letters in a contrasting colour to create the outline. Select the original letter without the outline with your magic wand tool and inverse the selection then select the image layer and delete the space around the shape.  Finally drag that layer to the top to see if it worked and repeat for the other letters.

An easier technique is to photograph something on a white background and adding text on the image. I use a palm-sized golden circle and shrunk it to the size of confetti and duplicated it, but the options are endless.

The images I created fit perfectly on an iPhone 4, but this tutorial should work for all phones. I hope this post gave you some ideas. If you like the images feel free to save them and use them but I encourage you to make some of your own as it is a lot of fun! Please let me know if you do.