DrawWithMike.net

We all have a collection of artwork probably safely stored away in boxes or shelves or portfolios or even on our hard drives. With Procreate, we can use our artwork in so many different ways. Our only limitation is our imagination!

I just used one of my digital drawings to create a calendar for 2025. It’s a quick and easy project and I’d like to share my process with you.

Firstly, we need a favourite drawing. It can be digital, or drawn on paper and scanned. We also need a calendar template and luckily there are many free ones online. If you want to use the same one as I did, here is the link
https://www.calendar-12.com/printable_calendar/2025

A wonderful feature of Procreate is that it can read and save in pdf format.

When you download the calendar and open it in Procreate, this is what you will see.

The bar you see at the bottom of the screen is called page assist, and will open automatically when you open a multi-page pdf in Procreate. You can also manually open this bar by clicking on the wrench icon at top left, selecting canvas, and then sliding the button next to Page Assist.
Page Assist is a handy tool that lets you quickly scroll through all of your pages, but in fact these pages are just layers which you can also see by selecting layers.

Then I selected a digital drawing I did in Procreate a while ago which I had saved to my camera roll. This could be one of your drawings that you scanned and saved to your camera roll. I clicked on the wrench icon at top left, selected Add, and then insert photo. Then I made certain to drag this new layer below my 12 calendar layers.

Now, to create the calendar with my artwork as a background, I clicked on the N on the layer containing my drawing. This created a drop-down menu with a slider to control the opacity. I slid the opacity down to 36%. You have to play with this until it seems right for your own artwork.
This is when it all comes together. Using my finger on the screen, I slid the layer containing my drawing to the right to select it. I did the same to Layer 1 which contains the month of January. Now, by clicking on the word “Group” at top right, I can combine these 2 layers. When I look at Page Assist at the bottom of the screen, I can see that Procreate understands that the 2 layers are combined on page 1..

Now it’s just a question of repetition. Using my finger on the screen I dragged the layer containing my drawing to the left this time, which reveals the Duplicate command. I clicked on this to create a duplicate of my layer, dragged the duplicate below Layer 2, which is February, combined the 2 layers using the group command as before, and February is done. Just repeat this for the rest of the months.

The only thing left to do is to save it as a multi-page pdf. Click in the wrench icon at top left, select share, then share layers and PDF.
I chose Best for the quality because I wanted to print my calendar.
And that’s it! I tried to cover all the steps, but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask, and if you create your own calendar, I’d love to see it! Thanks for following along!

Nicely done!
Having created calendars many times in my Graphic arts career, I just want to warn people that it can be a real trial to get all those dates correct! And the holidays!!! But the end result is rewarding and I hope people try out your suggestions.

Thanks Linda!

I know what you mean because I’ve been there too. That’s why I suggested downloading the calendar part of the project in my first post. It’s free, and all of the dates are entered. There are options on the website too to add phases of the moon for example, or holidays for some countries. It’s much easier to find options online now than it used to be. I remember having to buy software to make calendars lol

I designed this mini tutorial with the idea that a beginner could complete the project in an afternoon. My sister tried it and once she got the hang of how easy it really is, she made a calendar with 12 different photos of her labradoodle, one for each month! Great idea !! And, she was able to do it in just one short afternoon!

Very interesting thing to make a calendar with artwork taken from our own drawings or such source
Thank you for sharing

Thanks Artur. Just a fun project.