This article assumes you have knowledge of an image editing or page layout program.

A lot of people use clipart images to describe the text in their documents. You can do a lot more with clipart than that. A nice way to be creative and practice layout skills is to make backgrounds. They can describe a feeling or mood through style and colour. Here are some ways you can use clipart to evoke sentiment for backgrounds in projects other than brochures or newsletters.

Easy Stationery:
Using a single piece of clipart for borders:
· A repeat image like a flower or heart, down one side of your page as a border can look funky or elegant, depending on the style.
· A repeat image in different sizes and / or colour will impart a sense of continuity and theme.
· A repeat image in different tones of one colour is an elegant style.

Using a single piece of clipart:
· One small image in one of the top corners for quiet, understated interest.
· One large image centered gives a bold, confident feel.
· One image centered with transparency that looks like a watermark and can impart a gentle or romantic feeling.

Save your images as jpegs, so you can re-use them to make more wonderful creations.

Now you have lovely writing paper. But you don’t have to stop there. You can cut out envelopes to match and so make co-ordinated stationery sets for gift giving. You will likely have off-cuts of paper from the envelopes. Use a small strip to bind together a pen and pencil to go with it.

Play about and make some gift wrap for those small presents like soap and jewellery.

These ideas can be extended to make stunning Journal or Diary base pages. If you like you could get them bound at print shops. You can make themed notepaper or specific purposed pages like ‘To Do’ lists, ‘Schedules’ and address books.

Print out a page as you need it, do your magic and put them into page protectors. Later on you could select the pages you like and have them bound.

So now you have gorgeous, personalised stationery. Now put that pen to paper and write to someone you love!