A Christmas Card

Soon after Elise came home, a friend of ours came over to take some photos.  The friend has recently been bitten by the photography bug and is building her portfolio.  Because she had never shot a newborn before, she jumped at the opportunity for the practice- but her work has simply blown me away.  On Monday I had the pleasure of scrolling through the pictures she took and picking out my favorites.  You can see many of the pictures here or here.

In order to get a Christmas card out (albeit late), I picked out a print to get by email so I could design a Christmas card online.  After visiting many of the photo sites and looking at prices, I decided I would use picnik.com to design my own Christmas card.  Here's how it went down...

I started with an amazing picture:

After uploading the picture to the site, I began playing around with shapes, texts, and colors on picnik.com. I knew I wanted a place to place text, and since most of the background of the picture was white, I decided to put a red bar across the bottom to ensure the text could be seen. Under the 'Create' tab at the top, I went to 'stickers' and found the geometric shapes.  After adding a rectangle, I then stretched it to cover the bottom of the picture and made it a bright red color:

Next, under the 'featured' tab, I was able to find 'gift tag' stickers- exactly what I had in mind to break up the big red bar:

But I decided I wanted it in a different color:

From here it was time to add text.  there are many fonts to choose from, and I played around quite a bit in order to get the desired look:

After making up a few different prototypes, I sent the pictures on to Walmart.com so I could view them before I ordered a goodish amount of them. I'm glad I did, because the colors were not what I expected (every computer screen is different) and this morning I sent out a 'color test' card.  It looked something like this:

I added circles of color near the shades I was looking for to see how they would print out. After getting the picture back, I was able to go back in and change the colors.  Joe is picking up the photos now, and for 15 cents a card, I think I like this picnik option!

Merry Christmas!