Sunday, October 11, 2009

A Beautiful Card is Just a Click Away!

You can incorporate your wonderful photographs into greeting cards! It's like scrapbooking on a smaller scale!

For this card I had taken a photo of some hybrid daisies after it had rained. I LOVE the rain drops on the petals. I suppose you could achieve that look with a water mister too but this one was all natural! I took the picture offset on purpose. I wanted to add words to the dark area. I wasn't sure what words I was going to use at the time I took the photo but once I got it printed out I thought it would make a FABULOUS birthday card.

I use a program called "Print Artist." You can get it at Best Buy. It's a fun program that does LOTS of things from greeting cards to scrapbook pages. It does business cards, fliers, mailing labels and more. I have used "Print Artist" for years. I believe the latest version of it that I have is v22. I started out with v2 well over 15 years ago! It's a fun, versatile and inexpensive program. If you have your heart set on a photo editing program like Photo Shop, save your money and download Gimp. It's an open source program that is free and it's full of all the things you want in a photo editing program!

Anyway, back to my card. I imported the photo into my program and went into the text part and added the words. I picked out my font style. I have this thing for fonts and it takes me a while to find the right font I want because I have to go through them all and believe me there is a LOT of them on my computer. I seem to collect those too!

Once I got the words where I wanted them I saved the settings. I also saved the photo to a file which I downloaded to Shutterfly (they seem to have the best prices on the Internet for prints) and waited a few days for it to arrive. I was in no hurry for them. When I'm in a hurry I check the local stores for the best prices. Usually I am not in a rush for my pictures. I don't even get prints of our outings or vacations right away, I wait for the best price on printing because I have an itchy camera finger when I'm out and about and it can cost quite a bit to have all of my photos printed. I do need to get into scrapbooking more. I need a bit more motivation in that area and then there won't be any stopping me!!! LOL

I layered this photo onto a piece of Night of Navy card stock. After seeing it on the card stock I wished I would have put a piece of white behind it so about a 1/16" of it showed. It just needs a little thin border around the photo. But fortunately I ordered a lot of them and I can experiment.

Have fun with your photos! They're not just for scrapbooking!

Thank you SO much for visiting today,
Wanda

3 comments:

  1. Wanda, this card is just gorgeous. I have a file of photos I want to make into cards. I need to fiddle with PE6 to learn how to get a sentiment on them. You did a wonderful job.

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  2. Exceptional.......great idea. I will have to check out the programs you mentioned.

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  3. Beautiful, this is a wonderful way to create a card. Your scrapbook factory program should do the same thing for you...If you need help with it just let me know.

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