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

Rocket to the Stars!

When "superimposing" stamped objects to your photos you want to make sure the image blends in well and is as real looking as possible!!! It didn't happen here!!! LOL Click on the photo to have a closer view! But be aware that the closer you look the less the rocket ship looks real!!! LOL!

Here is how I came upon this idea. (Sorry to let you know how this strange little mind works!!!) I had opened an email and it contained a slideshow of space shuttle and outer space pictures. Now in the last wonderful (NOT) update from Microsoft, I can no longer access my slide viewer on my XP computer. But that's ok it makes it easier to remove those photos I want from a slideshow. There was also another part of the update I don't care much for either and that is the search part. I click on search and my cute little wizard guy would come up. Now as default (I HATE it) a different search screen comes up but at the bottom of it I can access the old search. WHY?? Does Microsoft like messing with us??? We can save that discussion for another time!!! And my poor laptop is on it's last legs. The fan is starting to make even worse noises. I had purchased it several years ago. I had it for a couple of weeks and all of a sudden the fan started making a horrible noise. I called Toshiba and they told me they couldn't do a thing about it until it failed. Can you believe that??? They sell us defective merchandise and won't do a thing about it until it fails. I use to purchase Toshiba with every laptop I replace but no more. DH bought a HP and likes it except for the Windows VISTA! I have yet to find anyone that likes VISTA.

Anyway, back to this card. I had printed out the photo onto glossy photo paper. Once the ink dried I took the rocket from the Stampin' Up! "Pun Fun" set and stamped the image on watercolor paper and colored it in with markers. I added the jumbo eyelet to make it look more like a window in the rocket. I set it in place on the photo where the space shuttle was and there you have it. A stamped image "superimposed" on a photo!!!

It makes for a fun card, doesn't it?

I think the photo is a NASA file photo, though there was a website http://www.geoman.net/ after the NASA wording but it showed the domain name is for sale. Which means that the original owner of the website (if there was one) no longer owns it and it's up for sale. I did try to give credit here for the photo.

Have fun with your photos too. Stamping isn't limited to just card stock and decorative papers! Keeping it fun (even if you're the only one enjoying it) is what it's all about, don't you agree???

Thanks SO much for stopping by,
Wanda