January 2012 Archives
I have SO many photos of my kids and my life that by the end of the year I feel totally overwhelmed with them. There are some really great photos and lots and lots of just OK photos - but those are our memories of our little ones. This year we welcomed our little girl into the family so the majority of 2011 was all about pregnancy and then her birth and newborn months.
Here's a great way to create a visual representation of the year with a Photo Collage - and if you are decent at PShop, it should just take a few minutes to create.
Start in Picasa. If you don't have Picasa already, I urge you to use it. It is a great way to organize your photos, edit them and keep an online selection of them in albums. Google offers free storage that lasts a long time and has several partner sites which make it easy to print the photos after you upload them to your online web albums.
Step 1: Create a collage in Picasa. I went through the year's photos and selected the ones that stood out to me. I put them in the tray and pinned them. After I was done, Picasa's collage tool did the rest. I selected a grid format. I don't like the way some of the photos go horizontal or vertical so I went in and changed some of those. Lost interest (and ran out of nap time) but you get the idea.Open your collage file in PShop.
Create a new layer and make your bold numbers. I chose Impact but get create and try out a lot of fonts.
Control click the numbers layer to select just the number area. Go back to your collage layer and select the inverse. Then, delete. Now you just have the collage in the shape of the numbers.
Now, I like the numbers against a black background but play around with it. One thing that I didn't like was the way that a lot of my photos were cropped out when they were between the numbers. Another font or squishing the numbers closer would solve that but try different effects.
This is not an easy project but if you know your way around Photoshop and Illustrator, it's a cinch. We use this technique of creating scalable vectors in Illustrator and then pulling them into Photoshop a lot. It's a great way to make use of the small, unusable graphics you find online.
Any profile photograph will do but in a perfect world, place your kidlet in front of a light colored wall. A solid colored background will make this a little easier to do.
Prepare your images by cropping them and then desaturate them in Photoshop. Give them a tint so that the background will be a different hue from the blackened silhouette in the next steps.
Print your images out on a piece of paper. Ink jets work better than laser printers because the ink is absorbed into the paper and you have a more porous surface to write on for the next step.
Use a black marker to draw in your silhouette shape. Really, don't over think it. Just trace the outline with a thinner marker and then use a thicker marker to color it in. Make sure the entire shape is really black. You can really see where I missed some spots in these photos - I had to go over them again.
Scan the images back into Photoshop.
Here comes the tricky part. If you selected a nice, solid, light background for your images, you won't have to do much but if not, you want to use the the brightness and contrast adjustment to lighten your image and then add contrast between the blackened silhouette and the background. Keep doing this until you can only see the silhouette in black. Use a hard black brush to fill in any light areas you missed.
Select just the blackened silhouette and inverse your select and delete the background. You now have just the silhouettes. 
Drag your image into Illustrator and use the LIVE TRACE function. Adjust the sliders until you are happy with the shape. Then, expand it and ungroup it so you can remove just the black silhouettes. 
Create a new Photoshop document which will be for your final artwork. Make it 300dpi at least and the size you want your final print to be. If you plan on matting the image, make sure you print the final artwork smaller to allow for the mat.
Now drag your vectorized silhouette shapes into Photoshop, size them and rasterize the layer. You can now make the shape any color you like - or leave it black against a white background. Making it white against a colorful background gives it a fresh and modern feel, me thinks. Add your child's name in a funky font. Print it, and frame it. You're all done!
Continue reading HOW TO: Funky, Fresh, Framed Silhouette Prints.
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Guess who had the honor of making a custom sculpted wedding cake topper for none other than Shania Twain and her new handsome hubby? US! Shania and Fred were married in 2011 and when it came time to wow his new bride with a custom gift, Fred selected The Younique Boutique to make this adorable and funny wedding cake topper.
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