tutorial

November 26, 2016 by Kat

The Best Gift: Creating your own Greeting Cards Tutorial

What is the best gift you’ve ever gotten? Think for a moment… Bring up the gift in your mind. What was it, who gave it to you, how did it make you feel? It gives you a nice warm fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it?

I’m going to take a wild guess… It probably wasn’t the latest electronic gadget or a kitchen appliance. It was probably something special, something where the giver thought about you in the choosing. Maybe it was something they had made.

I must admit, I’m partial to the handmade gift. I don’t get excited about the whole holiday shopping thing, but I love to give gifts, especially of my art. The problem is… It’s hard to give art as a gift. Choosing art for the walls of your home or office is a very personal thing. So if you give your art to someone, you risk that it may sit gathering dust in a drawer or closet, never to be used.

Over time I’ve learned that there is a great way to gift art that can work for everyone: Greeting cards.

Each year, for holiday gifts I create greeting card packs with new art pieces I’ve created in the last year. This way, I get to share my art in a format that everyone can use. The cards are blank inside and they can be used for any purpose, just write your own greeting and voila! You have a birthday card or a thank you card or whatever kind of card you choose. They are nicely packaged and can be re-gifted, if desired. I make different size packs, from three to six cards in a pack, and give these packs to coworkers, friends, and family. They have become quite the popular gift, with people letting me know how much they look forward to them!

Today, I’m going to share the ins and outs of creating your own greeting cards. I’m sharing all of the details from the card stock I use to the packaging I put them in. What I would like to encourage is less shopping and more creating this holiday season, because creating connections through art is one of the best gifts you can give.

Step One – The Paper

Finding a good greeting card paper is not easy. You want a paper that will give a nice-looking print, with good color and detail. You also want a paper stock that is enjoyable to write on, since it’s blank and the user will need to write in a greeting. You might also want the card stock pre-cut and pre-scored, so there aren’t a lot of extra steps to turn the paper into the card after printing.

I wanted all of these things, and after a lot of searching, I found Red River Paper inkjet greeting card stock. I first ordered the Sample Kit to test out the different paper stocks they offered, and then settled on the 60lb Polar Matte cardstock. This paper gives very nice detail and color and has a smooth finish which is lovely to write on. It is also pre-cut and pre-scored, which makes it super easy to create your own cards.

I buy the 7×10″ size which folds into a 5×7″ (A7) card.

Step Two – The Print

I do all of my printing through Lightroom, and if you do too, I’ll make things easy by providing a few templates for greeting cards. I’m not going to get into the details of getting a good fine art print, because that goes beyond this simple tutorial. (If you want to learn how to make a good fine art print using Lightroom or Photoshop, I recommend the eBook Making the Print by Martin Bailey.)

I’ve created three templates for the 7×10″ greeting card stock from Red River which you can download for import into Lightroom. These templates have a photo on one side and your name or website on the back. You will need to choose the correct template to ensure your image is oriented such that the card will open correctly. Download the templates here:
Square – Use for square photos
Horizontal – Use for rectangular photos in Landscape orientation
Vertical – Use for rectangular photos in Portrait orientation

To use these templates, first go into the Print Module, then right click on the template browser to create a new folder for your templates and then to import a template. Once your template is imported, click on it to select. You should see your chosen photo loaded into the template. Before printing, you will need to change the nameplate which current reads “Your Information Here.” Type in the information you would like to print on the back of the card. This would typically include your name or website address.

If you are using the square template, you need to have the bottom of the image facing toward the right side on the screen, as shown above. Unfortunately, the image will not auto-rotate to the correct orientation with a square format, so you will need to manually rotate the image before you print. Go into the Library Module and then rotate your image 90 degrees right before printing.

Before printing, check on your Print Job settings (right side menu) to ensure you have the correct printer settings and ICC profile loaded. You can get the printer settings and profile information on the 60lb Polar Matte stock from Red River here.

When you first use these templates, I recommend you run several test prints to ensure the color settings and orientation are correct. There is nothing worse than printing multiple cards that open the wrong way! Once you confirm everything is working correctly, you can print to your heart’s content.

Step Three – The Package

After the cards are ready, I add matching envelopes and then package as a gift. I’m all about simplicity, so for my gift packages, I use a simple clear bag or box with a stretch loop around it. The stretch loop gives it a nice gift-y feeling and can also hold a personalized holiday tag or note. Here is an example of a finished gift bag with three card/envelope sets inside:

I buy all of the packaging materials, including envelopes, from ClearBags. You can buy matching envelopes from Red River Paper, but I’ve found the ClearBags envelopes are also nice and are a bit cheaper when you buy in bulk. Here are the links:
Envelopes – White A7 size
Stretch Loops – The 10″ size works well for the A7 card bags and boxes below
Clear Boxes – You can easily fit 5-6 card/envelope sets in a box
Clear Bags – You can fit up to 3 card/envelope sets in a bag

I hope this tutorial helps you create some gifts with your art this year. Not only are greeting cards a great way to share your art, they also lead to meaningful connections between others as they are used. It’s one of the few gifts that truly keeps on giving.

If you don’t want to make your own greeting cards, I have sets created with my art available in my shop here. Custom orders are also available! Contact me for more info.

February 5, 2015 by Kat

Impressions of Artista Impresso (A Mobile Tutorial)

I’ve been playing with a new app this week, and thought I would share! JixiPix Software has released a new app for both iOS and Android, Artista Impresso, which creates an impressionistic painting style out of your photos. I love the JixiPix apps for their adjustability, and this is another great one for the app arsenal. Let’s take a look at how it works.

But first, a quick Mother-in-Law update: They found no sign of cancer in her nodes, so we are all incredibly grateful for that. She should be going home today. She has come through surgery fine although pain has been an issue. My husband said she described the pain as “wearing a barbed wire bra.” Ow!! Yeah, I think men and women alike can sympathize with that. Thank you for all of your thoughts and prayers for my family around this. I definitely feel the love of my blog community!!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

It all starts, of course, with a photograph captured with ProCamera. We’ve had a lot of foggy mornings this winter, and the greyish cast to the trees comes from the fog in this one.

The first step is to add some color, which is done with a series of layers in Mextures and Snapseed. This is the image that I pulled into Artista Impresso:

Most of the JixiPix apps perform similarly. You load a photo, select a preset, and then fine tune the options. If you don’t want to click through the presets, you can use the Randomize feature to randomly try on presets. You can also Undo your changes, which is much appreciated when you are playing around with options.

For Artista Impresso, once I’ve loaded my photo, I can select between the two preset menus: Alla Prima and En Plein Air. Within each menu are TONS of preset options. You can see I’ve selected “Sorbet” from the En Plein Air Presets for a purpley-pink color tone. (Note: All screenshots are from an iPad. The layout is the similar on an iPhone, but the icons take up more of the screen space.)

Now we customize! Let’s walk through the menu options. We can change the brush size, color enhancement and painted edge. This is where I go in and get rid of the annoying edge that all of the presets add. I think the edge is supposed to make it look more like a “real” painting, but since I’m always blending the output with something else, I want it gone. Thankfully, in this app, I can eliminate it.

Next we can change the substrate texture and strength, choosing between canvas and linen.

For En Plein Air Presets, you can now adjust your color palette. You’ll notice the En Plein Air Presets have a stronger color shift than the Alla Prima presets. The “Limited” style keeps more of your original color than “Full.” You can also shift the Palette, creating more varation in your output. I didn’t make adjustments here for my example.

For Alla Prima Presets, there is a different option in this location, called Artistic Finish. This allows you to modify the colors by choosing an alternate color and texture overlay.

Finally, both presets allow you to create a “Detail” area of the image. In the selected Detail area, you can select a more finely detailed brush stroke than the rest of the image. Move the center dot to center on your desired detail area, and then change the size of the detail area by dragging the individual points of the ellipse. Don’t use two fingers to change the size of the ellipse. That just pans and zooms the image (a nice feature in itself).

When you like what you’ve got, you go back home and save. The output is saved at the same resolution as the starting image.

Here’s the final output from Artista Impresso:

For me, this output becomes a layer in an overall edit. A “painted” image like this will provide color and texture variation, as well as softness to the lines in the photograph, as I blend it with other images. Here is the final image, which was the result of using Snapseed, Mextures, Autopainter, Autopainter II, XnView Photo FX, Image Blender and Artista Impresso:

I want to point out how much variation there is in the detail. Since I post low resolution images online, you can’t always see this, so I zoomed in here:

While you don’t necessarily notice this detail as you look at a whole image, this subtle variation in texture and color is what gives an image depth and interest, especially when printed. That’s one of the reasons I use so many apps blended together. As I’m working on an image, I look at the overall results but I’m also zooming in to see what is going on at a detail level.

The image I shared earlier this week, Holding my Breath, also used Artista Impresso as one of the layers. JixiPix Software has a full range of mobile apps as well as Photoshop and Lightroom plugins. Definitely worth checking out!

Enjoy your impressionistic photo editing!

January 10, 2013 by Kat

And then the rain came…

Ah, yes. Rain. I live in Oregon, and yet I forget about the rain sometimes. We’ve had a good run of not-so-rainy weather and you know how I know? I had forgotten about puddle paintings! Until yesterday, when I was walking into work and the reflection of trees in puddles on the parking lot surface caught my eye. Really, it’s not like it’s been that long since it was rainy. I think I just have a short attention span!

Last night when I looked at the photos I was inspired to create this piece:

And then the rain came…

I’ll show you how it came together for this week’s Paint Party Friday post.

It starts with the captured image of a tree reflection in a parking lot puddle. I now use ProCamera for capturing most of my iPhone images. I like that I can switch between 1:1 and other aspect ratios in app and can easily separate the focus and exposure when needed. The “Anti-Shake” shutter is also really nice for avoiding blurry pics when the light is low… like if we have an overcast day or I’m in a shady forest or something. (Um, yeah, that’s pretty much all the time for me anymore.)

Then I pulled the photo into Snapseed to rotate and add some color and texture. I felt a bit blue yesterday.

From there, it was into texturing apps to play with textures and see what happened. I liked this one, from Distressed FX. Hey, my blue turned to green! But I really liked the effect.

I could have stopped there, but it was not quite as abstract and painterly as I wanted. So into the painting apps… Glaze, the Autopainter apps (HD, 2 and 3) to see what I could do with it. It’s interesting how some painting apps really work well for one type of image, and then don’t work at all for another. That’s the part about this whole digital painting thing that is full of play and experimentation. There is no precise process in this medium… it just doesn’t work that way.

Out of all of that play, I started with the output from Glaze as the base in Image Blender. I like to start with Glaze output as the base when I can, because the base sets the resolution for the final image. Since I save out of Glaze at the highest resolution (4096×4096), my final blended image is saved at the same resolution, which is larger than the native resolution of the iPhone 5 camera. This means I can print the final image as large as I might want.

From there, it was just blending of the different images I had created while playing in the different apps. I really can’t remember what I was blending with what, or the blending modes I was using. That’s all play too! But I’ll show you the intermediate blends so you can see how it progressed to the final piece.

Blend 1:

Blend 2:

Blend 3:

Final Image:

And then the rain came…

I love the abstraction of the final painting, the watery feel and the depth of color. Even though I started out in a blue mood, the green in this makes my heart sing.

I definitely don’t mind rainy days this winter. People have been wishing for spring, but I’m not asking for it to come yet. I am inspired by the reflections found in puddles, and the blank canvas provided by a grey sky. I’m getting out to hike regardless of the weather, or maybe because of the weather, as the rain and mist provides such atmosphere to the forest. I am grateful, every day, for this wonderful art form that inspires me so much.

Here’s a happy song that resonates with me right now. Enjoy!

January 3, 2013 by Kat

Blending to Perfection

When you are creating, do you find moments when everything comes together and it just feels right? Your know your piece is finished. When you are new to a medium, it’s not as easy. You may not take something far enough or you may go too far, ruining something good. As you learn and progress, I think it’s easier to know when something is “done.” It’s part of the learning process, and our own style, to develop that feeling of done.

In mobile/digital art, I’ve learned that the name of the game is blending. Using multiple apps and blending them together, until it feels “done.” I had already started on this path, as I created some of my earlier pieces like Rain Painting and Winter Flowers. I had only touched the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with blending in those, however. I’m going crazy now. Today as I share one of this week’s pieces for Paint Party Friday I thought I would also give you a taste of the kind of blending I’m doing now, and how I created this one, called Under the Surface.

Here’s the starting image, taken with the ProCamera app. I love it! You can easily separate exposure and focus, and switch between aspect ratios within the app, going from square to rectangular.

Then the fun started. I’ve created this little matrix of images to walk through the process of creation, but it doesn’t even cover all of the steps. To be honest, I get so many layers going I don’t even remember the exact steps but I’m trying to recreate them to share.

From left to right, top to bottom:

The first step was into Snapseed, to shift the color a bit. This also added some texture and vignetting.
Next I pulled that image into Distressed FX to add textures. The next three are the image with various textures added. You can’t add more than one texture within the app, so I save an image of each texture I like on the photo. Distressed FX also will do color filters in addition to textures, but I often turn that off and just use the textures. It’s become my go-to app for textures lately.
From there, I start to blend. The center image is a blend of the different texture images I saved out of Distressed FX. I’ve starting using the Image Blender app for blending, because it is easier to use and has more blending options than Iris Photo Suite. When blending, I just play with the blending modes and percentages until it looks good to me. There is no logical sequence I’ve got for this step.
Once I had a nice blend, I started to use the painting apps. I take the blended photo into the apps and play around with different effects to get some I like. Middle right is the “Aquarell” painting filter from Autopainter HD (a recent favorite) and bottom left is from Glaze.
From there I started blending again, with the textured image and the painted images. Bottom middle is the new blend.
I was starting to lose the colors, so I took that blend back through Distressed FX and added a filter or two.

From there, I did more blending with previously created layers to get the final result.

Under the Surface

There were more steps and layers than these I shared, but it gives you the basic idea of how the final piece was created. There is a depth of color and texture in the final painting that is built through blending layers which won’t exist when you use a single app. It’s really the creative part of the process, and where the unique touch of each person will come in. I’ve started to learn the apps, what works on different images and how to achieve a certain look, as I play. Eventually I might develop a “style” but right now it’s all about play and exploration. Lots of fun!

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