Friday, November 13
Photoshop Your Heads onto an illustration
by Karen RobertI love when people put their heads on illustrated bodies for their Christmas cards. I know it’s a little corny, but when I see a human head on an illustrated body, it always makes me laugh a little in spite of myself.
The first few I saw done like this were sent to me from England back in the 90’s by my friends Rodney and Kasia Hodges. They are the creative types so it was to be expected that they had creative Christmas cards. This one of her boys as angels was one of my favorites.
Then when I was doing my Merry Christmas From book I found quite a few amazing Christmas cards by a woman named Mitzy Palne. She uses vintage cards and Photo shops your heads on them. One of my favorite Christmas cards of hers is of this couple which I featured in my book:
I just love everything about this card, it has a lot of energy and humor; I instinctively like Meg and Tom even though I’ve never met them.
Here’s another card which Mitzy sent to our card gallery last year, sadly too late to make it into my book, but I love it, especially the cat:
Mitzy makes a business out of doing custom cards like this. You can find her at www.kidsoncards.com.
Avoid Family Portrait Drama With Funny Photoshopped Cards
What is so great about this idea is that you don’t need to take the dreaded group photo with all of your kids pouting and giving you dirty looks (If your family is like mine, even the husband pouts). If you can do ANYTHING to keep from having to do a group photo do it. Usually the only way to pull off this kind of Christmas card is by knowing how to do Photoshop or by hiring someone like Mitzy. In my case having a brother who’s a Graphic Designer helped, but he was getting a little cranky when I kept asking him to work on my card year after year. (Between my husband and my brother I am surrounded by people being cranky about my creative Christmas card whims).
Make Christmas Cards Online
So I decided that , instead of everyone needing to recruit others to do their cards, why not create a website where people can do these things themselves? Of course, I had to ask my brother, Andy Kaynor, again to help me. He is also a website genius, so to keep him from being too cranky with me, he just became my partner. After more than a year of development, we’re still not quite ready. But it will be in the New Year. On this site we will soon have the ability to cut out heads and put them on illustrations like this one:
This card was done by young illustrator named Theo Felizzolli who did some other wonderful illustrations for us. Another one of our fabulous illustrators, Dave Shepherd, designed this card:
You can put your own family’s heads on either of these cards; we also have many others like this. For the moment, you will need to contact me to customize them for you, but by next Christmas when the programmers deem the site ready you can easily do it yourself.
I will post some more cards like this in a few weeks, I have so many of them I thought it may be too much for one posting. Keep checking back for more ideas like this… and others.
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