Making Greeting Cards

Workshop

Introduction

This workshop teaches how to make art work for greeting cards. You will modify a photo, combine two images in Word, add your text over the image, and set text properties and effects.

For this workshop you need:

• Microsoft Office Word 2010
• Microsoft Paint (comes on Windows 7)

In this workshop you will use the following tools and techniques:

In Paint:

• Open an image
• Use the “Rectangle” tool
• Use the “Save as” function

In Word:

• Insert images
• Resize an image
• Set image properties
• Set a color to transparent
• Drag and position an image
• Set text font and size
• Set text color and text effects

Getting set

First you will need a couple of images to work with – so download them from the instructor’s SkyDrive. If you need assistance with this task, please see the tutorial How to download a SkyDrive photo album.

• Click here to download the greeting card image folder
• Right-click the down-loaded zipped folder and click Extract All… – accept the location and folder name.

The newly created folder will be opened. It contains two photos. A photo of a small cabin and a photo of a Christmas tree. The idea of this workshop is to produce an image for a holiday greeting card featuring the photo of the cabin. To enrich the appearance you want to add the image of the Christmas tree so it looks like it can be seen through the window. Lastly some greeting text is to be added.

The two photos will be combined in Word.

Prepare the Cabin photo

• Open Paint.
• Click on the blue tab, then click Open.
• In the Open dialog window navigate to the new folder, GreetingCards. Click on the thumbnail for OurHouse2.jpg to select it, then click Open.

The image of the cabin is quite large and will most likely not completely fit into the Paint window. That is all right. In order to allow the tree photo to be seen through the window you will “open” the window panes by drawing white rectangles over them. Later, these white rectangles will be set to transparent. But that is getting ahead of the present task.

You may wish to make the view even larger so drawing the rectangles will be easier.

• Click the View tab. Then click Zoom in.
• Use the scroll bars so the window, or most of it, is in view.
• Click the Home tab.
• Click Color 1, the foreground color, then click the white box in the palette so that both foreground and the background, fill, colors are set to white.
• In the Shapes group click on the rectangle, see the illustration at the right.
• Click Outline, then No outline.
• Click Fill, then Solid color.

You have now set the rectangle tool to draw solid white rectangles. Setting the tool to draw with “no outline” will make the next step a little easier.The pointer now takes on a cross shape.

• Move to pointer to a location in one of the window panes. Hold the left mouse button down and draw a small rectangle. Approximately as shown in the top left window pane in the illustration on the right.

When you release the mouse button the rectangle will show a dashed outline with “drag handles”, the tiny squares.

• Position the pointer on the bottom right corner, the pointer will take on a double-ended, diagonal shape, see the illustration. Drag, that is hold down the left mouse button and move the pointer, so the rectangle reaches the bottom right of the pane.
• Position the pointer on the top left drag handle, when the pointer changes again to the double-ended arrow shape, drag the corner of the rectangle to the top left of the window pane so that it is completely white. See the illustration.

If you make a mistake, just press Ctrl+Z, or click the Undo icon, the counter-clockwise arrow in the title bar.

• Do this in all of the window panes, there are eight of them.
• Now save the modified image. Click the blue tab, then click Save as. Give the image a new name, here OurHouse3 will be used, so that the existing one is not overwritten – just in case, then click Save.
• Close Paint.

You now have a picture of the cabin with white window panes, as shown on the right.

This is all that we need to do to this image. So on to the next step.

Make the art in Word

For the next, and main part, you will use Microsoft Office Word 2010.

• Open Word.

Set the page orientation to landscape to better fit the work space to the image that will be manipulated:

• Click the Page Layout tab, click Orientation, and in the drop-down menu click Landscape.
• Resize the Word window so you can see both sides of the paper space.
• Click the Home tab, find the Show/Hide ¶ control and click it. This will show the paragraph marks to make the next step a little easier.
• Press Enter repeatedly until you get to a new page, press it a half-dozen times more. You should see something approximately like this illustration:
• Now scroll up in the Word window to see the top of the first page.
• Position the cursor to the first paragraph mark – that is move the pointer to that position and click.

This is where you will insert the modified cabin photo. See the illustration, note that the cursor, the flashing vertical line, is positioned in front of the first paragraph mark.

• Click the Insert tab.
• Click Pictures.
• In the Insert Picture dialog window, navigate to the GreetingCard folder and click on the modified cabin photo. You can recognize it by its white window panes. Click Insert.

The photo will be loaded into the Word window. It will be selected. You can tell by the Picture Tools tab that shows whenever a picture is selected. Just click on a picture to select it at any time you wish. To display the picture tools ribbon, click the Picture Tools tab.

• Find and click the Wrap Text command. In the drop-down menu click Behind Text.

The paragraph marks will now show over the picture. They are bit hard to see against this dark photo, but they are there.

• Scroll down to the second page.
• Click on the first or second paragraph mark to position the cursor there. Now you know why you turned on this feature – just to make it a bit easier to find where you are in the empty document.
• Insert the Christmas tree picture on the second page. The procedure is the same as you used for the first photo.
• Again set the Text Wrap for this picture to Behind Text just as you did for the first photo.
• Use the Zoom control in the lower right of the window to decrease the size until both pages show in the window.

You can see that the Christmas tree picture is proportionately much to large to “fit into the cabin”. So the next task is to decrease the size of the picture.

• Click the tiny icon in the lower right of the Size group in the Picture Tools ribbon. See the red arrow on the right in the above illustration. This opens the Layout dialog.
• In the Width box replace the value shown with a bit less than half of that. If it shows 78 % replace this text with 35 – you do not need to type the percent mark. Click OK.

The picture will now be reduced in size. It should seem small enough to fit behind the cabin window.

Now comes the fun part.

• Position the pointer over the Christmas tree picture.
• Press and hold down the left mouse key.

As you move the mouse a transparent copy of the picture will move along with the pointer.

• Drag the tree picture over the cabin picture and position it so it seems right behind the window.
• Release the mouse button.

The tree picture will now be in the right position but over the cabin photo.

• Right-click on the tree photo. Move the pointer down in the menu to Send to Back, then to the right, in the sub-menu click Send to Back.

You will still see the selection outline, but the image will have disappeared.

• Click outside the selection outline on the cabin photo – over toward the right will do.

Now nothing will remain to tell you that there is a Christmas tree photo behind the cabin photo.

• In the Picture Tools ribbon, over toward the left, in the Adjust group, find and click Color.

This opens the color adjustment menu. There are some neat effects here – but those are for another workshop. Of course, if you have the time, you are welcome to try some of these.

But you are after the command called Set Transparent Color almost at the bottom of this menu.

Click Set Transparent Color.

• Move the pointer into one of the white rectangles of the cabin window. Click.

Magic! You can now see the Christmas tree inside the cabin. Isn’t this a beautiful sight?

Set greeting text

There is now just the greeting text to be added to this work of art.

• Scroll down to the second page. Click on the second or third paragraph mark to position the cursor.
• Type your greeting text. For the illustrations here the text “Happy Holidays!” is used, but choose what you like.

In the Home ribbon the Font group provides a large selection of options.

• Click in front of the text line to select all the text on the line you just typed.
• Select the font you like. Select the font size.
• Set the color of the text.

Here the choice is Brush Script at font size 90. For the illustration the color was set to yellow.

There is more: That fuzzy “A” in the Font group brings up “Text Art”. Go wild!

Note that in the illustration instead of one of the text art option, the Glow option was selected, then one of the glows.

Also note that there are a couple of spaces in front of Happy Holiday’s to help position the text.

• Click in front of the paragraph mark above your greeting text.
• Turn off the paragraph marks by clicking the paragraph icon, ¶, in the Paragraph section of the Home ribbon.
• Now press the Backspace key to erase the prior empty line until your greeting text is position where you want it.
• If you have gone too far and the text is set too high up in the picture, just press the Enter key to move it back down.
• Click below the picture to make sure that the cursor is not in the picture.
• Save the document – it is your work of art!

Capture the image

• Enlarge the Word window on your monitor until all of the picture is shown.
• Do a screen capture of the Word window. On desktop computers that is done by holding down an Alt key and pressing the Print Screen key. Laptops often require a different key combination.

• Open Paint.
• Click Paste.

The whole of the Word window should now be in the Paint window.

• If all is well, you may now close Word.
• Click Select and draw a selection window tightly around the picture.
• Click Crop next to the Select command.

Now save your art as a combined image that you can use in all sorts of other ways.

• Click the blue tab.
• Click Save as. Give the image a new name, and click Save.
• Close Paint.

 

Congratulations! You have completed the greeting card art project. You have used some tools that you might not have been familiar with before. The skills you just learned may come in handy in similar projects.

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