Friday, January 09, 2015

Handmade Gifts

Now that everyone is back into the swing of real life....let me show you the Christmas presents I made.  Actually, I was really just the editor/art directory.  The real credit goes to my daughters.  At least one of them is still at a point where she's bringing home a lot of art work from school, some of it seasonal.

I've been scanning them into a PDF at the best resolution I could find.  Then around Thanksgiving, I opened them in GIMP (other photo software that can go between PDF and bitmap formats would work) and saved them out as JPG files.

From there, I uploaded them to one of the many photo printing/photo gift sites and made them into a calendar, using one of their templates.

We sent these to people who did not already have a supply of youthful art coming directly in to the house (e.g. grandparents, great aunts/uncles, etc.)  along with a gift to their local food bank.

The girls enjoyed looking through the finished product and I had them review the work before I sent it to print - after all, the work is their intellectual property, and at ages 7 and 12, they are old enough to have an opinion about what work they're proud of and what they want to see in the world representing them.  We had to switch out October - the artist wasn't happy with it.  We found another suitable October piece that was by the same person and had been shown in an area art show and was hanging on my bedroom door.

Handmade Gifts

I've set aside some December papers to scan and start the project over again for next year.

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