Since 2009, I've been designing and sending our family photo Christmas cards by email. The cards always have a nice portrait of the family, but that's about all I can say for them. There's one big difference between my card this year and those of years past: this year's card will be memorable. Since there's no postage and no physical card to send, the only cost is an investment of a little time with Photoshop. Here's this year's card:
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| Click on the image to see the entire card. |
When we were in Venice this summer, we decided to be silly and make faces in front of a mirror along the canal. I captured a family "selfie" that became the image for the 2013 Christmas card.
"Wow," you must be saying, "he even takes his dog with him on a Europan vacation!"
Well, not exactly.
Mr. Watson, our lovable-but-brain-dead cairn terrier has been on the card every year. It seemed a shame to leave him out this time. Unfortunately, I don't have any images of Mr. Watson that would work with my plan. The best I could do was search until I found the image of a dog that looks just like mine, one that was also taken at the appropriate angle. Using the selection tool in Photoshop, I then extracted the dog from the image, sized it and pasted onto the vacation picture. It looks enough like Mr. Watson that my wife thought it was him, even though she didn't remember him going on vacation with us.
That's the story of this year's more memorable Christmas card. I'll have to do something to top it in 2014!
You can view my website at:
www.tombellart.com.
