Creating Digital Greeting Card using Adobe Photoshop
By
Peter Smolens
One of my favorite ways to print my digital photographs and paintings is to make greeting cards. It’s a great way to show off my latest paintings and photographs. People love to get them, and they’re easy to make. Recently, a fellow artist I talked to was alone, bored, and stuck at home during the virus. I wanted to make a greeting card to let her know I was thinking of her as a friend.
How to Create a Digital Greeting Card
This article shows you how to create a digital painting greeting card using Adobe Photoshop and Avery 3378 Textured Half-Fold Greeting Card stock paper. Although I made the example greeting card in a vertical format, the process works in the horizontal format as well, with a few minor, apparent adjustments.
Select Cover Illustration
Looking through my image files, I found an image I created from sunset and a girl walking on the dunes of Cape Cod. I thought this would be the perfect cover image for a friendship card. Finding the right cover image is essential to making a greeting card effective. Your goal is to emote a feeling.
Create Greeting Card Shell
After opening Adobe Photoshop, I created a new document. According to the Avery greeting card instructions, the card stock works perfectly with a standard 8.5 X 11-inch paper format. Because I was creating my greeting card in a vertical format, I switched to a horizontal format for ease of viewing.
Insert Cover Illustration
Copy your cover image as a layer. On the Avery 3378 greeting card stock paper, there is a small crease 5.5 inches. You want to resize the width of your image to 5.5 X 8.5.
Add Your Greeting
Select the Type tool. Which font you choose is your choice. Adobe Photoshop has hundreds of fonts installed. In addition, the Internet provides you an almost unlimited selection of fonts that you can download and install. One of the biggest challenges you’ll face when creating a custom greeting card is determining which font to use. After playing too many hours, I like is Script MT Bold and Palace Script MT for romantic type cards. Other fonts that I have used include Brush Script MT, Trajan Pro, or Papyrus for a more casual look. Of course, you can go with the more common traditional fonts like Helvetica, Gill Sans, Myriad, and Minion Regular.
Add Your Signature
The last part is to add your signature to the back of the card. You want people to know that this is your greeting card. To save time, I created a document that contains my standard signature block. I used a traditional font like Arial or Times New Roman on its own layer. After opening the signature document, I copy the layer to the greeting card and re-positioning it to the bottom middle of the back of the card.
Inside Text (Optional)
At this point, you have a choice. You can print your greeting card and write by hand your message or you can use the same process to create text on the inside of the greeting card. Again, what you say and the font you choose is entirely your choice.
Print the Greeting Card
Printing is straight forward. I have an Epson SC-P400 professional printer that produces a beautiful greeting card with my photographic or digital painted image as the cover.
Avery greeting card stock paper comes with envelopes. Address your greeting card, put a return address sticker, attach proper postage, and mail off your card. The recipient of your greeting card will be glad you did!
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Author Note:
The article is part of a new paperback and e-book, “Creating Digital Paintings,” from Digital Art Press Publishers, and the publishing division of P.B.S. Studios.
“Creating Digital Paintings, a revised, updated, and expanded version of the 2019 publication of “Digital Photo Painting using Adobe Photoshop.” It’s a hands-on, practical guide showing how to create digital photo paintings using your computer, a graphics tablet, and Adobe Photoshop.
Written for beginners to advanced painters, you learn to create digital paints using Adobe Photoshop. “Creating Digital Paintings” contains over 200 illustrations, including print screens and original digital paintings, and is available on Amazon.com. To see more of Peter Smolens’ digital paintings, visit his website, pbsstudios.com, and my store on Etsy,