The incredibly fertile and imaginative
minds at Art by the Sea have done it again, they are asking you to
take your art and put it on a postcard and send it to them and let
them sell it off for the good of folks with less talent, imagination
and drive and you know that is a good thing so I am sure that you are
already working up your entry and if you aren't you are probably
using the ole “I just don't know how I would put my wonderful art
on a teeny, tiny little postcard” excuse.
But I have no intention of letting you
get away with that lame bit of whiny reasoning. No, by the end of
this post there will just be no good reason why you cannot do any art
on any postcard and I will even show you how to print it off on your
own computer so there is no crying about and wringing of hands
because of the cost.
Yesterday I asked you to go to
Photoscape and download the exe and set it up on your computer. Did
you do that?
Okay I put the link back up so if you
didn't you have another chance and you should cause having this free
software will make things a lot easier and it is good and did I
mention free and you should always have a free photo editor on your
computer.
So now you have Photoscape up and
running and I want you to bring it up, let it load and then click on
the Print section of the tools menu. On my computer it is in the
lower right quadrant of the selection wheel.
Once the Print section is up it will
probably have a bunch of small frames in the center of the screen and
one or more sections of your computer where your images are stored.
On the right there is a bar with 5 x 7cm in it. Click on that bar and
it will pull up a drop-down menu and four from the bottom you will
see 4 x 6 which just happens to be the size of an official, actual,
real and genuine U.S. Postcard. That's what you want and you can go
ahead and select landscape orientation cause that will work for both
horizontally and vertical images.
Now go back to the left where you see
your images and select two really good ones. Drag them one at a time
until they lock inside the frames of your 4 x 6 print form. Okay so
if you have followed along you should have two images in the forms
and you can now print.
I won't tell you how to print cause
every printer is different and on some you may have to select photo
printing or some other setting to get the right quality image.
Did you get the Xerox 80 lb semi-gloss
paper I told you about/ sure you can use any paper but this type does
a really good job of taking the ink and holding up as a card. There
are a lot of papers you can use which will do one or the other but
not too many which can do both. Try this stuff, it will amaze you.
So you printed out the image and now
you have two images in the center of your 8.5 x 11 page and you
don't know what to do next.
DON'T DO ANYTHING!
We have to have a word about what
happens if you haven't used the Xerox paper or even if you have and
your printer uses extra ink to get photo quality images.
In most cases if you haven't used the
Xerox paper or even if you have and the printer uses extra ink you
will need to allow some time for the print to dry. If you don't it
will smear ink all over your printer and extra paper and the stuff
which gets inside of your printer can be the very devil to get out so
just take a minute and let it dry.
When you think it is dry enough not to
smear take the paper by the right bottom corner as it faces you in
the tray and turn it over. Again the right way to do this depends on
the printer, my Epson has a straight paper path as does the Log
Sufferin's Canon so that part is easy for us but if you have an HP
they do a curl print path and you'll have to reason out how to get
the orientation right.
Now for the part where I help you out
again...
See I told you I was going to help you.
Just download this image to your computer and you'll be ready for the
next step. Be sure to name it Postcard Back or something which will
help you remember what it is cause sometimes Windows hides downloads
in strange and curious places and you'll have to know what you called
it to find it when windows hides it from you cause it knows better
than you do what you want to do with things which you download.
Now go back to Photoscape, you still
have the images in that print form so they need to go. You can right
click them or at the top of the page you will see thumbnails of these
images and you can right click them and select delete. Now find the
postcard back you downloaded and drag it into one of the forms. Then
do it again with the second form. Yes, Photoscape is smart enough to
know that you don't want to actually use the master image for this,
it loads a temporary copy and now you should have two postcard backs
in the printer form. Print.
Nope no special instructions for this
cause any printer setting will do for the back part of the print job.
If you followed my direction and rolled the page over from right to
left it will have the correct orientation and the forms will print on
the back of your images and now all you have left to do is trim away
the excess making sure that you don't cut off either the edge of the
picture or the postcard back.
There it is a beautiful, sturdy
postcard, suitable for mailing and you made it yourself. And the nice
part is if the first image you select doesn't work right you can try
it with another. After all you are doing all of the works so there's
no lag time waiting for the printer to get the thing Mastered Up and
printed and sent back and no extra add-on charges and no lost in
shipping just a new card whenever you want to run one
Now wasn't that fun?
