While you might normally use your graphics software to modify clip art, photographs, and other graphics, today we'll look at simple editing that can be done in most of today's page layout programs. The exact steps will vary depending on your software. Some programs have more editing options than others.
Size your objects
The first change needed is to resize the images so that they will fit on the front of our card and still leave room for that 3Rs poem that Grandma wrote. For our card we also want the images to be approximately the same size.
Most programs offer multiple ways to resize an image. The simplest is to grab the edge or bounding box (link) with your mouse pointer then drag in or out. To resize height and width simulataneously you'll need to grab one of the corners. Holding down the Ctrl key (PC) or other key designated by your program will allow you to resize proportionally -- make it larger or smaller without distorting the size/shape.
For more precise control of the exact size, you may want to use the dialog box (differs from one program to the next) to enter a percentage or exact dimensions for your clip art.
Color your image
Although black and white can make a stunning card, Grandma wants to make her cards a bit more colorful. She's decided on using Red, Blue, and Yellow -- nice primary colors. For these B&W images, we'll simply recolor the black portion to one of our three colors.
If you wanted to do the recoloring in a graphics program you would open the image in your graphics software, select the black area (or whatever area you wanted to recolor) then use the fill or paint tools to recolor the clip art. Some page layout programs also offer simple color change tools. Experiment with all the color options in your software to see what affect they have on each piece of clip art. Change one or both colors until you have a color combination you like.
Add a box
Although you could probably stop here and no one would enjoy your card any less, there is one more editing option to consider. Look again at our three black & white images in the sidebar. Notice the corners. Two have nice rounded corners but the other has sharp, square corners. Minor difference but once you see it, it sticks out.
You have two options -- round the corners on the one piece of clip art or square off the corners on the other two. I decided to go with option 2 -- squared corners on all images. Adding rounded corners to the book image would follow a similar procedure.
The quickest way to square off those corners without major editing is to draw a sharp-cornered square around the graphic. That's what I (uh, I mean, Grandma Baker) did for one of the clip art pieces (link).
Here's how it is done:
- Draw box around image with rectangle tool
- Make the lines thicker
- Move box to background (behind clip art)
- Change the color to match the clip art
For the third image the box wouldn't work. Instead, using the rectangle tool, a few shapes fill in the corners. The illustration (link) shows how the abacas would look if we used the box compared to filling in just the corners. Can you spot the difference?
The image in the sidebar shows our resized, recolored, and edited pieces of clip art. Or, see these larger examples:
Original B&W | Recolored | Edited (final)
Create a Greeting Card > Lesson 5 Definitions | Instruction | Assignment
