Graphic design has quickly become one of my favorite new hobbies, (like I really needed any new hobbies).
I recently had the pleasure of designing two cute new birth announcements and some custom artwork for a friend and I just made them all available in my Etsy shop.
I shared many of these pictures in my most recent photography dump, but here is the announcement I made for the Bailey family, including all of Austin's cute little newborn features.
Front:
Back:
This announcement could easily be customized to any color for a baby boy or a baby girl.
I usually use the picture(s) as inspiration for the color, as I did for Austin's.
I also include picture editing and/or black and white conversion with my cards, (as long as you have the rights to the pictures).
I am really loving this fun birth announcement also.
Front:
Back:
(Again, all colors, fonts, etc. can be customized).
Finally, my friend Ryan (his cute family can be seen here, here and here) called me a few weeks before Mother's Day and asked if I would be able to help him design something for Colleen.
He wanted to use the kids' handprints, which immediately made me really nervous because we have tried handprint projects before and they are extremely challenging with two adults so I had no idea how he was going to get handprints from his 6 month old and 2 year old on his own without Colleen noticing.
Even if I were to go to his house and physically help him I was sure we wouldn't be able to pull it off.
So, I got this idea that we would use digital handprints.
I had him take pictures of his kids' hands with his iPhone and measure the lengths of their hands from the tip of their middle fingers to the bottom of their palms.
Then, I took those images into Photoshop and played with them until I had something that sort of looked like a painted handprint and I scaled them to the correct sizes.
Ryan originally wanted one big print with both kids' handprints and some cute saying but I just couldn't come up with anything that didn't look completely cheesy or obnoxious.
He wanted it HUGE to hang on a blank wall in their house, and while I think it is a very creative and sweet idea, I know Colleen's style (very similar to mine) and I knew it couldn't look like a typical Mother's Day craft with a cheesy Mother's Day-ish saying because she would not want to hang that permanently on her walls.
So, after MUCH deliberation, this is what I came up with:
Three prints in separate frames that sweetly work together.
I love the Bob Dylan quote that I ended up finding.
I think these prints are cute for any time of year, not just Mother's Day.
When Baby J 2.0 gets here, I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to make a custom set of these for our playroom.
So, this is a tricky thing to sell in an Etsy shop, but what I have done is create two separate listings.
One is for just the digital file of this 8x10 print with the buntings and Bob Dylan quote in the colors shown (only $3).
The other listing is completely custom.
You purchase the design, take pictures of your kids' hands and measure them for me, then send me all the other specifics I will need to create something just for you:
-kids' names
-colors
-sizes (Jude is really big for his age and his huge hand BARELY fit on a 5x7 page, so the whole design would have to be made larger for older children)
The following images show the original pictures that Ryan sent me to give you a better idea of how they translate into the final digital files:
Etsy can be confusing.
Email me with any questions!
Xoxo.
