How to Make an Easter Card

There are several key elements involved in making an Easter card -

• Foreground objects.
• Background color and objects.
• Lettering.
• Accent objects.

Most importantly, we do not want to include too many objects, and make our Easter card image too busy. The lettering should be clear, and our background objects and color should complement our foreground items. We want our reader's eye to focus on our Easter text greeting, and main foreground elements.

Similarly, we do not want our Easter card to be too simple. We want to engage our reader with an interesting and compelling visual composition.

To create our Easter card, we will need to layer each of the elements listed above. Therefore, we will need an image editing software that allows layering, such as Photoshop or GIMP. I am currently using Photoshop 7.

The first thing I do when creating an Easter card is to determine the foreground objects. Easter is a celebration of life and rebirth, therefore, common Easter foreground items include -

• Rabbits or bunnies to symbolize fertility.
• Eggs to symbolize rebirth.
• Young children or animals to symbolize new life.

For my Easter card example, I decided to use a kid wearing a pink bunny outfit. I generated the figure in a variety of poses using Carrara. We can also use other 3D rendering programs such as Daz Studio and Poser.

To the right I have included three kid bunny images. Feel free to use them for making your own Easter card. If you click on the picture, you should get a large version measuring 1500 pixels by 2500 pixels.

[More Easter card pictures]

Another great source of foreground objects is from personal photographs. In this way, our Easter cards are personalized to the things and people we care about. For example, the Easter card below features my Siberian Husky puppy Lara. We took that picture of her soon after we brought her home.

I removed the photograph background using Photoshop, and then integrated it with a spring themed fantasy background.

Easter represents the season of rebirth - Spring. It is most commonly represented with pastel colors, flowers, and birds.

There are a variety of ways we can create a background for our card -

• Buy a background - There are many compelling backgrounds from the Renderosity store. For example, the background in the puppy card above was created by Sveva.
• Tiled background - In the example Easter card below, I framed the picture, and then tiled the background with a very light texture. I used a pink/purple pastel tile to fit in with the color scheme of the foreground object.
• Flat background color - For a more simple, uncluttered look, we can use a flat background color, as is shown in the second thumbnail below.
• Textured background - In addition to using a flat background color, we can also overlay a texture onto it, for a more realistic look. An example of this is shown in the third thumbnail below.
• Create our own background - We can also make our own background, or construct one by combining together photographs, rendered 3d-objects, and illustrated elements.

Most online card printing shops allow us to add lettering or text to our designs. I publish my cards on Zazzle, and they have a variety of font choices. A weakness though, is that Zazzle fonts do not support more advanced blending options such as beveling, contours, drop shadows, outlines, and more.

I find that I have more flexibility when I create the lettering in Photoshop, and then import it into Zazzle as a transparent PNG image. Photoshop has a large number of blending effects, and many options for curving and scaling our card text. Remember to save our text in PNG format, and not as a JPG. PNG will give us much clearer letters, when our Easter card is printed.

We can also purchase picture based text, where each letter is a fancy image, that is decorated with themed objects such as flowers, candles, and more. For example, the flowered lettering on many of the Easter card designs here, are created by Moonbeam.

Finally, we can create our own lettering by using Adobe Illustrator, or other similar vector graphics software. Alternatively, we can model and render our lettering in 3D using Carrara, Poser, or Daz Studio.

Finally, we want to make sure that our Easter card is balanced visually, and does not contain awkward empty spaces.

In several of the Easter designs on this page, I added a butterfly to balance space as well as accent particular elements of the image.

In the card design above, I added a cartoon bird on top, and some cartoon bunnies at the bottom for balance.

Only add accent objects judiciously, and do not overly crowd our picture.

Most of all, make sure to have fun designing your cards, and have a very Happy Easter!

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