Prepping for your Valentine’s Day with DIY (Part 2 of 5)

Making Valentine’s Day Special with Help from HP (Day 2)

I have to admit, there were a number of comments in the past couple of days that completely line up with upcoming HP Valentine’s Series posts, including how to utilize both HP ENVY x2 and the eAIO Photosmart 7520 printer to create some DIY gifts, such as cards.  So YAY for all of us being on the same page!

And?  The Hubs adored the invite.  He actually called it “cute”, so mission accomplished my friends.

So, I’ve recently had the pleasure of using Fresh Paint in HP ENVY X2′s tablet mode, and if you haven’t had a chance yet to try it out for yourself yet, you’re missing out on some child-like FUN.  Remember how awesome it was to finger-paint in school?  To really get your hands dirty and just create to your hearts content?  Well, Fresh Paint keeps the activity mess-free (it being digital and all,) but the enjoyment of adding paint to canvas, simply with the tip of your fingers, is still there.

And thus, with Fresh Paint running on the tablet sitting in my lap, I’ve easily created three Valentine’s Day cards for your viewing pleasure.  The art took not much more than five minutes each, as did the assembly, so you can create and print these works on the fly whenever the need arises.

This slideshow below illustrates how to easily create your next masterpiece in Fresh Paint:

The slideshow above mentions Activity packs, which is what I used to get the awesome monster and robot picks into my designs.  Fresh Paint currently has seven cute packs to choose from, and we can only hope and watch to see if their selection will continue to increase.  These packs include:

• Friends Pack ($1.99)

  

• Adventure Pack ($1.99)

  

• Variety Pack ($1.49)

  

• Craft Pack ($1.99)

  

• Creative Pack ($1.49)

  

• FUN Pack (free)

  

• Finding Nemo Pack ($1.99)

  

Once your art piece is created, you can simply print your image on the fly with a HP eAIO 7520 Photosmart printer. Even if you worked on this piece while sitting at Starbucks, as long as you have photo-paper sitting in the photo tray of your printer, you could print your work right away thanks to ePrinting. To create the card base (the actual card that your work is glued on top of,) you’ll probably want to pick up some card stock, as this is a thicker paper than the type you normally print with. Card stock can even be found an a multitude of colours and textures; check out your local crafting store for selections. If you have an Indigo/Chapters bookstore close by, you can find Paper Crafting magazines that have great suggestions on where to pick up some fabulous card stock paper.

I happen to have a ton of colourful card stock from back in the day when I sold paper crafting supplies, so I didn’t have to look hard for red and pink stocks. If you’re having a hard time find card stock though, construction paper can work too, but the card will have a hard time standing up on it’s own.

One 8 1/2 x 11″ piece can be cut in half to make your fabulous cards. Once cut in half, fold those pieces in half to create the card base.  (These card bases fit “invitation” size envelopes perfectly if that’s your thing.)

If You’re Ready to Make Your Own Cards with Fresh Paint…

Here are some sources to get you started:

• Fresh Paint Valentine Text Images (.zip)  All of the text images available in this zip package are show below.  Once you download and unpack this set of .png images, you can import them into Fresh Paint whenever you need them, as shown in the slideshow above.  Enjoy!

• Turn Photoshop .ABR files into images that you can use in Fresh Paint as stencils with abrViewer.NET.
• The Valentine floral heart Photoshop brush set that I used for the hearts card can be found here, by designersbrush.

If you have any questions on how to make these cards, please let me know! It’s been a long while since I last made a paper-crafting tutorial and I think I’m a bit rusty, lol.

If this is the first post you’ve seen for this series, you have a chance to win the HP ENVY X2 laptop (that doubles as a tablet) AND eAIO 7520 Photosmart Printer!  Complete the rafflecopter ballot box to enter below:
Every day there will be a new question to go with each blog post (total of five questions), so be sure to come back regularly to answer each one! Best way to keep up to date for a new blog post is to join the Geek with Style newsletter, as it will send you a note each morning when a new post to enter is available. Good luck!

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This blog post has been compensated, but please rest assured that it in no way affects the information that I’m imparting to you. I want you to have the best that’s available out there, so you won’t ever find “lemons” from me.