My son will be turning 2 in February so it's time to start planning for his party! We decided on a dinosaur theme because he loves dinosaurs and it's freakin' adorable when you ask him, "What does a dinosaur say?", because he roars at you. He also started saying "Dinosaur" which is equally cute.
 the inspiration from pinterest | I found a great idea on pinterest for an invite and set about making my own version. It only took about an hour to create my own take and the results are pretty fantastic! Below I'll detail the steps I used to create my version as well as give you my current dino party plan! |
my version
The first thing we did was head outside to snap our starting pic. As you can see below, in the original photo I'm the "dinosaur" growling and chasing him towards my husband who was snapping the picture. Please ignore my hideousness, those galaxy exercise pants may have been a mistake. We used an iPhone 6 Plus to take the picture so, you don't have to have a big, fancy camera to get great results! Just be sure to stay far enough behind your child in the shot so you can be photo shopped out. Unlike the photo to the right. However, make sure you get a photo of the same location and same time of day that hasn't got anyone in the back ground so you can use the clean background when editing yourself out.
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Once we captured the perfect photo we uploaded it to our computer and used pixelmator for mac to cut my picture out. If you don't have a mac you can use paint.net to do something similar. We did this by replacing that portion of the picture with a piece cut from a different picture of the same background that did not contain my person. Once we had a clean background, we found an image of a dinosaur that looked real, sized it into the shot and created a shadow for it using my shadow as a reference. (In the shot with me, my shadow was almost a strait line so it was pretty easy to create the shadow for the dino by using my shadow.
In the edited photo with the dinosaur you can see that the dino doesn't quite fit with the lighting so we decided to add a filter to make everything blend a little better. Once we finished with the photo I opened up a powerpoint slide (I'm sure you could use many different programs to do this but, I am good with powerpoint and I get great results. My husband makes fun of me for using powerpoint but, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.) In my slide, I make the size huge! This can be done by editing the page layout settings. If you don't do this you may end up with an image that is too small and grainy to use. Once you've enlarged your powerpoint slide presentation, add your photo to the slide. Then I found some free paper downloads at teacherspayteachers and used a chevron printed paper as the background for my party info. I then created an orange rectangle on the top of the chevron. After that it was simply a matter of manipulating text boxes to fit my content. After you've created something you're happy with, select all of your elements at once and group them. Then save that grouping as a picture. Now you can order cards! I ordered mine from Walgreens and just got the blank photo card. I also had a 40% off coupon so, for 40 invitations with envelopes, I paid about $25! Cheap, custom and cute!
I like to make a plan for every party so that I can visualize what I need to do as well as weed out the pinterest "yes's" from the pinterest "no's" on the party board. Because, let's face it, you can get a little pin happy and end up pinning about 15 versions of a cake or decor and you are not going to manage to get everything done. So, I created my plan and put it below for you're viewing pleasure. I'll be making more posts about party planning between now and the day unless I forget and in that case you'll see one big post afterwards. Either way you'll get to see what I create. Yay!
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