Face of a Princess Invitation
Turn your little princess's face into a lovely birthday party invitation for her princess birthday party.
Start with a small picture of your little princess's face.
Scan it into your computer (at 300 ppi for best quality) and paint out or erase the background. In this photo, since there were bangs, I left the hair, too. It can be left as-is, or decorated over. I also left the neck and a bit of the shoulders. At this point, print the picture, as many copies as you can fit on one 8 1/2 x 11 page, and print on white paper or card stock. (See the next step before doing this...you may not want to print it yet!) Cut them all out, trimming off all the white areas. (If you're using white card stock., not pink, you can print them directly onto the invitations, but print one first to be sure you like the placement, and to make sure you have printed it correctly so that it will be on the right side, in the right direction in relation to the printed inside info!)
Now comes the fun part: the decorations!
For this step. I found an image I liked online, (* see note in Tips, below) and adjusted my face to match fairly well the skin tones, brightness and contrast, and touched up a little along the edges to blend the two together. A little extra time and effort in this step makes a much better final image - and you only have to do it once for all the invitations, as you will be printing copies of this image, when done. Of course, if you add an online or digital image to your original face, you will wait to print it until you have the image complete. Then decorate as you wish over that.
At this point I embellished the image I had printed, using glitter glue for the top of the dress and the shoes, card stock and netting for the skirt--outlined with yellow glitter glue, orange glitter glue for the waistband, a crown cut from a metallic cardboard confetti balloon (the same container of confetti the stars came from) and some small craft jewels on the crown.
I made a template for the skirt from a duplicate print of the previous step on card stock. (The colors were off, so I made good use of it.)
At this point, if you find it's taking too much time to construct an invitation, and the fun is wearing off, take a picture of it, and print the invitations from that. If you're still having fun, create some more, with variations if you like!
(The image for this step is a photo, so the colors, contrast, and saturation shifted a bit. If you take a photo of yours, try to do it in bright indirect natural light, to keep the colors natural and avoid harsh shadows.)
Tips:
- Use bits of material, yarn, ribbons, glitter, metallic pens and colored markers, bits of tissue paper, construction paper, glue or glue stick, hot glue gun (with adult supervision), pictures from magazines (use glue stick for these, not liquid glue, or the image on back may bleed through,) and scissors to create your invitations. Each will be unique, even if they are similar!
- *If you find images on the internet to use, keep in mind that most online images are 72 ppi (pixels per inch) but you will want to print at 200 to 300 ppi. A 72 ppi image will either print at a fraction of the size left as-is, or a fraction of the quality if you stretch it to make it bigger (fuzzy with jagged edges.) The solution would be to find an image that is about 4 times the size you need on the printed item, so it can reduce in size (increase in resolution / ppi) while maintaining quality.
- If the invitations will be sent through the mail they will need to be rather flat, and not too delicate.
- Also, keep in mind the size of the envelopes you will be using. Most department stores carry envelopes the size of a sheet of computer paper folded in four (or card stock cut in half and folded in half.)