A Quick Kids Birthday Card Using Free Custom Illustrations

Last week I was brainstorming a card to make for my son’s birthday when I made a timely discovery on Pinterest. Thanks to a pin from Cool Mom Picks I discovered The Little Umbrella – a website that offers free (yes, FREE!) custom kids illustration.

The illustrations were so sweet, that I couldn’t pass them up. And as a bonus, they were super easy to make! I decided to use the image to make a card instead of printing it out as a framable 5″x7″ print.

Here is how I turned this free printable into a cute birthday card:

First, visit the website for The Little Umbrella and look under “Printables“. Choose the personalized illustration for either a girl or a boy and then choose the style of picture that best matches the child.

The colours can all be changed and there is even the option to pick custom colours. I tweaked the colour of hair and eyes to better match Casey’s look and then gave him a shirt in orange since that is his favorite colour. I also decided to leave the optional text blank so I could add my own text later.

Once I was happy with the illustration, it was saved to the computer (by clicking on “save file” at the bottom of the screen).

I think that picture is pretty close to what he really looks like, don’t you think?

Once the image has been saved, it is ready to print as a 5″ x 7″ framable piece of art. But I wanted to put this illustration onto the front of a card, so I imported the photo to a blank 81/2″ x 11″ document in Photoshop.

On the document I set a few guides to outline the edges of the front of the card and the centres to help place the images. Then some text was added to wish the cute little guy a Happy Birthday!

(Each sheet of card stock makes two cards, so I quickly whipped up a custom illustration for Robyn so I wouldn’t be wasting paper.)

This document is now ready to print on card stock, cut in half horizontally, and fold for a very basic card. Of course, I couldn’t stop at basic, so I cut out the illustration and layered it on some orange card stock to give the card a bit more colour.