How To Scan Your Artwork & Print Cards at Home!

Hi friends! When I painted this cute deer watercolor I mentioned how I planned to scan the painting and turn it into Christmas cards.

Many of you were interested in scanning your paintings to turn them into cards as well and in today’s video I will show you how!

Keep in mind that if you don’t have a scanner you can take a good straight on shot of your painting with a camera (even camera phones do a great job these days!) and follow the steps after the scan portion of the tutorial.

Tools and Equipment needed:

• Scanner or camera: I am using an Epson Perfection v19 scanner
• Image editing software: I am using Paint Shop Pro 12 software but Photoshop, or the free open source software Gimp or (maybe) Picasa can be used. There is also a free app online called ipiccy that will work for laying out your images and basic editing if you need it, it is very easy to use but is not similar to what I show on-screen.
• Color printer: HP Photosmart D7360 printer (Discontinued but still works great!)
• Matte photo paper
• A2 greeting card bulk packs from Micheal’s Craft Stores ($5 a 60 pack last year)
• ATG adhesive (double-sided tape)

Your process will differ a bit if you are using different equipment but the basic steps are the same:

1. Scan painting at a quality of 300dpi using the color photo setting or take a high-resolution photo of your painting.
2. Adjust levels using the curves tool or an intuitive “photo fix” button.
3. Open a new 8.5″ x 11″ document and copy and past your image in it.
4. Resize the image so it will fit on 1/4 of the paper. Add text if you wish.
5. Merge the text to the image but selecting the text layer and choosing merge down then copy and paste that combined image in each quarter of the paper.
6. Merge all layers and print using the best quality setting and nice quality matte photo paper.
7. Trim images and adhere to card-bases.

I hope you give this a try, it might take a few minutes to get used to using your photo editing software, there are many options out there and I recommend you use what you have or try the free gimp or ipiccy options before investing in expensive software. If all else fails you can use Windows picture editor to print 4 images on one sheet so don’t despair if your image software is difficult. That is what I mentioned ipiccy, you can upload your image and drag and drop it into cells and print but you do lose some control over what you can do in editing software. The way I learn any new software is to play with it, you are not going to break it:) Good luck & happy crafting!