Last year Lora and I made a handful of Christmas card templates for the Tablet PC. You can handwrite (on your Tablet, of course 🙂 ) brief greetings on them and email them to your friends and family from Journal.
After making the cards we realized we were no Hallmark. So this year, we left the design work to Lan’s five-year old niece:
Karrie drew the wonderful flying snowman using Microsoft Paint on a plain vanilla PC using a mouse. I imported the bmp file into Photoshop on my Tablet and dressed it up with a frame and a little bit of handwriting.
This year I decided to print out Christmas cards and send them the old fashion way, so I didn’t leave a convenient space for handwriting a personal message on the face of the card. I might create some emailable Christmas templates later.
For all you teachers out there, doesn’t it seem like creating personal greeting cards on a Tablet PC is a terrific classroom art project? I’ve used Photoshop in the past, which may be a bit much for the younger kids. Maybe someone out there has some suggestions on how a lesson plan for creating greeting cards on a Tablet PC might be constructed.
This isn’t rocket science, but my (non-graphic artist) students are given the following URL for instructions on using PowerPoint as a graphic layout tool. Could be useful in the context you’re talking about, although there are additional cautions about re-sizing, etc, that would keep images from deteriorating during manipulation.
http://sw.tulane.edu/MoPSites/LayoutWithPPt.htm