My FedEx Out of Office blog post is up for March, and I almost forgot to share it with you guys before St. Patrick’s Day!   This is a fun printable (with Dot artwork, naturally!) that your kids can fold up and have fun sharing with their friends.

You remember these from grade school, right?  You would make them out of a piece of notebook paper, then play with them telling fortunes until they were confiscated by a mean teacher!  We always just called them fortune tellers, but according to the internet, they are also known as Cootie Catchers.

I’ve got the printable and the instructions on how to fold it up, if you’re a little rusty, over at FedEx Out of Office.

EDIT: Apparently the FedEx blog is kaput, so here are the instructions! 

Continuing the highlights from yesterday’s Skylander’s Cake, I just realized I never posted the invitation to the Skylanders Party.  I wanted to do something a little different, and most of the invites I’d seen in my travels around the web were just repurposed graphics of a selections of popular skylanders.  And while cute, I figured why not give the Bad Guy a starring role in the invitations?  So here is Kaos, inviting the Skylanders to come to a party.  And really, he promises it’s not a trap.

So, if you’d like to use this yourself, here’s a free download, because Dot is just all kinds of sweet that way!  Here’s the graphic with a more generic “you’re invited to a birthday party” message, that works for anyone child’s name (Click for large):

Just right click and save: http://dabbled.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/skylanders-invitation-dabbled.jpg

OR, if you’d prefer to personalize the banner that Kaos holds, you can download this blank printable, add your own text either via a graphics program and print, or by hand, and have the invite color copied. (Click to see larger)

Just right click this link and save the file: http://dabbled.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/kaos-skylanders-dabbled-blank1.jpg

Of course, if your kid’s name is Dominic, you’re welcome to use the real invitation :)

More highlights to come!

It’s a little simpler too, if you’re just starting with your photoshop skills, it’s a great one to start with.  The principle is the same, take old vintage photos and in this case, combine two to make one creepy photo which contains a ghost!

Head over to Fed Ex Office blog to see all the details on how to make them yourself, or if you don’t have time or inclination to make them yourself, you can download the sample printable photos!

Update: Related technique and more downloads: Ghost Portraits!

Did you know Great Aunt Gertrude was a zombie?  Or Ancient Uncle Elrod was a tad undead?  Unfortunately for my Halloween décor, I don’t really have ghouls in the family.  But we can fake it with a little photo manipulation.

These creepy portraits will look great hung on a wall, or in small frames on your serving table, at any scary Halloween party.  You can either design your own, using the instructions provided here, or you can download the set provided here.  Then just have them printed in whatever size to fit your frames, at your local print shop on on your home computer.

How to make your own creepy vintage photos

Supplies:

• Photo-editing program.  These instructions assume you are working in Photoshop.
• Vintage photo image files.  Portraits work best, and the larger the better if you want to print big versions for your walls.  You can scan photos of your own relatives, or you can find public domain photos online. [You can find photos from public archives like the Library of Congress with no copyright restrictions here.]
• Skulls:  You’ll need a transparent photographed skull image. The simplest way to get the skull you need is to use a skull themed Photoshop brush set, of which several can be found online for free.

Method:

This is how to add a creepy skull effect to your photo.  There are of course many other possible spooky details you can add.  More detailed instructions can be found below the photos.

1. Open your photo file.
2. Create a new layer, and determine what skull size and shape will best fit your portrait’s head.  Place skull in new layer.  It should have enough transparency to see through it to the portrait layer.  If not, you may need to increase the transparency of the skull layer.
3. Line up the skull with the portrait head as well as you can.  Resize and move as necessary to get the mouth and eyes of the skull lined up with your portrait.
4. Next, fit the skull to the face.  Select the skull.  Under the Transform menu, use Warp.  Drag the dots around to fit the skull to the angle of the face.  In this example, I dragged the right jawline of the skull out to better match the portrait jawline, and pulled in the left side of the skull.  I also moved the nose to match up with the portrait nose.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need the eyes, mouth, nose and jaw to match up as well as possible for best effect.  Don’t worry about the outline of the skull, we’ll be erasing that in the next step.
5. Finally, erase the outside of the skull.  Use your eraser (a soft feathered brush) to erase anywhere the skull exceeds the face (like on the left side in this example) and pretty much all the edges of the skull image, leaving the features intact.  You can also erase any shading that doesn’t fit with the photo.

Once you have your final files, just take them to your local FedEx Office and have them color printed in whatever size you need to fit your décor.

Download the Files

Want the look, without the work?  Click here to download a zip file of the images featured in this post, plus a few extras.

New Stuff on Dabbled:

I cleaned up some stuff I’ve been meaning to do around Dabbled yesterday, so you’ll notice a few changes – nothing major.  I added Facebook comments as an option, and changed out the font, and cleaned up the formatting of the comments section.  I also added new and better share buttons, including Pinterest and Google Plus (and a “Pin It” hover link on photos, that I’m not sure I’m keeping, it seems a bit buggy – let me know what you guys think.)   I’ll be making a few more changes in the next few weeks if I have time, to make things easier to find around here.  So stay tuned!

Lazy Sunday

Today, however has just been pure lazy.  This morning early, The Boy & I walked down to the market to pick up some food for breakfast (my fridge is pitifully neglected!) and even then it was starting to get hot. So we’ve stayed in the rest of today while the Boy and the Husband played LEGO Batman 2 on the Wii (which I totally recommend, they are loving it).

Phone Photo Photoshopping Tips

So here’s the before and after on the photo, and the basic steps to get there:

Your quick and dirty photoshop tutorial (assumes photoshop knowledge):
1) Crop to a better size (I went for square)
2) Use the Levels sliders to bump up contrast a bit
3) Do a faux cross-processing using Curves
4) Draw a large oval in the center and use Feather to feather the edges of the selection greatly (amount will depend on the pixel size of your photo). Use Curves (drag up) to lighten the center just a bit.
5) Select and feather another large oval, then select inverse. Use Curves (drag down) do darken the edges.

Your mileage may vary, of course, as every photo is different, but play around with these ideas on your next mediocre phone photo!

I got the coordinates of the location from Google Maps (using these instructions) – but to avoid stalkers, I did change the coordinates in this image!

Want to use this for your own party?  Download the photoshop file (without the Happy Birthday text on the flag) – you can modify the time / date / location info on the ‘card’.  If you don’t have photoshop, I’ve also included the image as a jpg, with the text removed.

The artwork is my own, and is CC licensed Attribution/Non-commercial.  Which means please don’t use the image for profit, and give me credit :).

• Template for Dr. Who Dalek Party Invitation: PSD & JPG

More info:

• http://americancensorship.org/
• https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Internet blackout day is over, but we still need to stop SOPA. Yesterday I posted this to Twitter, but since we’re back up today, I’m sharing it here too! Feel free to pirate this image for use in getting the word out!

My favorite are the Twitter ones, but they are all a bunch of fun.

While we are on the subject of social media, i might as well plug my own!:

• I’m enjoying checking out Google+, though I’m not really sure I have the hang of it yet…  If you want to find me there you can find me at nancydorsner.com/+.
• On Twitter: DotatDabbled
• On Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/dabbledblog

Here are several more of the posters, and you can see more here: etsy

Really, I have been so busy with web design stuff, that I haven’t taken the time to draw, and that’s just sad.  So I’ve had this robotic rooster in my head (he’s eventually going to be a big piece) and here’s my first attempt at a sketch of him.  Doesn’t it look like he’s just launched a football into the air?

I really like this sketch so much I don’t want to mess it up by adding more…  but alas I need to keep working on it!  Does that ever happen to anyone else?

Mrs. Olafsen and her dog, Hercules (he made it from from  the McDonald’s Happy Meal milk bottle and a light bulb-pictured at the link.)