Well, today is Valentine’s Day, and I totally outdid myself. See, I started this strange tradition a few years ago where I Photoshop some Valentines for my kids to take to school, and now it has morphed into a pressure-filled requirement. In reality, I truly enjoy doing this for them, and I LOVE the look on their faces when they see what I have come up with, but let’s face it. I am NOT a Photoshop whiz, nor am I an extraction queen. VERY far from it, actually. However, I know the boys are not perfectionists, and they will be excited with anything I come up with, so I guess I’m covered.

These are not perfect, but I like them!

For Cole, my Spiderman fan:

This doesn’t look so good on the screen because my original image is low res, but I grabbed a photo of Peter Parker/Spiderman from the Spiderman website and then Photoshopped a picture of Cole where Pete’s face was. My son is MUCH lighter than this, so I had to add a layer of Pete’s skin tone, multiplied and opacity down to 95%. I burned a bit and dodged a bit and this is as good as it’s gonna get. LOL!

Grant wanted a Valentine with him popping out of a Pokeball. Good grief! I almost gave up on the whole custom Valentine idea altogether after that request, but I did eventually find an image online that kind of worked. It’s actually a coloring sheet that I imported into Illustrator, vectorized, then erased a bunch of paths. The photo is from last summer, so I extracted it in PSE (not very well, I might add!) and then imported it into Illustrator to finish it up. Actually, this didn’t take as long as Cole’s, but finding an image online was the hard part.

I posted these on Facebook and a friend told me that I need to offer this service on Etsy next year. NO THANKS!! LOL! If you have ever done something like this then you know that you are putting at least $100 worth of your time into the project (per Valentine!), and a parent would have to be insane to pay that much for a Valentine. Still, it’s a fun tradition for us! (Kinda like baking crazy birthday cakes!)

We taped those free fruit snacks on them and then I tossed in a couple of presents for the teachers (free Nivea lip balm!).

I know I sound all nonchalant, however I did stay up after midnight on two separate occasions to get this done!! Still, it was totally worth it to hear Cole say, “Brother, look! I’m Spiderman!”

I LOVE these boys!!

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