Making your greeting card is a fun way to use your art in the real world. They also make excellent gifts! People love receiving something personal, custom, and handmade. You can make single cards for a special occasion, or mass-produce your cards to sell them online. Whatever you choose to do, creating art for greeting cards is a satisfying experience to bring your artwork into the world.
I have been creating a huge collection of my artwork. Most of my artwork is the full illustration for the picture book. I revisit my artwork collection retouch each character and element and turn it into greeting card design elements.
I have studied the greeting card world and created greeting card templates to produce my artwork greeting card. So I am sharing how I make artwork into a greeting card.
Greeting Card PSD Templates
Greeting cards come in various shapes and sizes, the most popular being A2(4.25"Wx5.5"H), A6(4.5"Wx6.25"H), and A7(5"Wx7"H). I’ve created a Print-at-Home PSD template for each size that you can instantly download on my shop. Also, you will get a Bonus gift mock-up file with this purchase that takes the stress out of marketing your awesome card design.
This will allow you to focus on the fun part of creating a greeting card; illustrating!
You’ll find detailed instructions further down on this page.
Greeting card template terminology
Before you start, let’s familiarize yourself with some greeting card terminology. So you’ll understand how to use the templates.
Bleed Line
When you print a greeting card, it’s common practice to create a little extra room around the corner of your art. The industry standard is 0.25″, but some printers request more.
If the card is a white background, you can’t tell what’s being cut off, so I’ve used a card with a full-color bleed to show you the .25″ bleed that will be cut off the card.
Why it’s important to have a bleed
Letting your art BLEED off the side of the paper is important because when you go to cut it, you will never have any white space on the edges if you don’t cut it just perfectly. Also professional printers rarely promise “perfect” alignment. This means that they may be a little bit off and having a bleed accounts for this inconsistency.
Cut Line
This is the line that you would cut along. It’s the actual physical size of the greeting card.
Safe Space
The safe space is called the margin line. You’ll keep any important parts of your artwork within this space. If you have lettering or important art near the edge, the printer might not have perfect alignment and those words could get cut off.
Fold Line
This line represents where you’ll fold the card in half. If your art extends from the front to the back, it’s important to note where it will be folded, so you’re not putting any important art in that area.
Cut Line
Instead of printing a line along the edges, cut guides are used to prevent a black line from being seen.
Pro Tip: Use an Exacto knife with a metal ruler to achieve a perfectly straight line.
Let's start creating a greeting card with your artwork
1. Create your card art.
Decide the card size you want to create. I mostly create my artwork in Procreate and retouch it in Photoshop. You know that there is a variety of media to use in designing cards.
In traditional media, we see a lot of watercolors, gouache inks, and sometimes acrylics,
mixed media, a collage.
On the digital side, you can't always tell what program was used to create the design,
but the most common ones are done in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
Art Made with these programs is widely accepted in the greeting card industry.
Which method you use, you can scan or save your art front and back card design in your camera roll or your designation folder.
2. Open the PSD Card Template.
After creating your art, you’ll want to place your art in the card template.
Here is an example of how to place your car art in a PSD card template
Green color code layers are the smart objects. so you can double-click the smart object icon on the layer panel
3. Place your card art.
When you double-click the smart object icon on the green color code layer("you design here") to open the smart object layer, you can place your card art both front and back
Tips: make sure your card art cave card size plus bleed guideline. you can set your Photoshop with guide view, you will see colored guidelines(Bleed, cut, safe line)
4. Save your template for print.
Now that your card art is set up you’ll need to save a JPG or PDF for Printing to print out. You no longer need the instruction layer so you can turn that layer off.
You will however need the Cut Guides(Kept on) turned on.
You’ll need to be able to see these marks when you cut out your card.
Your art should look like this but with a WHITE background.
5. Print out your card art.
Print your card art out and cut it using the Cut Guide and Fold Guide.
6. Fold your card.
You can do this simply by just folding the card in half. But if you printed on thicker card stock that can sometimes leave your card creasing in weird places or crackling your card.
Pro TIP: To avoid tearing or ripping your art when you fold, you can use a bone carver.
This tool is made of a strong material and has a smooth edge that makes a perfect crease. If you’re planning on doing a lot of card making this tool can help with that.
If you do use a bone carver, crease your card on the INSIDE to avoid scratching the ink on the outside.
7. Pick and design your card envelope.
There are many online shops for buying low-quantity envelopes. However you want to design your envelopes, you can use an envelop template to add your art or pattern design to your craft card envelope.
Easy to make greeting cards and envelopes with PSD template bundles.
Turning your artwork into a sellable greeting card is a rewarding project. I have made many cards with my art to my friends and family. I know most artists think about sellable artwork and processes. So I am happy to help my fellow artists or art business owners. So I have made this template bundle for your art into the world.
Happy creating!
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