Birthday season in our family is upon us, and I am always looking for ways to lighten our impact during these grand occasions. One way to conserve is to create digital birthday party invitations to email, thus eliminating the need for paper, commercially created invites, besides, I really do enjoy making our custom invites. They have evolved from simple photographs with the necessary information to what you see above. My children’s birthdays are only two days apart, so we have one party for both of them. My daughter has wanted to do a theme party, after attending many princess birthday parties. Since we always have the parties at the beach, we settled on a Hawaiian theme, asking guests to wear Hawaiian shirts and providing natural grass skirts and leis. We also plan to bury a treasure filled with break your own geodes. We make our birthday parties a big community celebration, inviting lots of significant adults in our children’s lives, hence the potluck.

If you are interested, here’s the process I used to create the invite on Photoshop.
1. I found a graphic image of a hibiscus on the web, then copied it. I cropped the image and changed its color scheme.
2. I had trouble getting a good photograph of both of my kids together, so I selected two different images of the kids. I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the images. I then copied and pasted the images onto the hibiscus background. Next I used the background eraser to clean up the images, as the magnetic lasso is imperfect. I also used the blur tool to soften the edges and hide my mistakes.
3. The text tool was used to add the words.
4. Lastly, the image size was adjusted (resolution reduced), so that the file would not take too long to download in our friend’s email programs.