Nine-Card Set
Inspired by Bettina Weishoff, who posted a nine-card set on Emily's Facebook Group.
I will tidy up this page later, but I want to get things in place TODAY!
Inspired by Bettina Weishoff, who posted a nine-card set on Emily's Facebook Group.
I will tidy up this page later, but I want to get things in place TODAY!
Betinna's instructions said to start with Gemini.
I had never tried Google's AI generator. I still have mixed feelings about AI.
But I gave it a try
Once.
Here is the image I started with.
I opened the image in Procreate.
My original plan was to cut and paste the nine people onto a portrait-mode page, with three rows of three images.
I was going to use the "erase" tool to omit the background, then draw a new background that fit the scene.
From 4:27 to 4:32 I used the selection tool to break the image into EIGHT pieces.
From 4:32 to 4:39 I arranged the pieces onto the page.
I later discovered that I SHOULD have created a template with the correct aspect ratio..
I will remember to do that next time....
From 4:39 to 5:00 I spent time trying to erase the backgrounds.
Usually, this is pretty easy to do in Procreate, but something is going wrong.
I stopped working on the project for the day.
So far, I've only spent about 35 minutes on this, but it seemed longer because my tools aren't working very well.
I will add a note later to explain what went wrong...
But I didn't work on the project again until Sunday.
On Sunday I decided to try a different method:
Instead of using the existing images and removing the backgrounds, I would just DRAW an entire new layer, tracing the images I have.
Here's where I started: at 7:47 AM.
I took a few screenshots to show my progress, but I did not record the exact amount of time I spent doing the overdrawing.
I took a walk from 8:12 to 8:50. I did my exercises until about 9:20.
I took a screenshot at 9:37.... which must have been when I copied over the file and merges the layers and stared the overdrawing....
Between 9:37 and 10:00 I exported several TIFF files, them into Pages, printed, and cut the cards apart. After each print I made some adjustments.
At ten o'clock I exported the final TIFF file, to test how it would look when cut apart.
Next there was a period of getting the image correctly proportioned for printing as a PDF.
This took a while.
I exported the screenshots and converted them to 1080-pixel wide images for this webpage.
I keep an active Pages file on my iPad, and any time I need to print ATCs, I print from that file.
Here is the final image.
I will save it as a PDF and offer it to "the group."
Next time I make a nine-card set, I plan to:
Avoid using AI.
Use my own photo.
Create a template that has the correct aspect ratio.
Design a layer with the nine-card grid as an overlay, so that I do not need to print out the set and cut it apart in order to test the progress!
Do a MUCH better job of taking step-by-step screenshots.
Do a MUCH better job of documenting the time spent.
I learned a LOT!