It's snowing and the roads are icy here in the midwest today, and I just didn't feel like running out to the store to get a thank you card. I was fortunate to have been invited for a lovely Christmas Eve dinner at friend's house, and I just don't think an email thank you is sufficient for that kind of celebration. Call me old-fashioned. I have lots of odd-sized envelopes, but didn't have any thank you cards, so I went poking around in my files and found a photo I had taken out my front door in 2005.

 

 

I never did anything with this photo, but decided it could be used to create a wintry card (gee, do ya think?) I opened it in Corel Painter Essentials 4 (came free with my graphics tablet in 2008), cropped out the post on the right side, and let the program run Watercolor Sketch in Autopainter. I added some type (I choose purple to match what Autopainter put in), made it into a jpeg, and then imported it into a Word document, shoved down toward the bottom. When it printed, I folded it landscape and trimmed it to a bleed border. I think this is a way you could use some of your stock photos as customized gifts, as well as to show a potential client what your fabulous photos can be turned into! Here's the final product: