How to Make Free Animated Greeting Cards
To make an animated greeting card for free, you create a Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) animation. Learning to do this with graphics processing software is a slightly involved process. You must create multiple layers for your animated greeting card, each of which will become a frame of your animation. In order to create GIF animations for free, you will need GIMP image processing software. This free, open source graphics program contains many tools to help you create animated cards for any occasion. This project is for creating falling snow in an animated card, but it can be adapted to create other falling objects.
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Instructions
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Start GIMP. Choose a background image that is at least 450 pixels tall, but no taller than 600 pixels. Scale the image down if it's larger than these dimensions, but don't scale up an image that is significantly smaller. Click "File > New...". Create an image that is the same width as your background for the animated card, but which is twice as high. Click "Advanced Options" and choose "Fill with: Transparency." Click OK.
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Click the paint brush tool in the toolbox. Choose "Circle Fuzzy" as your brush. Choose white as your foreground color. Fill the top 100 pixels with random white dots. These dots will become snow, which will fall over the background of your animated greeting card.
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Choose the "Rectangle Select" tool from the toolbox. Create a selection area that is as wide as your image and 100 pixels high. Copy the snow dots, then paste them into the same image.
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Click the "Move" tool. Press the down arrow button until the snow dots move down into the space below the first 100 pixels. Repeat the paste and move process until the entire image is filled with snow. Save your snow image as a GIMP file with a file name you can remember, such as "snow.xcf."
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Choose the "Rectangle Select" tool again. Select one of the snow dots with your cursor. Use the down arrow to move the snow down 10 pixels. Save it with new file name, such as "snow2.xcf." Move the snow down another 10 pixels and save the file as "snow3.xcf." Repeat this process until you have 12 snow image files.
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Open your background file in GIMP. Click the "Duplicate" button to duplicate your background layer 11 times. Click "Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Layers." Click "File > Open as Layers." Change the order of the layers so that the first layer is the background, the second is snow2, the third is the background copy #1, the fourth is snow3, and so on through the last layer.
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Select the snow layer in the top of your layers dialog box. Click "Layer > Merge Down" to merge it with the background layer directly below. Also select the next snow layer and merge it down. Continue merging the snow layers down until each background image has its own separate snow pattern.
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Click "Layer > New Layer." Ensure that you select this layer, and then click the "Select Rectangle" tool. Select a segment of the background image that has nothing important in it. Click the "Fill" tool to fill this selection with white.
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Click the "Text" tool. Choose the font and size text you would like. Choose green or red as your foreground color. Choose the desired justification. Type in your message, such as "Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas." Place the text layer over the white background layer and merge it down. Duplicate the text layer 11 times and merge each text layer down onto a background layer.
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Click "Filters > Animation > Playback" to view your animated greeting card. Preview the animation to ensure that the falling snow and the text look right. Make any adjustments necessary. Click "File > Save As." Choose ".xcf" as the file extension. Then click "File > Save As" again. Save your greeting card as a .gif and choose "Save as Animation" and then click "Export." Click "Crop" when GIMP prompts you.
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Tips & Warnings
Use these same methods to create other "falling" animations in GIMP. For example, copy and paste leaves onto the transparent layer to create an animation for an autumn greeting card or create multicolored dots to create confetti for a birthday greeting card.
Resources
- Photo Credit Jennifer Claerr
