Make New Year Cards online

It’s lean, mean 2016, and by the way, when the heck did that happen? We thought what we had with 2015 was special. But you don’t have to leave last year entirely in the past: in this post, we’ll give you our top tips for using PicMonkey to create kick-butt New Year’s cards.

It all started when blogger Bettijo over at Paging Supermom turned a super-duper into this comic strip New Year’s card.

Really, there’s no better way to rocket into the new year than with a dose of comic book action. And since PicMonkey has our very own superpowered theme—Comic Heroes—we absolutely had to put our spin on this idea.

Here’s how we did it, and how you can make your own.

Start in Collage

Open Collage and choose your dimensions. Add your images and/or swatches. (Pro tip: in Collage, Comic Heroes has its own special set of cityscape swatches and colorful backgrounds.)

Add comic effects to each pic

Click “Edit” on individual photos in your collage, and then, at the bottom of the palette, click “Open image in Editor.” Go to the Comic Heroes theme to get comicky. For this card, masked vigilante designer Crystal Goade used two of our Comic Heroes effects on each image: Comic Print, and Graphic Novel.

Pro tip: Use the paintbrush to control where your effects are applied. Crystal erased distracting Comic Print dots from her subject’s skin by clicking the paintbrush icon, then “Original” in the Paint palette. Then she brushed the original image back over the effect.

Finalize layout in Collage before adding the fun stuff

Don’t add the overlays and text just yet!

“Wait, why?!” you ask. “I wanted to add superhero logos! You promised me speech bubbles!”

This is true, boss, but as your faithful sidekick, we advise you to edit your collage images separately and come back to review them in Collage. This is to ensure that your effects match each other and everything looks all intentional-like, because once you take your whole collage into the editor, there’s no going back.

Bring it into the Editor for overlays and text

Now click “Edit” in the top toolbar to add overlays and text.

This part is pure imagination funtimes. We’ve got speech bubbles, we’ve got sound effects (“OOOPS!” “LOL!” and “WHAAA??!” being among our favorites). We’ve even got superhero mask overlays for keeping your true identity on the downlow.

Plus, see that “What will happen next?!” box at the bottom? That’s not text and an overlay: it’s actually a single overlay, and there’s more where that came from.

Pro tip: To get Crystal’s epic outlined message, check out our text effects. The crucial sliders are Horizontal blur and Vertical blur: crank each one to about 20 to start, then move the “Intensity” slider until it’s dark enough for your fancy. From there, you can play around with the “Angle” slider to situate your outline perfectly.