Mother’s Day will be celebrated in North American on Sunday, 14. While she’s probably just happy to spend time with you, it’s probable that you’ve been trying to come up with the prefect gift for her.
When you think about it, there’s little that measure up to the value of someone who carried you close to her heart for nine months, who gave you life, loved you unconditionally, who sacrificed and guided. Over the years she has worried over you, occasionally anguished over you, protected and defended you.
She has been a shoulder to cry on, confidante, advisor. She has advised what direction to take, while encouraging you to follow your dreams even if they led you away from her.
Given all of this how can any of us possibly come up with the perfect way to honour Mom?
My advice? As a mother of four I know that the most precious gifts from my children are the ones that are all about them or time with them. A surprise visit for no reason other than me, a mother/daughter outing or a mom/son lunch are guaranteed to brighten my life far more than something extravagant.
Photos of my kids are also on the list of favourites. In particular, I love those pictures revisited from the past, where siblings take old poses and stage them again.
Another nifty idea is a collage, whether it’s a walk down memory lane or a group of family portraits. The nice part is that these are easy to do in Photoshop with just a basic understanding of the software. With some great images from iPHOTOS.com I’ve put together a collage for Mom to demonstrate.
I selected a soft daisy background (#453002) to begin. After opening a new 10″ x 8″ document in Photoshop, I open the illustration and dragged it onto the page. This is the first layer. (It’s good to rename each layer as you do it to make it easier to work with them. Simply double click on the layer name to do this.)
If you need to change the size use Edit > Transform > Scale. Hold down the Shift key and move the edge of the picture until you get the size you want then hit Return.
The photos of the mother and her children are #1202747, #310715, #811582, #311159 and #811606 from iPHOTOS.com. To place the first picture, I clicked on the background layer, went to File > Place and made my selection. After renaming the layer, I added a small frame. The steps for this were Layer Style > Stroke, after which I selected the size and colour I prefered. Then I simply repeated the steps for the rest of the photos.
As I was happy with the results at this point, there was no need to angle any of the pictures, but if you would like to do so choose Edit > Transform > Rotate. I then used Text to fill in a top space with that most important word — Mother. The font I chose was Forelle, iPHOTOS.com’s #765
Nothing fancy, super simple but guaranteed to make that special woman’s Mother’s Day.
If you don’t have Photoshop there are some great collage makers to be found online. Here are just a few:
