I ran out of cards a couple of shows back, and kept forgetting to make new ones. What I had been doing was making a folded card that was like a miniature brochure. It was printed on both sides and a pain in the butt to fold accurately. Printshops would charge out the yin-yang to do one like it, damn near a dollar each in quantity. Uh, no thanks, I'll do it myself. So I'm tired, and don't feel like doing another production job, so enter the quick, down and dirty treatment.
Word is too finicky to do this, and Photo Shop Elements using text is easier to layout. Open a new file, 300 pixels per inch and 2x3.5 inches document size. Hmm, something artsy is needed for the font. I've used Vinerhand a lot but it's starting to show up more and more. Ahh, ha! Black Adder should work ;-) Hey, keep it simple; studio name, a little blurb slogan, my name in big letters, website and phone number down in the opposite corner from the studio name. Move the lines around to suit yourself, and save the document. Takes about 15 minutes of fritzing around to make it look good.
Almost there. I looked around the studio/garage and find a spiral pad of Strathmore 400 series cold press watercolor paper, rough texture, 18x24. Pull a couple or three sheets off, trim off closely the torn ends, and start slicing the stuff into 3.5 inch wide strips the width of business cards and the 24 inch length of the sheet. Each page is good for about 50-55 cards depending if the printer doesn't screw up the first one with bad margin spacing. It's nice heavy paper, distinctive and doesn't look like anything from Vistaprint. Just about ready to rock and roll here ;-)
Time to finish up the PS work. Make a new file; 300 pixels/inch; 3.5 inches by 22 inches. Over on the original file, do yourself a favor and make the canvas 2 pixels larger on both dimensions and make it gray. Do this and you have a cut line that is barely noticable. Start dragging and dropping the card art work over to the new file. It'll snap in place when you get it over to the edges. Nice touch they put in there ;-) Go back and drag&drop again and again until the new documeent is filled up. Use those gray edges to keep it lined up and everything will be in the right place. you might have noticed there was a little extra paper left over, anout and inch and a half. Add a half inch canvas size to the top of the document so so there isn't anything squirrely with the printer margins.
Go to your printer, and set the custom size feature to 3.5x22 and don't sweat the extra length on the paper strip as it will still eject anyway. BTW, I doubt this will work with the printers than bend the paper 180 degrees like the HP printers. Start printing and catch them so they don't fall underfoot as they get ejected from the printer. Use those gray borders to line up your cutter and start whacking away. If you have a rotary cutter, make sure it'll handle whatever paper you use. I use an ancient Premier 24 inch blade cutter and have no problems with the small strips cutting true.
The nice thing about the DIY approach is that you can use all sorts of paper including some commercial hand made types. Total cost on this was probably about 2 bucks and a hour or so of my time. Hey, we're artists; our cards don't have to look like the car salesman's down the block. Get a little creative here :-)
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