In the October Coloring Challenge we touched briefly on resizing coloring pages so that you can use them for a postcard. In this blog I will walk through a couple of ways to resize the designs from thecoloringbook.club so that you can use them for cute postcards to send to your friends, leave as notes around the house or even embark on some postcrossing!
…an invitation to do lunch sometime!
If you are comfortable resizing and printing documents you can skip to the end to see my own postcard coloring example and an invitation to do lunch sometime!
Choose a design.
First select the design that you’d like to print on your postcard. Single mandalas and recurring patterns work well, like these examples from the weekly coloring books which our members receive when they sign up.
You can even use full page designs like I demonstrated in my earlier blog.
One thing to be aware of is that a full sized illustration reduced to the size of a postcard may leave you with a very intricate design to color. Those vacant white spaces, which looked quite roomy at full size, may have shrunk considerably!
Postcard size
A good size to choose for a postcard is the international paper size A6. This size (roughly 6”x4”) fits the guidelines for a postcard as set out in the US and other international countries. You can buy this card pre-sized from Amazon or you can cut to size from standard letter or A4 card stock. You can even use watercolor paper cut to size (as I do in the example below).
Resize your design with shrink to fit.
Assuming you have selected a design that you simply want to fit to your cardstock then this should be possible by following these steps. Note: depending on how you have your computer setup there may be some slight differences to the steps below, but the main procedure is the same.
- Open up your pdf.
- For Mac Users this typically opens the book in Preview
- For Windows users this will most likely open Adobe Acrobat
- Find the page you would like to print.
- Select the print option from the application menu
- To only print a single page from the PDF either add the specific page number to the selection in the print dialog or choose “current page” or “selected page in sidebar” from the menu.
- Change the paper size to match your cardstock.
- Make sure “Scale to Fit” is set.
- Print!
I loved the recurring pattern of the cutlery set but shrinking to fit would have had my eyes crying submission if I tried to color the design!
Select a portion of the design to print.
For certain designs, shrinking the image to fit a postcard size will not always be suitable. The resulting design may be too small to color effectively. An alternative way to print this type of design is to select the portion of the design you would like to print.
For the example below I loved the recurring pattern of the cutlery set but shrinking to fit would have had my eyes crying submission if I tried to color the design! Instead I used the in-built screen capture tool to select a portion of the pattern and then printed this to fit the size of a postcard.
- Open up your pdf.
- For Mac Users this typically opens the book in Preview
- For Windows users this will most likely open Adobe Acrobat
- Find the page you would like to print.
For Mac users:
- Pressing SHIFT+CMD+4 together will change your mouse pointer to a selection tool.
- Use the selection tool to drag a rectangular shaped selection from the design of your choice. Do this by holding down your mouse button and dragging the selection. As soon as you release the mouse button your screen capture is saved to your desktop.
- Open the screen capture in Preview and follow the print instructions from the resize method above.
For Windows users:
- Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 has the snipping tool. This allows you to select a portion of your screen for capture.
- Once you have made your selection the resulting capture is opened in the snipping tool.
- Save the snipped image and open in MS Paint where it can be printed directly from there where you can follow the print instructions from the resize method above.
Color yourself a card you can share with your family, friends or even a stranger in another world!
Now the technical part is over you have the fun of coloring your design!
If you find the design you printed doesn’t extend to the edge of the card you can add a sharpie border around the edge.
Choose your colors, hunker up with your favorite drink and color yourself a card you can share with your family, friends or even a stranger in another world!
For me, I’m simply using my design to remind a friend that we should do lunch!
What would you write on yours?
and for Linux users?
also we exist.
Maria,
In linux it does depend on the distribution of OS you are running and the utilities each user has installed. It would be difficult to cover all environments in this article but there are some very useful resources on the web.
The following link will explain printer setup:
https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/774476-how-to-manage-printers-in-linux
And this article explains how to capture a screen shot.
http://www.wikihow.com/Take-a-Screenshot-in-Linux
From there you can use an image editing tool like GIMP to crop parts of the image and print. http://www.gimp.org/
I hope this helps.
If, at a later date, you have specific steps that would help linux users then that would be great to add in the comments here. Thanks for reading and pointing out the gap.
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