Fun with Sara - The Cartoons
I don't know about you, but I think it is insane what you have to pay for a greeting card these days, so I tend not to purchase greeting cards in favor of two other options. 1) If it is for my sister Norah, I recycle a used card. I take a card someone has given me and scratch out whatever they wrote to me and their signature and write in my own greeting and signature. I especially like to take something like an Easter card and turn it into a birthday card by crudely scratching out the greeting and writing new ones. Norah thinks it is hysterical and I live to make Norah laugh. Note that you should only do this with people who have a highly developed sense of humor. I do not do this with my sister Janelle. 2) When I have the time, I make my own cards.
My friend Sara recently had surgery to remove a cancer from her liver. Fortunately livers grow back, but that growing process is really tiring, so Sara has 6 weeks of lying around feeling tired while her liver regenerates. I wasn't about to go buy Sara a treacly get well greeting, and Sara has a VERY highly developed sense of humor. I wanted to make her something that would make her laugh. I started this project with the intention of having it be just a cartoon book. Later I added silly puzzles to give her something to do and I'll tell you about how to make those later. Here's the finished product: Fun with Sara
HOW I MADE IT
I made the cartoons at toondoo.com, which is a free cartoon-making site. You start with TraitR, where you make the characters. If you've ever made a Bitmoji, it's a lot like that. Once you have created the face you can pick the body to go under it and change the clothes around, then you name it and save it. But here's an important tip: before you close the TraitR window to make your cartoon, you should make lots of different versions of the character wearing different clothes because you won't be able to open the character back up and edit it later. If you don't make lots of them before you close the window you will have to recreate all the facial features from scratch, and that is really hard to do.
This is the Trait R design window.
When you're making a cartoon character, you want to pick a prominent feature to exaggerate. Sara has what we in The South call an "ample bosom," so I made her with a ridiculously large chest. I knew it would make her and her husband laugh. I made Saras in several different outfits because she is, after all, the star of the show. When I made the character for Sara's husband Chris, I made him kind of macho because he fancies himself a stud muffin, albeit a 68-year-old stud muffin. Then I added our friend Karen and I made her super skinny because she swims a lot and doesn't have an ounce of fat on her. I also gave her a lot of hair because Karen came back from a 3 week trip and thought she really needed a haircut but we all said Your hair looks GREAT on the very day she was supposed to get that haircut so she postponed it for a month and then, of course, her hair started to get completely out of control. Finally, I made some nurses and a doctor for the hospital scenes, and I made myself. It is probably harder to make a cartoon out of yourself than anyone else. ToonDoo doesn't have a lot of body choices and I had already used all the good ones, because I assure you, I would never actually show cleavage like that.
Once I had all my characters created, I went to the Toondoo Maker to make the cartoons. You can select different backgrounds, props, and text bubbles and drag your characters to the stage. It's all pretty intuitive. You can change the characters' postures and expressions but, like I said before, you can't change their clothes. If you don't have ideas for the cartoons, google it. For one of the cartoons I made, I googled "menopause cartoons" and then ripped off the idea for the one I made with the boobs in the coffee. Otherwise, poke fun at the person's foibles. Sara texts Karen and me often, and it is as though she types with her toes without looking, or dictates while eating popcorn, but the end result is often completely indecipherable. So I knew I had to have a cartoon about that.
When the cartoon is finished you save it, and you have the option of making it private or public. I always make mine private. You can download the cartoon but I found that the ToonDoo site was a bit buggy with the downloads and there were sometimes error messages across the downloaded image. I fixed that problem by taking a screenshot of it using the Snipping tool in Windows. I finished it out in Photoshop but you could just as easily use Powerpoint to lay out the pages of the book. Using Powerpoint or Impress, which is the free presentation tool from OpenOffice that I just adore, is a lot easier than trying to lay things like this out in Word.