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Fun Staff Photos

 


With masking requirements being implemented across states, prior to the start of the 2021-2022 school year, I was looking for a creative way to share a department photo without actually having to put anyone in close contact. 

Last year I created a fun Brady Bunch style picture but I really like the comic book style this year. 


For anyone wishing to duplicate it there were a few steps. The first is obviously to get pictures of your team. I had some from previous years and I started stalking Facebook for some backups.

Once I had the pictures saved I emailed them to myself so I could open them up on my phone and save the pictures to my camera roll.

I used the app "Photo Lab" to "cartoon" the pictures. It is free with in-app purchases but you may have to wade through quite a few advertisements. I never paid for any features. It is not super intuitive to use so I made this short 2 minute video. 

I took screen shots of the finished cartoons versus saving to my camera roll and used the editing feature on my phone to crop around the pictures.  





After all the pictures were "cartooned" I emailed them all back to my laptop. From there I used the site remove.bg to get rid of the background.

I found a comic panel layout online that I liked with nine panels to use as the background (searching "9 Panel comic layout").  Once I had the panel in place I started inserting and tweaking the pictures using Google Slides. I would duplicate the slides so I could adjust a layout without losing the previous one. Honestly I could have created the background myself, and was prepared to do that, until I found a template I liked (which saved me a lot of time). If you have several people on your team/department Google image search "cartoon head shots" to see other layouts that could be used instead of a comic panel. 

The name tags I created using white text boxes with drop shadowing and the Google font "Naucha". These are skills I learned taking Tony Vincent's "Classy Creations" online course (which I highly recommend). 

I did run the finished product by my teammates allowing them to change pictures if they wanted and I got a lot of helpful suggestions. We typically share our back-to-school group picture on our EdTech and District Facebook page as well as on Twitter. 

If you create a similar layout I would love to see it! Please respond in the comments below or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife. 


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