This year’s holiday theme card was of course: Star Wars!
I am so so grateful to Jeff Kuo, who is my go-to photographer for everything. He’s so great to work with, so versatile, produces amazing photos, and I love his cat. =D He was also incredibly forgiving of me for waiting until the last minute to pester him for photos.
I had grand plans to do the holiday card photoshoot in November and be all on top of it, but I ended up having an emergency quilt to finish in November (which I’ll blog about later), so I didn’t get my imperial officer costume done on schedule, and the photoshoot ended up getting pushed into December.
One of these years, I will actually get my act together so that I will not have to pay the rush fee for the card printing.
Thankfully the only costume I had to make was mine. The Princess Leia dress was purchased and needed a few modifications which were quick, the ewok costume I had already, and the stormtrooper was borrowed from a friend in the 501st. (I have a stormtooper costume as well, but I ran out of time to resize it for Marcus.)
We shot on a green screen so a background could be Photoshop-ed in later. We took a LOT of photos because kids are kids and well… they don’t always cooperate.
And then we tried to take some extra photos for fun…
So after going through all our photos, it was pretty obvious which one we wanted to use. For the background image, Marcus spent a few hours in Star Wars Battlefront getting screencaps of Endor. (There was a lot of dying involved with rebel players taking shots at him as he was trying to take photos. =D )
I traded some embroidery work for some Photoshop help from my friend Doris. Doris put the background over the green screen and another friend, Cheryll, did some quick graphic design work to put our holiday message on the final image.
For the back of the card, I picked a few cute photos from the past year.
We got a lot of comments from friends about how much they loved our card which made me really happy because it ended up being quite a bit of work and involved a lot of people! (How many people does it take to get a holiday card out the door?!)
There have also been a lot of questions about what next year’s card is going to be… and I have no idea. I will hopefully figure it out before December. =P
