Personalized Pictures to Color- a Tutorial

Oh, I am so excited over a new app I found. You can make a coloring sheet from a photo! I link up with Monday Made It to share.

The app I'm happy to tell you about is iPiccy.  It is an online app so all your work is done online and there's nothing to download except your finished picture. Open an account using your email address. Once you confirm and log into the site, the screen will look like this.

Click on "Upload photo" and a drop down menu will pop up so you can select the photo you want to work on. I put all the photos I'm going to upload to an online site, like Walgreen's for photo printing, for example,  in a desktop folder I named "Photos for Upload." Click on the photo you want to use and it appear on the screen, looking like this... with your own photo, not one of my daughters. snort.

Now you want to go to the "magic wand" tool up at the top, the second one over, and click. Suffer through my rather crude arrows I use to point things out in this tutorial.

Now you have a new menu of effects on the left hand scroll bar. Scroll past "Basics" "Vintage" "Area" and "Color" all the way to "Artistic." Under Artistic you'll see "Pencil Sketch." Click on it.

OOooo! They became a drawing! You can adjust the line weight by sliding the bar, and then hit "Apply" to save.

At this point you can be all done, or you can give the picture a caption. To add words click on the "Layer" button along the top menu, highlighted by my arrow.

Then the screen gives you the choice of a text tool button, a "T" highlighted by my arrow. Click. 

Now your screen will look like this.  

This next part is a lot like using many other apps like PowerPoint, or even KidPix. You'll want to drag the text box to where you want it on the image. Choose from the fonts by scrolling on the left. Then type in whatever caption you want in the box on the left where it says "Your Text Here." I tried getting a cursor to go into the actual text box on the photo and it didn't work. You have to type in the box on the left side bar and your text will appear on the photo. 

Here is what I ended up with. I can hear the eyerolls now when my two see that caption... good thing they never read the blog. Hee. And yes, when my DD do eyerolls, you can hear it...

To save the photo you first need to click on the "disk" image and a pop-up window will appear like as in the image below. Click on "Combine layers"

Lastly, a final screen will appear allowing you to save the image wherever you like.

Just print and TA-DA! All ready for coloring!

NOW, teacher friends, just think of the ways you can use this! The kiddos will LOVE coloring pictures of themselves. It would make a great cover for a portfolio, or to designate their display space in the hall. Or how about a field trip book of photos that they color. Or pictures of their building projects... the list goes on and on. And of course, once you become familiar with this app you will discover all sorts of other ways to customize images! I hope you find ipiccy.com another good use of technology and as much fun as I do! I can hardly wait for the school year to begin... well, I guess I can wait just a bit more..

Click on their image to go to their home page.

If you are happy to find this, or you have used it and can think of other projects to do, add them below! I love to hear from anyone out there in the Internet Land.

Click on back and see what the rest of the teacher blogging world has been creating this week. See you next time. And Tara, thanks for the linky... it is a happy par-ty!