Christmas Picture Cut and Paste

Today, Hoochie Momma and I figured it'd be a good idea to try and get the Christmas picture of the kiddies taken. Yes, yes, it should've been done the first weekend in December, but better late than never. At least she's sending out Christmas cards, which is more than I can say for Stink Pants #5's and my Save the Date wedding cards.

As many of you with small children will know, it's hard to get a toddler and a baby to sit still and smile at a camera at the same time, especially when one is bored with sitting at the table and the other is trying desperately to climb on top of the table to see the tv. Even when there were two of us trying, one with the camera and the other jumping up and down and acting like a fool yelling "Here! Look here! Twinkle twinkle little star.... If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands! Look! Look at me! Smile! Say Cheese!" we still weren't lucky enough to get one awesomely perfect picture.

We did get a lot of pictures with one child smiling and the other child looking away or both children looking away. Any pictures we happened to get with both children actaully looking at the camera at the same time were riddled with blank faces and squinty eyes.

Well we had to get a good Christmas picture, and there were a couple good smiles, but no one picture was perfect. I did what any computer junkie would do. I cut and pasted their heads from other pictures onto the bodies in the pictures where they were sitting well but not smiling.

I know what you're thinking, "That's easy to do with Adobe Photoshop! No problem! Easy peasy butter and cheesy." Well, it wasn't that easy. I don't have Photoshop. I'm too cheap for that. So I had to use Irfanview (a free picture viewing program) and MS Paint.

It wasn't perfect. There is no such thing as a "blend tool" on MS Paint, but it was okay. My first attempt was horrible.


You can see the telltale lines around their chins and Meow's head is frickin' huge (*gets Scottish accent out* "like an orange on a toothpick") The funny thing is I thought that was good until I made the better one.


Not bad, huh? If you look at it really closely, you can see all the little imperfections that come with pasting something into a picture but those aren't that noticeable when you actually print the picture out.

Here's the original picture:


I don't know if Hoochie Momma is actually going to use the doctored picture for their Christmas photo, but it was fun making it.

Originally, Hoochie Momma wanted a picture of the kids on top of Magi the Llama, but it's getting colder out now and we're not sure how the kids will take to the llama and vice versa.

Instead I got a cute picture of baby llamas and pasted the kids heads on top. Giggle with impunity!