Over the Christmas holiday, the kids and I did a lot of playing around with pictures of our family on the computer.  We’re big fans of Picnik because it’s free and you can make a lot of funny faces with it.  Have you tried the Gooify tool?  Hilarious what it can do to facial features!

Anyway, I was looking for a rainy day project, and I remembered there is a tool that will transform any ol’ photograph into a black and white sketch.  So then I thought we could just make some coloring pages for the kids… here is the simple (and free!) step by step:

***** See update to this post at the bottom with the latest disappointing announcement that Picnik is closing on April 19th (or in some aspect moving to Google+) that came the day after this tutorial was posted.

* * * * *

It’s best to start with a high resolution image (1000+ px) since you’ll be printing these as 8 x 10s on letter size paper.  First, upload your image into Picnik and change it to a black and white image under the Effects tool.  You can also use the Boost tool to add a little more contrast between the blacks and whites.

Read the rest of this entry »