Taking a break from designing a Christmas card...

[dewline]

...that'll be going to my sister's family on the day. Perversely, I don't have the money to buy cards made by other people right now, but I've got the hardware, software, ink and paper to make my own from scratch in the house. For now, at least.

So, I think I've found a vector clip-art silhouette or three that could populate the landscape on the front of the card. I can make the footprints in the snow, the stars in the night sky...but trees were a problem.

Now to see how to add curves to the snowbank without turning the snow from white-to-pale-blue to solid black. I know there's a way to do it in Illustrator CS4...and I just have to rediscover it.

Update 1: my colour printer is throwing up this message:

"There is a problem with the printer or ink system. Turn printer off, then on. If problem persists, contact HP."

"Cyan - cartridge has failed". The others, I've been defying HP re: where I get refills from for a couple of years now.

Update 2: Some cartridge-swapping, and a few shutdowns later, the card I designed was finally printed. Victory is mine, Hewlett-Packard!

Comments

[dewline]

Will be keeping that recommendation in mind for my next purchase of scanner-printer combo devices.

[thewayne]

Myself, I strongly recommend, when possible, get separate scanners and printers.  I experienced a situation where I needed to scan a document, and the multifunction printer would not scan because one of the inks was empty. The printer was tossed, I bought an external scanner and have used it for many years.  It is now on its second laser printer.

[dewline]

Funny thing, that.

I already had an old Epson Perfection 1260. My first external scanner. Also, a Brother B+W laser printer. But when I saw the HP OfficeJet 7612 with a scanner fit for 11 x 17 art boards - a longtime standard of North American comic books - at what was then a halfway tolerable price for a seasonal temp office-worker, I had to get it. The colour ink issues were secondary to getting that scanner. The Epson device will only let me scan those art boards in segments and paste-up time in PhotoPaint or Photoshop is a pain.

If there's a hack for getting access to the scanner despite the ink issues, I should start looking for it.

[thewayne]

Cool!

I don’t know you’d go about that, I suspect it would require a hack at the scanner driver level to (A) report the correct ink level, and (2) tell the scanner to ignore the ink level.

At my library, I scanned a large book (one chapter), double-pages, to a PDF. That was pretty awesome. It’s been a while since I saw a large format consumer scanner like that, but I don’t frequent computer stores like I used to. Sounds pretty awesome!

Large-Format Scanners

[dewline]

I have to look into this. If/when finances again permit. I expect there's got to be several household-affordable options out there to be comparison-shopped.