Photo Gifts - Let's Get Artistic

I took some pictures of my aunt's little fluff of a dog at Christmas time and decided to give my aunt a framed copy of the best one for her birthday (which was yesterday).

This is the original picture. Her name is Desi and she's a Coton de Tulear. Cute, right? She's over-the-top friendly and happy all the time. She has this way of flashing a smile, front teeth on display, that's just hilarious.

While this picture was great, I'd recently downloaded a couple of artistic photoshopping iPhone apps that I wanted to try out.

The first one is called Waterlogue. I've written about it before, and it's really fun. There are different settings depending on how intense you want the colours to be, or how much detail you want to show. I find that it doesn't capture people's faces very well, but for animals & scenery it's terrific.

Here is Desi "waterlogued":

The second app is called Artist's Sketch. Pretty self-explanatory, it turns a photo into a black and white pencil sketch. The options are a bit limited right now, but I really like just the basic one anyway.

Here is Desi "sketched":

Great detail on the fur, isn't there? The sketch was definitely my favourite so that's the one I went with.  I found a grey and black fabric photo frame at Target and had her gift ready just like that. I also printed out the other two pictures and put them behind the first one, so she can change it out if she wants to.

I also tried my hand at making a pillow box for the first time. It took two tries, but it isn't bad. It was a bit hard because of the size - I couldn't print out a template big enough so I had to freehand a lot of it.

And the only thing large enough I had on hand was plain white poster board. I love how Rebecca at Older & Wisor makes them from leftover cereal or pop boxes. I will definitely try that when I need a smaller one in the future.

Have you used these two phone apps yet? What do you think of them? Are there other ones that you like better? What about gift boxes? Do you recycle what you have or buy new ones?