Fun with Photoshop

Back in February, we met with a designer on Etsy, who makes the beautiful wood toppers for wedding cakes.  They said that we could make our own design and get back to them.  Life happened in between now and then, and the design fell off the radar.

We simply had other priorities, like designing the Invitation and RSVP.  Oh, and Little League.  Somehow, Hubs and I ended up responsible for munchkin's baseball team.  We've been very excited at how involved we've been able to be in his sports program.  It has taken a lot of our free time though.

Today, I happened to have a free second before work.  Hubs was getting munchkin on the bus, and so I popped onto Photoshop and all of a sudden the ideas started flowing.  Hubs and I had collaborated earlier on, but come up with very poor ideas for a topper.

The Etsy folks advised that it had to be straight black and white clipart.  So the original handcuffs we picked couldn't be used since they were essentially in photo-realistic format.

We then tried different versions of clipart handcuffs, but they didn't seem to align the way we wanted them to, and while we found heart shaped clipart, we're not that mushy and so it didn't feel like they fit with "us" and who we are.

You can see below just how our first drafts just wouldn't come together.  The first is wayyyyy too wordy, and the second is too cutesy.

I popped onto photoshop and combined a few things together.  The first was a proper set of handcuffs.  The first time I looked on google for reference images, I searched using "handcuff clipart" and came up with the options I shared earlier.  They were either too detailed, or not detailed enough.

This time, I used the search terms "handcuff stencil" since essentially, that is what this is going to be used for.  The options were so much better.  I was able to find one with a nice looking and properly curved chain in between.

With the suggestion from the Etsy folks to put our initials inside the cuffs, I tried that and went from there.  The end result was good, but it seemed too plain.  So, I thought back to the Thin Blue Line theme and I decided to see what it would look like with his badge outline as the border.

This is what I came up with:

And, of course given Photoshop's amazing options, I was able to take a picture of a wood slice, and superimpose the image onto it so that you can see what the final version might look like.

I really hope Hubs likes it!  I'm going to show him the design after work!

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***21:00 UPDATE***

Leave it to me to forget to count the points.  Depending on which Sheriff's Office a Deputy works for, they can have 5, 6, or even 7 points on the star.  I sat there with his badge in front of me and paid attention to the positioning of the circles and whether the points were in front of them.  Good old me forgot to actually count the number of points.

So, here is the final submission, with the correct number of points.  I made sure I got it 100% right by taking a copy of the badge from the Sheriff's website, and tracing the outline in Photoshop.  The lines aren't as thick as in the original, but I think it will still look good.