When my friend Tammy’s 40th birthday was approaching, I knew that I wanted to make her something special. The special gift turned out to be a large 40th birthday photo collage.

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I have known Tammy for almost 5 years. Our girls were in the same class all the way through preschool. When I looked for pictures I could use for her gifts I realized that I did not have many pictures of her. All the photos are of our girls. I asked her husband for pictures of Tammy and he put me in touch with Dana (one of Tammy’s friends) who sent me tons of pictures of Tammy and her friends from high school to the present via DropBox. I love using DropBox to share photos and large files with friends and family and the best part is that it is FREE! 🙂

Not only did Dana send me pictures, she also e-mailed me a spreadsheet with head shots and the name and description of each person. Dana is my kind of organized woman! When I looked through Dana’s photos, I knew that I was missing photos of Tammy’s family so I contacted Tammy’s mom through Facebook. She mailed me old photos of Tammy and also gave me a CD of all the digital photos. I also reached out to a few of Tammy’s other friends and family via Facebook messages and received photos from them. I also looked through all the photos of Tammy on Facebook and downloaded a few of those. Facebook photos are a bit tricky. Sometimes downloaded Facebook photos are at a high resolution and sometimes they are not. It depends on how the photos were uploaded. As you can imagine, I had a ton of photos of Tammy at this point.

Since many of the older photos of Tammy were scanned at a lower resolution, I decided to create a photo collage using 3×4 photos. Some of the old original photos were fading with time so I made the decision to convert all the photos to black and white. The black and white would make the photo collage look classic and it would make editing the older photos easier.

Supplies:

• Elmer’s Tri-Fold Foam Display Board in black
• adhesive (I love and use Scotch ATG tape)
• X-ACTO knife
• paper trimmer
• A lot of photos!!!
• Photoshop or Photoshop Elements
• 3×4 inch cards

Directions:

These directions are for Tammy’s 40th birthday photo collage but it can be adapted for any number. For a single digit number I would turn the board to have a portrait orientation.

• I cut the folding sides of the tri-fold foam board off with an x-acto knife. What I ended up with was a piece of 36 inch x 24 inch foam board.
• I placed my 3×4 Project Life cards onto the black foam board in the shape of my number so I could estimate how many photos I would need for the collage. In my case the magic number was 40 which I though was a fun coincidence! I did add a few extra photos just in case.
• I looked through the photos and decided which ones to use. This was probably the most difficult part of the entire project because I wanted to include all the photos!
• I used Photoshop to edit and convert the photos to black and white. (Most photo labs also have the option to turn a photo black and white once you have uploaded it to their server.)
• Next I used a template to put two black and white photos onto a 4×6 photo. I wanted to have a 1/8 inch white border around each 3×4 photo so my template includes borders. I also accounted for cropping when the photos are printed. The photos from my local photo place seem to get cropped about 1/8 of an inch on all sides so I took that into account when creating my template. You can download the template I used for free here.  This step and the previous step were definitely the most time consuming.
• I had the 4×6 photos printed at my local photo lab.

• I cut the 4×6 photos in half to get the 3×4 inch photos.

• I placed the 3×4 inch photos onto the black foam in the shape of the number 40.
• I removed one photo at a time from the foam board, added adhesive and then placed adhered it on the foam board.

Tammy loved it! The 40th birthday photo collage and my other gift for her made her cry! Her tears were happy ones of course.