How to make photo cartoons for the non-artist writer
Why Photos?
Sometimes a writer can also draw – maybe not create nice art, but perhaps some cartoons. Most often, other writers are like me – they cannot draw a straight line without tracing along the edge of a ruler.
What can we do?
One thing we can do is write captions on photos to bring a smile or two to the viewer. The photos to be captioned can be those we make with our own cameras, or they can be copyright-free photos we can buy in the computer store or get from their owners along with permissions to use them.
Ketchup bottle ?
The captions you write for each photograph should fit the mood of the photo, but with a twist or two. For example, you may select an image of a beautiful sun flower (about six feet tall) and write your caption to both fit and "twist" the image. "I am telling you my dear, this will just not fit into that empty ketchup bottle, and I don’t care even though you cleaned it."
Much less than a penny each
All of the photos that accompany this Hubpages article came from a single CD I bought in the store for about $20. The CD is said to contain more than 1 million photos and drawings. All of the images are categorized. That made it easy to ask for medical photos so as to get a choice of several hundred of them.
You can do better if your thinker's a stinker
After taking a look at each of several photos, I decided on a wacky caption for each one, nothing at all like the sensible captions for those photos that the captions should really be.
You did it ! Time for celebration...
Using the "paint program" that came with my computer (and probably with yours, too) I typed my captions right onto the photos. "Paint" allows you to change the color of your lettering such that you can alter its color from dark to light according to the photo background shade at the location of your text. If you make the text frame itself transparent, you won’t have a big white rectangle there to block out any of the photo itself.
Note: You cannot copyright the photos (unless they actually are YOUR photos), but you can copyright the whole to protect your new captions.
Have fun. Let’s see what you come up with. These days I could use a nice laugh.
