How to Make a Greeting Card in Procreate • Bardot Brush

How to Make a

Greeting Card

in Procreate

Making your own greeting card is a really fun way to use your art in the real world. They also make excellent gifts! People love receiving something that’s personal, custom and handmade. You can make single cards for a special occasion, or you can mass produce your cards and sell them online. Whatever you choose to do, creating art for greeting cards is a really satisfying experience!

Greeting Card Procreate Templates

Greeting cards come in an array of shapes and sizes, the most popular being A2, A6, and A7. We’ve created a Print-at-Home Procreate template for each size that you can download here. You’ll get 6 custom Procreate canvases that take the stress out of making cards. No measuring, no math required! This will allow you to focus on the fun part of creating a greeting card; illustrating! You’ll find detailed instructions further down on this page.

Greeting Card Anatomy

Before we get started, let’s get familiar with some greeting card vocabulary so you’ll understand how to use the templates.

Bleed Line

When you’re printing a greeting card (or any art for that matter) it’s common practice to create a little extra room around the perimeter of your art. Industry standard is .25″, but some printers request more.

With cards that have a white background, you can’t really tell what’s being cut off, so I’ve used a card that has a full color bleed to show you the .25″ bleed that will be cut off the card.

Why it’s important to have a bleed

Letting your art BLEED off the side of the paper is important because when you go to cut it, you will never have any white space on the edges if you don’t cut it just perfectly. Also professional printers rarely promise “perfect” alignment. This means that they may be a little bit off and having a bleed accounts for this inconsistency.

Cut Line

This is the line that you would cut along. It’s the actual physical size of the greeting card.

Safe Space

This is the area that you’ll want to keep any important parts of your art within. If you have lettering or important art near the edge, the printer might not have perfect alignment and those words could get cut off.

Crease Line

This dotted line represents where you’ll fold the card in half. If your art extends from the front to the back, it’s important to note where it will be creased so you’re not putting any important art in that area. I.e. if you were drawing a person on your card, and you placed them along the crease line, it might look bad if the crease goes across their face.

Cut Guides

Instead of printing a line along the edges, cut guides are used to prevent a black line from being seen.

Pro Tip: To achieve a perfectly straight line, use an Exacto knife with a metal ruler.

Let’s Make our Greeting Card

1. Create your card art.

Choose a card size and download the Procreate Art template. This template is the size of the card WITH the bleed.

You’ll notice a locked layer at the top that says “safe space and cut guide.” You can turn this off, but keep in mind the area around the edge that will be cut off so don’t place any important art or lettering within those bounds.

After you’re finished making your card art, save a PNG to your camera roll of the front and back

2. Open the Print-at-Home Template.

After creating your art, you’ll want to place your art PNG in the Print-at-Home template.

Import the Print-at-Home canvas for the card size that you created your art for (so if you made art for an A2 size card, you’ll want to open the Print-at-Home template.)

3. Import your card art.

Import your card art, both front and back PNGs to the Print-at-Home template. Do this on a layer UNDER the Print-at-Home template.

Tip: Make sure your Magnetics and Snapping guides are turned on. You’ll find these in the transform menu bar.

This will make it so that your card art PNG will automatically snap into place.

4. Save your template for print.

Now that your card art is set up you’ll need to save a PNG or JPG to print out. You no longer need the Print-at-Home template so you can turn that layer off.

You will however need the Cut Guides turned on.

Save out your art with the Cut Guides turned on and on a layer ABOVE your card art.

You’ll need to be able to see these marks when you cut out your card.

Your art should look like this, but with a WHITE background.

5. Print out your card art.

Print your card art out and cut it using the Cut Guide crosshairs.

6. Crease your card.

You can do this simply by just folding the card in half. But if you printed on thicker card stock that can sometimes leave your card creasing in weird places or crackling your card.

Pro TIP: To avoid that the tearing or ripping of your art when you crease you can use a bone carver.

This tool is made of a strong material and has a smooth edge that makes a perfect crease. If you’re planning on doing a lot of card making this tool can help with that.

If you do use a bone carver, crease your card on the INSIDE to avoid scratching the ink on the outside.

7. Pick a fun colored envelope.

Cards and Pockets is a great online shop for buying low-quantity envelopes. They have a huge collection of colors and some of their envelopes are as low as .10 cents.

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MAE Monthly Project

The Monthly Project is a part of the Making Art Everyday challenge. For occasional art-makers or those who would like to work on one project over several sessions, this beginner to intermediate-level monthly project will is accompanied by in-depth resources, presented in sections so you can put it down and pick it up throughout the month.

Making Art Everyday is a series of daily, weekly, and monthly prompts and challenges to help you overcome creative fears and develop your art-making practice. Every month, we will feature a new theme that will allow you to hone a set of skills, practice drawing something specific, or complete a project.

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