From your camera roll to the mailbox.
We've tried to keep this short. You came here to make a card, not read a brochure. But there are a few details worth knowing before you upload a picture of your kids.
Upload one photograph.
A single picture does it. We recommend something recent where faces are roughly centered and there's some daylight — the model is forgiving of phone shots, blurry edges, and mild overexposure, but not all three at once.
Groups of up to twelve people work. Pets count as people here. If you upload something that won't paint well, we flag it before you pay.
Accepted: JPG, HEIC, PNG. Up to 20 MB. Portrait or landscape.
Choose a painting style.
There are four, and each one does something different to your photo. Watercolor softens and warms. Oil pastel gets moody and rich. Vintage postcard lines things out in engraved crosshatch, with a tiny stamped-on year in the corner. Paper-cut flattens and simplifies — good for cards where the background is busy and you want faces to pop.
You can preview all four on your photo for free. Pick the one that looks like the card you actually wanted.
Write a message — or don't.
We wrote twenty templates that sound like real people wrote them, in case you hate this part. There's one that sounds like your mom, one that sounds like a slightly dry British friend, one that sounds like the card you send to someone you haven't spoken to in two years but still like.
Want to write your own? Thirty words maximum. The paint budget gets tight after that.
Pick digital or printed.
Digital is a 5 by 7 PDF with bleed and crop marks, ready for any print shop or your home printer. It's three dollars and lands in your inbox in under a minute.
Printed is twelve dollars. We press a set of ten cards on 300gsm matte stock — the kind that bends but doesn't crease — slide in ten cream envelopes, tie the bundle with a red cotton ribbon, and ship it from Portland. Six days to anywhere in the US. Eight to ten overseas.
Address them. Sign them. Mail them.
That part, we leave to you. We're a painting factory, not a postal service. But we do leave the signature line empty on purpose, because nothing looks sadder than a pre-printed name in cursive font.
Also: if the card makes someone cry, we'd love to hear about it. There's a form on the contact page.
The bits under the paint.
The model
Ours. Built in-house. We trained it on roughly forty thousand hand-painted cards from the mid-century — the ones with patina, weird proportions, actual brush texture. It doesn't pull from the usual image-gen soup, so the output looks like a human painted it because a human's hand is what it learned from.
Revisions
The Design pack includes three re-paints per card. If the first watercolor didn't catch your son's hair right, regenerate it. Prints are shipped only after you say "send it."
Rush orders
Printed sets ship in six days by default. If you need them in two, there's a $15 rush option at checkout. We cap rush at 200 sets a week so the shop stays sane.
Your photo
Uploaded photos live on our servers just long enough to paint, then vanish. Thirty days max. No training. No sharing. No reselling. If it matters to you, read our privacy page.