During an Apple learning event, we took a lot of photos! While it was nice to use the iPhone 13 Pro to capture holiday moments, the fun didn't end there.

Note: I was invited as media to the event. Views expressed are always 100% my own.

We also learned how to use the iPad to get creative and personalize our photos to make holiday photo cards.

My son decided he should be the one to edit our holiday photo on the iPad. Since he tends to do a lot of digital drawings, I passed the Apple Pencil over to him and just took all the photos. HA!


My son easily imported the photo into the Procreate App on the iPad, where he was able to draw and write on the photos. He could quickly adjust colors and lines using the menus in the app.

He could even add animation, but I asked him to keep our holiday card simple....cause we already look cute together. HA!

Making Holiday Cards on iPad with Apple Pencil

While we kept our holiday card simple, I could tell there's more that creative families could do using iPad, Apple Pencil and different apps including Procreate.

So I wanted to share these tips from Josh Cochran, an illustrator and muralist.

• Open Procreate. Start with a colored background or with a photo.
• You can zoom in, using the selection tool to incrementally tap with the pencil to create precise selections.
• Make your own textures by shrinking or enlarging your brush size and drawing on top of your selection.
• Try different layer mixing modes to find an unexpected color combination.
• Hold the Apple Pencil a little further back from the tip.
• You can also “draw” with the eraser.
• Try different things on different layers! You can always turn off a layer if you don’t like how it looks.
• Use a lower layer opacity under a new layer as a way to trace.
• Create something with feeling. For example it can be happy, sad, funny or even angry.

Creative Apps for iPad

Procreate

Offering hundreds of handmade brushes, a suite of innovative artistic tools, advanced layer system, and the lightning fast graphics engine — Procreate is a great app to create expressive sketches, rich paintings, gorgeous illustrations and beautiful animations.

Bring your cards to life with Animatic

Create hand-drawn animations. Simple enough for a beginner, powerful enough for a professional, Animatic was designed to offer creators an elegant experience in bringing their ideas to life through moving image.

Create holiday highlight reels with Clips

Create special one-of-a-kind video stories for your loved ones with the Clips app on iPad. With Clips, you can pull existing videos and photos from your Photos app or create all-new memories by recording them directly in the Clips app. You can then rearrange and edit your clips to create a story. You can add even more personality to your video by adding emoji, filters, text, stickers, live captions, a custom soundtrack, and Memoji. And when you’re done you can share your heartfelt creation through Messages, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and more.

Develop photo and video slideshows with Photoshop and iMovie

The holiday season is all about sharing sentimental moments with family and friends. Photoshop and iMovie on iPad make it easier than ever to create photo and video slideshows to share memories. Below are some helpful resources consumers can incorporate into their workflows on iPad:

• Use selections to make a composite on your iPad
• Make a composite with layers on your iPad
• Create a composite with layer masks on your iPad 
• How to create a new iMovie project
• Edit in iMovie
• Use effects in iMovie