BIG Custom Sports Photo Poster Collage (super easy and Inexpensive)

Yesterday I shared the HUGE Custom Photo Poster I made for my girls' room.  My son was impressed when he saw it and wanted something similar, so I used the same concept with an engineering print, but made it a sports collage instead.

Check it out...

 

I knew I wanted something sports related to match his room and his interests, so I made a collage of him playing four different sports and added text labels.

 

 Again, I used PicMonkey.com to add the effects, make the collage and add the sports words.  This isn't a sponsored post or anything, but if you haven't tried PicMonkey for photo editing fun, you really should.  It's really easy and there's so much you can do.

I simply went to the collage page and chose the layout that I wanted, then added my pictures.  I changed all the photos to black and white, adjusted the sharpness and exposure, and cropped them to best show the action.  When I had everything looking the way I wanted, I hit "Edit" at the top of the collage page, and I was able to add the sports' names.  I rotated them to fit where I wanted them and everything was ready.

NOTE:  Because you'll be printing this out at 24"x36" , you'll want a 2:3 ratio when you're making the final pixel size of your collage so it fills the whole poster without being cut off.  It sounds really "math-y" but it's just simple multiplication tables.  You'll want the short side to be a number multiplied by 2 and the long side to be that same number multiplied by 3.  For example, mine was 1400 (700x2) by 2100 (700x3).

Once I got the collage the way I wanted it, I uploaded it to Staples again.  I chose the engineering print option in 24x36 and chose to fill the page with the image.  I picked up a black 24x36 frame.  (Black seems to be a lot easier to find than white and it was cheaper than the girls' white one ~ only $9 for the frame!)

My cat gets very curious when I'm doing projects!

I just popped the poster in the frame and I was good to go.  My son loved it!  I think it would be awesome to do this with any sports or hobbies ~ you could even make a big collage of a whole season's worth of photos or really with anything.  And at $4 a print (mine was actually $3.29) you could switch it out whenever you want.

 

 Pretty cool, isn't it?  And for about $13 total for the picture and frame, it's way better than any generic sports print you could buy for your wall!