Get creative with your captured memories

There's something special about putting a photo, or series of photos, onto a canvas and with my Father-in-Law, Tim's birthday coming up, I wanted to make a gift that I knew would make him smile.

A couple of months ago, my Sister-in-Law got married and the photos came back recently with so many happy memories and natural shots of the family captured. Tim likes to select one or two key photos of memories to display in his home, and the staircase has long been a gallery to his three children and how the family has grown over the years, with Ethan and myself more recent additions to the O'Hanlon Wall of Fame.

I decided to take a look at the canvas styles on offer from Snapfish, as I often get my photos digitally ordered from there. There's different wall art styles, from the standard, chunky wrap-around canvas prints through to slimmer versions, collage prints and even acrylics.

I opted for a canvas for Tim, to match the style of his current wall art, and had a play with the collage canvas option. I really liked the idea of combining a few different images, rather than just selecting one. I mean, how can you choose just one snap to sum up such an important day?

I borrowed the wedding photography from my Sister-in-Law, Erin, and started selecting images that really stood out. I wanted to choose a photo that represented each member of the immediate family, as well as showing those special moments between Tim and his daughter on the happiest day of her life.

I selected a few reportage style photos, showing Erin in her wedding dress then driving to the church, walking down the aisle and so on. There was a great image of her kissing Tim on the cheek, with him having the biggest and most natural grin on his face, which I knew had to be on there. I also wanted to make sure there was a shot from within the church, as I know how much this means to him.

To really make more of the print, I wanted to choose some detail photos of the day. Things like the personalised coke bottles we gave to Erin and her new husband. And the ribbon and button bouquets the bride and bridesmaids had.

Once I had my shortlist of images, I started to play around with the layout. The software is really easy to use and my collage canvas came together quickly.

I then noticed that there was the option of adding text, like a caption, to the design, which I thought was a great idea.

Perhaps I could add a quote from Tim's speech? Or a lyric from Erin and Rob's first dance?

As the bride has a thing for Elvis, and Tim used Elvis song titles throughout his speech at the wedding breakfast, I started looking at song lyrics that would summarise the theme of the canvas.

And chose the following:

I give, give you my heart

Today, tomorrow and forever

You'll always be my love

It seemed like the perfect sentiment for the day and for what I wanted the canvas to mean.

I decided to create the canvas print on Pic Monkey, to enable me a little more control over the number and positioning of the images and the overlay of lyrics. The Snapfish collage tool is really simple to use and you can create a canvas really quickly but I just wanted to have a bit more of a play.

So, I uploaded the images into Pic Monkey, created the layout I wanted then used a template of a heart as a fade on the centre image. I then added the lyrics and chose a handwriting style font which seemed to match the style of the images.

All I then had to do was upload the image to Snapfish and position it within the print area.

I decided to try the new slim photo canvas (prices start from £17.99), as it's a best-seller and looked like a sleek alternative.