Each year I like to create a fun a family Christmas card out to family and friends. My wife and I try and to dream up some sort of silly creative way of sharing holiday cheer  what better way to do that than with Pez. We took each of our children, Lydia, Diego, Elijah, Josiah, and baby Ezra, and made them into Pez dispensers. 

The first phase of the project was to shoot pictures of the kids that I would then edit and customize to look as though they plastic. Using the photo as a reference, I used Adobe Illustrator to create flat colors as a base. I brought that art back into Adobe Photoshop and used different blending techniques and filters (Plastic Wrap doing most of the heavy lifting) to create the classic Pez head.

One of my coworkers has massive Pez collection in his classroom, so when it came time to select the right dispensers to take pictures of and attach to my children, that was perhaps the easiest part of the project. I had to isolate the dispensers, clip them out, edit the size and height, and  adjust color just to make it more vibrant.

It's all about the details! Adding shadows, finding an actual picture of the Pez candy to put behind the dispensers, and once again using blending modes, masks and the Plastic Wrap filter to make it feel as real as possible.

Then it was adding the finishing touches. I created the snow and string of lights in Illustrator, bringing them back into Photoshop to be used as the cover art for the box.

It was also very important to use the actual Pez font to finish of the design and of course, it can be found on dafont.com to download.