Graduation Shadowbox Cards

Wow, didn't realize till my sil started rattling off names that we have a lot of kids graduating in our family this year! I wanted to make special cards and leis for them all, but with so many to do, I knew I had to try to keep it simple. Since I had enjoyed making the recessed window shadow box cards for our moms at Mothers Day, I decided I would go with that again.
These two were the first I came up with...very clean and simple, using only a sheet of cardstock of the school's color for the inside back panel and the graduate's name cut out on the bottom of the card. IRL the cards included the graduates' full names, but I edited the photos to block out the last names to avoid privacy issues.

Clean and simple is great, but I get easily bored....so for the rest of the cards, I experimented with different backdrops for the inside back panel. For my niece's card, I found a photo of her school campus to place behind the silhouette of the graduate.

I tried a metallic gold backdrop embossed with Cuttlebug's Congratulations folder for this one.

And for these two I printed up and added the school emblems mounted with some foam tape.
The tutorial for the recessed window card by Lynn Mercurio can be found over at Splitcoast Stampers. For the front panel of the cards, I used graduate silhouette images found by doing a Google image search. The female graduate is a free image file generously shared by Sue Cimini on her craft blog...thank you, Sue! "Class of 2012" is Amazone BT font and I used Arial font for the personalizations. Used MTC to make cutfiles for each and welded them into windows so the entire front panel would be one piece. Glued this to a piece of clear acetate, and added colored cardstock behind the name before adhering the panel to the front of the recessed window to create the shadowbox.
These didn't take too long to put together once I got started, and happily I had a chance to make each one a little different with some personalization.