Baugasm™ Series #1 - Create Experimental Gradients and Posters

1. Intro: Hello everyone. My name is Vasjen Katro, I'm a graphic designer. I recently started a project called Baugasm, where I challenge myself to create a poster every day for one year. Today, in this class, I'm going to show you how to create something similar to this. I'm going to guide you how you can use Illustrator and Photoshop to create a poster like this. There are so many posters I have created with Baugasm project. This is one of the most liked ones and many people really asked to create a tutorial based on how I make these kind of gradients and shapes. So this class, I'm going to show you how to make this exact poster. Enroll to make sure to check out the whole process and tutorial. 2. Project: Hello everyone, I'm Vasjen Katro. I'm a Graphic Designer and I recently started a project called baugasm. You should check it out on Instagram. The idea was six months ago, I wanted to create something every day and be creative every day, and I decided to start this project called baugasm. What I decided is that I'm going to make a poster everyday for one year. I knew it's going to be challenging and it is, but I wanted to educate myself to be productive everyday. There are some good days, there are some bad days. Now today that I'm recording this video, it's the day 201 and has been difficult, but also a lot of fun because in 200 days basically, I've got so much support from many people and has really inspired me to keep doing this and extended more than I expected. I've had a lot of requests from many people to make tutorials on how I make my posters. Sometimes I try to share on Instagram stories now, previously on Snapchat. Some of the process on how I make every day poster, but most of them are not so technically specific, and many of you asked if I could make a tutorial to show some of the techniques I use on making the posters. Here I am, on this tutorial I'm going to touch some of the posters for example, I'm going to try to replicate this, but not exactly as it is. I'm just going to show you the technique on how you can achieve something like this. Hopefully you're going to learn the technique and try to experiment with it and make your own poster or even more work. You can make animations or you can make banners, or you can make business cards. You can apply those tools on different areas. This is baugasm. I started creating this project, as I said some months ago, and you can see that sometimes it's very difficult because I usually design the posters at the end of my working day so sometimes it's very difficult because my days, you can see on some of the posters that, for example, this one is pretty simple. I was really tired. I didn't know what to do, so I went straight forward experimenting with gradients. But there are some days that I spent two hours, three hours working on poster and I don't know what I'm going to end up doing. For example, this one I remember I played for one hour and half and since in the beginning I didn't know what I was going to do, but at the end, I got with this result and I still wasn't happy with it. But when I saw that was 2:00 AM, I was like, "My God, I have to finish this." But this is not something bad actually, is something good because what I've learned from all of these is that even you are not happy with it, you have to accept it and you're like, "This is still something creative and something that maybe I don't like that much, it's not my best day, but some people really do." Some of the posters I really don't like, many people have requested to purchase them and get a print out of it. In that moment it's really subjective because actually what I'm doing, it's not marketing and it's not advertising. I'm not doing this to spread a message or to sell something. These are more experimental and more aesthetically beautiful, so you can hang on a wall or just look at it and enjoy it. Hopefully I'm going to show you some of the good techniques. I'm definitely going to try to make more videos in the future and extend this class more and show you some more techniques. But in this class I'm going to show you a few of the techniques, I'm going to show you how to make a few of the posters. On the next video, you're going to see probably I'm going to start doing something like this. I'm going to show you how to make something similar to this and the process it takes to make this. Then probably we're going to jump to some more cool stuff. Make sure you enroll in the class and to see the whole process. See you on the next video. 3. Poster overview: Welcome back. As I mentioned on the previous video, I'm going to show you a technique on how to create basically something similar to this. The softwares I'm going to use, is first Illustrator and then Photoshop. As you can see on this poster, I've used a few different colors. This is the orange, which is basically the dominant one, is the blue. Basically, I'm going to show you all the process. I'm going to recommend to choose the colors in detail and colors that go well together. On the next video, I'm going to show you how to make something similar to this, how to create the gradients on Illustrator, and then jump on Photoshop and get the final result there. See you on the next video. 4. Creating Gradient: Hey, welcome back. Here I have open Adobe Illustrator and here is a document already open, but I'm just going to go and create a new document. You go to "File", "New" and make sure first of all, that you are on RGB mode. Then for the size, for the width I'm going to something like 2,000 pixels, and as height probably something like 3,200 pixels. Here I am. I have a fresh new document. First of all, on Illustrator, we're going to try to create the gradient. Here is a really nice technique I'm going to show you, something that I have discovered some years ago and I keep using it and I think is the best tool to create gradients. First, what we going to do is go and grab a rectangle tool and just draw something like this. Doesn't have to cover the full document size. I'm going to take off the stroke, and I'm going to fill it with a dark purple. For this technique, I usually really like to go with a dark bluish purple color. I'm going to go here and change the color a little bit more darker. Yeah, this is something that looks good. Now, the tricky part is that you have just created a rectangle and with one solid color. What we going to try to do is split this in different grids and different points and make different colors, on different part of the rectangle and create gradients. The tool you can do that is, on the left side, you have this it's called the mesh tool. Just take this and as you can see, you have cursor, whether grid. Basically, every point you click on that rectangle creates a checkpoint where you can edit each of those points, like here, you can edit these, and all of the other ones to create a different color for that part of the point. More you add more dots, more points, more area spaces you have to add colors. But I would not recommend to go crazy with it. I would probably just stick with this, what I have now. You go and get the "Select" tool. As you can see, this rectangle is divided in grid. Basically, what we're going to do now is select one of these points and apply a color for that point. I'm going to show you some shortcuts I use on Illustrator. On your keyboard you press the key A and you tap this one. As you can see, this anchor point is selected. For that anchor point, I'm going to go here, make sure that's selected. You double click there and you select a color. For this part, I'm going to select a blue color. Make sure you press again key A on your keyboard and select different point. But for this case I'm going to keep Shift pressed and select different keys and points. I'm going to go change the color. I'm going to make something more like purplish like this. I'm going to press still A on keyboard, and go select different. With Shift remember to select multiple anchor points. I'm going to go back again here to change the color. I'm going to go with something more like red, maybe something more like red in here, which is more highlighted. Then I'm going to grab again the A, select few more. I'm going to go and change the color, probably maybe some dark blue. Then again, keep repeating the A thing, I guess you-all got it now, so I won't mention that. I'm going to go select a few more points, change the color. Maybe I'm going to go with something more like pink into reddish. What I like actually to do is, these colors go very well together, but sometimes I need something else, like one color that is not applied in a lot, but it's only in few places. Usually, from that I choose a turquoise or maybe yellow. I selected this point, I'm going to select this point here and this one. I'm going to try first with the turquoise color, maybe something like here. Let's see. Well, I think looks okay. I'm going to add also maybe some yellow color to these anchor points. Maybe it's not bright yellow but something lighter. I'm going to continue to do this, add maybe some more red in here. You can choose different colors, you can experiment with this. I think the rest of these needs to be more like blue. Make sure you select also the anchor points that are outside. This I already selected, but like these anchor points because they still have the dark blue from the rectangle we created. I'm going go with a brighter purple like this. I have this anchor point and this with no colors. I'm going to make them maybe still like this, and then select these two, maybe more and make them a bit darker, blue. This one, this one, this one, maybe apply some yellow in these two. For this one here, probably, I'm going to apply some red again, maybe this red into orange. What I have left are these anchor points in here, and that's maybe these dark purple. I forgot this anchor point here. Maybe you can leave it just dark like that, but just for the sake of explaining. Here's another one. Probably I'm going make that two keys or I don't know how it's spelled. As you can see, this is like a gradient I just created on Illustrator. I know that the Illustrator is like vector and it's not so good with pixels. As you can see if you zoom into this, it's not that smooth when you see it. But what we're going to do is, we're going to export this on Photoshop and we're going to apply some noise and make these more smooth and play around. Something cool, you can do in Illustrator before jumping in Photoshop, you can apply to these basically different effects. For example, you can also, from Illustrator, you can press A, select one of those or many of those anchor points we created before. Now, after selecting this four, you can just drug. You can drag this rectangle and move it around. But by pressing A and selecting one, you can also move this and create a more not so fixed gradient. You can make that or select different point here. I just played around. You can go crazy with this and make like, I wouldn't recommend that you move them a lot because sometimes if you do this, it will look like these line it's solid. But up to you what you decide. Also, something else you can do in Illustrator is go here and grab one of these tools, probably like the wrinkle tool. As you can see, this is small, but by pressing Alt and Shift, and keeping those pressed and dragging the mouse like you're drawing something, these two becomes big. Now, you can just press slowly on these and let's see what is going to happen. This happened. I wouldn't recommend you go crazy with this tool. I don't know what's wrong with Illustrator, but if you apply it too much, it gets stuck and it doesn't work anymore. I tried with the best computer out there and still it doesn't work and it gets stuck and loads for hours. I don't know, maybe it cannot handle that much processing. The next thing, what we're going to do is copy this. You can go to "Edit", "Copy" and jump back to Photoshop and continue editing this in Photoshop. I'm going to show you on the next video how you can continue working on this on Photoshop. See you on next video. 5. Creating Gradient Shapes: Hey. Here I am on Photoshop. I have this template where basically I use every day to apply the posters and basically this is my artwork where I warp and I create the final product. For this case, I already have created this but you can go to Image, Image Size and the dimensions I use are these. You can create a different file, for example you go to File, New and create a new one. Make sure still the color is on RGB. I'm going to apply in here the gradient, the design we did on the Illustrator before. I'm going to go on Illustrator again. I'm going to select with this tool. I'm going to select this and copy it with Command C on Mac and Control C on Windows. I'm going to go back to this document and I'm going to go at it, paste or you can just do Command V or Control V on Windows. When I paste here, this is asking me if I want to paste it as Smart Object or Pixels. I would go with pixels, not smart object because it's just going to make the Photoshop get really busy and we cannot apply many things on smart object. Let's go with pixel and here. You can stretch this make it be up to you. But for this scenario I'm just going to stick with the size and go click "Okay". Here on the right side as you can see, I have different layers. One is the background, and one layer here is the design we made previously on Illustrator. Basically what I'm going to do now is go and grab a circle shape. Make sure you hold Shift and start drawing a circle. Basically the collides going to apply it on this is gray since this is the default color I have here. But you can change the color by double clicking on this eclipse layer and change the color. But in this case we don't actually really care about what color the shape is because we're just going to drag this design on top of this layer, and then we're going to apply this as a mask above the circuit. You select the Layer 1 and right-click and go Create Clipping Mask. As you can see, the design we did before, the gradient, it's applied above this circle. Everything is fit inside the circle shape. In this case you can select the Layer 1 and drag it around and you can see that that's masked beyond the circle. What I'm going to do next is as I have this, I'm going to just experiment a little bit with it and getting to a point where the colors look nice. I think here we can see most of the colors like the yellow, the orange, the blue, the tokies we did previously. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to try to warp this around. But before we do that, we don't know how it's going to end up. I recommend you do a copy of it. You select the Eclipse Layer and then you press and hold Shift and select also the above layer and from the keyboard you press Command J on Mac and then Control J on Windows. As you can see, that makes that all these are grouped in one layer. Let's say this is the design. What I'm going to do now is duplicate this folder where basically inside are the two designs, you right-click here and you go Duplicate Group. Let's call this Design 2. As you can see we have two folders with designs inside but for this one, the second one I created, I'm just going to right-click and go with Merge Group. Now it's one layer, it's not grouped. You cannot add it that anymore. That's why we created a copy of it so in any case we want to go back, we still have the other folder. I'm just going to press on this ion here so that disappears so only we have this layer. This is something close to the final but what I'm going to show now is a technique called warp. On Mac you press Command T, and you can see a rectangle that is selected. Basically with this what you can do is change dimensions. But, in this case, we want to right-click in here and go to Warp. What warp does is that, it gives you the ability to stretch this around. For example if I drag it and do this, you can see that this object it's stretching. In this case what I do is I go with something like this so we want to replicate what I did before one the bougas posters. In here I think it looks okay. You can play around with this. You can even duplicate this. After you're done with that you just press the Okay sign above so I press that immediately. But, as you can see this is the gradient we created previously we changed the shape of it. What I like usually to apply to this gradient is some noise so they are more smooth, especially when you want to get them printed. You go to Filter, Noise and Add Noise. You can see that some of the noise is applied there but I think this is too much so I'm just going to reduced to maybe 16. I think this is okay. You can play around with this and experiment with it. Now, you can see that some of the noise is applied in the gradient makes it a bit smoother, the transition between one color and the other. Now what I'm going to do is that, I'm going to try to brighten up a little bit the color. Make sure you select this layer and go to Image, Adjustments, and Hue/Saturation. On the saturation value, we just try to increase this a little bit. You can see that the colors keep burning in few places. I like that. I don't like that really smooth transition, but sometimes this gives the effect that the colors are more three-dimensional. Basically I'm going stick with this color here, but you also can play and change the colors with the hue value. But in this case, maybe I'm going to just dig in here, use a bit of the saturation. Again was a bit too much. This is one of the things you can do with switching through Illustrator and working on Photoshop. But usually I don't leave it like this. I try to apply a few more things. Let's do something else to this. We go and create a new layer. You can see by going here, I created a new layer and we go to the brush. On the brush, I put the size with a keyboard, you can just make it bigger. I want to get the eye drop. It's found in here. I want to select maybe this color here. You see that the color that is active now is this orange. Maybe I'm going to get this yellow here. You can see that it's yellow. I go back to the brush and I have a friend size and make sure before applying the brush, you have selected the Layer 2, which is empty, is nothing in there. I'm just going to click in here and go select the Select tool. Now, this is applied on top of this design we did previously. But, this is missing that noise we added before. I'm going to go again to Filter, Noise, Add Noise, and the value is still as we left it before, so I'm just going to stick with it and click "OK". This was the technique I wanted to show you and explain to you how I create these gradients. You can experiment more with this, with the colors, you can go back to Illustrator and do more crazy stuff. I personally really like it like this, but I'm just going to maybe add a few drawings, more like lines with a brush. What I'm going to create with Command Shift and Control Shift N on Windows and Command Shift N on Mac, you can create a new layer I'm going to call this Strokes. I'm going to go and grab the brush tool. You see that this big, I can make it small. You can go here and just make it smaller. I'm going to go maybe with six or five. Let's see. I think it's fine. Now, let's select with I tool on the keyboard, let's select this red color, make sure the stroke layer is selected, and then press the B on keyboard to select the brush and the size is as I left it before. Let's try to draw a few elements. You can go and do many things with this but I'm naive it's like giving in more touch like different feel to the whole design. I'm going to create a new layer Command Shift N. I'm going to get the color. Maybe I'm going to go with something like white and go back with B to the brush, and start applying some white again. I think this is usually what I do and this is something I work on Photoshop on how to create these shapes. You can just play around more with this and right-click Warp and you can make more different shapes. You can play around with this, but I guess the idea of the whole tutorials that I'm going to show you the technique and you can play around with it and create more unique stuff. I want to recommend that you make something similar to this, but I would really like to see you guys getting out of the box and making some unique things with this technique. I think this is all. If you want to save this you go to File, Save As, and then you select what you want to do with it. If it's for web I would recommend PNG or JPEG. PNG is better for quality. But if you want to print it probably you can go with save as Photoshop PDF. Thanks for watching. Hopefully on the next tutorial, maybe in a couple of weeks I'm going to show you how to make a different poster and different technique, maybe someone Cinema 4D. Thanks for watching and taking the class. 6. Finalizing: So this is what we created and this is the final product, something that I saved from Photoshop. As I said before, you can use this technique we used to create this poster, to create many things. You can play around to creates so many nice stuff. I hope that you learned something and I hope that you can try to create something similar to this, or something completely unique by using this technique. Hopefully you're going to use this class to show me what you created. I'm going to be active to give you some guidelines and also to ask questions if you don't understand something. I hope it was easy to follow and I really think that I'm going to keep doing this and make some more classes and show different techniques. So there are a few other posters that I have created on Baugasm project. For example, I use this technique with 3D where I make this cloth affecting cinema 4D and there are some other works. For example, typographic ones similar to these. The one that I think many of you would be interested is how to create something similar to this. In this class, I wanted to show you something with a gradient, similar to these, because many people really were curious and wanted to know the technique, how to create this style. Again, I hope that you understood something. Let me know if you have any questions. I really would like to see some more creative things from all of you. See you on the next class. Bye.