Baugasm™ Series #3 - Create an Abstract Poster with Gradient Shapes

1. Introduction: Hey, hello, my name is Vasjen Katro. I'm a graphic designer. I recently started a project called Baugasm on Instagram, where I design a poster, every day for one year. This class consists of one of the styles that I designed the process. I'm going to guide you through how to create these exact posters. This is the third class skill in skill share. I really want to share some of the techniques and the style I use to create the posters on Instagram and for the Baugasm project. In case you really like this poster, and these abstract shapes, and typography, I would strongly recommend you to enroll in the class. Let's go few of the details on how to create these abstract shapes, play with topography, with a few drawings. We're going to have fun with it. Make sure to enroll below. Let's get started. 2. Illustrator: Hey, welcome back. As I mentioned previously, basically what we're going to do is something similar to this poster. This is a poster I have designed a few months ago. Was a simple idea. I was playing around with a few shapes on the illustrator, and I end up doing something like this. Since then I really like this and I have played around more and more during designing the posters for baugasm. Basically what we're going to do is we're going to build a few shapes, which is simple and nice technique with brushes in Illustrator, and then we're going to explore that and import it on Photoshop. On Photoshop we're going to play around with typography and few of contrast and just play around with it. I mean, I'm going to show you a few techniques and how you can expand that and create something more unique and not just exactly like this. You can play with colors and so on. But first, we need to be bill up and design the shapes on illustrator. I'm just going to go straight forward to illustrator. Here I have a document set up, but you can go to File, New, and for this case I've used a A4 European size. I think this is going to work for me, but you can play around with different sizes depending on why you are creating the shape and the design. But in my case, this just going to work fine. As I'm importing it on Photoshop, I think it's still going to work because this is a vector and we don't care about size, but that's to have some big size because you can have more details why you create the illustration here in Adobe Illustrator. One thing before I continue with is, you have to be in color mode in RGB. Make sure you have that checked and click "OK". I just duplicated the document, but I'm just going to close up this. This is A4 as well. The technique using and building those abstract shapes, it's pretty simple actually. I mean, you can create those by yourself and create different shapes, but one of the techniques I've found out and I was playing around with the Illustrator, is actually building brushes Adobe Illustrator has. You can go on the right side here and choose brushes, but if that's not there, you have to go to Window and go and check brush. What I'm going to do, I'm not going to use the brushes that are already here. You have to go to this small arrow with a burger icon and then go to open branch library, and I'm going to choose artistic, and then artistic watercolor. Here it's going to open a small window with a few of the brushes. Lets expand this so we can see all of them. As you can see these brushes consists of different shapes and it's supposed to be a watercolor replica. You can play around with watercolors in vector. But I've actually found a different use for this. I'm just going to select this one. I'm going to go to brush on the left side. What I'm going to do now, I'm just going to start drawing something in here. As you can see, this already build up a shape depending on the line and stroke I was playing painting basically. But you can try the different brushes. Here is different one. Here is a different one. Here is a different one. But let's try this one. Basically my favorite for this is this and this, these two. Basically is this one and this one. What I'm going to do for this tutorial in this class, I'm just going to play with those two and try to build up something. But before I do that, I need to increase the stroke size. I'm going to go with six, and go select the brush. If you press B on keyboard, you can immediately jump to brush 2. I'm going to try to brush here. I think that's too big, so I'm going to switch back to maybe 3, maybe less than that 2, let's see. I think this is fine. What we're going to do now is just play around and create a few weird and just random shapes. I'm just going to keep doing this. Just don't make big waves like this. It just going to break the shape. I would recommend that you go slightly like one direction lines may be only few of arcs and rounding shapes, but I'm just keep doing. You can even do small ones. You can see what that creates. I'm just going to playing around with this. I don't know where I'm going to end up. I don't know. Well, we're going to end up doing, but hopefully something similar to what I showed to you before. Enough playing with his brush. I'm just going to grab the other one just to create some variety. I'm pressing B again to access brush. I'm just going to play around with these new brush stroke and create a few different shapes. Well, I think it's enough. I wouldn't recommend that you go totally crazy with this as simple as this. I think it's enough shapes in there and enough of elements. As you can see right now, all of these are basic lines. Let's say this is like a line and that's where the brush is applied, but what we want to do is that, we want to get each of these waves in a separate layer and or separate path. The way to do that is to go Object, expand appearance, and boom. All of these are like separate shapes. I'm just going to go back and plays a shape where it was. Press command A or control A on Windows, and select all of them. I'm going to go to Object and expand appearance. As you can see, all of these expanded, so there are no lines anymore. We cannot play anymore with a stroke and with the size of it. This is like a separate element that you can make it bigger or decreases size this way. The trick here is that, after we done this, you can see that all of them have basically same color. It's like the gray and few are darker, and few are lighter, but what we want to do is apply a gradient to all of these. I'm just going to go on the right side on the tools and choose gradient. I'm going to add the gradient. As you can see here now, the gradient is applied and it's from white to black. All those shapes took that gradient that I applied, and this looks really amazing. When I first tried this, I was like, "Oh my God, this is so simple, but you can make so many nice stuff out of it." Let's play around more with colors, I mean, you can even choose to go with black and white, but I usually want to play with more gradients and colors. I'm just going to press again command A and select all of it. I'm going to go and change the white color. You can go to swatches here, or you can add more colors. But in this case, I'm just going to go maybe with something like red, and maybe some blue. Yeah. I think this is something just keep in mind that after we do this, we also going to play around with the colors, increase contrast and stuff on Photoshop when we're going to import this. But as part of illustrator, I think this is what I want to achieve for now. But a couple of other tricks you can do is that, you can even select like these one, and only for this one you can change the color to yellow and play around with fill the shapes and just change colors depending on the mixture. But I mean, it's up to you. You can play around with these. I'm just showing you a technique that you can play around and create your own stuff. I'm just going to switch back to the colors that were. Also you can kind of select all of them and you can go to the Tools here and good and select, for example, the, I don't know, I like to wrinkle tool and just make sure you press Alt and shift, and then you just drag so you make this shape bigger. You can just do this. I don't know what we're going to end up doing, but let's see. Here, this is crazier than that, but to be honest, I don't really like it. You can keep that. I really like these organic shapes, more like topographic mountains and I don't know how they're called like drawings from typography and yeah. On the next video, I'm going to show you how to import this on Photoshop and play around with it at some topography, increased colors may be changed the colors at all and apply a few more effects. See you on the next class. 3. Photoshop Typography: Hey. Welcome back. On the previous video, we played around and we created these on Illustrator. Basically what we need to do now is take this and grab it and import it on Photoshop. You can go Command A or Control A on Windows and then Command C to copy, or you can go to Edit and go Copy. Now, we're going to import this on Photoshop. I'm going to go and open Photoshop. Let's make this big. This is document I usually select a template that I use for all the posters for bogas. Basically, I'm going to import that in here. You can even create a different document with your own size and make it like depending on the need and where you're going to use the design for. But in this case, I'm just going to paste that here. I'm going to go to Edit, Paste, and I'm going to choose, let's go with Smart Object. Here it is. I'm going to press Alt and Shift on keyboard and then drag it and make it bigger like this. Keeping Alt pressed helps you expand this and change the size of this in proportion, and the same time, Shift does that, but Alt keeps it in center. Because if I keep only Shift pressed and then increase the size, this is what happens. But if I press Alt, it all expands in the center of the artwork. I'm just basically going to leave it somewhere here and press Enter. This is a smart object. You can see that is this file in here. What that means is that if I want to change any element in there or change the colors of this, all the information is taken through the file we copied from Illustrator. In case I want to edit this, I just need two double tap here, and click Okay, and here we are, we are back on Illustrator. Here, we can change the colors in case I need to do a different color. If I save this, automatically back on Photoshop, the smart object is going to be updated. But for this case, we played around with that color. I like it, so I'm going to stick with this. But I just pasted it here as a smart object because I thought I will just show you, if you didn't know what a smart object is and how cool that is to play around on Photoshop and Illustrator and jump back through the both programs. The background in here, it's gray. I'm just going to make it a bit lighter, so something like here. Now, this is a smart object. I don't want that because I want to play with saturation, with hue, and add some noise. We could apply smart filters but for this case, I'm just going to rasterize this. Right-click and rasterize, after I do that, I cannot anymore jump back on Illustrator and do the change, so be aware of that. Right now, what I'm thinking is that I'm going to go to Image, Adjustments, and Hue Saturation. I just want to make the colors a bit more bright. I'm just increasing the saturation. Maybe I can play with hue and see what colors we get. You can play around with this until you're happy with it and you can come up with other colors and more unique style, but for this case, I think I'm going to stick with this color here. It's into this purplish, blue, and red and some pink in there, but yeah, I'm just going to stick with this here. Now, what I'm thinking to do is that the background is some solid colors in gray, but let's add a different element. Maybe I'm going to just grab an Ellipse Tool and just create a new layer, Command Shift N, and then just make a circle like this. You can seen that is in different layer. I'm just going to position it in the middle, but maybe I can switch this to white like this. I think that that gives a contrast between the artwork and the background, and it's more dynamic. But what else you can do with this is that you can select the layer where the artwork is, press Command T for free transform on keyboard, and then right-click and go Warp tool, and then you can even play with this like this and create even crazier shapes. Let's see what we did. You can see that Photoshop doesn't handle very well the artwork. It's slow, but sorry about that. Actually, I don't like this, but you can play around with that tool and see what you can do. What I'm going to do now is maybe add some noise to the artwork we imported from Illustrator. I'm going to go to Filter, Noise, Add Noise. Let's see what we do. Here is a small preview over that, but maybe I'm going to switch to seven. Now, I'm going to go again to Image Adjustments, Brightness, and Contrast. You can play with the Contrast. I'm just going to increase a little bit of contrast in here. Let's see what the Brightness does to it. I'm going to switch to zero brightness. Just a little bit of contrast and yes. What else we should add to this? Basically, I was thinking to add some writing, some letters, I don't know. Let's found a word and place it there. I'm just going to go and grab the type tool. Going to click in here, and let's make the size, I don't know, like 48 so we can see what we're typing. Let's write Tutorial. The font for this is Myriad Pro. I'm just going to go with my favorite, Futura, and choose Futura Medium, and change also the color. Let's grab the blue that is in here. That was purple. But like get a darker won. Click "OK." Now if you press Command T is Free Transform, and Shift and Alt, as I said before, you can just make this bigger. But for this case, let's try if we tilt like this, like that, and see what we can achieve. Well, this is totally experimental. I haven't planned this. Even though maybe you're going to see this on the first video on the introduction of this class, but I am ensuring you that this is totally just me playing around and ending up with something that I'm going to like or not. But let's see where we're going to end up doing. If we write Tutorial this way, maybe what we can do after is that we can hide a few of the letters in the background of the artwork we did on Illustrator. I think that would be a cool trick for this tutorial, and we're writing Tutorial there. Let's try that out. The way to do that is that you select the type tool. I mean, the tags, the tutorial, and the layer, it's a type you can edit, but we don't want that for now. I'm just going to go to Rasterize Type. Or maybe let's go undo, and duplicate these Command J just in case to have it there. I'm just going to switch off the view of tutorial 1. Let's call this Rasterized. I don't known if I write that right, but who cares? Rasterized Type. Now, what I want to do is, I want to get a few of these letters on the background of those shapes. The way to do that is that I'm going to go on the Opacity and decrease the opacity somewhere around 60 so I can see what's behind the text. What I'm going do do now is zoom. Let's say the T needs to be on the back of this shape. I'm going to select that one. I'm going to go here, and maybe let's try with the Magic Wand Tool that can select the whole shape. Maybe I increase the Tolerance to 50 and let's see. Maybe a little more. Just be careful with this. You can see that these selected don't select more parts below. Let's keep it like this and I'm going to show you how you can fix it. Right now, I have selected this part of the artwork, but the layer that is selected is the Vector Smart Object, the artwork. Let's rename this. What I want to do is select the Rasterized Type typography, the letters, then the word that we wrote before. Now press Command J on keyboard. Basically what we do have now is this duplicate of the text based on what we selected previously. It's this one. After you do that, the next thing we want to do is, delete the other selection we did, which is below. Let's zoom out, grab the select tool, grab all of these where it's selected, and Delete. Basically this layer contains only this part. What we want to do is delete that part on that shape. You can even mask these, but I don't know, I'm used to do sometime this way, and I'm just going to show a different technique. I'm going to select press Command, on keyboard and click on the "Layer 1," where is the part we want to hide behind the shape. Now we select the Rasterized. You can see that only the artwork, that part, is selected. What I want to do is that, I'm just going to press Delete. You can see that the T is hidden behind the shape. You can keep doing this as much as you want, but I'm just going to try on a different letter. This time I'm going to use a different technique for that. Let's zoom in here and try something with u. I'm going to select the Polygonal Lasso Tool, and I'm just going to go here, here, here, here, select this part. I think this way is quicker to do this trick. Now, I'm just going to go to the Rasterized Layer, delete that. I'm going to go again somewhere here, and maybe I go straightforward here, and delete that part. What we're going to do here is maybe we hide this part. Just make sure that the letter doesn't disappear, all of it because then it's not readable. In this case, I'm just leaving part of the T out. Then at the o, let's take from here, here, here, here. We're going to to delete maybe the whole section in here. Let's delete that. You can seen that is all. Now, let's hide some part below that, which is here. Maybe some part here as well. You don't have to be that precise. These shapes are random, so you can even skip something. With your i here, I'm just going to go and create, follow these paths from the artwork before, and right here, delete that part, and we're almost done. Let's get this part, and maybe until here. Let's delete this part. Then let's do the same thing with the l, and maybe with the l I'm just going to grab this part in here only because we need to see that is an l. Here we go. Let's see what it looks like. Well, you can read what it says. But what we need to do now is increase the opacity of the type. It's just going to go to 100 percent. This already looks pretty cool. Sometimes really like to do is add small elements to these, and add some drawings. But for that, I am going to show you in the next video, and how we can add few more elements to this, and play around with a few other stuff. See you on the next video. 4. Adding Elements: Hey, welcome back. Previously what we did is we tried to mask this type, this word tutorial on the back of the shape. Basically on this video, we're going to try to play around with a few more elements. What I was thinking is that I have this pack of resources that I usually use for myself, where I have drawings and elements that I have done during the months been working with Baugasm. I'm going to go and open the pack. This is the graphic pack. Recently, I also published this in Instagram, and many of you can go and grab it. I'm going to leave a link below. There is a free version of this. There is also a paid version of this, where you have all the elements up to 50 different resources and elements. But you can grab also the free pack and you can play around with elements that are on the free pack. But for this case, I'm going to go to the Drawings. This is the drawings. Basically, these are elements that I have done myself. I'm just going to get something like this maybe, maybe I'm going to get this one. Yeah. Let's open this in Illustrator, and here is the shape we did previously. I'm just going to grab this copy, go back to Photoshop, and paste. Different from the previous one, here I'm going to paste as the shape layer and not as a smart object or pixel, because that way with the shape layer, I'm going to be able to change the color very easy and expand the size as much as I want, because basically it's just going to be a vector. Here is the shape. I'm going to press "Command T" on keyboard, and I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees, and then "Alt Shift" pressed on keyboard as I mentioned before, so I can resize this. Let's see. It looks cool like this, but let's play around with a few more colors to see what we can achieve. Also white doesn't look that bad. Looks like rice. Maybe let's go with a blue like this one. I think I'm going to stick with this color. I'm just here also experimenting as I mentioned before. I don't know what I'm going to end up doing. I like this style right here and maybe let's try to add something else. Let's go to the Resources, find a few more elements. Let's see what the others are. Illustrations. No. By the way, on the resources, you will find also shapes similar to what we did right here in Illustrator. Like this one, for example, let's wait for it to open. For example, this is the same thing we did previously and what this class is all about. But anyway, I'm going to go back to the drawings. Maybe this one is going to work. We're going to apply with different color. I'm just going to grab only tiny part in the middle here. Copy, go back here, paste, make sure you paste as a shape layer. I'm just going to "Command T" for transform, keep "Alt Shift", and let's leave it. This is still color blue, but maybe I'm going to go with the white. I'm going to make it smaller. You can even play with right-click for you to transform, and then warp. You can play with, I don't know, you may click random. I'm just going to switch back to it. So I'm duplicating this, Command J, you see that there is different layer. I'm just drugging this below, rotating this, and just keeping it here. What if we add some more text to this? I don't know. Let's write design. Let's make these all caps. Design, shapes, abstract, skill, share. I'm going to make this text white. Maybe what I'm going to do now is grab this layer, put it on top of all, and I'm just going to select all of it, keep "Alt" pressed, and with the Right Arrow on keyboard, you can expand the letter space. Then the same thing keeping Alt pressed and pressing down, you can expand the line height. Press "Okay". I'm going to bring this in here. Maybe I'm going to divide skill, share with a slash, maybe design, make it like this, shapes somewhere. We can even bring it to a different. I'm just going to make this a little smaller. I'm sorry. I mean, you can play around with keyboard shortcuts as I have mentioned during this class, so I won't mention them all the time. For a few of them, I'm just going straight forward. Sorry if you miss something, but I think it's best to learn few of the shortcuts because it's just going to help you on the way to move faster on Photoshop, and I'm assuming some of you are not that basic in Photoshop. I'm assuming in this class, you know a few things how to move around. I'm going to stick with these letters. Maybe I'm going to just make them with Alt and Right Arrow, expand the letter spacing and the line height little more. I'm just going to press "Okay". I'm going to make the whole Command T for free transform, and then we're going to make all these letters smaller. Let's see if I remove those. We're okay. What if I had more like a line dividing from design but change the color to something more highlighted? Let's say something like yellow or orange. This is okay. Now, you saw how I did that. I just grabbed a Rectangle tool. You can even do it with a Line tool. When I'm grabbing rectangle because I want the same width. I'm just duplicating this, I'm going right here, and then make this smaller duplicate Command J, and I go right here. Let's add a few of these vertical. I'm just going to maybe let something in here. I don't know. Maybe it would just take all of this out. But if you like, you can play around more with it and design and add more elements. Maybe something else I would like to add to this is few elements outside of the whole composition. I'm just going to go "Command Shift N". Creating new layer, I'm going to go and grab the Brush tool. You can see that the size of it is big, so I just want to make it smaller. I'm going to grab the, let's say, I don't know, the orange and yellow we had before, and I'm going to try to draw a few things around just to give it a bit more, I don't know, different elements in there. I know that this might complicate it, but sometimes it's simple is best, but I like to add these elements. Then you can go to this, and I don't know, you can change the color. Maybe red is better, I don't know. Maybe gray or even black. I'm just going to stick with the gray in here. I think it looks pretty cool. You can even creating new layer Command Shift N, I'm just going to increase the size of the brush, and make sure you select the further one. Let's try to paint something maybe with a different color and see how that's going to look like. If I grab this now and then go to overlay, it's gives it more like a highlight in the middle. Command T for free transform, just going to make it this, and I want to just have a part of it like that, maybe duplicate it and rotate like this. I think here just encapsulated inside the letters, but maybe not. Let's see them. I don't know. You can keep them, you cannot, you can play around with this tool. I'm just going to stick with them and keep them here. Maybe we change the color of the background. Maybe we go with something like cream. It's looks cool. But I like these gray, I'm just going to stick with this. Yeah, I think I'm just going to keep it as it is and I think I'm going to call it a finished thing. I didn't know, I could play with this for hours, but I'm just going to let you decide and do whatever you want with this technique. I hope you learned something and let's recap on the next video. 5. Conclusion: Hey, welcome back. We went through a long process on how we can make these parser. I hope you learn something. I know that the technique is pretty simple, but I just want to show you a simple way you can create an abstract shapes in Adobe Illustrator and then how you can play around on Photoshop and create something similar to this. So I'm really looking forward to see what you guys going to do and I'm really encouraging all of you to submit projects, here in skill share, so we can talk about those and I can give you some points and help you out if there is something that, I mean, even for simple feedback, I would be really happy to talk with you and with the projects and artworks that you're going to create. I would totally recommend that you go out on a different step and use this technique to build your own things. Doesn't mean that you have to do exactly what I did here. So really looking forward to see what you're going to end up doing and thanks for following me on this class and I hope to see you very soon on a different tutorial. So until then, have fun and be creative. Bye.