Transcripts
1. Class Preview: In this class will
work together in Adobe Photoshop to create
this dynamic art poster. The main goal for this
project will be to practice adding depth
and your designs, but also to learn
how to show movement by using shapes,
objects, colors. And we will choose our
main focal point and use repetition and
consistent color themes to really bring all
the elements together. We will get a chance to
create 3D shapes and Adobe Illustrator to add an extra polish to
our poster design. This is an intermediate
level class, so familiarity with the layering
system in Photoshop and wearing masks will be very
helpful tackling this project. At the end, you'll be
tasked to complete a student poster design
where you will get a chance to create
your own variation of the class project. My name is Lindsey Marsh and teaching design
theory is my jam. I had been a graphic designer
for over 20 years and a design instructor to over 350,000 graphic design students. I'm excited to be able to
bring this class to you today. This is the perfect class
to take if you're wanting to elevate your
design skills and learn how to use
both movement and depth to create rich
dynamic layouts. So I'll see you in
the first lesson.
2. Getting Started: Let's go ahead and get started. We're gonna do this
in Adobe Photoshop. And just another reminder, this is an intermediate
level projects, so we're going to use lots of layering masks and
lots of layers. It's gonna be a little bit
more on the complex side, but hopefully you
guys are prepared and can handle it
and don't worry, I will move at a steady pace and not too
fast and not too slow. So let's get started
opening up a new document. We're gonna be doing
a poster size. But for this, we're
gonna do a little bit of a smaller poster just to kinda keep file sizes
down because we're gonna be working with a
lot of graphic elements. And so we're just going to
keep it on the smaller side. So let's go ahead and get into Photoshop and open
up a new document. I'm going to stick with a
standard size of 8.5 by 11. But if you wanted to do
like an a for document or an A2 document,
whatever you wanna do. But I'm just going
to stick with an eight-and-a-half by 11 just because I want to have
a tall orientation. Alright, so with this, I really want to talk about a lot of things
with layout design, with how to create a sense of movement and how to
create a sense of depth. And both of those are
really hard to do in static poster design because
it doesn't move at all. But you have to
create this sense of movement throughout a design. And so that's what
we're gonna do with angles and curves and layering. And we're going to make a very active poster to create a lot of positive design tension
and create something really colorful and awesome. So first of all, we need a
focal point, a subject matter. So you can go on pexels.com and just type in dance movement. You can go on other websites
like Pixabay and just find a and locate somebody
that has movement. And I suggest finding
somebody where you have the whole person shown. You don't have anything
cropped at the waist, just get the entire person they're going to be
our focal point. We're going to build
all of our elements around this person. And I found this person and
what I liked about her. She had a nice
smile on her face. I wanted this to be
fun and energetic, but also how her
arms go diagonal. And I think diagonal and having things away from the horizon are just straight vertical
will really help add movement and a
sense of dynamic pop. So I'm gonna go
with this person, but you can have someone
who is in the air dancing, jumping whatever you
wanna do for yours. So now that we have our photo, Let's go ahead and
isolate the woman completely from the background. So I'm just going to
select the object and do a quick Select Subject. And I, for this project, I did about ten of these, ten different people dancing and moving and tried to
find the right one. And when I did the object, I did the select object tool. Sometimes it did a good job, and this one it did
an excellent job. But a lot of times
you have to zoom in and make better selections. So let's go ahead and add a go down here and adding
layering mask. So I just master. Now I'm just going to
copy her or you can drag and then paste
her into the document. So we want to make sure
that it's a smart object. So I'm just right-clicking
and just converting it to a smart object so we can scale
her down to where we need. So we need to figure out how, what's gonna be our blocking, what's gonna be our layout. So we don't want to make
her too big or too small. So let's kinda make her
right there in the middle. We can always make her
bigger or smaller. But I want to have some
background elements, maybe some 3D objects that are around her
that are moving, kind of creating that
sense of movement. So I don't want to make her so big that we don't have room for some of these
other 3D elements. So one thing I usually like to do when I have lots
of pop of color, I want to just apply a black
and white filter to her. And it kinda takes everything to black and white
and really allows the color to show off
on the other elements. So I'm just gonna make
her black and white. I can always change that if
I want to in the future, gonna go up to image adjustments and just do a black
and white filter. And I might need to
adjust it because she she's looking a little dark. So I just wanted to just kind of lighten that a little
bit so she doesn't get sometimes you
have to tweak this and rarely does it do
it perfect by default. So now we have to think of
blocking and shape and layout. So what shape? Usually putting
something that really helped that focal
point be grounded. And you could do this in a
lot of ways with shapes and putting a shape in
the background to ground the focal point. Because if I were
to start putting all these objects around her, she could easily get
lost if there wasn't another graphical element to
draw your eye toward her. And what, we're gonna
do that with a shape. So we can do that with a
lot of different shapes. Let's try just the Ellipse tool. And let's add a
super pop of color. And usually something
that's really attention-grabbing is kind
of a brighter yellow, but I'm going to put just a
tiny bit of orange in there just to not make it like
that greenish yellow. Just like that, and just
bring it behind her. So already you are
seeing your eye really be drawn to her and you don't want that
shape to overpower her. So it's always a
balance of sizing. So you want to get there right. Sizing and I like
the idea with layers is to have a little bit of herself popping
outside of the shape. So in this case, her hands and her legs are popping
out of the shape. It's not completely
encapsulating her shape matters. You could do all sorts of
different shapes with this, we can even go into Adobe
Illustrator and create a custom shape using
the curvature tool. So we can go into
Adobe Illustrator. I'm just going to get
the ellipse tool. And let's go ahead and
make that a solid color. Let's make it similar to
the color we had earlier. And what we could do is I
can get the curvature tool and create this abstract shape. And so you don't have to use
just straight up circles. You can do all sorts
of interesting shapes. And you can just toggle between these two to find the right one. So that adds a lot more
movement than just a circle. A circle is very centering
and this kind of oblong abstract shape
gives more flow as well. But I want to do something that really compliments her movement. And her movement is very
diagonal and sharp. So she has her arms
and they're aligned. What is a good shape that
I think would really help to make this really pop. And I'm thinking triangle, triangle just kinda gets
into my head at the moment. So we're going to
create a triangle. We're gonna make it the
same color that we had. We already have it
saved in our swatches. And what I wanna do, I'm
trying with this project, I'm trying to create
as much movement and layering as possible. That's just the goal for this particular project is movement. So instead of keeping the triangle to
straight up and down, we're going to need
to spin this thing. So let's go ahead
and spin and see, and see how our
arms are going out. Let I wonder if we can align, not perfectly aligned, but kinda go with the flow of design. So the flow is this
diagonal shapes. So let's do the triangle
and a similar manner. You can see already switching to the triangle
instead of the circle, it just flows really
well together. They're not fighting each other. They kinda work a little
bit better together. So you can use whatever shape you want for your
subject matter. As you can see, lots of
different shapes work well, but I'm just trying to create the most dynamic sense
of movement I can. We have some movement going on? We need to make sure we add
depth because movement in depth or two goals
for this design. So how can we add depth? We can add a simple drop shadow to give her placement
with the triangle. It's not just a
floating triangle, but she exists with
angle and a 3D space. So there's gonna be some kind of shadowing That's happening
with this to create depth, we can hand paint a shadow which I've taught and
some other lessons, but we're gonna do
it right here today. Or you can just double-click the layer and just
do a drop shadow. But what I find with these, it's very limited, very
generic. Not a fan. I really love hand painting
shadows because you can add curvatures and your shadows
and bending and your shadows, instead of just a perfect, everything is casted
the same distance. So let's create a
layer underneath. And we're going to name
this shadow layer. And we're going to
be at the point, we're gonna have tons of layers. By the end of this, I'm just going to delete
anything that is not necessary and
name those layers. And if I don't name a layer, I apologize because it gets, it's going to be intense. So here's shadow. So I'm just going to
get the brush tool and I'm going to do
a soft round brush. And what I really want to do
is hand paint those shadows. And I want it to be
a rather big brush. Let's try out 500 pixels. And I want to paint
this on at 50% opacity. And the reason for
that is I want shadows are complicated things. Rarely do they just cast at
one strength the whole way, like it would when you
do a Layer Style words generically does it. A real realistic drop shadow will have layers of intensity. So you have intensity
that's closer to the subject matter and
then it gets faded out as it moves away from
the subject matter, especially when you have
a soft light source. So understanding shadows and how they work are really critical. So I'm going to get black and I'm going to show
you what I mean. So I'm gonna go ahead. I have 50% opacity here. So as I keep painting
over the layers, I can make it darker. So I'm going to start
off large and just paint where I think the shadows
would be cast with her. And just a tiny bit on the
other side just to get her grounded. That's it. Then we're going to
make it smaller. And we're gonna go a
little bit closer to her. So this will be more of the
darker side of the shadow, kind of layering our shadows and making it whatever
it's closer to her, a little bit darker and
it looks like a mess now, but we're going to be
erasing some of this later. So we can go back
through, maybe even lower the opacity some
more, make it bigger. We're just going back
and we're layering the shadow where we think it would be
and it can go along with their body as well. So you just make it curvier. It all really depends on the
light source and I can spend an entire hour just
talking about shadowing. Let's instead just erasing this. We can easily just erase this top shadow
that we don't need. I'm going to make it
non-destructive and I'm just going to
add a layer mask. And as you know,
with layering mass, if you paint with black, it will make it disappear. If you paint with white
on the layer mask, it'll make it show up. We're gonna be doing a
lot of layering mass. So I'm going to paint
with black with the soft round brush tool on my layer mask, which
is right here. And I'm just going to go ahead
and delete and a mixture. I have full strength on this. Just going back and just
fine tuning the shadows. Like I don't really
need it down here because I'm casting
light on the triangle. But when you get back here,
there's gonna be depth. The background is
going to be way behind her in the 3D space, so we don't need shadowing
right here quite yet. Now I can go back and this is all just little small things. This is when a way com tablet is really helpful because
you can go in, I'm just have the layering mask and I just have black
and I'm just kinda slowly erasing it at a light opacity just to make it softer
and more realistic. Now it feels like she's
there on the triangle. So we need to add
layering to the triangle. We have shadows on her, but we need to add
shadows on the triangle. We really want to
create a sense of place for the triangle because right now it's just floating
on a white background. Let's go ahead and
create a background. So what I'm gonna do
is I'm just to create a simple backgrounds
can be gray. It's gonna be very light gray. So I'm just gonna
do the background. And I'm going to
do a light gray. This will just help the
colors pop a little bit. And I could just do something as simple as the paint bucket tool. And I'm going to bring that all the way down to the bottom. Now we want to create that
sense of depth again. So let's go ahead and add
another layer and put it behind the triangle so we can paint behind and we're going to paint on some shadows using
the brush tool, soft round brush tool. Let's make it nice and big. And you want to create shadows that are going to
show some distance. I want to create lots of depth. So you're gonna put more distance and your
shadows are going to be longer and bigger if you're trying to
create lots of depth. So it's not gonna be super
close to the object. If I want it to be super close, I would just be taking a very small brush and
making it look closer. Let me go ahead and get black. Change the opacity. So it would just be
a very tight shadow. We want very loose long shadows. So let's make it nice and big. Maybe even, gosh,
1,400 pixels, maybe. I have my opacity
set to lighter. I'm just going to click.
And of course you see her shadows on the
right side of her. So we don't want to
draw shadows here that wouldn't make any sense
with the lighting source. So if the lighting
sources coming here, let's go ahead and
do it to the right. I'm just going to click and
just drag up maybe just once or twice doesn't
take a whole lot, but it just adds a little
more depth and click a little bit closer to create
those deeper shadows. If you ever think
it's too intense, you got it on its own layer. So you can just
reduce the opacity. So we already starting to see
a little bit of depth here. What I wanna do is
with the background. And a lot of designers do this to add a little bit of detail. So you could do that
by going up a filter and go to add noise,
Noise, Add Noise. And this effect can really
look awful if you do too much. So I only do just a little bit. Maybe seven, 7% is all you need. Because if you do too much, it starts to look very static. And also sometimes if
you click monochromatic, so let's say I don't have
monochromatic selected and I do a lot almost looks like TV static has all
this color to it, but when you do monochromatic, it takes that color away. It makes it look less
like a TV static. So let's go ahead and
go back to seven. So clear, I'm going to do
that to the triangle filter, add noise and just
adds that texturing. And you see a lot
of artists do this. A lot of illustrators do
this with a little bit of texture, adds some richness. So we also need to make
sure that her feet have a place because right
now she is floating. She has a sense of place
with the triangle. The triangle has a sense of
place with the background. But what about her poor feet? She is floating. So we're going to once again
need to create a new layer. We're going to have to
title this foot shadow or whatever you want to call it. Let's do the same thing. And we're going to have to do
a lot shorter of a shadow. And just we're gonna just add a little place for her feet. So it's going to kind of at
the shadows to the right. Let's kinda make
a right dominant. And sometimes I just
click, click, click. It's hard, hard to get
shadows right sometimes. So that at least
gives her a sense of place on the ground. Now, we're gonna be
ready to add lots of really neat elements to
really make this pop.
3. Creating 3D Shapes : We're looking for a
very dynamic piece that has a pop of color, a pop of movement, and a pop of depth. We're really trying to
be more dramatic here. We need to have
dramatic contrast in colors on the color wheel. And what is the color that's
super high contrast with yellow on the color wheel
is going to be purple. So that purple is going to
pair so well with a yellow, It's going to feel
like they belong together because it's
a color harmony. So it makes a lot of sense
to maybe work with purple. And of course, at the very end, we can tweak color and see what other color
combinations may work. So This dress, it's
a black dress, but right now we
really want color. Let's change the
color of the dress. So I have her selected. We need to isolate
just her dress. So let's see if we can
cheat a little bit and do the objects selection
tool and just see how well it automatically
exit for us. Thank goodness for
these updates and tools. Of course,
it's not perfect. So I'm going to
have to go in with the Magnetic Lasso Tool and
I'm going to be subtracting. I'm just going to
subtract all of this selection and we do not want to select
her hair in this. We're going to be
very precise because we're gonna be changing
lots of colors here and we can't
have anything that's not actually a part
of the dress. Okay. If I feel like I got her
dress pretty well selected, what I'm gonna do is I'm going
to create a copy of this. I'm just going to copy. I'm going to do some shortcuts, but let me do it the long way. I'm going to just copy this
layer and paste it in place. It's going to paste it
right on top of it. And this is gonna
be purple dress. And there we have it completely
isolated from the woman. So now we need, it's really hard to
add color to black. So we're gonna do
a little trick to help change the black color. So if I go up to Image
Adjustments and humans saturation and I tried
to change her color. You're not going to see it because there's no color there. There's no color to
change, it's just black. We're going to have
to change that. So we're going to have to
go to Image Adjustments. And this is a little
trick I discovered. We're going to have to
go to selective color, which I use a lot
in previous lessons and previous beginner
level courses. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go down to blacks. So we're going to try to
select, That's the only thing here was black and
maybe some white. We're going to go to black. So we're going to try to
add just enough color, doesn't matter what color, as long as it changes color. So try to get where
it's a color. So it's green, so we're
going to click Okay, now we have color. So when we go to the
hue saturation portion, It's got color now
that we can change the hue of that green to
whatever color we want. So you can see how
it can change. So just a little tweak to
kinda give it a little color. So then now you can
go into the hue and saturation and be able
to have an effect. So let's try to find a nice
purple color that looks nice. Let's go on the other end. Probably, probably at
the very end here. That looks great. Add
a little saturation while we're here and click Okay. Of course we can always
do some adjustments. We can go to exposure if we
really want to bring out those shadows a little bit
more so they're not so dark. They're just going to up the
exposure just a tiny bit. You can really overdo exposure. We can go to the left
of gamma correction. That's really going to
bring out those shadows. So that hurt. Her dress is not
so dark and drab. So we added lots of
color very simply. So now I can easily
toggle that on and off if I want to
change the color. Super easy. So if I ever decide,
Hey, I don't know, I'm going to do orange and blue. It's gonna be really easy
to change all that and then change the color of
your rectangle right here. Let's surround her with some
kind of design element to really help draw the background and the foreground together. Because right now it's just
her and a yellow triangle. Let's add some dimension and just something to look at,
something to kind of go. Okay, that's really
complimentary of the triangle shapes
and everything like that. So what I'm gonna do is we're going to do a little
bit of 3D work in Adobe Illustrator because I love illustrators, new 3D tools. We're going to pop
into Illustrator. And we're going to
create some shapes. And create, make a
little bit of a 3D. What I like about 3D
objects is they're going to add the highlights and
shadows perfectly. Then you can bring it into Photoshop and really
bring them out. It just adds a really nice
polished look to designs. Instead of just doing flat. Of course, you could do flat shapes and still make it work. But we want depth. We went shadows, highlights,
distance, and movement. I really think 3D shapes could
help really make this look a little bit more polished
than just flat, simple shapes. We wouldn't let say
Swiss design style. Let's create some shapes. What indicates movement,
what gives the eye, what draws the eye places? And that is arrows. Every time we look at an arrow, you're always gonna
be looking toward whatever that arrow is pointing. So I figured that would be a really good selection as
something to put around the woman to indicate that sense of movement
and direction. Okay, So let's create an arrow. That's pretty easy. And Adobe Illustrator, Let's go ahead and
make this black for now to make it a nice
big stroke and around, we're just rounding
the corners here. This is intermediate level, so hopefully you guys
have already done this in the first masterclass or
other lessons of mine. We're just gonna
do a simple arrow. Put this together. Just like that. Maybe we'll make sure
that's centered. Just do a center alignment. So I'm going to group these
together because when you do 3D objects in Adobe Illustrator, if you don't group
them, they'll do them as separate 3D objects. So we're going to
group them and go to Effect 3D materials
Extrude and Bevel. We might want to make
this a different color just so we can see
what's going on. So let's make it blue for
right now. There we go. So now we can take this and let's go get the
center point here. And we can just move this
around however we'd like. So let's kind of what we
wanna do is we want to get, we want to play with
that sense of direction. So we have this diagonal
kind of look to it. So let's kinda keep that
going with our arms. So let's do it with
along with her arms. So let's go, let's point the
arrow in that direction, which is going to be
two going to the right. Like this. And we want
to have a little depth. So let's show the distance
there by tilting it up. So let's bring this forward. It's kinda flat on the top. So let's add a bevel. And I love these new this, this is probably added
about two years ago. And I'm just really
loving the new tools. So I thought keeping
with round would be nice, nice and round. Or there's lots of neat
things you can do with this. So if I do step, I do repeat. So it's good to
repeat that shape. Many times you can create some really detailed 3D objects. But let's stick with
nice around bevel. And let's make it higher. So we want to add a little bit more height to the bevel and a
little more width. And it's really a chunky arrow. So one way to change that
as reduced the depth. So up here in depth,
we can reduce that. Of course, it's really small, so it might not be able
to let me drag it yet. Well, we're just going to
make it a little bit smaller, just like we don't want
it to be so chunky that can't really
see the front of it. So let's go to materials. So we're gonna go to the
materials object right here. It's just on the default,
everything's on default, on the whites hidden so far below because
it's so important. Roughness this, so this is how light is bouncing
off the 3D object. We want to have a low roughness. So I want it to be shiny. And a little bit of metallic and metallic is really good to add. Of course, you could do
so much metallic that it reflects all the light
and it looks dark. But the metallic will
give you that little bit of a nice gloss. So play around with the
roughness and metallic. I was just looking for
a little bit of gloss. Let's go to lighting. We could change the
rotation of the light. How, where do we want the
light to bounce off of? And we kinda have
a light source on our picture on the
top coming down. Because you want to be, you don't want to have too much gloss that you can't really see the detail that
might not work out. So you kinda have it where
it's shining on there, but it's not as intense where it takes away
from the object. So once again, you're
just going to have to tweak these things until
you're happy with it. We can always add more
contrast in Photoshop, so don't worry if
it doesn't feel like it has enough contrast. You can do a lot of similar
post editing in Photoshop. Okay, so what you could
do up here, and this, this could be an entirely
new section of the course, but you can actually
render with ray tracing. So let's render with ray
tracing what that's gonna do, it's gonna take its time and
make it a higher-quality. So you're just gonna
go down to the drop-down and go mediums. So it's going to render it. Let's go to really polish it up. That's all I'm doing is doing
medium and clicking render. And it's going to
kill your computer. Although with the small arrow, it's not actually so bad. But every time you
make a change with this ray tracing on
it, re-renders it. So sometimes you gotta get
everything nice and then when you're ready to render,
you can render it. When you're happy
with your arrow, you can just drag it
right on into Photoshop. And you have your arrow. We want to make it big
enough to make an impact. And if you don't
like how it looks, you want to add more contrast. You can go to hue
and saturation, or you can do brightness and contrast and adjust it to add more depth or whatever
you want to add.
4. Arranging Our Shapes : So we have our arrow. I went back and tweaked
it just a tiny bit. But now we need to really
think about coloring. We did this super bright yellow just because it was
the brightest color. We just started a
blank document. It's really the first
color we picked, but now that we have
this deep purple, Let's tweak this triangle
just a little bit. Let's just make sure
it's a smart object. I don't know how it got. I think when I added the grain, it converted it
at rasterized it. So I'm just right-clicking, just making it a smart object. And so now I can do
hue and saturation. I just want to tweak
this a little bit. What I wanna do is I want to add a little more warmth to it. So I want to add a
little more orange. I don't want to make it orange, but just a little bit more orange to help
complement the purple. I'm just going to make
it ever so slightly. Orange. Click, Okay, so now we
have this arrow, but what, how many do we put around
and how big do we make them, and what color do we make them? So let's take a, let's really think
about our color palette before we move forward. So we have these high
contrast colors like this, orange, really yellow,
orange and this purple. What if we made, let's go ahead and do hue
saturation on this arrow. So there's a lot of
colors we can make this. And if you make them
too close to that, as green as Really, it concerns me is the green and the purple
and the orange. They're not really complementing
each other very well. So you just have to find a color that's going
to complement well. And what compliments well is analogous colors which are close together on
the color wheel. So what we can do
instead of making it the same exact
shape of the triangle, because the arrows
will just disappear and they'll just be
these leftover elements. As we can make it
slightly darker or lighter to have more
of an analogous color. So I'm just making
it slightly darker. So the arrow pops out at
you beyond the triangle, but it complements the
color of the triangle. We don't have ten different
colors going on here. We're trying to be thematic
with our color choices. So that's why I've decided
to go with a dark orange. Now, let's have a, what we wanna do is we want
to duplicate this layer. So I'm just going to
duplicate the layer. And also before I
duplicate the layer, just for the cleanliness
of my design file, I need to name this arrow. So now it's gonna be really, Let's do orange arrow. When we duplicate it, it's
already named for us. So I'm just going to
duplicate the layer, just gonna do a copy and paste. So now we need to think
about design repetition. Repetition and design
is so important because you're able to kind
of throughout the piece, see similar objects
and connect them all together and having a
sense of repetition. That's the key word there. So we want to
repeat these arrows without being overwhelming. So we want to make these different sizes
because once again, we want to add depth,
depth and motion. Depth and motion as the two
things we're looking for. So adding depth, we want to make these different
sizes so they look like they exist on different
planes in the 3D space. Meaning this one is really large and this one
is really small. And they, they look like
they're just different distance from my site, my eyesight. So let's take this and make
it a little bit bigger. And so now we have to figure
out where to place this. If we want to have a sense
of layering and depth, we want to have them
crossover other objects. So instead of having
them all exists nicely like put like right here. If we have it cross
over the arrow, it adds depth
because now you have the object going behind
or past a certain object. So what we're gonna
do is we're to sprinkle a few of these about. We're gonna make some smaller. And the smaller ones are probably going
to exist behind her. If you really think
about how all of these layers are really
existing in the 3D space. The smaller ones are
gonna be further back. So they're probably gonna
be behind the woman. So we're just going to drag
this behind the woman. What I'm gonna do is
I'm going to bring my layer panel out so you can
see it a little bit better. Okay, so it's gonna
probably going to be behind the woman right here. But I wanted to also
cross over here. Let's zoom in so I can show you all these little small
design decisions matter. So she's behind the woman, but also like having it crossed over the shape of the
triangle to add depth. So it's crossing over
an object right here. And it's also going behind the woman because it's smaller. Let's do one more. We don't
want to do too many of these. We don't want to
overwhelm with arrows. Let's bring this on top. This is when you're
layering system, it starts to get a little busy. So here's what we wanna do. We wanna make one
that's pretty big. And if we had it like this, and we kept it
exactly how it is, kind of really becomes
the focal point. And we don't want this to
take away from the woman, the woman and the triangle or the focal point
of this piece. The arrows are
complimentary of the piece, but they're not, they're
not the main attraction. So we want to be able
to also create depth. So let's blur this a little
bit so it takes away from the strength of the arrow and make sure it makes the focal
point the focal point. So what we're gonna
do is we're do a Gaussian blur on this. So we're gonna go
up to Filter Blur. Just do a simple
Gaussian blur to this. And we want to make it
really blurry because it's really the front of the piece. And we don't want it
too much close to who. We want it as a background
element like this. Or we can have it up at the top. And it creates that
sense of depth. We also want to have balance
with everything we do. We want to make
sure we don't have things heavily
weighted on one side. So I don't want to have three
arrows over here and one arrow over there because
it's not, it's not balanced. You need to have okay, we have one here and your eye darts to the left or to the
right darts to the left kinda have
this centering, this balance that happens. And that's kinda what helps you determine where I
placed the arrows. And that's going to be balanced. So it's just trying
to figure out all these little small
design decisions. Five to 10 min to just rearrange the arrows
to make sure that we have some nice
layering opportunities with some behind her son
behind the triangle. So I'm in front of the triangle, just having a sense of balance. My plan for this is not
just to have 50 arrows, but to have something
different than just arrows, to maybe have another
complimentary shape. So perhaps, let's bring out
the theme of the triangle. We have the triangle, it's a very centered
part of the piece. Let's incorporate
that triangle and another additional shape that we can incorporate with the arrows. Let's go back into
Adobe Illustrator. This goes back to repetition. We're trying to repeat
similar objects to create a thematic presence in the design, which is
really important. That theme really ties
everything together. So let's just create
a simple triangle. And let's make it 3D
effect, Extrude and Bevel. Let's kinda do a similar angle. We can always go back
to this original shape and find out what the
angle was on this. Alright, so let's get
the right angle here. Kinda match what we had before. We want everything to
go in the same flow. That will help stay with
the flow of design. Let's not make it so deep. Let's make it a little
bit more shallow. And let's do some beveling. Wants to keep it around bevels. I'm just reducing
the size of it. And we want to do
the repeat this time because I think
that's such a rich effect, adds lots of texturing to it. So what I wanna do
is I've created, I think for maybe
let's do three. I don't want to do too many
where you lose the details. Let's do three and let's create a little more
space between them. And what I wanna do is I want to round these sharp corners. Just think it'd
be kind of a more polished looking 3D object if it had some rounded corners. So I'm going to take the
direct selection tool and this is what's cool about the 3D elements in Illustrator as you
can live, edit them. I'm just going to go and
create rounded edges. Kinda helps to keep it a little bit more polished looking. Let's go to Materials and make sure we reduce
the roughness. Maybe increase a
little metallic so we can have a nice
little shine to it. We can change our lighting,
get the right lighting. There we go. And
then we can also make sure we do ray
tracing to give it that nice rendered look and
maybe change the depth on it, just make it a little
bit more shallow. We don't want to have
this big chunky object. We want to have it be nice
and simple just like this. So we can drag that
into Photoshop. And I went ahead
and applied hue and saturation to match the orange. So now we have two
elements here. We have these arrows and we have these little
triangle thing. So now here's where it does get a little bit
more complicated. How do we balance
all of these out and integrate both of these without having it be unbalanced. Like too many triangles are too many triangles
on the left side or too many on the right side. But we're gonna do
the same thing. We're going to try to
find little spaces and opportunities to integrate these with the arrows and have everything
seemed balanced. This is the tricky part because you don't want
to overwhelm with too many objects which
were starting to do. But one way to
balance this out is I have this really
close arrow object. We can also have a really
close triangle object down here to balance
out the design. So that's exactly
what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go and
do a Gaussian blur on this bottom-right triangle. There we go. Make sure that goes
over that shape as much overlapping we can
do over shapes, the better.
5. Creating Depth: I feel like I have enough
triangles and arrows and I feel like I'm happy with the
layering and the placement. But now we have some
overwhelming colors happening now and we
need to tweak it. We have too much
of the same color, we have lots of orange elements. It's very busy looking. One way to change
that is with color. So we're going to
select a few of these arrows and triangles
and do a balance of having some of them be orange
and some of them bring out the other dominant color in
this, and that's the purple. So I'm just gonna do simple hue and saturation for some of these and try to match
that purple color. Okay, great. So now it's still seems
a little bit busy, but I like the idea of
having the dual colors. The theme is really
starting to come together. But I think we need to
add something else. And to create depth that's put something behind the woman. But in front of the triangle, Let's add another layer
of fun and excitement. We kinda have a lot going on here and I want to
have something to help really tie it all together to make it
a super fun piece. So what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna go over to Pexels and I'm going to find something with powder
or smoke or fire, or probably going to go in the powder direction to have something look like
it's exploding. Like you see those color
battles where there's, they're just throwing that
chalk, that colored chalk. So let me go locate
an image now. I couldn't find what I
want it on pexels.com, but I did go to Adobe Stock. If you go to Adobe Stock
and you search for free, they actually have
some free photos that you can use in
the Adobe stock. You don't have to be
in Adobe subscriber to be able to get the free ones? I don't believe so. I have to double-check on
that, but it just went too. Just went to Adobe Stock, typed in free than
just typed in dust. And I was able to find one. I'll have to double-check
to see if you need a subscription. I'm logged in. So I'm wondering
if you need to be logged in to get the free, but if you don't
have to be a paying premium stock member to get it. Okay, so I have
this and this one's going to be a little
bit tricky to isolate. So it has this black background and if you do any kind of
objects selection tool, it's going to fail
miserably because there's so many little details that
it's going to leave out. So we're going to
have to do some photo editing tricks to get this ready to isolate from
the black background. If I were just to
do a blending mode and blend it over the object, I wouldn't get a sense
that the photo is actually they're just
slightly transparent. So I'm not looking to just do a quick blending mode either. Let's cut this object out and get the blackout
as best as we can. So what I wanna do is go to Select and go down
to Color Range. Select color range, since
this is just black, I could select black. Notice how it just selects
all the black right here. And what we wanna
do is we can adjust the fuzziness to get details
or to not get details. And let's just go ahead
and click Okay and see how it selects it. So you can also invert it. You want to invert
your selection. So white would be
what it selects and black would be what it doesn't
select. It can invert it. So now I just clicked on the black to select the black and then I
inverted that selection. So now we're selecting
everything that's not black. So let's click on Okay
and see how it does. And it left out a lot here. So we can tell if we go down and do a
layering mask on this, you can see it's selection. Actually that's really good.
That's actually really good. Maybe the selection to preview wasn't as good as the actual. I thought I think
that's excellent. Let's go ahead and just
copy and bring that over. To this. What we wanna do is we don't
want this to overwhelm. This is not the focal point. This is a decorative detail. So we don't want to make
it be overwhelming. So let's make it smaller. And let's bring this
behind the woman. This is really going
to help us with our color theme
because it's gonna be able to add a lot
of color for us. So let's make it smaller.
We just want it to be some small details
that are coming behind her and instantly it feels like that
gap is filled in. Anybody know, the colors are
a little jarring right now. It kinda helps take
the busy-ness of the arrows and helps
complement that as well. We want to make this
a nice deep rich purple and we might want
to turn this to get, we want to take that
blew out of there because right now
blue is not working, but Purple might work well. So what we need to do
is make this a rich, saturated purple to
complement or dress. So what we're gonna do
is I'm going to go up to adjustments and I'm
going to do a gradient map. Okay, So what we're gonna do, keep that black,
keep the shadows, blacks, change this to purple. All the highlights are
now going to be purple. We might need to slide this, so that's some of the
mid tones become purple. We don't want this to be
a dark blob behind her. We want this to be a very
highly saturated purple. We might need to even add a lighter shade,
maybe even white. So you're just
gonna have to slide this around and figure out what result you want to have. This can even be a deep purple. So there isn't. But there's all purple but
deep, deep, dark purple. Great. So we're
going to click Okay. What would be really
need is to somehow incorporate orange and
this explosion too. So I'm going to copy and paste. I have another version of this. I'm going to turn
it, so it's not an exact copy. Here's
what I'm gonna do. I just want I want
this to be orange. So I'm going to go up and do a, make sure that's a smart layer. And let's go up and add a
gradient map to this one. And let's do orange. Instead.
We're going to do orange. Now we have orange, but it's taken away
from the purple. So what I'm gonna do,
I just want orange to kinda be in small elements. I'm going to add a layer mask. It's going to paint
and delete with black. Nice soft round brush, nice enlarge one, just
deleting with black. Make sure I have 100% opacity. Just deleting all
this stuff I don't need just keeping a little orange where
I want to have it. Just a little pop orange and we can even go to hue and saturate. Well, let's see, Let's
go back to Gradient Map. Well, here we go. I want a little bit deeper,
orange. There we go. That's going to really help
pop out against the purple. We're getting there. But I think we need to add
our typography elements very soon or we're going
to not be able to have a proper place for it. So let's add our
typography elements and then we can adjust any of our elements or 3D elements
around the topography. And really just kinda block
this out and we start getting to the background
and some final elements.
6. Adding Typography : Now we need our
typography choice. For that, we're just going
to have a very simple phrase in it to win. It could be, it, you don't
have to use that phrase is something that was
short and easy to use. You don't want to have
a lot of words on this one. There's
a lot going on. So it's really
simple, short phrase. I picked out this typeface and it's a nice
condensed typeface. So it's got these nice
tall condensed letters. And I thought that
would be really good in such a tight space. So let's go ahead and
make this. Right now. Let's just make it
white so we can see it, but we're gonna be
changing some things. So let's go ahead and
put our whole headline together and then we'll figure
out the rest from there. So let's do n in it to
win it or in it to win. It's trying to
think of something that we can use it to win. So we have four
different words here. What are ways that we can maybe condense or pack in
a couple of these, what I notice, and this is
how my design brain works, is I noticed these are
very similar widths. So what if we were
to stack these two? It should probably still be readable because it's
a very popular phrase. And we can stack those
two so that now we have less horizontal space that we're going to have to
use for this headline. And I think it reads, okay, you always got to make
sure it reads okay, in it to win. I
think that works. So let's go ahead
and make it smaller. Let's go ahead and get
the sizing we need here. We do not ever want to
overpower focal point, but this is kind of part
of the focal point. You have some topography,
have the woman, the triangle that's all kind of centered here
in the beginning. And you notice that once
I added the topography, some of the arrows and
the other 3D objects, it just seems a little
bit less busy because those words really center everything, really kinda anchor. So that's kinda planned
on the words being here, whatever, whichever works
for you in this case, I just decided to
do the topography after the 3D elements
so I can see what typography I needed to use that complemented
the 3D objects. But whatever works for you, we want to do movement,
movement and depth. So how can we make this
not moving much at all. It's nice and stable. It adds stability to the
design being horizontal. But what, but that's
not the point of this project is point is to maximize depth and
maximize movement. So let's add movement
to the topography. We can select all
the typography. I want to share it. I just want to add a diagonal
movement to the typography. So I'm gonna go up to edit, Transform and we're
gonna go to skew. We're going to skew
the topography here. And we want to go with
the movement of her arms, with the movement
of the triangle. So let's just move it up. Just like this, this
upward movement. We want to go with
the flow of design. And there we go, just
adds a little bit of a dynamic pop to it. This is more detailed
than I would normally have in InDesign, but I want to make sure
everything matches that detail. I just want to do some
stylistic things. Maybe change some of the color and maybe
add something to it. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make this black. Here's what I'm gonna
do. I'm just copying and pasting another version of this n. And I'm going to make it
a stroke really quickly. So I'm gonna go up here. I'm going to add a string,
a takeaway color overlay. I'm going to add a stroke. I just want to have a white stroke and I want
to take away the fill. I talk about this in
my first masterclass. We do it a few times. We're
going to reduce the fill. And I'm just gonna do a stroke
and I want to add, this, just adds detail and
it's a stylistic choice. It's not a, not anything
you have to do. It just adds a little bit of a more modern appearance
to the topography. And we want to add
layers here, right? So what if, what if we had part of the eye or the
end go behind the woman? We can do that. We could do that. So what we're gonna do
is we're going to add a layer mass to the black in it. Let's go find the black end. There's the black end and
you're going to have to start naming these things or you're
gonna get completely lost. And then this is the white
light in outline. Black in. And we're going to
add a layer mask. And I'm just going to
take the brush tool and I'm going to paint
away some of this. We want her arm to
kinda go over the n. We do like an actual selection
would probably be even better if I selected
a little bit. Let's go all the way back
to them when I do this, but I think that might be
the best way to do it. I'm going to select the woman's go ahead and title or woman. Yeah, that's messy. So let me just get the polygons, do it. Old school. There we go. So now that
we have that selection, we can go all the way
back up to our black in there it is. Do our layering
mask and paint on. Paint this off. So it looks like it's layered. Oop, I don't wanna go there. I just wanted you to the I might look a little
messy. That's okay. You can just go in
and clean that up. Alright, so now
that's cleaned up, it kinda adds a little depth to her put kinda pushing
her arm through. We're gonna keep the stroke
on top just for readability. And let's see what
we can do to make the win also different colors. White is not working
with this because we have a lot of color to this. It's kinda washed out. So what if, what if we
kept with our theme and made this orange and maybe a little bit
of brighter orange. And right now it washes out, right? I can't see it. But let's keep our theme with
the stroke that we have. Let's duplicate this and do a black outline it with
the same style as in. And white kinda blends in. So let's do nice high contrast. Black with the stroke. Maybe even make it a
five-point stroke. We're just going to offset it. I'm just taking my
arrow tools and just kinda slowly
off-setting it. We also want to make sure
the fill on this is reduced. We just want the stroke.
There we go. Perfect. And maybe let's go back and make that a four-point stroke.
All these little details. I mean, if I included every single thing I did when I originally did this
practice project, if I were to go
step-by-step over everything I did to get there. It's a sick took me 5 h
to figure all this out. It'll be a very long,
arduous boring lesson. So some of this is not as detailed as I would normally
have it in a project, but I don't want to have
a five-hour project either and bore
you guys to death. So we need to do something
with it and two, and since there's a lot
going on with color, Let's, I think it could
stand alone as a stroke. So let's just make
these some strokes. Going to have to do
white to show up on our purple dress and
reduce the fill. Let's do the same thing here. Reduce the fill. And we're just adding a stroke. Just like that. Oh, I think that's still
reads really well. So let's go ahead
and just fine tune is moving some
topography around. Make sure I have
everything, how I like it. We can even put all this into a folder because right now
it's hard to put some of these into folders because
I have some arrows on the very top
and some errors in the very bottom. So
it's kinda hard. You can guess, you can group
or link them in a way. But what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to at least take all the typography
and put it in a folder. So I'm going to select all
the typography we have here and just pop
it into a folder. And now I have a place for type, which makes it a
lot easier to go up here and do auto
select by group. All this is kinda
beginner stuff, but go ahead and select
by group and then I can move it all together at once, find
the right placement.
7. Finishing Touches: Okay, so now let's take some of these 3D elements that should be on top and put them on top. So this triangle should
go all the way up at, up at the top in
front of the type. And we might just need to jog. We don't want to cover up
the bottom of the end, but just a little bit at
the end would be neat to add more depth. Same
thing with this arrow. This arrow most likely would
be on top of the typography. So we can go even further
and add shadows that cast on the woman from this triangle. You
have right here. It just looked like the
triangles floating. But what we can do is we can add shadows below it that
cast on her leg. So we're going to duplicate
this. Put it behind. I probably should a name, this is just a
vector smart object or should name that
arrow. I had a chance. I'm gonna make this smaller and put it where the
shadow would be casts. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to double-click this and do a color overlay. Maybe do a little bit
of a Gaussian Blur. Not too much, just a
little Gaussian blur. And then I'm going to reduce
the opacity on this layer. So it's gonna look like it's
casting a shadow on her leg. But the background is further
behind in the 3D space, so it wouldn't, that little
part wouldn't be there. So what I can do is I can
create a layering mask and just simply erase
that part away. Just keep it casts on her leg. So being able to study shadows and highlights
is so important in design to know like how
they operate in real life, how our shadows
cast in real life. So now it looks like the
shadow is on her leg. It just adds more
depth and realism. Maybe back-off the shadow
just a little bit, maybe 20%. Great. Same thing. And some of the other areas, if we wanted to cache, if we wanted to
cast a shadow here, Let's bring that below. And do the same thing. We're just going to make
it a color overlay. Do a Gaussian Blur, reduce the opacity, and make
it a little bit smaller. And then do a layering mass.
There's a lot of steps. I know it can be overwhelming for some of you
somebody be like, Oh, I know how to do
all this, but some of you guys may be like
this is a lot of steps. But that's why this is an
intermediate project and not a beginner level
project or there's something incomplete about this. She's still kinda floating. There's nothing bringing her really centering her. I
mean, she's centered. But I think the
background can help to further exaggerate the
sense of movement. And I want to create some
little background elements that'll be in the
very background. And it's not just a white space. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to just create a, Let's do like a not quite all the way black because I
want to add color to this. So I'm gonna do a little
bit of a dark gray. So as little color
that we can use are a little bit lighter colors we can use to change the color. I'm just going to make
a rectangle shape. What I'm gonna do is
I'm going to bring this in the very back, all the way in the back and make sure there's not a
stroke on this either. So what I'm gonna do
is I'm going to add more sense of diagonal angle
and direction and movement. So I'm just going to
angle this and having this darker color helps to
bring everything together. So it was she just floating in a whitespace and now she's
gonna be more grounded. And so I'm going
to duplicate this, bring this on the
bottom to kinda continued to anchor this. So what I'm gonna do is
I'm just going to do, add a little bit of that noise, a little bit of that
grain kinda adds texture. Convert to smart
object and click. Okay, so just add a little bit of texture to it
makes a difference, in my opinion, could
do the same down here. A little bit of nice texture. Then I'm going to make sure that this has a little hint of
our color theme in it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to Hue
and Saturation, see if I can't bring out a test, a tiny bit of purple. And why might need to do
what I did in the beginning, which is go to my
Selective Color and go ahead and get to black and add a little
color that way. There we go. It'd be great if I
can go ahead and add purple this way too. Right? So now I can go
to hue saturation and be able to have an effect. Here. I can also, since this is, let's go ahead and do
a quick Dodge Tool, lets rasterize this. Let's make it big. I just want to add a little
bit of highlights to this, this at the top. And that needs a lot
more saturation. So just all these
little tiny things in here at a lot of
people leave out. But I'm just showing
you my whole process because it's, it's messy. There's a lot of activity happening when you
do design like this. I'm going to zoom out.
I'm going to take a look what feels
unbalanced here. What about this top right? Is that too much orange? Especially when you
have this orange here, is it almost too jarring? Maybe. Let's switch that to
purple and see if it makes a difference. That
looks much better. It's not as jar doesn't bring
my eye to the upper left. I don't want my eye
to be the upper left. That's a detail, a small detail. My eye to continue
to be centered. And there's all sorts
of tweaks we can make. Let's, let's say,
okay, the triangle. How can we tweak this to make it a little bit better so you can go to
brightness contrast. Can we add more
brightness to it? Orange. What can we do to
make that a better color? So you're just going
to continue to do this over and over
and over again. This is what I ended
up in the end, of course, this is the one
I did before the project. I don't think they're
too different. So this is the one that we
did in the class together. And everything's going
to come out different. You can't recreate
it exactly the same. And this is the one
that I did as a teaser, kinda figuring out what
project we're going to do. A lot of you might go,
oh, this is really busy. But this is more, less of an ad and more
of an artistic piece. Just crew and just kind of creating depth and
layering and practicing. That's what this is about. You don't have to
have it be this busy, you can have it be really clean. I did another version of this where it was just a
little bit more clean. There's not as much detail, but it still had a lot of
the basic elements and use different shapes
for your project. I'm gonna go ahead and
give you your project in the next lesson. And it'll be really fun. I can't wait to see what
you guys come up with.
8. Student Project: So for your project, I want you to create an
artistic poster that has one nice centered focal point and have expressive
things around it. Let's say 3D shapes
or flat shapes, or some type of
graphical little element or illustration or something
around the focal point. I want you to put
a shape behind it that compliments that person. And after that, you can choose
anything you want to do. You can choose your
own color theme. Whoever you want to
feature doesn't have to be someone who's
dancing or moving. But I want you to have
two goals in mind. I want you to have something
that shows layering, lots of layers and depth. And I want you to
have something that shows lots of movement, lots of dynamic movement and expressing that through this art poster that
you're going to create. Those are the only rules as long as you're doing a
few of those things, you can do whatever
you want with the shapes and illustrations and focal point that you want
to choose for your design. You could do a
different background. You could do
something more clean. You could do something
that's more Swiss style, more clean and elegant
with your typography, I would like you to incorporate one piece of typography in here, but if you really don't
want to, you don't have to. But just as an added bonus, if you can work in a word, a very short, short,
short phrase. We don't want to
get too busy with this very short phrase
or one word that helps to express whatever it is that focal point
person is doing. But once again, not
required for the project. You could do it in any
color theme you want. You don't have to do
high contrast in colors. So it's really up to you what you want to come
up with some really, really looking forward
to seeing your work. Make sure you tag me on my Instagram at
Lindsey marsh design. I would love to share whatever
you guys put on there. I'd like to do that often, so please do that and
make sure to post in the project section if you want to get some feedback on it or in the student
Facebook group as well. So excited and hopefully you've been able to
stick with this. It was very complicated. Lots of layers, as you can see, just layer after
layer after layer. It can get a little complicated, but in the end it's
just a few shapes. It's just repeated and copied layers and it just makes it
a little bit more complex, but nothing that
you intermediate designers can not handle. So anyway, looking forward to, and hopefully you've enjoyed this little additional project. There's one more thing
I want to talk about, and that is color. So we picked our colors. Some of you may be like, I don't like the orange or I don't like the purple advice I
want to change at all. So I'm gonna go to Export, Export As and save it
as the max quality. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to zoom
in a little bit so I can see the details. I'm going to double-click
on lock this layer and I'm going to go up to
selective color. As you can see, this is like my favorite color selection tool that I use a lot. So what I'm gonna do is this, Let's say I just want
to change the yellow. Let's say I'm like,
I don't want I don't want orange, yellow. So we're just going to
go down to yellows. We're gonna tweak this. We're just going to
tweak the color. You can completely change
the color and it completely changes the look and feel
of the piece as well. So that has a much more
softer look to it, having the peach color, right? So let's do peach. And then what we
could do is we can go and get the magentas, change those as well, and also make that
a different color. What you could do is if
we want to find out how much of an effect
it has go to black. And you'll see, okay, well
I have no greens in there, so it's not going to have a
whole lot of been effect. Now I'm on blues and I would love to make this
instead of purple. Love to make it blue. I might just need to go back to magentas. There we go. There's some blue. So that whole different
feel to it, doesn't it? Very different. And then you can see kind of how you can keep going and get lots of
different color variations. And you can find out what color color
combinations you like. And you can do that
really quickly just by editing the jpeg, instead of having to go back and edit all those
little layers. You could do that quickly
with selective color.
Lindsay Marsh, Over 300,000 Design Students & Counting!
