How to Digitize Watercolor Illustrations (Beginner)

1. Welcome Video: Hi there, my name is Audrey, and I'm the creator behind Things Unseen Designs. I'm excited to teach this class on how to digitize your watercolor paintings. Digitizing your paintings gives you a lot of creative freedom, and they go beyond paper to products such as, mugs, aprons, pillows, and so much more. In this class, we will first paint together as we individually paint berries, branches, and leaves. Then, the majority of the videos will focus on bite size, step-by-step instructions on how to clean up your scan, digitize it, and then arrange the individual elements into various shapes, such as wreaths and a corner accent design. If you don't have a scanner, don't worry, I have attached my scanned image, so that you can still follow along. By the end of the class, you'll know two different ways for digitizing your watercolor paintings, and you'll soon be on your way to creating your own lovely products. For this class, you must have Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and if you don't currently have these, you can download them at Adobe.com/downloads. If you do want to become a designer or create products beyond paper, then I highly recommend investing in these products. If you're eager to get started, let's break out our paints and dive right in. I'll see you in class. 2. Supplies Overview: Hi everyone. In this video, I'm going to show you some of the supplies I'll be working with. First for the painting I'll be using my watercolor paints, I'll also be using a round brush size six mostly and watercolor paper, of course. For the scanning, I currently own a Canon PIXMA MG6220. I've had this scanner/printer for a couple of years now and although there are better options, this currently works well for my needs. Later on I am considering buying a more high-end scanner such as the Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner and a separate printer such as the Epson Artisan 1430, both of which are highly recommended by other artists. If you're not sure whether you're scanner is good enough, just check to see if it scans images at least 600 DPI. DPI stands for dots per inch which is a printing term referring to the number of physical dots on a printed document. The higher the DPI number, the clearer and more accurate your printed image will be, 300 is actually sufficient enough for print jobs so if you have 600 DPI, that's even better. DPI is often confused with PPI, which stands for pixels per inch. PPI refers to the pixels on a computer screen. Although both are describing resolution, DPI is for a printed images and PPI is for digital images. Next, I'll be using the latest versions of Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator. If you don't have these programs, you can download that at Adobe.com/downloads. Like I said in my intro, these programs are well worth the investment, so take advantage of the free trial and if you can afford the entire suite, it's really amazing. I regularly use Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, and so many others. I'm teaching myself to learn the rest of them. That's it for my supplies, let's get started with painting. 3. Painting Individual Watercolor Elements: In this video, we're going to work on painting individual elements of our wreath. Now, for this wreath, it's going to be mostly leaves with pops of berries and branches. In order to do that, we're going to paint maybe four or five different types of leaves, variations, and color and in shapes, and we'll also do some berries and then a couple of different types of branches. Let's get started. With the leaves, I like to vary the colors. I'm going to start with a mostly sap green and a little bit of hookers green dark in there. I'm going to start with a pretty basic leaf. There's my first set of leaves. The next one, I'm going to add some blue into it just to give some variation. For this one, I'm going to pretend that they're eucalyptus leaves. They're going to be a little bit rounder. That is my second set of leaves. Now for the next two, I'm going to make them a little bit narrower, just because these two are a little bit wider and their fuller. I'm going to add another set of leaves, maybe back to the sap greenish color, and then do more thin leaves. I'm going to do another set similar to this one, but in a much darker color. There we have it. I'm actually going to do a couple more leaves, and this time I'm just going to do single leaves. I forgot that I actually do like to add just single leaves because I can use those to fill in any gaps that I might have on the wreath. I'm going to use the rest of the paper that I have here to paint some single leaves. I'll just do them in various colors. Now I have all the leaves that I want. Since our wreath is going to be primarily leaves, it's a good idea to have a good variety of them. I may add one more type, but I'm satisfied with how it looks right now. Now on the bottom half of my paper, I'm going to add some berries. For the berries, I'm going to add maybe two or three different types. The first is going to be just single berries or maybe a clump of berries, and then the next one I'll put on a branch, and then there may be a clump on a branch. Let's do the single ones. For the berries, you want to have somewhat of a bright spot. That's what I'm going to leave pretty saturated. Then I'm going to wash out my brush, and have the next one be a lighter colored one. I didn't put any extra paint on my brush, and I'm going to draw out the paint here by painting right next to it, like so. Then I'm going to do another one just like it right next to that. Now I'm going to do the one on a branch. Similar to that, I'm going to just paint a single berry, and you can have that bright spot happening there. Wash out your brush and grab some brown. There we go. Then now I'm going to do a couple of berries on branches. I like to paint the berries in clusters of map two or three. I have these three here. I have these two up here. This one is the one that's going to be at the front most. Then I'm going to do another cluster right here. I'm going to grab that brown again. Then since this is my front most berry, I'm going to do that one first. Those are my berries. Next I'm going to do some branches. For the branches I'm just going to use this space here. Branches can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be. I'm going to do maybe two or three different types and they're going to be long and short. Let's do a long one. You can vary the colors and the branches too, you can do a more dark and black one or you can do a more yellowy, orangy if you want. It's really up to you. For this I'm just going to do maybe like jagged lines. This is going to be my long one. I can have them going out this way too. Then I do another one that has a little bit more of a yellowish tint to it. Then I'm going to do one more that's a little bit shorter. Then maybe another one just for variation. There you have it. We have four different types of the leaves and some single and double leaves. Just for variation, we have three different types of berries and some variations in branches. Now, let's get to work on scanning and digitizing them. 4. How to Scan : Hi everyone, in this video, I'm going to talk about scanning. Each scanner is going to have different functionalities. I'm not going to go into too much detail about how mine works. Basically, your scanner should come with software that takes you through the steps of scanning. For me, I just use the navigation buttons on my scanner and then use a USB to export the file. At this point, if you don't have a scanner, that's okay. I do have my painted image scanned and ready for you to download. You can find it in the class files. I'm going to place my painting on my scanner and hopefully your scanner has options, such as what type of file output you want? I'm going to choose JPEG. What level of DPI that you want? I'm going to choose 600 DPI. Then make sure you select to have a scanning color and let it do its thing. Once it's done scanning, you can take your painting off the scanner and if it's all ready on your desktop, then that's great. For me, I exported it to my USB. I'm going to plug that into my computer and then follow up. I'm done. If you're all done scanning, join me in the next video and then we'll learn how to import it and then get started on digitizing. Bye. 5. How to Open, Save, and Rotate Image: Hey everyone, let's get started by importing our scanned image into Photoshop. When you first open the program, you might see a screen like this. To open it, you can either go to your folder here or click on the button open. All you do is click on the image and drag it and drop. The first thing I'm going to do is save this image as a Photoshop file. You can do that by going to File. Then Save As in the top left. I'm going to save it as a Photoshop file and I'm going to save this image as leaves, berries, and branches collection. You can hit "Save" or press "Enter." There you have it. Next I'm going to rotate my image since it's turned on its side. You can go to image, the top left image rotation and then 90 degrees clockwise and there you have it. Join me the next video where we'll learn how to duplicate this layer. 6. How to Duplicate Layer: When working in Photoshop, you always want to create a duplicate layers, so you don't make any permanent changes to the original layer. To do this, go to your Layers window on the right side, and right-click over the Background Layer, and select Duplicate Layer, then click OK. For the purposes of this class, I'm going to hide the Background Layer by clicking on the hide icon, and this way you can see any changes that are being made to the duplicate layer immediately. Join me in the next video where we'll begin to edit the image to get rid of the watercolor paper texture. See you there. 7. Erasing the Paper Texture Part 1: Levels: Now we will begin editing the image. The first thing we're going to change is the background watercolor paper, because as you can see, it has a very rough texture. To get rid of this texture, we will play around with the levels. The levels can be found under image, adjustments, then levels. You can use a shortcut control L. In the levels window, use these three tick marks to adjust the black, gray, and white levels. Make sure that the preview box is checked so that you can see the adjustments as you make changes. Begin playing around with the tick marks until the texture is virtually gone. As you play around, you'll notice that the painted elements also change with color and contrast. But don't worry about that yet, we can edit them again later on. Continue playing around until you're satisfied with the background and then click okay. There you have it. 8. Erasing the Paper Texture Part 2: Using the Eraser: Now that our background is cleaned up, we're going to erase as much of it as possible with a regular eraser. This will make the overall process easier because later on we may have to erase tiny spots and doing this step now, we'll focus our attention on the areas closest to the painted elements. To do this, find the eraser icon on your toolbar on the left side, or press "E" on your keyboard. To adjust the size of your eraser, I need to select my background copy layer. To adjust the size of the eraser, press the open bracket to decrease, and the close bracket to increase. Now we will begin erasing the outermost areas of our paper. To drag the eraser in one continuous motion, just click with your mouse, hold, and drag. Try to get as close to the painting elements as you can without actually erasing them. Keep going until you've done the entire perimeter area. If you ever mess up like I did right there. You can hit "Control Z" or go to edit on the menu bar and undo. Now that I did the perimeter, you can also do the inner areas. This can be helpful if you want to separate out your elements. Again, we're trying to erase as much of it as possible so that it is just easier later on. Okay, I am just about done. So in the next video, I'm going to show you how to get rid of the rest of the watercolor paper texture. I'll see you there. 9. Erasing the Paper Texture Part 3: Magic Wand Method: To erase the rest of the paper, I will demonstrate two methods. To show you the two ways I'm going to duplicate this layer and rename it so that you can see which method I'm working on. To rename a layer, simply double-click on the name and type. The first one will be called the Magic Wand Method, and the second will be called the Magic Eraser Method. Let's start with the magic wand method. I'm going to hide the magic eraser method for now. To use the magic one, select it from your toolbar on the left or press W. The magic wand selects any area that is similar to the area you click on. When you click on the white paper, it will select all the white area that is uninterrupted and is exactly or very similar. Go ahead and click and you'll see a vibrating outline that shows you which areas have been selected. As you can see, because I erase the paper area between some of the painted elements, that magic wand didn't select those areas, because they're not connected. See the berries and the branches at below. Simply click on the white areas down there to add them to your selection. Now, when you zoom in, you'll see more areas that should have been included. Click to add them to your selection as well. Now go around to each painted element, and see what additional areas that magic wand didn't pick up. Zoom in and out. You can press Z, and then swipe to the right or swipe to the left. When you think you've selected all the areas, hit Delete. The vibrating outline is still there, so to deselect that and get rid of it, go to Select on your menu bar, then Deselect or Control D. Now to double-check our work, you can create a dark rectangle and place it behind our painted elements to see if we've missed any areas. Change them to your excellent draw color, and draw your rectangle. Then place that rectangle layer below your magic wand method. I'd like to do this as a form of double checking, because I can already spot some areas that I've missed. Like right next to this branch, there is spot there. I'm going to use our regular eraser to delete that. Over here in this berry, I miss that, so I'm going to use the magic wand, click and then delete. Keep going around to each element and see what else you may have missed. That was a magic wand method. In the next video, let me show how the magic eraser method works. I'll see you there. 10. Erasing the Paper Texture Part 4: Magic Eraser Method: The second way you can delete the rest of the paper is with the magic eraser. Here I have the magic eraser layers selected and have hid the magic word layer. To find the magic eraser, go to the toolbar on your left and where the eraser icon is, click and hold. Then select the Magic Eraser Tool. The magic eraser will be similar to the magic word, but instead of adding selected areas with each click the magic eraser will immediately erase. Before we study erasing, makes sure that at the top-left, the tolerance is set to about 25 or 30. If it's too high, it will erase too much of similar colors and if it's too low, it won't erase enough of the similar colors. But play around to see what works for you. Check off anti-erase and contiguous, although they should already be chopped off by default. Now set your magic eraser in the white area and click. As you can see, it erased all of the white areas that were connected. Similar to what we did with the magic word, zoom in and continue to erase the areas that weren't picked up the first time around. If it helps to see, unhide the black rectangle and make sure the magic eraser layer is selected. Now start erasing. That's it. With time and practice, you may come to prefer one method over the other or you might use both simultaneously. There are still many other ways to eliminate the watercolor paper background, but for now, you know at least two ways. In the next video, we'll isolate each painted element as its own layer and then edit the colors. I'll see you there. 11. Isolating Painted Elements into Individual Layers: One of the reasons I love Adobe products so much, is because it's very organized. In this video, we're going to create a layer for each of the painted elements. This way, if we were to use them for another project in the future, they would be available. To take that idea one step further, we're going to create a library in the Creative Cloud, so that we can access these elements anytime across other Adobe products. My library is right here, on the right, but yours may not be opened already. To open your library, go to Window, then Libraries. The default is my library. You can create a new one for each project, or for each collection, etcetera. Click on the Drop-down menu, and create a new library. I'm going to name the new library the same as the file name, Leaves, berries and branches collection. Next, I'm going to merge the two method layers into one, because we don't need them separated anymore. Click on both layers, right-click and select Merge layers. Now you will begin separating out the painted elements into individual layers. To do this, we will use the Lasso Tool. You can find the Lasso Tool on the left toolbar, or use a shortcut L. Let's start with the top left leaves. To use the Lasso, click, hold, and drag the Lasso around the object. To finish, cross where you first started, and then let go. You'll see a vibrating outline of where you drag the lasso. Right-click anywhere within the Selection, and choose Layer via Copy. This means that we're going to create a new layer by copying the selection, as opposed to layer via cut, which means that we're going to take it out of the original selection. Now if you look at our Layers Window, a new layer has been added. We can now rename this so that we know what it is. Double-click to rename. I'll call this light green leaves. Now you can add this layer to your collection. Just click and drag. This will make the next step, which is digitizing an illustrator, a little bit easier because this collection will now be available in Illustrator. Let me show you quickly what I mean. Here I have illustrator open, and in my Libraries panel, I can choose a collection we've been working on. The light green leaves I just added is now here. Now I can drag and drop the image so that I can digitize it. Easy. Now let's delete eucalyptus one together too. Go ahead and right-click, and layer via copy. Now I did my Lasso Tool, and I went to right-click, but I got an error message. That is because the light green leaves layer is selected and not the magic eraser method layer. Click Okay, select the correct layer. You'll see that the Lasso selection hasn't disappeared, which is good. Now go back to your selection, right-click, and select Layer via Copy, and rename as eucalyptus leaves. Now you can drag your layer into the library. Continue until you've isolated each of the items as a new layer, giving them names, and add it to your library. I'm going to speed up this process, but you can take your time. There you have it. In the next video, we'll edit the colors, and fine tune our graphics. 12. Editing Colors: Now that you have separated out each element, editing them will be a lot easier. Let's start with our first item, light green leaves. Go to your library and double-click on the light green leaves graphic. Makes sure to double-click on the thumbnail and not the text. This will open up a new tab and now you see only that graphic. From here, you can use all types of tools to edit the colors. But before we do that, as always, remember to create a duplicate layer in case you don't like the changes you've made and want to revert to the original. Under the image menu, there are a lot of options. I'm going to try and edit the colors that it's close to the original painting, but you can take free liberty. You could even make the leaves purple if you wanted to. I like to use the color balance to try and achieve the right color. You can adjust a mid tones, highlights, and shadows to get just the right colors. When your satisfied click Okay, then make sure to save. If you are done with the light green leaves, you can x out of the tab. Now let's try doing the eucalyptus leaves together. Great work. Keep going until you've done all of the painted elements and save them. I'm going to speed up my process, but you take your time. Great work. Now they're ready to be digitized. See you in the next video. 13. Digitizing in Illustrator: Now, we're going to digitize the leaves. It is true that digitizing will take away some of the watercolor texture of the painting. But it's all in how you do it. If you plan on blowing these up into large prints or works, then you must digitize. Otherwise, the graphics will turn out pixelated and grainy, and that's really unattractive. If you digitize it well, then you won't get a blurry graphic. First, begin by opening up your Illustrator program, and then select "create New". We will work half of a letter sized document in landscape orientation. You can change the file name to "Leaves, Berries, and Branches Collection". Change the sizes and make sure you're in inches or whatever unit you're most comfortable with. Then click "Create". Open up your library window, if it's not already open, and select the library for Leaves, Berries, and Braches Collection. You'll see that all of the elements that we edited are now here. You'll also notice a small "Ps" icon to the right. That means it was originally saved from Photoshop and if you wanted to edit the original, it will open it up in Photoshop. Let's get started on digitizing. Select the light green leaves graphic, click and drag to the document area. There are a few ways you can drop the image. You can click to drop the image or you can create a space that you want the image to occupy first. To do that, just click and drag to create a rectangle, and it will automatically be proportional to the image's size. Either way is fine, because you can always resize leader. To resize, use the Selection Tool or shortcut V, and you can use the corners to make it smaller or larger. Now, for the purposes of this class, I'm going to place these two right next to each other, so we can see the difference between digitized and original. I'm also going to give them names on the document so that we don't forget which one is which. I'll name the first one Digitized and then the second one Original. To digitize this graphic, we will need the image trace function. Select the ''Image Trace window'' if it isn't already a part of your panel. You can find that under "Windows" and then "Image Trace". Mine is already open here. Make sure that your graphic is first selected with the ''V Tool'' and then the Image Trace comes to life. The first thing you wanna do is change the mode and we're going to change it from black and white to color. Moving up, we're going to leave the view tracing result as is and change the preset to high fidelity photo. Basically, this will produce a very high-quality photo rendering every single possible color, creating thousands of small paths. While it is digitizing, the screen may go black, and that's not a big deal. Image tracing is a lot to process. It may go black so that it can work faster. I should mention that if your computer does not have a lot of processing power, it may be time for an upgrade. Now, it's done digitizing. As you can see, the digitized is identical to the original. You can hardly see any differences. Let's zoom in. When you zoom in on the digitized version, you can see that the colors have been rendered into shapes and even when it zoomed in further, the colors are still clear and the edges are crisp. However, when we get to the original and zoom in, the colors and edges are blurred and this is the biggest difference between digitized and non digitized watercolor works. From here, I'm going to bring out the image trace panel. From here, you can click on the ''Advanced'' and make any changes that you'd like, adding more colors, paths, corners, and noise. I generally don't mess with these unless I absolutely have to and it's really just fine tuning. It's really hard to see the differences on a larger scale. To finish the digitizing, if you're satisfied with how this looks, all you need to do is just click ''Expand''. Now when I zoom in, you can see that all of those tiny shapes have been rendered into paths. You can see all of those paths right there. There's just a few more steps left. I'm going to delete the white background to make it transparent. To do that, select the ''Direct Selection Tool'' or "A", and select the white area, and delete. If you're not sure that you got all of the white areas, just like we did in Photoshop, you can create a dark rectangle and place it behind the painting. I can see there are a few spots that I have missed. When I zoom in further, there are a lot of tiny little bits of white that weren't detected the first time around. You can use the ''Direct Selection Tool'' or shortcut "A" to individually get rid of these. To select more than one at a time, hold down the "Shift" key as you click. If there are simply too many to delete, like in this area over here, you can select one and then go to the "Select menu", "Same'', ''Fill Color", and then it will choose or find all of the same, all of the elements that have the exact same color and then you can hit "Delete". Now, sometimes it might not be the exact same color, so it won't be selected. In that case, it becomes a little bit of a hassle, but hopefully it is a same color. Now, we're done with the digitizing. I'm going to rename this layer as Light Green leaves. Let's do the Eucalyptus leaves together too. Once you've got it on your document, select it, and then change the mode to color, preset to high fidelity photo, and then let it digitize. When I zoom in, I see that all the colors have been rendered. I'm satisfied with how that looks and I'm going to hit ''Expand''. Then now it's time to delete the white background areas. I'm going to use my "Direct Selection Tool''. Go to "Select'', ''Same'', ''Fill Color", and then "''Delete". I like how that looks. I am going to go ahead and rename that as Eucalyptus leaves. Do the same steps for the rest of the graphic elements. Drag and drop it in the document. Use the ''Image Trace'' function. Adjust as needed. Click "Expand", then delete the background colors. Rename the layer, and save as you go. I'm going to speed up my process so I'll see you at the end. Great work. Now that all of our elements are digitized, we can finally work on arranging them into different forms and shapes. See you in the next video. 14. How to Manipulate Form: Before we start arranging our graphics into shapes like a wreath, I want to show you how to manipulate some of these, forums so that you can vary your options. For example, see how some of these leaves and branches are fairly straight. Well, using certain effects allows you to bend them so you can fit a curve. Let's learn some of these basic editing skills. Another great thing about Adobe products is that there are always multiple ways to perform a certain task. To show you how to do some of these edits, I'm going to use a light green leaves as an example in a new document. Let's start with something really basic, like copying and pasting. You know the basic copy and paste when your Ctrl+C, then Ctrl+V. But sometimes when you do that, it will paste at the center of the screen, which might be unhelpful. Another way to copy and paste is to select the graphic, click and hold, then press the "Alt button" and hold that, then drag the graphic with your mouse. Now you're free to move it wherever you need it. In addition, if you need the graphic right next to you at the same height, then you can press the "Alt" and the "Shift" button and then drag. Now let's practice rotating. There are a few ways to do this as well. First, you can select the graphic then move the mouse up beyond the corner and you'll see the cursor move from an arrow to a curved corner. Now you can click and rotate. The second way is to select the graphic, then press R, then move the mouse around. The last way is to select the graphic, right-click, transform, then rotate. Now you can choose the exact angle you want to rotate the graphic. Next, let's practice reflecting. Reflecting the graphic is usually a good idea because it's the least amount of change that still produces a new perspective. There are a few ways to do this as well. First, you can select the graphic, right-click transform, then reflect. Now you can do a horizontal or a vertical reflection. The second way is to select, then press "O", and then just move your mouse around. Lastly, let's look at dramatically changing the actual shape of the leaves and stems, and learn how to bend this graphic. Under the Effects menu at the top, go to Warp. Here are various options and feel free to experiment with each one on your own. For now we're going to focus on the arc and the bulge. Let's start with the arc. The horizontal and vertical at the top determines the bend. The distortion options below will further affect the width and height of the graphic. Let's see what a vertical bend at 25 percent looks like. This looks cool because it's much taller than the original, and it looks like it has natural bend to it. Now let's see what happens when we do a 25 percent horizontal bend. Now that looks really interesting. It just got very wide. I don't know if I like that as much. I'm going to change that back to zero. Now let's see what happens when we do a 25 percent horizontal distortion. It got a little bit taller and a little bit wider. Let's bring that back down to zero and then do 25 percent vertical distortion. It made it a little bit skinnier, actually a little straighter. Now you see just some of the ways that you can distort your graphic. Just keep playing around and see which one you like, and then when you're satisfied, you can click "Okay. Now when you look at your graphic, you'll notice something strange. You see the original shape, but then you see the warped graphic behind it. All you need to do is just change the selection to match the new warping. To do that, go to Object, Expand Appearance. Now your selection matches the warped graphic. This is why I like to actually make a copy each time I change something so that I don't lose the original. Let's try to go back to the original. I'm just hitting Ctrl+C and undoing. Let's make a copy, and let's do the bulge effect. Again, play around with some of the numbers and just see how it changes. You can make it seem very skinny. Then when you find something that you like, then click "Okay". Now remember to expand the appearance, and then now you have a new leaf. Let's look at our three leaves. The original, the bent, and then the bulged. They look slightly different, but each one will add some variation to your final product. Now let's put them all together. 15. Putting it Together: Let's Make a Wreath: In this video, we're going to arrange these particular elements into a reef. I've selected eight out of the many ones that we had. To help us get started, we're going to first draw a circle. Choose the ellipse tool on the left, and then draw a circle. To draw a perfect circle, hold down the shift key. I'm going to keep my stroke color as black and then change the fill color to transparent, and then I'm going to lock the layer so that it doesn't move even if I tried to click on it. I'm going to take one of the leaves and just start rotating them and try to affix them on the circle outline. These leaves already have a slight bend to them so they naturally follow the curve of the circle. Let's choose our second leaf. Rotate it around again. Try to make it fit within the curve of the circle. I'm letting the leaves overlap a little bit so that it looks like they're connected. That way It looks a little bit more natural. Let's grab the next set of leaves. Lastly, I'm going to add the eucalyptus. Now to make things easier for myself, I'm just going to select all of these leaves here on the circle, and I'm going to make a copy and then just rotate it so that it fills up the rest of the circle. Just fine tuning in a little bit and rotating it just a smidge so that it fills out the circle nicely. Now I have a little bit of space at the top, so I'm going to fill out the rest of the wreath with branches. I'm going to flip this one just so that it looks a little bit different. Let's see how that looks. It looks pretty good but this yellow branch is sticking out a little bit too far, so I'm going to rotate it just a little bit so that it fits that natural curve of the circle. I'm going to adjust that as well. All right, so now when I zoom out a little bit more complete. You can also hide the circle layer to get rid of that black outline and there you go. There is our completed wreath. If you want to, you can fine tune by sending some of these layers to the back so that you don't see where the two layers overlap each other or that stem sticking out isn't so obvious. Now I'm going to hide this stem as well. I'm just going to move it behind that dark green layer and now it's gone. Okay, and the same thing with the eucalyptus and there we go. Now it looks a little bit cleaner, a little bit more seamless, little bit more natural. Well, there you go. That is our wreath. Great work. In the next one, let's put some of these elements into a corner accent decoration. 16. Putting it Together: Corner Accent Design: In this video, we're going to arrange these elements into a corner decoration. We're going to use a rectangle as our guide. Make sure that your fill color is transparent and your stroke is black, and then lock the layer. I'm going to use this cluster of berries as the main focus. I'm going to use these single leaves as supporting leaves, then I have them as if they are just sticking out of the berries. Now, I'm going to start moving to the side and downward. I use these dark-green leaves to act like arms reaching out. I'm going to warp using the arc just so that it bends a little bit further down. Let me make these zeros so that they don't confuse me. There we go. It looks a little bit fuller and then it bends a little bit more. Let's see what happens when I do some more distortion. That looks pretty good, and now I need to expand the appearance, then I drag that down a little bit. That looks pretty good. I'm going to make another copy of these dark leaves and then warp it again, so that it bends the other way. That looks pretty good. Then expand the appearance and then move it into place. Next, I'm going to maybe use these branches to fill out the arms a little bit more. That might be a little bit too big, so let's make it a little smaller. I'm going to send the branches to the back so that it looks like it's emerging from the leaves. I'll use the yellow one for the other side, and I need to send this to the back as well. It's looking pretty good. Now, I want these leaves to seem fuller. I'm going to take these double leaves because they're are similar in color. I'm going to just have it sticking out of this side, as natural looking as I can make it, to make this stem of leaves seem fuller. This side is looking pretty good. Now, let's do the same on the other side. Let's zoom out and see where we are with the leaves. Yeah, that's looking really good. Now, I'm going to take these berries on a branch, and I'm going to use them to fill out the corner area a little bit more. Now, I'm going to use the single berry to fill out that corner a little bit more. That's looking pretty good. We're going to fill out the rest of that space with these yellow-green leaves and have them coming out of the original cluster berries, but on the other side. Let's zoom out to see, and that's looking really nice. I think it looks pretty full. Let's hide the rectangles that we can see. I think that looks really great. Last thing I'm going to do is group all of these elements together so that when I select any part of that image, all of it will be selected and they can move as one entire group. I'm going to rotate it just so that I can fill out the other corner. Now, this is a really great design for photo frames or for cards, even for a business card or logo. The quality is going to be really high because you scanned at 300 DPI, then you also digitized it. It's going to look very crispy and very clean. I think this looks really great, and I can't wait to see what you've created. 17. How to Export: Hey, everyone. In this video, I'm going to show you how to export your illustration as a JPEG or a PNG. One of the things you can do is either export a selection like this wreath, or you can export the entire artboard. I'll show you how to do both. Go to File. Then in Export Selection, you will export only what you have selected. But let's do export the entire artboard. Let's do Export and Export As. You can choose your folder, and then change the name. I'm going to call this maybe Wreath artboard. There are many different file formats, but we're going stick to JPEG, and then click "Export". Another window will pop up, and you can choose the quality that you want to do, the color mode, the PPI, etc. It's going to keep everything the same and click "Okay". Now that's done, let's do exporting just the wreath. Go to File, Export Selection, and then you'll see that the one wreath that you have selected is there, and then you can choose the PPI. I'm going to keep that the same, and then choose either PNG or JPEG. Let's do the PNG first. Make sure that you know where your file is going to end up, and click "Export". Then I'll also do the same thing, but for a JPEG. Now, the three files that I just exported our now here. Here's the artboard, and you can see that it captured the entire thing. Next, I'll open up this one which should be the PNG image. The background is black to indicate that the background is transparent. The PNG is different from JPEG, and that it doesn't lose quality when it's exported, saved, opened, etc. In addition, PNG images retain empty or blank spaces as transparent. Remember how we deleted the white spaces after we digitized? Our background is already transparent, therefore, exporting as a PNG won't change anything. Now, there are some differences between a JPEG and a PNG. Exporting as a JPEG means that any blank space will be translated into a hard white background. This might be good if you want to use them as a background design that's going to be on something white. To get technical, a JPEG means that the file format has been compressed to be a smaller size. So if you were to upload it online, it would process faster and not take up that much bandwidth. However, at the cost of being compressed, you also lose some digital data. A high-quality JPEG at 300 or 600 DPI will still be sufficient for most print jobs, but sometimes a PNG is preferred. Neither PNG nor JPEG is better or worse than the other, but they fulfill different functions. For example, if you want to post something on social media or in your blog post, you might want a smaller files that it loads faster, then use JPEG. If you're putting up a logo or putting a colored background behind your image, then use PNG. With that in mind, I always export in both just in case I need either of them. That way, I don't have to go through the hassle of opening up the original Illustrator file and exporting. For these mockups, I exported my file as a PNG so that if the mug is a different color or the pillow is a different color, then it doesn't matter because the background is transparent for a PNG file. Now that you know how to export the files, do the same for the corner accent design. 18. Final Thoughts: Hey everyone, and congratulations on making it through the end, and learning how to transform European things into digital work. As always, I'd like to share a couple of final tips as you complete this class, and begin creating your own work. First, keep an open mind, and paint whatever inspires you. That sounds like two things, but what I mean by that is that your sketchbook, watercolor pad, or journal, whatever you use, that is a treasure trove of inspired works. You can find inspiration on Google, Pinterest, Instagram, et cetera. You can also find inspiration in your driveway, at the park, even at work, anywhere. Even if a rock inspires you sketch, and then paint it. The second tip is to scan everything, especially now that you know how to scan, and digitize your work. Before I built my own watercolor journal, I was painting on loose watercolors sheets, they were everywhere, and I would lose the papers from time to time. Even if I was just practicing, there were things that I wanted to save. Even though I have my journal now, which looks like this, I just got to the habit of always scanning everything. This way you also have it in case you ever need it for something else. The third tip, and I always end with this is, practice. Practicing can be such a pain in the butt sometimes, especially, when you don't see much progress. Something like digitizing, will definitely take practice, and it can take a long time sometimes. One time I spent over three hours digitizing one single rose, and I didn't even like the final result. It was super disappointing. Granted it was a fairly large rose, that required a very complex procedure, but still. Even though I didn't produce a satisfactory result, I did learn a lot in those three hours. For example, how to use certain tools in Illustrator, or how not to use certain tools. I also learned that I can be more efficient, and I can persevere, into two or three hours of digitizing, even if I did it produce anything that I liked. Finally, thank you for taking this class. I hope it was fun, and informative, and I really want to see what you've created, so please create your class project here at Skillshare, and if you're on Instagram, you can tag me at ThingsUnseenDesigns, and user hashtag watercolorwithTUD. Thanks, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.