Mockup your Stationery and Paper Products

1. Introduction: Welcome to how to mock up your paper products. When I started off as a stationary designer, it was difficult for me to find mock ups. They just were not readily available. Through this course, you'll see what my process is in order to create professional mock ups, that you can create just using Adobe Illustrator. Even if you're new to Adobe Illustrator you'll be able to follow step by step, exactly my process, so you'll have these as templates. Once you've created them you can use them in the future, as many times as you want by changing up the colors, size, dimension. Everything here is easy to follow. You're going to learn how to make tags, give tags, stickers, envelopes, invitations, and even wall art. The course outline is going to be very easy to follow, invitations and stationary. We'll create envelop mock ups, labels and give tags, wall art, and I'll share with you a list of resources that I've used, and that will be helpful for you along the way. So please join me in this course. 2. Invitations + Stationery: Hello everyone. We're now going to begin by working on a really quick mockup of our invitations. It's not really a mockup, but just how to use the proper drop shadows. On this invitation as you'll see here, I have the front and the back, and when I display it either in a catalog or on my website, I'd like for it to look realistic. These flat images just are not going to give the right illusion. I'm going to begin by selecting the background here. As you can see, I have a pattern overlay over my invitation, but I want to select the navy blue and not this cross pattern that's in front of it. Now that I have it selected, I'm going to go to "Effects", "Drop Shadow". There's going to be preset numbers in here, I'm going to enter my own numbers. These are just numbers that worked for me. Sometimes I have to change them up a bit depending on the background that I'm going to display these invitations in, but for now, if you can follow along, these are just the numbers that for now will work for this scenario. I'm going to change the opacity to 70, the X and the Y offset are going to be set to 0.03, and then the blur is going to be set to 0.03. It defaults to this black color, I always change it to a light gray. I just want it to be subtle enough and not to be a really stark contrast against the page. Then I'm going to click "OK". As you'll see, it just gave it a little bit of pop. To me, that works fine. This is just a single card. If I had 10 cards stacks, maybe I need a deeper shadow, but for a single card, this works perfect. Now I'm going to repeat it on the back of my invitation. To do that, I just have to select it and then go to "Effect", "Apply Drop Shadow". The reason why I do that is because I don't have to go through all the steps of drop shadow and entering all our numbers, it's going to save our last preset. "Apply Drop Shadow", and that gives it the drop shadow here for this one. On this one you can see it better because the color is lighter. That's pretty much your mockup for any flat paper products. It's just easier if you make yourself a note of what works for you. If you're someone who displays your products on some fabric background or wood grain, then you're going to need darker colors or maybe more of a shadow. You can play around with those presets and make sure you save them or write them down somewhere on what worked with which background, so you don't have to always play around with it when you start working on mocking up your products. 3. Envelopes: For this next step, we're going to begin working on our envelope mockups. There are a lot of envelope mockups online and some of them work really well in many cases. I found that if I create my own mockup, it just works well with my invitations because my invitations as we did earlier have the drop shadows the way I like them, and I want my envelopes to match the same type of shadow. I want to make sure that everything is just cohesive. For me it's easier if I create my own envelope mockup. We started working with these invitations and now we're going to mockup the envelopes. The invitations are 5 by 7. I want the envelope to fit a 5 by 7 invitation. I'm going to go here to the rectangle tool, I'm going to double-click, and I'm going to enter the dimensions 7.5 by 5.5. Now just to let you known this is just a basic envelope that I'm making, you may need a square envelope to mockup for your square invitations or you may need an A_2 size, or an A_9 size, or any size that you're working with. This is just the basics of a 5 by 7, and it could bee scaled down to anything. I just want to show you just starting off with the 5 by 7. Typically when I display my products on my website or in my catalogs, I just use about a two or three inch image. I don't leave them true to size like this because they would take up to much space. I just want to show my retailers and my customers what the envelope options are. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same exact actual size, it just needs to look like an envelope in my opinion. Here we have this rectangle. In our next step we're going to go back to the rectangle tool, we're going to double-click. This time the width is only going to be 7.5 and our height is going to remain at 5.5. Just going to change the color so we can seen what we're working with. Now we're going to drag this object right into the corner here and align it. Then I'm going to hold down the objects, and I'm going to hold down Option and click and drag just about halfway. I'm using Creative Cloud so that's why you'll see these four live circles. This Live Tool, an option is noted Creative Cloud and it's very easy to use. If I click now on this right upper hand corner, this circle here, I'm just going to drag down and that now rounds out all my edges. As you can see now we've created an envelope flat. I'm going to select both objects, and I'm going to unite them using the Pathfinder Shape Mode Unite. If your pathfinder or window isn't open, you can go to window, click "Transform" and that gives you this panel here, Transform, Align, and Pathfinder. Once again it was the Unite tool that we used to make this into a single object. Now, I'm going to hold down Option once more. Let the object click and drag, and I'm going to drag it to the opposite corner. Let's try that one more time, to the opposite corner here. Now, I'm going to go to object, transform, reflect, and we are going to reflect our image 90 degrees. Now we have both sides of our flaps. Now we're going to create a closing flat. We're going to select this object once more, hold down option and drag it out just to the center here, and then we're going to do object transform rotate. We're going to rotate the object 90 degrees. I want to align it hear to the center, let me just change the color up a bit just so we don't get confused. Now, it's aligned there to the corner, and I'm going to click and drag up to just about there. Let's bring this to the front because I see it's just behind this one of flap here. Now we have that in the front. It may not look too much like an envelope, but trust me it's going to make sense at sum point. There we have it. Now, we're going to select this back our original shape, and we're going to select Option and drag up. We're going to drag up just to this line here to the top of the top flap. Let me just drag the hole shape down so it's not off the art board, there we go. Now, we're working with this open flat and the reason why I like to display it this way, I also just display just a rectangle, and I'll show you that later. This is just so I can Option the open envelope because sometimes I display my invitations with an optional liner. Let me just change this color here as well so we don't get mixed up on that. That's good. Now we're going to do this next step. My envelopes aren't square like this, I do have a bit of a mitered corner on mine. If yours is square, you can leave them like this. If you have a mitered corner, then you can follow my next step. I'm going to go here to the pen tool, and I'm going to select Add Anchor Point tool. Now, I want to line up my first anchor point that I'm going to add right here with this line of the flat. I'm going to repeat that on this side. I'm just adding extra anchor points because I'll show you later then how we get to delete. Then I'm going to go here and add an anchor point here and one here as well. Now in this next step, we're going go and select the Delete Anchor Point tool, and all we're deleting is this corner and this corner here. Now I have my mitered corners of my envelope. The last thing I want do to this shape is add a tape, just a gum square here that most envelopes have, and that's just going to be a little darker, and we'll play around with that later as far as transparency and everything. This is pretty much our open envelope. Now we have two make it look realistic. Let's go and select this inside flap, this outer flap, and this other inside flap, and let's add a drop shadow. We're going to use the same exact drop shadow formula that we used for our invitations because we want to stay in line with the same exact feeling that we gave the invitations to same depth. Once again, it's 70 percent opacity, 0.03 ,0.03, 0.03, and let's click "Okay" on that. Now, you can see that everything pretty much popped up just a bit. So now, as you can see, I'm not really happy with the way this shadow turned out. So we're going to change now the opacity of just this one. So I'm just going to backtrack and delete the drop shadow on that flat because they wanted to be offsetted on the same side as this one. So effect, drop shadow, and the offset, and I just want to show you by doing the preview. Right now the offset is 0.03 and you'll see, I just want to change it to negative 0.03 and that's just going to move it to this side on the X offset. See. So now, as you can see, it gives us just that little bit of realism there. Now the next step I want to do is, I want to add an envelope liner. So for that we're going to just line it up just about here. I'm selecting the rectangle tool and I'm just going to click and drag and line it up to just about there. Let's make that in different colors so you all can see. Then these all have to come to the front. Seems okay. So now we have a liner. We can actually move this out a little bit more, that makes more sense just like that. So now we have the liner, we have our envelope and that's pretty much how I mock it up. Now, what we can do is also add a slight drop shadow to this back panel here, and that's just going to pop it off the page just a bit. But as you can see, see how it remembered that I had added the drop shadow to the X offset on this side. That's what it did here, but that's not what I want because that's how our invitations have the shadow on the right-hand side. So I'm going to select that, go to my appearance palette here and just delete that. Just drag that drop shadow fill right into the trash can there and we're going to do effect drop shadow, and we're going to change this back to 0.03. Click okay on that and there we go. Let's just drag that out just a bit, just to cover. Okay, perfect. So now we have a pretty realistic looking envelope for an invitation. So now usually this invitation I offer it with a kraft paper envelope. So I'm going to select all of these panels and I happen to have a kraft swatch here, somewhere in here sorry, and there we go. So as you can see now that I've changed up the color, I'm not really happy with where this drop shadow is on this panel here. So let's change that up. So let's go to Effect Drop Shadow and I think my Y offset, we can hit preview and play around with it. The Y offset, I think needs to have the shadow there. So lets do that. Negative 0.03 so we can get that shadow with the top there and just click okay. Perfect. So now this really works well with my invitation. Now remember what I said about this gum tape here that is in all invitations. I'm just going to make it a little thinner there. I'm just going to leave the gray and I usually use it gray like that just so I can play around with it. Because what I do is I changed the opacity on it, just so it shows ever so subtly. I don't really want it to too dark because that's not how it is. It's just usually just a tinge darker than the paper. So now I just went to opacity. I dragged it down to about 34, see this 45 is just too dark. So I drag it just around the 30s, and that is perfect. So now this envelope liner, I can change the color of. So I'm going two go to my eyes dropper tool here, and I'm going to make it into that same mustard color. I'm going to make a copy of it. Because let's assume that I'm going to use the same pattern. So I just did edit copy, edit paste in front and now I'm going to use the eye drop tool and select this pattern for the front. So there you have it. That's the envelope liner. You can leave it just like this or you can display it without an envelope liner. If you don't offer envelope liners and you just want to display it open like that, that's fine. I would just suggest you put a tiny little line right across here just so you can show where the fold line is and you could make that into a gray like the same color we have here, and just use a transparency as well. So something ever so subtle, you could make the line a little thicker if you'd like. Just so you can show that that is where the fold line is. But once again, if the envelope liner is in place then you don't really need that at all. So that pretty much takes care of the envelopes. If you don't use kraft paper, you just use any colored paper that you offer it in, you can just do the same thing. Just change it up. You don't have to get too fancy with it. Sometimes there's golden envelopes. You can use a gold look to it. You can have a black envelope. I mean, any color envelope that you offer with your products is what you can use. So there you have it. That is your envelope mockup. 4. Envelope addressing + Stamps: I have gone ahead and made a couple of minor adjustments. These flaps here, the shadowing wasn't working too well with this craft paper. So I've gone ahead and I've just changed it up a bit. I wanted to show more of this top shadow here, so I've played around with the settings just a little bit so now it's 70 and 0.03, negative 0.03, and again 0.03, and I've done this for both. I'm going to put all these formulas in a PDF that you can download and keep them for reference just so you can have a good starting point. Like I said, when you're working with it, sometimes the settings don't work with certain colors, so depending on the color of your envelopes, you may just want to adjust it a little bit more. The other thing I'm not too fond of is this green line here, it works well with most colors, but on this craft it's really just not working. So I'm going to select just a light brown, that's pretty good, but I can go even lighter on the opacity on that. I just want to show where the gum line would be. You see now to me that looks just a bit more realistic. Now, we're going to work on the back flap. Let's say if you offer return envelope addressing or if you offer stamps as part of your product offerings, you can also on display what those would look like. I'm just going to select all of these objects, and I'm going to click and drag and create a copy up here. Once again, let me just adjust my art board here so we're not extending past it there and that's just for purposes of me showing you what I'm doing. We're going to delete the liner and we won't meet the gum line, and then we're going to take this shape here and we're going to rotate it. Object, Transform, Rotate, and we're going to rotate that 90 degrees twice. Once you hit Enter, you can just do Command-D and it'll rotate it one more time. I'm going to bring it down and line it up, right with that line there, but I'm also going to bring it to the front. Sorry. I'm also going to bring that to the front, so Object, Arrange, Bring to the Front. Now the flap is too long, so I'm actually going to just go down here to this bottom edge and once I get these double arrows, I'm just going to drag it out a little bit more than halfway. See that works well now. But a lot of the shadows that we used for our open envelope or not working too well with this closed back flat. So the first thing I see I want to eliminate is this shadow that you see up here. Just want to show you there's a shadow up there, shadow up here, neither one of those shadows are working. I'm going to select this one flap here and I'm going to go here into my appearance panel, and you'll see here the drop shadow. I'm going to double-click it just so I can edit the effect that we had put on it. I can try to adjust it and move it down so you don't see it, but I think for purposes of this flap, I don't really need it at all. So I'm just going to click on it and drag it down to my trash, so that no longer has that effect and I'm going to do the same thing for the other panel, just click and drag it down to the trash can. Now, I think that works better. The other shadows look to be a great, depending on how you're displaying it. You may not want the shadow on the right-hand side. You may want it on the left-hand side and you just have to remember, if that's the case, you can double-click here and just hit You're going to do your X offset to negative 0.03 and that'll just move it to the other side. Let's just hit "Cancel" for now and then I'm just going to move this up so you can see better. Here, I have a sample of a return address personalization that I'd like to put on the back and offer it, let's bring that to the front, so there you have it. What about if you offer envelope addressing to the front? That will do the same thing. We're going to use just the back panel, which is this panel that we created over here. It may just be hidden behind so many panels at this point. Let's just drag this guy out so we can get it. It's this great panel that we have here. We can drag that out, or if you remember, we could just create one from scratch again. That was the Rectangle tool, and it was 7.5 by 5.5, and there you go. It already had my craft fill of my paper. I just have to go to Effect, Drop Shadow and add the drop shadows the way we originally did. It was 70, 0.03, 0.03, and 0.03 with a light gray. Click "Ok" and that's just enough of a shadow, so this is the front of the envelope, and this is the envelope addressing that I want to display that I offer. Let's bring this to the front, and there you have it. Now we pretty much have a cohesive sweet offerings of our invitation, our liner, our envelope addressing, and our return address stamps or our return address envelopes. That's pretty much it for now. Next, we're going to discuss return address stickers and a few other tags. 5. Labels + Stickers: Now we're going to create stickers, return address label stickers, or if you offer any other gift stickers, it'll be the same setup. I'm going to go into my rectangle tool once more, I'm going to double-click and the return address labels stickers that I use are three inches in width by one inch in height, and I'm actually going to make that into that mustard color. The ones that I have aren't perfectly square like this, they just have a little bit of a curve just on their corners there. I'm going to leave it at this size just because we're displaying it in this full array. If I were to just be displaying the return address labels by themselves, I'd obviously have to make them bigger just so the detail can be shown a little better. This size for now is fine because you can tell scale wise, it would be perfect for the return address label. I already have a pre-made address here on address designs, so let me just bring this to the front. I may have to make that white just so it looks prettier. There we go. Now, let me just group this so I can show you. This would be perfect just the way it is. If I were to add a drop shadow, it just wouldn't look realistic, and what happens is stickers unlike papers or these invitations or the envelopes, they're just completely flat, and if you were to add any type of realism to them, it really would just throw them off a bit and not give you that effect that we'd like. I'm just going to take off, ungroup it for a minute and bring it over here just so you can see. What I can do is add just a very little minimal effect. Maybe we can make this 0.01 and 0.01, and we can leave the blur at that. Let's just preview it to see what it looks like, and maybe this can go to 0.01. I just really want minimal. As you can see, that works pretty well. This way it's not too much, but it's still flat enough. This same formula that we used for the envelopes or for the invitation would just had been too much. This is just enough, like I said, you don't really have to add anything if you don't want to but usually that's what I add. It's just that little bit of depth to the stickers. The same would apply to any other sticker. If you create any gift stickers or anything like that, you would use just the same exact formulas. The next thing we're going to create is tags, gift tags is what I offer as part of my products. The first one I'm going to do is going to be two by three. Let's make that into that navy. Once again, I also have a little bit of rounded edges on mine, very minimal, just like that. I have a creamy design here, which is going to bring that to the front. Let's actually move that down a bit. It's a little more, I'm going to add just a little detail here. Put some white stripes. That's just a little bit of detail that I added, and move this one down just a bit, this one up just a bit. Perfect. Now let me add a drop shadow to this. Just make sure sometimes it defaults to a drop shadow, good, it didn't this time. I'm just going to add a drop shadow. Remember the last drop shadow effect we used was on the sticker and that's just not enough of a drop shadow, so we're going to go to our original 70 and then 0.03, 0.03, 0.03. Click "Okay", and that's perfect. Now, the other thing I want to add to this is going to be a little punch hole. I offer my gift tags with little punch holes and they come with twine, or sometimes I market my bookmarks and those come with a ribbon, so I'd like to do the punch hole in them just to show what the ribbon or the twine would look like, what my finished product would look like. I'm going to select the ellipse tool, and I'm going to just make tiny little circle mouth, nothing too big and I did that by holding down shift so I maintain the perfect round circle. Change the color just so you can see what I'm doing. Let's just line everything up to make sure we have everything all in lines. All I did was I selected all of my elements, and I went up here to the horizontal align center, and that winded up for me. There we go. Just zoom in a little bit so you can see what I'm doing. Now I'm going to select merry lips and select just the navy background. I'm going to go to my transform tool and click on the second option which is minus front. I'm going to click that, and that punched out this hole for me. Let's just send that to the back Object, Arrange, Send to the Back. Now it's starting to look like a really realistic tag. The next thing I'm going to do now is add a twine. I offer these with twine, so let me go into here. I have a brush that I purchased online and in the course description, I will add links to any of this brush and any of the other mark-ups that you'll see later on, so you'll have a list of resources that you can refer to or you can purchase these. But the twine, I find this is one of the best ones that I have found. The artist who created this did a really great job and you can actually even change the color if you wish. I'm going to select that brush. I'm actually going to use the pencil tool, I don't want it too thick, so I'm going to use the pencil tool, and with the brush selecting, I'm just going to go here into the center of the hole we punched out and I'm just going to make some swirly mark. As you can see, it's really thick I don't want it that thick. Let's make it even a little lighter than that, and there we go. We have twine. Like I said, you can change the color if you wish, you can do just a million things with it, but I just like that it gives you just that realistic twine look. You can change it into a red, red and white, blue and white, bayesian white, any of the standard twine colors. Just for purposes of you just seeing again how to create the label, I'm just going to create now a round label, and we're going to make that two-by-two. Let's go to the eye dropper tool. Let's use this mustard colored again. Let's put this design in front. Let's just resize that a bit, maybe just a little bit more. Now, we're going to line it all up again. Line it up this way, line it up vertically as well, let's move this B down. Then we're going to do the same thing again, we're going to add the ellipse tool at just a tiny little hole at the top. Select that ellipse, punch up a hole the way we did before, and then send it to the back. Now we have that there. Let's add our drop shadow effect. Now it's punched out, it's popped out, and we'll take again the pencil while we have this brush selected, we're just going to draw a little bit a twine. It's going to be perfect. Now you see its already in this pretty mustard color. You can change the color of the twine just by selecting your stroke color here. You can change it pretty much into any color. I could do the same thing here, make this into red, so that's pretty realistic looking to me. There you have it. Our collection is looking pretty complete. Next up, we're just going to discuss some other ways that you can bring your whole collection to life. 6. Photographs: Now I just want to go ahead and share with you a couple of steps that I use to display my products either on my landing page or on catalog cover. That's by using pre-made photographs that some very talented artists have for sale on various websites. I'll share those links of the ones that I'll be using on our resource page as well. I just want to show you just so you can then place your mock-ups on these realistic photographs. So now we're going to select a few elements, so this back of the folder and maybe this tag. I'm just going to copy it, and I'm going to go here to this pre-existing aerial view of a desktop. I'm going to place my items on here, so my products are going to go right on here. Usually you have to resize and rearrange just so you can have it placed whichever way you want so it'll be visually appealing, so let's just scale that down. When you scale down, you want to make sure that you don't transform the patterns. Because sometimes that'll distort the image there. So you just uncheck that and let's just do 80 percent, let's see how that goes. Okay, and let's take control Z and just scale it down a bit more. That should be pretty good like that, let's just move this guy out of the way, the invitations, our hero. So we're going to put this here. The envelopes going to go here, and actually I'm going to twist it at a bit of an angle. I have to make the envelope just a little bit smaller. Let's move the invitation to the front there. Okay, let's make this envelope a look just a little bit small. Like I said before, it's not going to be the same exact dimensions. Sometimes it's just to give the idea of what it's supposed to look like. So by looking at this, my customers or my retailers can say, I see it's paired up with this craft envelope and this is the envelope addressing on the back. So here's the label, I'm just going to move the tag around as well just so it'll give it some bit of an interest there, and that's it. This is just an example of what I would use either on a landing page on my website, or as a front-page to my catalog, or just pretty much anywhere you'd like to use it. Now, I'm going to show you another one. Here's another invitation suite that I had made previously, and this is another pre-made photograph mock-up that you can purchase. I'm just going to begin to add some elements here. The invitation is the hero, missed a step there, grab it all. Just make sure we select everything, let's move this around here. Just made a copy of it, and there we go. Okay, and now if you notice, if we scale it down this way, it may distort the patterns like I told you earlier. So you see how it retained the pattern large like that. If I'm scaling it down, it's going to distort the actual look of my invitation. So I just wanted to show you why we didn't use that step in order to scale it down. So we're going to go to object transform scale, and once again, we want to make sure that transform patterns is not selected there and we'll click ''Okay''. As you can see, it's exactly what I wanted it to look like. I don't want to display all of these elements. So I just want to make sure that I show probably this envelope. This, I can scale down this way because there is no pattern. So let's put that here. Now if I put that here, it's not going to look realistic because you can see it's going to be then in front of the flowers there and that's not realistic at all. So let's just make more room here. Let me group these objects because it makes it easier for me to move them around. Okay, there we have it. Now we're going to move this guy here, and it's okay to layer. Everything has a drop shadow, so it should layer perfectly fine. Let's move that again. Just bring this over to there, okay. Then I'm just going to take the return address label. I just want to show that this is all part of a suite that the customer can select one or any of these pieces as they see fit. So there you have it. So that's just another mock-up that we can use as well. 7. Wall Art: The last thing we're going to discuss is wall art. I offer wall art as part of my product offerings. Sometimes it's a little tricky to display them so the customer can get the full effect of what it will look finished. Once again, it will take a lot of investment to display actual products, it would be difficult to take photographs of them all, it's just a costly venture when you're first starting out. There are great mock-ups online that you can purchase for wall art. Here for instance, I have this little mouse wall art, I'm going to select it, edit, copy, and then I have this frame that I purchased online, and I'm going to paste it into here, just going to move it aside for a minute just because I want to show you. If you notice here, this frame comes with a odd shadow that is probably not going to look realistic once I put in this artwork. It's just going to make this still look a little too digital for my taste. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to go to this corner, select my rectangle tool first, go to this corner and just drag down until I make a perfect square there. I'm going to select the color white. Then what I'm doing is, I'm just going to make a mat for my frame here. Let me select that edit, copy, edit, paste in the front and I'm just going to object transforms scale, that's probably a good size, 80 percent. Let's see what 90 percent looks like. Ninety percent, it's not enough, so let's do 80 percent. Click "Okay", then we're going to select both of them and hit our minus front, so there you have it. Now we're going to add some drop shadows of our own. If you zoom in you'll notice we could probably bring this in a little bit here, but not enough to where all of that shows. We just want it to look realistic. It takes some getting used to, once you do this once, you can keep it as your template and all you have to do is change out the wall art in the back. This guy is going to have to get scaled down a bit, just a little fit. Once again, you want to be just as accurate as possible when it goes to scaling because you want to display your product exactly as it's going to look when you ship it to your customer. That looks pretty good, but we can try to see if we can add a little bit of a drop shadow here, so let's play around with drop shadows for a minute. Effect drop shadow. Now, I feel like I need a little drop shadow here and may be a little drop shadow just on this bottom edge here. Let's put preview on, that actually looks pretty good, but maybe we can go to 0.2 and 0.2. I think that works well, click "Okay" and there you go. That looks realistic enough for me. Had we not had that, I don't know if I like the way this looks at all, but again, it's a matter of preference. If this shadow here is good enough for you, I like to display this better. My art work, I also sometimes sell it with different colored mats, so I would like to have that. I would like to be able to show it with different color options as well if you offer the mat as part of your art offering. That would all depend as well. I think the white was pretty good on that. That's pretty much it. There's a lot of really beautiful framed art mock-ups out on the market that you can purchase. Just make yourself an arsenal of what works best for your products. There are some very feminine ones, there are some that have wooden airplanes here if you have boys wall art, there's some that are just over sofas if you sell very large-scale types of prints. Just find the one that suits you best.