Adobe Fresco: Digital Illustration with Hand Lettering

1. Class Introduction: This is an illustration of a birthday card with a carrot pun on it and pretty nice hand lettering. I drew it on my ipad with an app called Adobe Fresco. My name is Dylan M, and I'm a professional illustrator living in Phoenix, Arizona who's had the pleasure of working with brands like these. I make my artwork using pencils, pens, markers, paint, and you guessed it, adobe fresco. In this class, I want to show you how to use fresco to create a fully colored illustration, from concept to sketch to final render. I'll give you a tour of the app and show you my favorite brushes and gestures. And even if you don't use adobe fresco or like this particular style of illustration, what I'm really sharing is a creative process applicable to any illustration you may be creating. If you've ever wondered the steps to develop a piece of artwork that features hand lettering, If you've been curious about adobe fresco or drawing on an ipad. If you've ever wondered what it looks like to work through a creative problem, just wait until you see how many tries it takes me to draw some carrot tops. Or if you just like watching artwork come alive out of nowhere, beginners and seasoned artists alike this course will suit you well. See you in class U. 2. Class Project + Resources: In this lesson, I'm going to talk about the class project as well as an overview. And where to find the six resources I've included as a downloadable PDF. The project for this course is to develop and illustrate a placement design for a greeting card using Adobe Fresco or whatever drawing app you prefer. The process I'll show in this class is applicable to lots of different types of illustrations you could create. But I think a greeting card is a really nice way to focus in on a more manageable canvas. I think it's a great project to practice your digital art skills. I'm going to walk you through the process of developing your concept all the way through to a finished and textured illustration. Don't be nervous if this is your first time or you feel like you don't have any great card ideas, you'll be brainstorming and creating in no time. I've made a resource PDF to help support you in your success, which you can download by going to the Projects and Resources tab and scrolling down to the download resources section. Here's all the goodies I packed into that PDF. First, there's a project brief and check list, alongside a quick overview of the process I demonstrate in the video lessons. I've also included my top tips for designing marketable illustrated greeting cards. Some resources for generating color palettes and finding lettering inspiration. And a little cheat sheet of my favorite and most used brushes. Now that you know that the class project is to create a placement design for a greeting card. And where to find all the goodies that I packed into that downloadable resource PDF. It's time for me to show you around Adobe Fresco. 3. Adobe Fresco Tour Pt 1: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a tour of the Adobe Fresco app and some of the basic actions I'll be demonstrating when creating my project. Consider this a primer as well as a quick reference video for the future. I'm going to cover the home screen and making a new document. The document settings along the top of the app, the layer settings along the right side of the app, the tool bar along the left side of my app, the multi function touch button, and some basic gestures Starting out on the home screen, this is where I come to open or start a new document. Along the top here, I've got options to create a new document and below that are any recent documents I've been working on. Moving down, the left menu under the Home button is a folder icon where I can access any documents saved in the cloud that have been shared with me or were recently deleted. The light bulb icon below that provides access to various fresco tutorials, and the globe icon below that gives access to streams and artwork shared by other artists. The blue plus sign in the bottom left corner provides saved and predefined document settings. And the last icon in the bottom left allows me to open a layered Photoshop document or Adobe Sketch or draw project. Back at the home screen, I'm going to make a new document. There are some recent sizes here that I can re use or I can hit Custom Size, which is what I'll do for this demo. The options on the left mirror, the options that came up when I pressed the blue plus sign in the bottom left in my home screen on the right is really what I want to focus on. You can name your document here, though. I tend to do it inside the document. And I'll show you where in a bit importantly, you can set the dimensions of the document and choose your preferred unit of measure I like inches. Even more importantly, you'll want to toggle the print size options if they aren't open already. To increase the PPI from 72 screen size to 300 print size. You can choose between a white or transparent background though that's editable inside the document anyway. Lastly, you can save the size if it's a common one you'll want to use later. I'll go ahead now and click Create Document. Let's start with the Document Settings within the top toolbar. The arrow in the left corner will take you back home. I want to mention that it's very close to our brush button, making it very easy to accidentally leave the document when trying to grab a new brush. Fresco will save the document if this happens, which is great. But as your files get larger and your saved times get longer, it can get really frustrating to accidentally go to the home screen when you were just trying to select the brushes panel in the middle. I have access to rename my document, which I'll do now. But more importantly, this is where my save button is. Save early and save often. One time, I hate to even talk about it, but I was creating this like 12 placement Christmas design and I got really sucked into what I was doing. Good old fashioned ADHD, hyper focus, and my ipad died. And I hadn't saved it. And it didn't save any of it, nothing. I was real thunderstruck for a while after that. Moral of the story is to save. Often you'll see me remind you a lot throughout the process. Next are the undo and redo buttons, though I tend to handle that with the gestures I'll show you at the end of this lesson. It's still good to know where the buttons are. Next is a great help area with tutorials and app references and such. The person and plus sign icon give you access to sharing documents with other people, though I've never used them. Next we have the export settings for when we're ready to move our artwork to a different place, which I'll cover in a later exporting lesson. Our **** wheel gives us access to document settings where we can actually edit the size and resolution of the piece, flip or rotate the canvas, toggle on and off our multi function touch button and access more app settings. The last button in our document setting tool bar is the full screen button which hides your tool bars so you can focus on your art a little bit more easily. Now I'm going to move down the layer settings on the right side tool bar. The first icon toggles my layer panel on and off. I prefer to keep mine on when working. When I toggle it on, I get access to more tools further down. The plus icon is how I add new layers to the document. The eyeball icon will toggle the visibility of the active layer. The square with the arrow allows you to clip your layer to the one beneath it. You'll get to see this in action in the texture lesson. The three overlapping circles provide access to adjustment layers, which are ways to visually adjust the look of one or more layers of artwork. You'll see these in action during the texture lesson as well. Tapping on the ellipses icon gives me access to the layer actions, which are also accessible by tapping on a layer itself, which is how I tend to access the layer options. Some layer actions worth mentioning are Delete layer, which will obviously delete the layer. Select Multiple is a great way to group a bunch of layers at once. Is I can hit Select Multiple, select all the layers I want to group, then tap the file icon to group them. I can double tap the group to access the layers within the group. And I can hit this little arrow to get back to my main layers and groups. To ungroup the layers, I can click and drag a layer, holding it over the arrow and placing it elsewhere in the layer stack to remove it from the group. Or I can tap on the whole group and hit Ungroup. The layer settings is also where I like to duplicate layers and cut a part of the layer that's been selected with the lasso, which I'll show in a bit. The next layer action I want to mention is to create an empty mask. Which allows me to hide or reveal pixels on a layer without having to actually erase them. Which is also called working non. Destructively. For example, I have this flower stem in the letter A, and I want it to look like the stem is coming through the letter. I could grab my eraser and erase the part of the A that's ruining the illusion. The problem is, is if I ever want to get back in there and move or change the stem, the pixels from the letter A have been all the way deleted and would need to be redrawn to replace them. Instead, I can work non destructively by using a mask. I'll add a mask to the letter A. We'll make sure my setting is set to hide, and we'll use my brush to color away the pixels I want hidden. If I get a little over zealous, I can simply switch the mask back to reveal and I'm able to brush back and restore the pixels I want to see, you're going to see me do this a lot when I'm rendering the lettering in my class project. But I wanted to call it out here because it's a very powerful tool that I use quite often in adobe fresco. To get back to the artwork on my layer, I can swipe to the right. And to get back to my mask, I can swipe to the left. I can also tap on the mask to reveal further masking options, including to delete it back to our layer actions. This is also where you can lock a layer if you want to protect it from future edits. As well as merge a layer down to fuse it with the layer beneath it. That's all the mighty power contained in this little layer section. The next icon down gives me access to the properties of the active layer, like changing the blend mode and opacity. I'll use blend mode and opacity during the sketch and render lessons to create ghost layers or layers of artwork that are turned down in opacity. And or have a blend mode applied so I can draw a new version on a fresh layer. The grid icon gives me access to precision tools. Rotation snapping means when you're rotating an object, it will snap easily to 30, 45, or 90 degree points. Alignment guides help you align objects in the center of your canvas. Finally, the grid toggle gives you access to visual grid settings like spacing and the opacity of the grid. You'll see me using these in the sketching lessons. The speech bubble icon allows you to add comments for collaborating with others, but again, that's not really how I work in this app. Finally, at the bottom, we've got some drawing aids. By default it's a ruler, but you can press and hold, and get access to a circle, square, and polygon as well. I found these a little lacking in usability myself, but I wanted to point them out in case you find them helpful or in case they've been improved in later versions than what I'm currently using. 4. Adobe Fresco Tour Pt 2: Now for our tool bar on the left side of the app, the first three icons are all different types of brushes. We'll be focusing on the first set in this course, as they're the awesome pixel brushes that will create our shapes and textures. The second set of brushes are live brushes and are special to fresco. They too are pixel brushes, but are designed to mimic the effects of real paint. The third set are vector brushes. You can create vectorized artwork right within the app, then export to Adobe Illustrator and have access to all the anchor points. Like I said, we're going to be focusing on the first set of pixel brushes for this class. If I open the panel, you can see there's all these built in categories of brushes to explore. And if I click this plus sign, I have access to add more free brushes from Adobe that have been released, as well as upload my own Photoshop brush files. When I find a brush I like, I add it to my favorites by starring it and those get sorted into their own section. One word to the wise is twice now I've had Adobe Fresco totally dump my favorites. Now from time to time, I like to take screenshots of my favorites panel and favorite the photo on my ipad for easy finding in case I need to rebuild the library naturally. Since employing this fail safe, I haven't had to use it, but I do want to pass it along to you. When using a brush, it activates the brush panel down here. First, we can adjust the size of the brush followed by the flow, which changes the intensity of the brush, followed by the smoothing. If I want a more organic line quality that's true to the tremors and bumps of my hand, I keep the smoothing down. If I want Fresco to do some of that work to work out the smoothness of the lines I'm drawing. Like when I'm lettering or working on rounded shapes, I turn the smoothness up. You'll notice the brush cursor is just slightly delayed behind my apple pencil, allowing it to adjust and smooth as I draw at the bottom. You've got access to brush settings that really fine tune how the brush works, including a little sample area to see how your adjustments are changing the look of the brush back to our tools. Next up is the eraser, which is exactly what it sounds like if you press and hold, you can pick different types of erasers, but like I showed earlier, I tend to use masks so that I can work non destructively. Up next is our smudge tool, and while I don't use it for my type of illustrations, I do want to show you how it works. Essentially, it turns any brush into a smudging tool, allowing me to blend pixels on a layer. Below that, we have our transform or move tool. When this is active, it will put a transform bounding box around the entire layer contents or just a selection of a layer from here, you can scale, rotate, and move the artwork. I would recommend refraining from scaling your objects up unless you're scaling up to retrace at a larger size as you can lose resolution pretty quickly. Next up, I have my lasso tool and you're going to see me use this throughout the course in conjunction with other tools. Essentially, it allows you to draw or plot points to isolate a certain part of your drawing. I can use it as a tool to draw shapes and fill with the paint bucket. I can use it to cut pieces from a layer to put on a different layer. I can use it to isolate one part of a layer to rotate or move it, et cetera. If I press and hold the lasso icon, I get access to other ways to make a selection. Like coloring in the selection with a brush, using a square marquee, or using an elliptical marquee. If you make a particularly complex selection and want to use it again, you can hit this button load last selection and it will activate the previous selection. When you're done using the lasso tool, be sure to hit de select down at the bottom to deactivate the isolated area. Next up we've got our classic paint bucket, which will flood a layer shape or selected area with color. Next we've got some pre made shapes from fresco, but I literally never use these. Same with the text tool beneath that, honestly, which allows you to add and edit text in your document. Though, this could be helpful for creating a base for a lettering skeleton, which you'll see me draw from scratch later in the sketch lesson. Next up, we've got the Eyedropper tool for sampling colors. I tend to use a gesture for the eye dropper, which is to press and hold anywhere on the document. But what I do want to show you is the multi select eyedropper. If I have a multi colored area on my document, I can use the eye dropper to sample a bunch of colors at once, which are then used to create interesting effects with the brushes. The photo icon here gives me access to place images from other places onto my document. You'll see me use this when I place my thumbnail in the sketching lesson at the very bottom of the tool bar, we've got our color picker including a wheel color transparency, color adjustment sliders, which you can choose between hue saturation and brightness, or RGB levels. Finally, our palette collector. Unfortunately, in the version of fresco I'm using, the color management isn't very sophisticated. It essentially holds onto any color that you sample and draw with throughout the life of creating your project. Which sometimes can be really helpful, but sometimes it can get a little bit overwhelming. This little floating button is multipurpose. You can move it anywhere you prefer by pressing, holding, and dragging it. You can toggle this button on and off in the setting section. And you can also see all the things this button can do with different tools. By going to App Settings Help and touch shortcut. I primarily use it to move objects while constraining the x or y axis. Meaning I can move something in a perfectly straight line. The last stop on our app tour is to show you all of my favorite gestures or touch shortcuts I use while working in the app. You can reference all the available gestures by going to app settings Help view gestures. Here are my most used ones to undo. You use two fingers to tap on the screen. If I continue to tap, it will continue to undo. If I use three fingers to tap on the screen, it will redo my actions. If I continue to tap, it will continue to redo. As I mentioned earlier, if I press and hold on an area of my document, this will sample the color. If I color with it, that will add it to my palette to zoom, pan, or rotate. I'm going to press and pinch with two fingers. If I do a quick pinch, it will resize the document so the whole canvas is visible. To quickly group layers, I can drag one layer or group of layers on top of another. I mentioned it in the layer setting section, but I can double tap to get inside the group and to ungroup the layers with a gesture. I can press and drag a layer, hold it over the arrow, and place it elsewhere in the layer stack. And lastly, when drawing, if I press and hold my line, Fresco will snap it into a straight line. You'll see me use this when creating lettering guides in the sketch lesson. Now that you're primed on where everything is, we are ready to begin our project by defining our concept and drawing a thumbnail beginning with the next lesson. 5. Step 1: Defining the Concept: The main demo for this class begins with me creating a digital sketch from a thumbnail concept. If you don't know what that is and don't have one ready, don't worry. That's what this lesson is for. I'm going to talk about from where I got my concept for the project you'll watch me create, and the steps I take when I'm developing a concept in thumbnail totally from scratch. An overview of this process is also shared as a PDF class resource. By the end of this process, at minimum, you want a thumbnail sketch of your defined concept. But at most, you could also decide on your color palette, find references and inspiration, and define project parameters. Plan as much during this phase as feels great to you. And remember, you can always return to the research and inspiration steps as often as necessary throughout the process. To begin defining your concept, you'll want to decide on a general concept. I keep a spread in my bullet journal called Illustration Ideas To stockpile ideas as they come up. It's where I found the concept I'll be rendering. In this class, I have a little bit of a head start. If you're starting totally from scratch, here's how to do it. I recommend choosing a concept that's general but marketable, like a thank you card, a birthday card, a congratulations card, or a winter holiday card. These types of one off placement designs bring in great pay checks in between larger projects as they are always in demand. Once you've got a basic concept direction like birthday card, you can move into step two, brainstorming, which is reflecting on the concept at hand and writing down any ideas that come up. A brainstorm for birthday card may look like red balloons, presents joy confetti, colorful cake stealing frosting, singing happy birthday grandpa falling asleep. Awkward pictures of people holding up their gifts, et cetera. This leads to an idea to draw a birthday cake with people singing all around it and someone stealing frosting. Already, we've taken the general concept of birthday card and applied story and visuals to it simply by brainstorming and generating more ideas. Next, I find it helpful to do some research and find references and inspiration. This is something that can also help in throughout the process. In fact, later on, you'll see me pause while sketching to go find lettering inspiration from some of my favorite books. And again later to go generate a final color palette before I begin rendering my project. In this birthday card example, maybe for research, we'd scroll through some card brands. We like to see what sorts of colors and lettering styles we're drawn to. During this process, we see cards that feature all sorts of animals and get excited to draw animals instead of human figures. Our concept changes to be dog singing around a cake and a dog stealing frosting. We also notice bright and happy colors with lighter backgrounds and decide a soft but bright water color palette could work for our scene. Now that we've got some inspiration, it might be helpful to collect some royalty free references of dogs and maybe some cakes too, from which to draw. So now we've gone from a general concept of birthday card and brainstormed a little story to sketch a group of people singing around a cake with a frosting stealer present. We got inspired and did research by what's selling now, which helped land us on a soft but colorful color palette. And to draw dogs instead of humans. We even took some time to gather references of dogs and a couple cakes to draw from later. The last step when I'm defining a concept is to draw one or a few thumbnails or small scale versions of the illustration. This allows me to quickly test the concept and make high level decisions about how the composition will work. When I'm out in my actual life and I think of an illustration idea, it gets drawn into my bullet journal as a thumbnail. Instead of describing it with words. That helps me get a head start for later on realizing the idea. When you're making your thumbnail, you really want to consider the main elements and how they might live together within the design. If your design has lettering, it can be helpful to write out the exact lettering and punctuation that will be used to ensure early on that there aren't spelling errors. And to get an idea of the shape and centers of the words. In our birthday example, these elements would be a cake with shapes for dogs around it. When I draw these elements within the frame of a standard card, I'm left with a little space at the top. I solve this by adding in a speech bubble to be filled with lettering. This is as simple as a thumbnail can be. As soon as those main elements click into place. From a high level, you know the concept is ready to take into sketching. I do encourage you to draw a few thumbnails since they are small, to push yourself to move around the main elements as clearer ideas tend to come with a little tinkering. I included some steps in the class resource PDF of things to keep in mind when designing for greeting cards in case it helps with this high level thumbnail view and the concept stage in general. As you know, the idea that I'll be rendering in this class started as a concept that was drawn in my bullet journal of a carrot, standing next to the lettering that said, we really carrots your birthday. When making notes for this class, I redrew the thumbnail more clearly and added in some extra carrot friends, Taking care with considering the elements, in this case carrots, Carrot tops and lettering, and how they'd work together. It hit the main check boxes for designing greeting cards, for example, there's eye catching visuals at the top quarter of the design. It features characters, it features hand lettering, it features a fun pun, and is a good canvas for bright colors. And in fact, I could already picture some blue, orange, green combo to make the scene bright and fun. All in all, I feel good about my defined concept. I'll go ahead and take a picture of my thumbnail with my phone, airdrop it to my computer, and this is where Adobe Fresco will come in to help bring this concept to life as a fully colored illustration. 6. Step 2: Sketching the Concept: Once you have a defined concept in thumbnail, the next step is to create a clean and clear pencil sketch, which you'll see me do in fresco over the next few video lessons. To keep the sketching lesson manageable, it's been broken down into the following sub lessons. First, I'll start my document and sketch over my thumbnail. Then I'll refine the sketch, adding more detail and adjusting the composition. After that, I'll sketch in the base of my lettering, or the lettering skeleton. And finally, I'll refine the lettering sketch to have weight and style. One thing I want to call out here that you won't see on camera is when I take a break after sketching the illustrated elements to find inspiration for my lettering. During that time, I simply flipped through a few of my favorite lettering books, which quickly helped me discern the type of lettering I liked for the project and also what I didn't. You'll hear me chat through it a bit in the lesson. But I wanted you to know that I put some of my favorite lettering resources in the resource PDF. If you want to know more, if you're following along, your goal at the end of these sketching lessons is to have a sketch that has clean lines and informative detail. Let's begin this demo so I can show you how. 7. Step 2A: Tracing the Thumbnail: I'm ready to begin my sketch. Whenever I'm making just a general greeting card, I like to design it in a five by seven aspect ratio just to have things a little bit larger than I might be needed. I always double that size. I always have a ten by 14 waiting for me in here. But of course, if you want to make a custom size, you can. I've got my document here and I'm going to go ahead and bring over my sketch. And I'm going to hit this photo button down here above the color picker. And so that I can place a photo, I've already air dropped over my sketch. And I can go ahead and drag these to get it in place. Now first what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn the transparency down opacity, so that I can see the boundaries of the canvas. Okay? This isn't necessarily the, this isn't the sketch I'm going to draw from. This is just the thumbnail that's going to help me build the sketch. It helps me see generally where I was thinking of putting the text, where the character is going to be. All of that stuff. What I like to do, I turned the opacity down, but I'm also going to go ahead and change the blend mode to multiply that way, anything that I draw underneath, I'll still be able to see really well. I like to sketch with my pencil, which is in my favorites, but if you are just starting, you're going to find yours in your sketching. And it's one of the basic pencils or one of the brushes that comes with adobe Fresco. Lastly, what I like to do is I like to turn on my grid. I'm going to go ahead and check this on. And you can see, now let me turn it up so you can see it. Turn this off. You can see that right now it's small cubes and I like to do bigger ones. Let's see, 1-234-567-8910 Yeah, 12 columns would be ideal if you're like really getting into designing on a grid and everything. But for this I really just need general alignment. I want to see, generally speaking, where the rule of thirds, where those lines converge. I just want to see what straight lines are and all of that. And that is my point of having the grid. So I'm just going to turn the opacity down on that because again, it's just something that's going to help guide me in the background. Now I'm going to go ahead and see how big my pencil is, see if it's a size I like. I'm going to go a little bit smaller than 28. I'll take it down to 18, too small, 22. There we go. The pencil is great, because if you draw straight on, I know you won't be able to see the line at first, but if you draw straight on, you get a nice uniform pencil line as you would expect. But if I turn the pencil on its side, I can get a really nice shading effect. And then everything in between, if I go at a 45 degree angle, I get a harder but more blunt edge. Again, if I go up on the tip, I get that fine point. That's why I really like sketching with the pencil in here because I get a lot out of one brush. My pencil is a little loosey, goosey, so I'm going to go down here and turn the smoothing up. I'm double tapping just to undo what I was doing. Sometimes the whole point of this sketching phase is to loosen up. I feel tense because I'm on camera, and I want this to be good. But I'm going to start by just sketching what I drew for my thumbnail, and then I can go from there. I think this is a great demonstration of how the thumbnail is a great starting spot. But it's not the sketch, because if I sketch just simply over those lines that I drew in my thumbnail, you can see that it just, the composition is not perfect yet. We've got some weird negative space down here, some weird negative space down here. The word birthday doesn't quite fit in where I was drawing it to. There's some text hierarchy issues, and so this is a good starting spot. I'm glad I had that thumbnail to go off of, because now I can start making some other decisions of how I can start making this look better. 8. Step 2B: Refining the Sketch: At this point, I can start using my lasso tool over here to start moving around the elements that I've already made. I just drew a circle around the word. And I'm going to grab the move tool. Select, draw another circle around the word. Really use the move tool. I can just start massaging this sketch in a way that I can't really do on with pencil and paper. So I've been able to improve at least the overall composition. I filled in some of the negative space with some more baby carrots and resize this carrot Overall, I played around with moving around the lettering. But I wasn't only moving it around, I was also considering the hierarchy of the text. The word r is less important than the word birthday. And birthday was getting swallowed up by your. I readjusted those sizes. The word, now that I'm looking at it when I redraw it, I might want to make a less more squat font. I would need to re letter that. But at least I can push this down so that I know that that's my thinking, that I can still take up that much width. But the word really isn't as important as carrots and birthday in this case. But it's still more important than the word we or your down there. It's just a game. When I say it's more important if I were seeing this from far away, and I can only see a few of the words, carrots, your birthday. Actually I think carrots, your birthday is more important than really carrots your birthday, sometimes just saying the phrase out and thinking about seeing it from far away. What are the important words here? What's the message here? It's we carrots, your birthday cats. Your birthday is really the thing that drives home the pun and drives home the message. Even your like yours is still the less important word between those two, but it's important in there. These words can be downplayed a little bit so that the other ones can shine. We can do that through scale, we can do that through weight. Right now, I'm not making all of those decisions. I'm just playing around with the structure underlying this design. Now that I've got a pretty solid structure and I want to zoom out and just see that I like how that all flows. Let me see what it looks like. Without the grid on, I think I've got a start of something good here. A few things that I might want to keep in mind is just white space. You know that the feet and the edges here that we don't get too tight, but also that there's not too much space around them. But now all I'm going to do is I'm now going to turn this sketch down in opacity. I'm going to turn my grid back on. I'm really going to get in there and I'm going to start figuring out more fine tune. What are these carrots look like, what are their faces, how does the foliage look, or their little greenery coming off of the top and moving in there. Just drawing myself a guide line, I know where not to put their feet below. I can even turn the move tool on to make sure that that's centered and see how that is snapping to the center there for me. That looks pretty good to me. Now I know that I don't want any of the carrot feet to go below there. Earlier I drew just a rectangle for this cake, but now is the time where it might be helpful for me to actually think, what does this cake look like? What are the actual shapes that make it up? How many colors might be used? Is the cake showing or is it just icing that thing? Now that I have two guide layers, I've got my main sketch layer that I'm going off of, and I also have this line at the bottom as a guide line. I'm going to group them together by dragging and placing one over the other so that they're a group. So that I can toggle them on and off at the same time. I really like to look back and forth between my previous sketch and my new sketch to see how it's coming along. In this refining stage, I'm also making some decisions. So for example, in the original sketch, these guys were kind of had their arms behind each other and are cheering. But in the new one, I decided I would have this guy giving this one the bunny ears. You know, his arm is going behind this baby carrot and he's got these two bunny ears coming up. And it's just a small detail that, you know, someone might not see when they look at the card, but it just adds personality and story. You know, these baby carrots are so excited they really care. It's your birthday. They're so excited that this one is, you know, in a fun mood to give a prank, and this one is jumping in the air. And so those are the decisions that I'm thinking through as I'm drawing these. And I'm really just letting my brain come up with ideas as they come up. You know, I wasn't, you know, as I'm drawing them, my brain was just like, oh, well, what if this one was jumping, and what if instead of just having their arms behind their back, what if he was giving the bunny ears, Which is something that my family always does in family pictures. It's just a fun way to tell story. I'm noticing something I didn't notice before is there's like a little bit, there's a lot of space between these two carrots, whereas these ones are all packed in. I'm wondering if in this hand this one's holding a cake. If down here he can be holding a present, just allowing yourself to have fun with it. The thumbnail was enough to get started. It was enough to make sure that the idea, the general composition worked. You can still allow your creativity now to like, really have fun with it. Now that present really nicely fills the space and it gives a nice little repetition to that square shape in there. I've been working for a long time without saving, which is dangerous. Also, go ahead and change this to birthday and hit Save now. Okay, so I have gone through and sketched and refined my carrots. I feel really good about this composition. And you may notice that I didn't refine the lettering any further, and that's because I actually need some more inspiration. I'm not totally sure yet on how I want to render these letters, and so I just want to go and look at some lettering inspiration to see what kind of playful letter forms would fit with this style and really fill this space. I'm probably going to look for something that's not too rigid, like I want to be able to really take up this space and have the words really fill up that shape. But yeah, I'm going to go and look at some inspiration first before I just dive right in. But at least now I've really refined my initial thumbnail. If I bring that back up, you can see that it's definitely got the spirit of the idea there. But the sketch that I've got now is much more refined, has a much more clear starting spot. There's still things that need to be decided. I'm sure that I feel pretty confident that I'm going to fill this area with a big brush to kind of do that greenery up there. And so I'm not going to worry about refining the perfect shape for it right now. Right now, I at least know where it's going to go. Whereas down here, you know, I already know how these guys fit in what they're holding. I feel good about the space happening there. And so the sketching phase feels really good. I just need to find some lettering inspiration so that I can refine the lettering further. Give it one more save and I'm going to go find some inspiration. 9. Step 2C: Lettering Skeleton: Okay, so I've had a little bit of lunch. I've looked at some lettering inspiration and I've made a few decisions of at least the direction I want to move towards. I know that I want to do something more playful and less rigid, and so that means I've got a little flexibility with the letter forms. I want to do something that is more upper case and then script. So I don't want to do a script, I want to do like an upper case form. And I just really want it to maximize and take up the space really comfortably. A mix of styles is okay. Like maybe I'll do some split seraphs on one, Maybe I'll do some of those little do hickey things that hang that point off the sides of the letter form. But right now, my goal is to just work out the skeleton of the base of where the letters are going to be. I'm not even going to be drawing the style of letter yet. I'm just going to be drawing in the skeleton beneath the letter. Even though I have a grid set up, I like to draw additional guidelines like I did with the baseline down here. Just pencil lines for me to follow the top of the letter forms and the base line with Fresco. If I draw and drag, if I draw a line and then I hold, you can see it snaps it into a perfectly straight line for me. Since I have these grid lines to follow, I'm able to eyeball it pretty well. I want we and really to have the same height. So I'll just go ahead and duplicate that layer over here. I did that by tapping on the layer and saying duplicate layer. I'll grab my move tool and move him down. And just stretch it out so that it fits the width of really. I'll go ahead and duplicate that again. And move it down for your, your might be a little bit wider but good starting spot. Then carrots will be a little bit bigger and I'll duplicate that one for just so that things are uniform. I'm going to tap on this layer, select multiple, and I'm going to select all the layers that have those letter guides in there, Group them, and turn the opacity down so that I can see. I'm just going to go in here and start refining my letter forms. When I'm thinking of a skeleton, I'm trying to also think of the space that might need to be around the letters. The letters are going to have more weight to them and I just need to leave a little bit more white space. I haven't made any decisions yet. Like I don't know that even this structure is going to be good. But when I draw the rest of my letters, I am going to take clues from these letters. For instance, the lean in this. I'm going to try and replicate that for this R. I'm not worried about it being too perfect, but it's just something that I want to keep in mind. Because if I can keep those a little bit more uniform, they'll probably read better even if it's got a more flexible playful lettering style. Here's the beautiful thing about sketching and doing your lettering in fresco is now I ran out of a little room down there. But I can just go ahead and adjust all these and redraw what I need to get the spacing better. Now that I've got the skeleton of all of my letter forms down, I'm in a much better place than I was with just my thumbnail. I at least now know that all these uniform letters are going to fit really nicely in here. It's got a good flow, it's got a good hierarchy. The only decision that needs to be made or decisions that need to be made before I move on to rendering, is really refining this letter to give it style. Um, you know, I don't want the final lettering to be this like thin mono line style. I want it to have some weight and some cool character to it. And so that's what I'm going to work out with my pencil brush. Now, if you feel good about this and you're ready to move into the next stage, you definitely can. There are times when, you know, I'm kind of tired from the sketching phase and I just want to get into coloring and I'm not ready to start making the decisions about the lettering yet. And that's totally okay in this case. I just want to show you the fullest version of this process, which does include refining this lettering a little bit further. 10. Step 2D: Refining the Lettering: I'm just going to tap on one of the lettering layers and hit Select Multiple. And I'm going to grab all the lettering layers and group them together. And I'm going to go ahead and turn down the opacity. Just like before, I'm just going to go in and start making some decisions about what I want these letters to look like. I think I want these all to be thicker and so I can go ahead and go and start drawing a letter. You can see in this case, I didn't follow the exact form. I added a little bit of extra weight down here at the bottom and the edges flare out a little bit. So these are all just things I'm trying at this point. I don't know necessarily what's going to work, I just want to start adding a little bit of flare to these. In this case, the lettering style is really playful and so I think variation in weight for the different letter forms makes sense. But if you want a trick for doing more uniform weight, I like to use this brush called the ink roller. And let's see where it comes with fresco. It's in the ink section. It's called ink roller. What it does is it has a really uniform weight to it. I use it almost as a sketching tool for me to trace over my letters, so I at least know what that weight will look like. If I were doing this word carrots, I would find a weight of the brush that I really like. Let me go ahead and turn the smoothing up. That's a really nice, fast way to be able to add weight to the letters, or at least see what it looks like with weight on the letter forms. The great thing is, if you don't want to do this is one uniform brush for the entire letter form. But you could also do thicker on the downstrokes, then use a smaller brush for the upstrokes, and then you could just trace over with your pencil. I would make that darker, make another layer on top of it, and go with my pencil. And then I would redraw those letter forms. This guy would be here. This is one of the more uniform ones then this one where I did two weights. I can smooth over where those jumps are with my pencil. That's a really fun way to explore adding weight to a letter form without having to draw it and know where that weight is going to be. But in this case, I don't want it to be so uniform. I really want there to be a playfulness in the lettering and I'm going to turn this drawn layer back on and I'm just going to keep moving on my merry way. A good tip with hand lettering, especially when you're trying to license your artwork, is to make double letters, not exact copies of each other. I could have just duplicated that R and brought it over here, but it's going to have a lot more personality if I just draw that R a second time, and they're not exactly the same. Lettering is an art. There's rules and people who study it and do a really good job. But then there's also lettering. I don't know an expression. I'm not a hand letter in the sense that I don't know all the correct terms for all the letter parts. I don't know all the lettering styles, all the mothers styles and all of that. But that doesn't mean that I don't get to enjoy lettering in my work. It means that I have to loosen up about imperfection. I still want to take into account things like legibility and hierarchy, But I don't have to be a lettering genius in order to enjoy adding lettering to my work. This word carrots probably breaks all technical lettering rules. Or the fact that the stems of these two Rs are so thick but it's not on the A, or maybe that's not a problem. My whole point is I'm not a lettering professional and yet I can use lettering in my professional work to make it more marketable and more licensable. Birthday, I have to be mindful of because the letters are really squeezed in here because it's a longer word. If I make the letter forms too thick, then the whole word is going to feel and really squeezed in this spot. Even though it's as important as the word carrots. The fact that it's longer will and its size will help it stand out. I don't need to make it the exact width of the word carrots again, because like I said, if I do, in this case it's going to make all of this to squished together and that's going to hurt the overall legibility. Or at least I think so from where I'm sitting now. Things can always change as we move into the rendering part. But the whole point here is that we find the artwork on the way. It's okay if you don't know everything about your piece when you begin. We learn by doing. That is looking very cute. When I was looking at inspiration, I really liked some of the split seraph I was seeing. I still might come back and see if I can work that in, but I'm really encouraged that it just already looks so cute. Just with everything fitting in there nicely and being legible, that just the playful I guess drawing over of the letters might be enough. I might not need to add in the extra layer of the split seraph. Or if I do, maybe it'll just be on the words. We really, because I have more white space to work with. If there's something I could tell my younger illustration self, six months ago self, my year ago self or when I was just beginning. I wish that I would have just been comfortable to try more things in the sketching phase and to know that if it's okay to redraw things 1,000 times, that it's not a waste of time to do that. And in fact, that sometimes is the way that sometimes is the process is to draw it a lot. Yeah. Just because I'm so curious, I want to see if I can fit in some split seraph on the words. We really, if I can, again, I won't know until I try. I think the way I want to do this is I'm actually going to duplicate and turn off one of the layers so that I've got the original safe in there. And then what I'm just going to do is come in here and draw the splits and erase what I don't need are just doing that one. I already think that it's going to add too much noise to these already smaller letter forms. I could be wrong, but my gut says I don't want to do this right now. Like I don't want to continue that. I really like the spacing of this, and I think it already has a lot of character by that W being flared out in the Y and R having these curly guys. I feel pretty good about this sketch. You can see what I mean by refining it. There's nothing wrong with going from your thumbnail, right, to drawing and using color. If that's the way that you like working, that's wonderful. I just find that I get really overwhelmed when I do that. And I'm trying to decide too many things at once by taking the time to sketch, refining the sketch slowly, both the supporting imagery and the lettering. Now when I go into color, I know exactly what I'm coloring. I don't have to figure out how many carrots they are going to be or how the letters are going to fit together. There's still room for me to make decisions and to explore how I'm going to bring this together with color. But for right now, I've got a really, really strong foundation to build this illustration on. 11. Step 3: Rendering the Concept: At this point in the process, I've taken the thumbnail of my defined concept and refined it into a clean and clear sketch. Now it's time to turn that sketch into a fully rendered illustration, which you'll see me do over the next handful of lessons to keep this rendering lesson more manageable. It's been broken down into the following sub lessons. First, I'll create the base shapes of all of the elements in my sketch. Then you'll see me struggle. I work through the creative process to render my carrot tops. After that, I'll add supporting details, and after that I'll render the lettering. Then it'll be time to refine the overall render correcting or adjusting anything that needs it. And finally, I'll add some texture to make the whole illustration sing. One thing I want to call out here that you won't see on camera is me creating a design dummy and exploring color palettes. I'd like to take a moment to break down that process a little. Once my sketch was done, I had a vague idea that I wanted to use a blue, orange, and green palette, but I didn't know which blue, orange, and green I wanted to use. So this is an example of me pausing the process to return back to the concept phase so that I can work out the color palette that I want to use. I made what I call a design dummy, which is essentially a quick and dirty version of the piece that represents the base shapes and amount of colors a piece may have almost like a digitally colored thumbnail. In this case, I used the pen tool to draw a few rough carrots. Used the type tool to create a squashed placeholder for the lettering. Drew some placeholders for the cake and presents, and applied some basic colors to it. From there, I was able to adjust the colors digitally until I found a retro but bright palette I was happy with. I use a lot of different tools and methods for developing color palettes. This just happened to be the route that felt most right. When I was developing this particular piece. I've gone ahead and added some of my favorite resources for generating color palette ideas in the class resource PDF. If you'd like to know more. If you're following along with your own project, then by the end of this rendering process, you will have a fully colored and textured illustration ready to leave your ipad and head out into the world. In my opinion, this is the most fun and satisfying part of the process. Let's get rendering. 12. Step 3A: Drawing the Base Shapes: Now I'm just going to go ahead and sample each color that I've got it in my little color palette section, the colors are going to come across a little brighter on being recorded than they are in actual life. But I'll upload my projects. You can see what they really look like. Now that I've got those, I don't need this guy anymore. Now, I can just get back to rendering My favorite favorite brush to do. All of the base shapes is newsprint inch, which comes with Fresco. First I'll go ahead and paint the background because that's what I know. It needs to be painted blue. I'm just going to use my paint bucket tool and I've got my blue color. It's going to say how do you want to fill this layer? And this is where you can determine if you want it to be a vector or pixel. I always use pixel. I can go ahead and make a new layer on top of that. I'm going to go back to my newsprint ink brush and I'm going to start rendering these shapes first. I like to just test my brush to see how large it is. It just takes some practice to get a feel for what you're looking for, for the scale you're drawing. Then when it comes to filling in, if you like to color and take your time, you can certainly color or you can just fill in the shape with the paint bucket tool. But one thing I want to point out is, in the paint bucket settings, there's this color margin and that's going to determine how much it fills in and touches what's already there. If I have the color margin turned down really low, honestly, I'm not sure if it's going to show up here. But there's more likely there's these little dots that are happening between where the original outline was and where the fill. But if I turn this up all the way, it's going to make sure that it fills in, honestly it looks the same there. Well, terrible example. But I like to turn my color margin up for what it's worth. Right now, I'm drawing all of these carrots on the same layer because it'll be easy enough. If for some reason I need to break them up, they're not overlapping anywhere, it'll be really easy for me to use the lasso tool and cut them out for right now. Since this illustration is so simple and there's so few colors, I think trying to keep things that are the same color on the same layer is going to be helpful. I'm switching colors, so I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to switch over to my light, er, clementine color for these other carrots. I'm realizing I want more of these carrots to be light. Maybe I'm trying to think of how I want to break this up. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tap on these layers and hit Lock transparency. What that's going to do is it's going to make it so that if I color over top of these, it's only going to stay on where I've already colored some pixels in. This is going to help me. Oh, there it is. That's all I needed. I just needed to break up all of the dark orange that was happening. And I think that will work again. Those small things can be adjusted, but I at least want at this phase to see what is the disbursement of color. Now the only thing is, is I have one carrot on this layer that is light. So I'm going to go ahead and grab my lasso tool. Make a selection tap on the layer, it cut selection. Tap again on the layer and hit Paste Selection. That light carrot is on his own layer, and I can go ahead and group the two layers of light carrots together. Now those two are in a group, and I can tap again to hit Merge layers in group. Now they're all on one. Keeping your layers organized is a really helpful, helpful way to keep yourself from going insane, quite honestly, and trying to find layers that you know exist and all of that. 13. Step 3B: The Carrot Top Struggle: I'm going to start working in the green tops. This is something that I didn't really work out in the sketch. I left it scribbly. So I'm just going to try and have some fun with it to figure out how these are going to envelop to be leaves. The green is really dark. The greenery on the carrots really just adds some nice framing and gives us a dark color to work with for the details. But it's not like the focal point. I'm not trying to spend too much time here, I just want to figure out the visual way I'm going to render these. I don't like that. I think now that I've played around a little bit, this is too busy. But I think it's because they're all splaying out at the end, and that's competing with the lettering. But I like that you can see the separate strands coming together. What I'm going to do is I'm going to have them all coming from a central location on the top of the carrot, which is how they grow. It makes sense that that would look more correct. I thought my sketch was looking a little strong. I'm going to go ahead and turn my sketch layer in the blend mode to multiply. And I'm going to turn the opacity down a little bit, that way I can still see what I'm drawing, but it's not going to fight so much with the lines that I've actually rendered. So I can actually see what I'm doing. This guy's greens are going to be a little bit different because the space that I'm working in is different. So he can have a little bit different personality of hair or greenery. At least they're united by the green color and being representational of a carrot, it will be able to come across as such. In my sketch, I really liked that there were so many curly cues, whereas I switched when I rendered it to make them bubbly. I might go in and just rework some of these because I really like some of the looser style in here. I'm going to go ahead and cut this greenery away from the rest of the layer. Cut selection, Paste selection. It's on its own layer and I can turn that off. It's still safe, so I didn't get rid of it. And I can just keep playing around here. This might be a place where more smoothing would be helpful too. So I can just get really nice curly cues. What I'm trying to find the balance between is having this shape up here, be fun and wild, like the greenery of carrots. But not so fun that it takes away because it's really not the focal point of this design. It really is the frame already that seems to help making this wavy, but then having some of these areas in. Now, this one needs some help. This is why I sketch first because I hadn't, if I had to do this process for every single element on here, it would take me forever to figure it out. But luckily, the only element I'm trying to figure out here that I don't have is, is the greenery. This is the only part of the illustration that was not totally figured out in the sketch time. Okay, I think the three in the center look nice. It looks like Bangs. And I'm going to mimic that over here on this one to have some nice symmetry there. And then I'm just going to try and do some waviness to get him in there. And maybe I won't do the curly cue. Okay, I'm going to leave the greenery for now because it's not so much the base shape. I think I'll be able to really do a lot by adding a little bit of a lighter green on top, but I don't want to get too far. At least this is good for now. I want to come up with an alternative for him because now he doesn't quite fit in with the others. No, now these just look so weird. There is like a big voluminous shape, a solid shape that forms, but there's all of these little spindles that are showing as well. What I'm going to do this time is do a lot smaller wiggles. Okay, that's reading much better. Not only does it read more like carrot tops, but it works as a solid frame, but it's also not so distracting. Okay, great. So now I have a rendering style that I at least like enough. I'm going to delete the ones that I didn't like. Sometimes I will keep these extras in case I like them for later, but in this case I just really didn't like like, there's not a chance I go back to those now. I want to apply the same style to all their hair down here. Okay, Now we've got just some really nice dark framing by that greenery. It looks wild, It looks like it can be carrot tops. But again, since it's repetitive around the side here, it doesn't draw too much attention. I'm going to group together any of my carrot top layers. And I'm going to delete this one that I'm not going to use. 14. Step 3C: Adding Details: This dark green color is also the color for all of my details here. I'm not going to use the newsprint inker brush for their details. I'm going to switch it up to see if I want to use something with more texture. I really like the carving Nibi brush. It has a great natural, I don't know, almost like a pastel texture. It's not great for little, tiny circles. Usually if I try to make this guy's eyes, it's going to make a weird angled oval. And I really want their cute little eyes to be little dots for these little guys and to have more precision. So I'll probably switch brushes for that. The last thing these carrots need are little cheeks already looking so cute. And we haven't even added the texture, even though I'm about to draw the cake that goes with this frosting, again, I'm putting things on different layers to keep things clean and neat. If stuff is different colors, I want it on different layers so that I can easily manipulate it later. If I need need or want to saved in a while, I'm going to group some of my layers together, Select multiple, Get the cake together first. Now, all the cake is in a group, all the greenery is in a group. I'm going to just group the carrots together by dragging one layer over the other. I'll also go ahead and put their details in the click and drag their cheeks and those over top. Now they're in that layer. Now I'll click and drag their faces in Details and drop that in the Carrot group. Now they are all in one group. I think I said all in one layer, earlier I meant all in one group. Okay. Now that I have all of the main elements, at least rendered in color, I am ready to go ahead and do the same for the lettering. I'm going to do the lettering in a separate video because I am going to render it a little bit more carefully and a little bit differently than I did for our little illustrated friends down here. 15. Step 3D: Rendering the Lettering: I'm ready to render the lettering just like before. I'm going to go ahead and make some layers beneath my sketch layer. And I'm going to be making the lettering in yellow so I've got my letters selected. I usually like to do my base for my letters with my newsprint anchor brush. And I like to turn the smoothing up all the way. Here is the main thing that I really want to share with you. The tip that I have rendering letters digitally, is I have the smoothing turned up all the way so that I have nice control over the shape of my letter. If I don't, let me draw one. That's how I was able to follow the inside of that C with the smoothing turned up all the way. If I do another one with the smoothing turned down all the way, even with all my practice, it's just a little bit more likely to actually that one wasn't bad. Gosh, I'm not really making great points in my examples today. Oh, this R will be good, but when you get to the O's really good. O's can be so finicky. Maybe I've practiced enough and I'm zoomed in enough that I've improved. But basically, if I don't have my smoothing up, it's just really easy to get some wonkiness that you aren't wanting some wonkiness that makes the letter forms look like they're not, I don't know, strong or sturdy or well thought out. Poorly demonstrated example. But I like to keep my smoothing up. The problem with the smoothing being up since it's on a delay. If I need to make a sharp turn, if I want to make a corner, I have to really slow down. If I take it too fast, it's going to round that out. That to me is one of the telltale signs that someone did digital lettering. Not that there's anything wrong with digital lettering, but I just think that you can tell that it was drawn quickly on an ipad. The way I get around that, with my smoothing turned up all the way is to draw my letters with tails. I'll start up here with the word. Instead of trying to draw the corners and the edges, I'm just going to draw each line and I'm going to continue past the boundary. Now I can go in with my paint bucket and fill in all the shapes in here. Now I have a very strange looking. Now what I'm going to do is trim the tails. I'm going to do that with a layer mask. I'm going to go ahead and tap and create empty mask. I'm going to hit hide because I want any pixels that I color to be hidden. And I'm just going to go in here and I'm going to trim those tails. And I'm just going to cut right across. Cut right across. What this allows is for me to have really nice sharp corners to my letter forms while still getting to have the smoothing turned all the way up. There's my W drawn with the tails. I'm going to turn that off and draw another version where I don't do that. Hopefully this example will look better than the others have. You can see it's hard for me to even draw. I'm so used to drawing them in this way. But you can see when I'm drawing this letter, there's all of these intersections and these areas where my brush needs to change direction. And those are all areas where my brush is going to round things out if I'm not going slow enough. Okay, Let me do a little side by side. Okay? So you can see I followed the same sketch and there's nothing wrong with this letter, but when I look at them, this one is just so much cleaner while still having way more personality. And I'm going to continue on through, let me delete ugly here. Turn this back on. And I'm just going to go ahead and go through, and I'm going to do that for all of my letters. When I'm working with multiple lines like this, what I'm going to do is draw each word on its own layer. And I'm going to draw the entire word with all of its tails. And then I'll go through and trim all the tails off all at once as I move through this. I'm going to save also I'm just going to ignore any kerning issues like this. R is a little bit further away from that, E the L's are a little heavy on the bottom. I'm really not worried about that right now. I just want to get these rendered. I just want to take the shapes from the sketch and turn them into rendered shapes. I'm getting some tails crossing down here, but I can still make out what needs to be crossed out, so I'm not too worried about it. But if that started to get a little bit and I was starting to get concerned about being able to carve the right shapes out, I would just do the letters on different layers. I have finished rendering the lettering as it's sketched. Now that it's rendered, I can see that there's some things that I want to fix, so I might want to go back through on. We really and actually thin that out a little bit. It's feeling a little bit heavy at the top, but all of those are things that I will do next when I start refining, adding in texture and finishing up the detail so that this piece can really pop. But at this stage, it's at least in full color and everything that was part of our sketch has been rendered. 16. Step 3E: Refining the Render: The first thing I'm going to do to start refining this is to thin out the lettering. Meaning I like the overall height and width. The lettering is currently taking up, but the strokes that make up the letter form are too thick. I've turned down the opacity of the letter layers that are too thick to create a ghost layer for me to draw on top with fresh layers, I'm keeping the most extreme points of the letter the same. But this time I'm drawing thinner strokes. When I zoom out, I see that the weight of the letters is definitely better. But now the W and E are a little bit far apart. But before I can use the lasso and move tool, I'm going to flatten the mask on the word by tapping on the layer and selecting flattened mask. This will permanently apply the mask to the layer. Meaning those tails aren't hiding anymore, they just don't exist. If I try to use my lasso and move tool before applying the mask, I could get some unintended and wonky results. I like the new weight of the word. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for the word, really creating a ghost layer from the previous version and drawing on top on a fresh layer with the lettering much improved. I'm going to go ahead and work my way around the rest of the illustration to add in or adjust anything that catches my eye like a party hat on one of the baby carrots to fill in some space, I think I'm going to try adding some organic and wild strokes here to the carrot tops. What if I made them bright green to add? No, no, no, not bright green. I'm going to take my mind off of the carrot tops by nudging some letters around. And I'll also add in that exclamation point that I forgot to draw on the first render. I'm going to zoom way out to see how the elements look from a high view. I think the carrots look a little bit flat, and I do plan to add texture in the next video. But I think a couple accent lines that don't compete with their expressions will really help these buddies stand more solid on the page, have a little bit more form. I'm now going through and organizing my layers. Grouping things together and deleting anything. I don't need to get it out of my way. Like the ghosted letter layers that got redrawn, followed by a quick save. Of course, back at the tops. I'm trying to find a way to add in more movement and texture without making a big old mess or distraction. Which I finally find with some thoughtful and loose curly cues. But it's not until a few toggles on and off, that it finally hits me a solution I haven't tried, which is to use the background color to draw on top of the green mass to help create some movement with negative space. Boom, beautiful solution does exactly what I need from far away. It cuts through the dark mass and close up, it adds fun movement and brush texture. This illustration is now 95% done, and I can't wait to show you how a little texture can really elevate a piece and make it pop in the next lesson. 17. Step 3F: Adding Texture: My favorite brush for adding texture is called stipple bot three. It's from the Spring 2021 bonus brushes that you can get for free, right in the app. There are a lot of great texture brushes in here, including ten different stipple bots. Definitely check out other brushes than what I'm showing here, as there may be some that you like more or just work better for your illustration. To start, I'm going to add a fresh layer on top of my carrots and tap the clipping mask icon. This will make it so any pixels I draw on this new layer will only show up on the shapes of the layer beneath. In this case, the carrots. I like to brush the texture on really heavily and then apply a layer mask to brush some of the texture back off. It's like pouring glitter over fresh glue. You need a lot and then you pour off the excess. In this case, I'm brushing it away. When I want to use multiple colors, I simply make an additional new layer. Tap the clipping mask icon, and repeat the same process of brushing it on, applying a mask, and taking some away to soften and control the edge. If I toggle the two texture layers off and back on, you can see the texture gets applied quickly, yet makes a big difference in helping the artwork pop. I'm going to continue to add to the existing yellow and orange texture layers for all the carrots. Taking care to add a touch of texture. But not going overboard though, the amount of texture and illustration should have is totally personal preference. Again, if I toggle those texture layers off, you can see how flat it is. When I turn them back on, everything feels more alive and also has a nice retro feel. I want to add more texture to the carrots, but don't want the heaviness of the super dark line. I'm going to borrow the pink from their cheeks and use my carving nib brush to add a few more detail lines. I'm going to switch back to my stipple bot brush to texturize the pink areas. I'm going to sample the pink and adjust the hue to be a little bit more red and a little bit more saturated. Then I'll apply the texture to a layer that's clipped to the frosting layer. Again, it's nice to zoom out to see how things are looking as a whole. You don't just get sucked into how they look close up. Now for the present, I'm going to cover the whole thing using my texture brush and I'm going to apply a layer mask as I've been doing, but this time I'm going to use my selection tool to isolate the area I want my brush to remove the texture from. You can see as I remove some of the texture, it's only taking it from the area within the selection. I'll deselect that area, and then I'm going to use it again, this time selecting the bottom of the present. When I remove the pixels near the top, it doesn't affect the lid of the present. This is a nice way to keep all of your texture on one layer while still having control over where it's showing up and where it's being removed. Just adding a little texture to the bow again, it doesn't have to be much. Just enough to add some grit to the page and for the eye to catch on to When it's time to add texture to lettering, I like to do more all over texture. I'm going to make a single new layer and add it as a clipping mask to the entire group of lettering layers. The effect I want to achieve here is very subtle. Almost like the letters were printed down and just a few spots of the background are peeking through. I don't need to go layer by layer. I can save some time by clipping one layer to the whole group. Coloring all over it and using a layer mask to strip away most of it, leaving behind just some really sweet texture dots. I like to toggle it on and off to see the effects and give it a little save. Now it's time to add texture to the background similar to the lettering layer. I want to do some simple all over texture. I'll make a new layer and pick a color that's a little lighter than the background, brushing the excess away with a mask. I chose the texture color pretty randomly. I want to show you how you can adjust and play around with color, right? In Fresco. In this case, I'll tap on my texture layer and then I'll select the adjustment layer icon. I want a hue and saturation adjustment layer. By default, an adjustment layer affects every layer below it. I'm going to clip it to the texture layer. So it only affects that I can then use the sliders to adjust the hue, saturation, and value of the selected artwork. This is a great way to sample new colors when you've already drawn the artwork to see if an alternative would be stronger suited. In this case, the adjustment layer actually just confirmed the original color I chose. I tapped on it and deleted it. I do, however, want to brush a little bit more of the texture away with the layer mask to ensure there's no competition with the lettering. Here I am grouping all the green layers that make up the carrot tops so that I can add a subtle all over texture with a single clipped layer, just like I did with the lettering. I'm going to brush it on pretty heavy and it doesn't look so great in this state. But then I'll apply a mask and remove a lot of it. It's very subtle. But again, it just gives the dark green a little bit of life and a little bit of grip. I wasn't sure if the green was too dark. I added an adjustment layer to play around with it. But again, it actually confirmed that my original choice felt strongest to me. I ended up deleting it. With that, I'm saving my file because she is done. When I look at the before and after of the non textured version and the textured version, the texture didn't take me very long and it certainly wasn't difficult to apply yet. It's so impactful on the final piece and the energy the illustration has, the texture layer was so easy to apply because I had a great process. I had a strong set of rendered shapes drawn from a strong sketch created from an initially strong concept. 18. Step 4: Exporting the Illustration: Now that our illustrations are complete inside of Fresco, it's time to export them from our ipads to be shared and used elsewhere. In this lesson, I'm going to cover exporting flat artwork from Fresco, exporting layered artwork for Photoshop or Illustrator. Exporting a time lapse video of your process, and a few tips for managing the working files. As you'll probably remember from the earlier tour, our export settings live in the top tool bar under the icon of a square and an arrow pointing up, followed by publish an export. If I select Export, as you can see, I can change the file name and select the file format. I want to export the artwork as PNG, Jpeg and PDF are all going to be flat versions of the artwork unless the PDF is a vector artwork, in which case it will be a layered PDF. Once opened in Adobe Illustrator, PSD is the layered working file that will open inside of Adobe Photoshop. I love bringing my fresco artwork into Photoshop, whether I'm simply doing a sanity check and looking over the artwork with a fine tooth comb, adjusting the color, or even making repeating pattern tiles from motifs drawn in Fresco. One super specific thing that I would like to share is when I'm drawing in Fresco, I tend to group the layers by motif. Meaning I'll group all the layers together that make up a flower, or in this case, I grouped all the carrots and their expressions and texture layers together. Once I'm in Photoshop, especially if I'm doing a lot of color adjusting, I tend to regroup the elements by color. In this case, I would regroup all the facial expression details separate from the pink cheeks, separate from the orange bases, separated from the textures on top. Reason being, is when working in Fresco, the composition is still flexible. Keeping motifs grouped helps to move and adjust the composition as needed. Once the work is in Photoshop, unless it's a pattern tile, the composition is set. It's more helpful to be able to quickly adjust the color palette by having same colored objects in the same group. In the case of a pattern tile, I'll keep layers grouped by motif as drawn in fresco. Arrange the pattern tile in Photoshop, then save a copy of the PSD file and regroup the layers by color for easy adjusting. I just really prefer to nail down composition first and then deal with color or recoloring later. Whichever file format you choose, selecting export will give you a few options for delivering the file, like air dropping, e mailing, saving to the cloud, et cetera. I prefer air dropping a working file to my computer and a flat version to my phone to watch or export. One of those cool time lapse videos of you working on your piece. You can go to export, export, and publish. And time lapse export to export a file for Illustrator. Like I said, you can export as a PDF or go back to the main export menu and select Send to Illustrator. The Send to Illustrator feature seems a little more predictable than the PDF version, but both will work and retain the anchor points of your vector objects. One tip, especially if you go the PDF route, is Adobe Illustrator likes to do unnecessary grouping of objects. Once you're an Illustrator, you'll want to select your artwork and ungroup the layers multiple times until things are broken down to your desired separateness. The keyboard shortcut to ungroup is shift command or control. This may be an issue that has been long fixed in Fresco, but a bunch of fellow artists have told me that tip. And so I wanted to relay it onto you just in case it's helpful. Regardless of how you export your artwork. It's important to note that the color space adobe fresco uses is brighter and more saturated than regular RGB. Therefore, certainly more saturated than CMYK. Expect some color shifting depending on what the artwork will be used for. I like to open my artwork in Photoshop even if nothing else needs adjusting to at least change the color profile to RGB, which I do by going to edit, assign profile, and selecting working RGB instead of display P three or whatever profile your ipad and Fresco chose. This will dull some of the colors, which sometimes is acceptable, but sometimes requires me to go in and readjust the color layers to brighten them back up a bit. You can also do this in one fell swoop by adding a hue and saturation adjustment layer on top of the entire artwork and bumping the saturation a bit. In this case, when I was exploring color palettes, I chose colors that would work already in CMYK. And so I was expecting some dulling to happen, and I didn't feel like it was really sacrificing any of the necessary brightness in my color palette. Now that you've got your finished illustration, go ahead and export it. Save a copy of the working file on a hard drive, share a flat or time lapse version on social media and with your favorite creative communities. Your friends can cheer you on. And cheer yourself on too. You just finished an illustration. In the next lesson, I'm going to do a quick recap of the entire process for easy reference in the future. 19. Quick Process Recap: You just watched me fumble through the creative process in a very real way. There's usually some unforeseen carrot top in every single project I start. There probably will be in yours too. That's why we have creativity to help solve problems we face in the process. In this lesson, I just want to recap the overall process in a quick bite sized way, even though we both know it's never this tidy in real life. First up is defining the concept. This is where you think through parameters, brainstorm ideas, seek inspiration, information, and reference photos, and ultimately create one or more thumbnails to help you clarify the main elements within a concept and how they'll work together. If it clicks as a thumbnail, it's got a great shot of making it as a refined sketch and a solid illustration. Remember, you can return to this stage throughout your process as you find missing links in your concept. Like I did to find lettering inspiration during sketching and to finalize my color palette after sketching. Next up is sketching the concept. This is where you use a pencil to create an at scale or larger version of the thumbnail. From there, it's all about refining this sketch, adjusting scale and position with the lasso, and move tools and re, drawing fresh iterations on top of ghosted layers of previous versions, adding more details and information during each pass. At the end of this process, you should have a pencil sketch with clear lines and informative detail. Now it's time to render the full color illustration and refine until it's finished. In this project, I started by drawing all the shapes that made up my sketch in my chosen color palette. I spent the most time working out my carrot tops, which I hadn't clarified during the sketch phase with the main characters in place, I then rendered the lettering using tails, allowing me to keep my brush smoothness up and my corners sharp. After that, I spent a little time refining the overall render, adding in new details and adjusting the placement of others. Finally, it was time to bring the rendered shapes to life with some texture. With the illustration complete, it's ready to be exported, saved, and enjoyed in other places. This general process is so easily adaptable and always reliable. I hope you enjoy taking what you like from it and applying it to your own creative workflow. 20. Thank You!: Thank you so much for watching my course. It is my pleasure to share my experiences and processes with you. And I hope that they empower you to take another step on your creative journey. It is the goal for all of us artists to not quit. And by being here, you aren't quitting. So thanks for inspiring me back. I love teaching on skill share. So be sure to follow me here to be alerted of new classes, and be sure to check out my library of 20 existing courses in case there's something already waiting for you. If you ever have questions about your creative path, want a professional illustrator to review your portfolio, or would just like some casual art dates to show up with some fellow artists to make art with, then you might like joining my fellow artists group. We do all of those things every single month. I believe it's the best group, a round for working artists and illustrators. I'm also a round on Instagram at Bydylanm and have a newsletter at Bydylanm.com See you next time and thanks again.