Adobe Photoshop for Artists - Digitize, Present and Monetize Your Art

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Welcome to the Photoshop for artists course. My name is Alexandra and I'm going to show you how to digitize your artworks created by traditional mediums like graphite, watercolors, acrylic or oil. I'm sure you have seen pictures like this and thought, wow, do they really set up this living room to take this picture? No way, that's just Photoshop [MUSIC]. I'm also sure that you already know that social media is the best place to spread the word about you and your art. Getting a following is not easy. Mainly if you just take pictures with your phone. Even if they are really good pictures, I'm sure your feet could use a little variety. By digitizing your artworks, you create a whole new world for your art career. Even if it was just a hobby, you can create replicas of your artwork, give them to your family and friends and keep the precious original. I think this is the best you can preserve your artwork, mainly in watercolors. If you are in this medium, I'm sure you already know that some colors fade over time, so all you need to do is to digitize them, and you can preserve your artwork or even make them better. By simply retouching, you can get rid of the pencil marks that can be seen, or if you have some unwanted paint splatters, or if you make a mistake, you don't need to throw your artwork away, you can simply just digitize it, retouch it, and voila, you have an amazing artwork. I will show you simple but effective techniques to create mockups. Wait, what's a mockup? Do you remember what I said at the beginning? A mockup is basically placing your artwork into a ready thing, for example, living room, a lifestyle picture, or a frame on the wall. You would like to do that to present your amazing artworks on social media as I said before. As a bonus, I will show you how to create your own mockup files that you can use over and over again for different designs, and that can be tools in your creative career. What is also exciting, I will show you how to place your artwork on products so that you can show your customers or clients how would it look like. With the course, I'm offering you my own artwork that you can use throughout the learning process. Also my own mockup template files that you can use in the future. But the whole point of this, I will show you how to monetize your artworks. There are several options, one of them is for example, POD sites, print-on-demand sites. For example, Society6, Redbubble, Etsy or Displate, which will print your artwork on products for you. All you have to do is to create amazing art and digitize them. I will show you how to set the correct sizes for these sites to give you an extra chance to succeed. I'm Alexandra, a professional art teacher and artist. You can find me online as The Artmother. Visit my website, www.theartmother.com, and follow me on social media like Instagram and Facebook. I have worked as a graphic designer for an Italian fashion company for four years, and I'm going to share my tips and tricks I learned through this job, and the way actually I made my passion my career. I designed this course, especially for artists. Photoshop is an amazing program. It can do so much, but it can be overwhelming. You don't need to master all of its functions. It is enough to learn how to remove backgrounds, align multiple images, use smart objects, and set picture sizes. Don't be afraid, this course is suitable for very beginners. I will describe everything step-by-step. What do you say? Hit enroll, and let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Course Guide : Welcome to the Photoshop for artists course. I'm glad you decided to join me on this creative journey. [MUSIC] I hope this course provides you with all the knowledge you need to digitize, present, and monetize your artwork created by traditional media. [MUSIC] After the course introduction, you will get an insight to the creation process of a watercolor illustration, which I created exclusively for this course and for your educational use throughout the course, so that you can learn all the skills required even if you don't have your own artwork scanned. I will also give you tips on how to approach an artwork which you create intentionally to digitize. In the resources section of this video, you will find a PDF file with a link to a Google Drive folder which you can download. [MUSIC] It includes the Photoshop for artists class files that will be used throughout the course. [MUSIC] I want this course to be taken at your own pace. There is an auditor lectures. But if you think the pacing is too slow or too fast, feel free to skip a lesson or re-watch a lesson and find the right pacing for your skill level. [MUSIC] I'm including a PDF after each process with detailed description so that you have a reference to return to. You can also find instructional video of the Photoshop interface for very beginners. If you're familiar with the essentials, feel free to skip that part. [MUSIC] As always, reach out to me throughout a course, if you have any questions or if you have an additional lesson idea, I will be happy to help you. Option creative style. The course is divided into three main sections. In the digitizing section, you will be guided through the scanning process, aligning multiple images, dashing, removing backgrounds, and playing around with the design. I will also show you the process of digitizing Paso drawings and cameras. The section is called my personal pro tips that I learned through my own professional experience. [MUSIC] In the presenting section, you will learn what is a mock-up and how you can create simple and complex mock-up files, which will become your essential tools in your art career. [MUSIC] In the final section, you will learn about options for monetizing your digitized artworks in the form of art prints, digital art prints, clip art bundles, and designs printed on products by POD sites. We will talk about Etsy, creating market and print on demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. [MUSIC] Now that we reviewed the course outline, are you ready to start learning? [MUSIC] Let's kickstart your artistic career. [MUSIC] 3. The Functions of Photoshop for Artists: [MUSIC] If you're a very beginner and you don't even have Photoshop, no problem. You can download a 30-day trial version to a computer from the www.adobe.com. In this course, I'm using the latest version of Photoshop CC 2018 and hopefully you don't have a too old version on your computer because somethings can be differently as in mine. Please, if you are stuck anywhere or you have questions, feel free to ask for help. I will try to answer as soon as possible. As I've already mentioned, Photoshop is a program that is essential nowadays for creatives and can do so many things. But in this course we are going to focus only on the functions of Photoshop, which you can use as a traditional artist: retouching, masking smart objects for creating mockups and resizing. In this video, I'm going to give you a short overview of its use, but I will go into everything in detail later in the course. Retouching is basically getting rid of the mistakes like pencil marks or paint drops or even brushstrokes if you are talking about acrylics. Within retouching, I would love to measure playing with settings so you can make the painting more saturated. You can make your painting more vibrant, you can even change the colors of your painting. Mask is a very handy tool to get rid of unwanted paint splatters too, helps you in removing backgrounds and with overlapping objects when it comes to mockups. Smart objects are basically as little windows created within a picture which you can modify anytime. So when you have a mockup template, all you need to do is to insert your artwork and it will fit the template right away. Resizing is very important when it comes to pixels, so if you want your artwork to look good after it is printed as an art print or printed on a product, you need to take care about the settings right at the beginning of the digitizing process. Have you ever heard of PPI or DPI? It is basically pixel per inch or dots per inch. If it's at low, the print will become pixelated. So it is good to set it 300 minimum, but we will get back to this later. Also every social media uses different sizes so when it comes to sharing your artwork, you want it to fit their restrictions. Let's say Instagram as an example, it is restricted to square format. You can upload a non-square format to the side but it will only show when somebody clicks on the picture. So if you want to keep it professional, it is good to upload well-prepared, high-quality pictures. So that's only short, now I would like to make some more things clear. There will be shortcuts within the program I will use, and I'm sure you already know them, but to make sure everything is clear, I made a short document with the shortcuts that you have a reference to get back to. You can find it in the resources of this video. I am using a Mac and you could have a PC, and that's not a problem. I'm going to comment on the shortcuts as much as possible but keep in mind one thing; command on Mac equals to Control on a PC. I might not say both always, so here is a document explaining essential shortcuts which will help us in the process. I also included a short video explaining the Photoshop interface to very beginners so if you're finally here, just skip the video and let's get to the creation process of the artwork. 4. Photoshop Essentials for Very Beginners: [MUSIC] Welcome. In this video, I would love to go through Photoshop essentials for very beginners so that you have some idea how this program works. If you know the basics, you can skip this video. At first, I would love to show you how to open files in the program, so simply file open and you can open an image like such in your computer but the most important thing is to know that it is like opening these images. If you have multiple images opened, the program is opening them in like new windows as if in a web browser. You can like change their arrangement, and work in them simultaneously. One of the most important tools is the selection tool, which you can find here and if you're right-clicking on this icon, you can see several possibilities, or options you can choose from. Here's the rectangle marquee tool. You can choose a rectangle, etc. We are going to select which is rectangular. Simply just drag over the picture the area you want to select. To deselect an area, you just simply right-click and hit de-select. There is the possibility to do invert the selection and again, right-click and select inverse. There is another tool. Here, this is the Lasso tool. What are we going to use in this course is the polygonal lasso tool, by which you can select area by placing dots around and just selecting an area like this. I'm going to use shortcuts in this course. I'm including a PDF. You can find these essential shortcuts in a PDF I'm including in the first aligning process of folder and I'm going to include it in the resources of this video. As you can see, I'm working on a Mac so even if you have a PC, it doesn't really matter what you need to remember that command is equals to control on a PC most of the times and including the shortcuts I'm using, including the comment and the control but sometimes I might not say them both. I want you to know that command and control equals so when I say hit Command C it is equaling Control C. As you can see here are the shortcuts. Select All means that if I deselect this area and just hit Command A, I'm selecting the whole picture. This is the Select All and it is equaling Control A. Now we're going to copy. I'm going to go into this picture, hit Command A to select all and as you can see, Command C, or Control C is for copying. I'm sure you know this shortcut so Command C and to paste, I'm going to choose the layer of this one and hit Control V. It is now filling my sheet of paper. To zoom out, you can use the zoom tool, which you can find here, clicked out and you can zoom out, or if you're on a Mac, you can hold down option, or I think option equals Alt on PC so hold on Alt and just roll your mouse and you can zoom out of the picture. We're going to transform this to scale it down. I'm going to transform it with Command T, or Control T. Now I hit Command T and the whole artwork just appeared. Now I'm going to scale it down. Just look at this, I can like distort the whole artwork, which I don't want. I'm going to hold down the Shift key. If I hold down the Shift Key, I can scale it down without losing the proportions of the artwork. To approve this, I'm going to just double-click. It is like transforming the artwork, or you can see here, up here is this sign, and if you click it, it says that it's all right. I would love to talk to you about the layers. Now, look here. Here are the layers and here is the background layer. This is the image I had opened. You need to pay attention which layer you are working on, but I'm going to select an area, and now I'm not cutting from this autumn wipes artwork, but I'm cutting from the background you see, because I have the background selected. Now, if I select, my selection still stays. This is the same selection. I choose my first layer and now I can simply move it around. Always pay attention to the layers you are working in. I'm going to deselect, yes, and make sure that when you want to deselect a selected area, select the selection tool and then you can deselect. There are lots of other tools that you can use and that we are going to use. One more I would like to show you is the rectangle tool. If you right-click on it, you can see that there are several other shapes you can do but we're going to use the rectangle tool in this course. I have preset this that I have the stroke up here. You have this panel. You will always have options for customizing the things you are doing. Now, I'm just going to select the stroke to none and fill it with our layer and you can see I have a rectangle behind this artwork and if I want to bring this rectangle to the front, just grab it here. When I have a background, it is always going to be at the bottom but I can unlock it. When I unlock it, it becomes a layer and now I can place it all around. That's it for the essentials. Take a look on these shortcuts. You can print it and just keep it at your computer if you don't know them all. If it is to safe, I didn't mention, but it's like common guess, you can save it but we're going to mostly use the File and Save As because we want to customize the formats shape. We are saving our documents. One more thing about this. We're going to use the Photoshop format, the JPEG format, and the PNG format. What's the difference? Photoshop format actually keeps every information you have in this file. Let's say I'm going to save it as a Photoshop file so PSD. When I open it, it is going to be opened in the Photoshop and I will have all the layers, all the texts and everything in it. If I save it as a JPEG, it is going to be simple picture as if it was a picture shot by a camera, or something like that so it's just simple JPEG. This we can use in the social media posts and a lot more places with one more thing about a PNG, we are going to remove the backgrounds from our artworks and we're going to save them as a PNG because a PNG can tolerate a picture when there is no background so it's a transparent image. If we would love to save an image that doesn't have a background, but we would save it as JPEG it will automatically have a white background, but not with the PNG. I think that's enough for the essentials. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask me in the questions and answers section, if you are stuck anywhere, I'm here to help you. Let's get started. 5. Research Trending Topics: Welcome to the first stage, the creation process. In this section, you will get an insight to my own creation process that I follow when I create an artwork intentionally to digitize. I have several reasons for that but now my point is to make an artwork that is on trend and that I can show you all aspects of the process on it. If you are in this course, I assume you are constantly creating new artworks. In the digital world, there are trends that it is good to follow to have bigger success in getting more following or selling artworks and products. Trends can be in color palettes or topics, but I would love to emphasize that you should stay true to your style and artistic voice. Use this trend only as guidelines for your future artworks. Let's just stop in Pinterest and see what is trending now in autumn 2018. [NOISE] I'm sure you know Pinterest, it is actually a search engine for images. I just put some keywords in it. I'm familiar, it's trending now, for example, watercolor brush lettering. I'm sure you've seen this on clothing, on social media posts, on motivational quotes, and things like that. This is actually giving more personalized thing to illustrations. We can call it also a modern calligraphy. Trending watercolors I put this here so that we can see what's in. As you can see, there are some botanicals, like I said, the tropical leaves are wherein this Monstera leaf is painted everywhere. Cacti and flower bouquets of rats, botanical patterns. As watercolor, I'm going to write 2018 color [NOISE] of the year. It shows me this oceanside blue. As you can see, it's purple or violet mostly, and then gold rush. I see lots of artworks with this gold accent in it, and I also love to use it. I really love gold mainly in acrylics. I just love to watch shining painting. My point here is to just put keywords into Pinterest or other websites research design websites, not particularly art related, but for example interior design. See the colors that are trending. Your eye will stuck at the things that you like. You need to use those things. Because as you can see, there are some pale colors here, and is red pair color and my eye just stuck on this oceanside side violet. Now that these are my colors from these trending colors. Again, there are several other things on this sites. Trending watercolors, where was that? Yes. For example, sunflowers or I don't know these abstract things, wedding. When I roll or scroll through these pages, my eyes will see pictures that it likes. Actually, that are the guidelines I need to follow that appealing to me so I will follow my artistic voice, my thing. I'm sure you get what I mean. My creation process starts with this. Then I need to answer some questions. Let's see what those are. 6. Choose Your Medium: In order to make the digitizing process easier, it's crucial to decide what medium are you going to use? What size are you going to paint on? What colors are you going to use? If you are about to digitize an artwork that you already have painted, it is okay anyhow you painted it. I would just love to show you my own process and give you tips for the future. Let's talk about the size. If you have a scanner, for example as me, as I do, I own an Epson scanner which is A4 sized, I'm restricted to A4 size and A3 size. If I'm going to create a painting on A3 size, I need to scan it twice, then align these two images in Photoshop. I will going to show you this process. It will make actually the creation and digitizing process a bit more complicated. But there is a prone to it. In A3 size, I can get so much more on the paper. If I just create a painting A4 size and just put it in and digitize it, it's okay mainly for individual elements. But if I want a complex artwork, I cannot get that much on an A4 size paper. I will show you this aligning process. Actually we are going to start with that in a digitizing process. Let's talk about a canvas. I'm mostly an acrylic painter. If I'm painting on canvas, I have two options. The first is that I find a scanning service around and they scan the artwork for me and the second is, and that is what I'm using actually is using a DSLR camera, setting it to the highest resolution and shooting in RAW. I will go into this in detail later in the course. But my point is that I'm not going to paint on smaller canvas. I just don't like it. I have the same reasons as for the A4 sized watercolor paper. Let's talk about the medium, what I'm going to use. As I'm restricted to the sizes of A3, what I'm going to paint on is a watercolor paper because I don't like the small canvas. Therefore, I'm going to use watercolors. I have several reasons for using watercolors for illustrations that I'm intentionally creating to digitize that is fairly cheap so I can make them more. It has a nice texture and the result is flat. I don't need to deal with unwanted shadows. For example as if we would have an oil painting or an acrylic painting with a textured effect. It is actually in a dimension and not absolutely flat. I don't need to deal with that in Photoshop, which makes the reduction process easier. Also, if you want to sell the original painting, it is not a good idea to manipulate the artwork too much in Photoshop. This is the reason why I'm mostly just doing a little retouching, do my acrylic paintings and only use them in social media posts and mock-ups. I can go a bit wilder with retouching for art prints. Back to the main topic of this video, you need to think about the reasons you are digitizing your artworks. Are you going to sell the original? Are you going to create art prints? Are your illustrations going to appear on products? If you're not sure in your answers yet, it's absolutely not a problem. We are going to go through this process together and hopefully you will get inspiration and at the end, you will have a clear image that you want to do. Now, let's go and watch me prepare the painting. I will explain why I'm doing things. I will make the final artwork available for you so that you can work with it throughout the course. 7. The Creation Process - Plan Your Painting: [MUSIC] In the previous video, I told you my own answers to those questions. But don't get intimidated by them. Follow your own heart and find your own answers. Even within the process, you will find the best solutions that are most comfortable for you. That's a promise. Before I do anything, I want to explain you what I'm going to do and why. I'm going to create an autumn themed painting. My main reason for that is that it's autumn when I'm shooting this course, and I want to create a painting that will fit in the interior, that is fitting the theme, and all the posts that are actually on social media. My point is also to make a design that can appear on products. It will contain a lettering. As I said, it's on trends to have hand lettering. I'm not the best at it, but I would love to just include it in the artwork. I would love to have separate elements in it because I would like to show you how easy it is to play around with the composition so that you don't need to pay attention at it that much. Also, create a complicated design so that I can show you process of removing backgrounds on bit complicated artwork rather than just having a circle and just cut it off. I would love you to be an expert in it. It will contain a lettering because it's on trend as we've seen. The dominating colors will fit the trending colors like as we saw purple. I'm going to use yellow ocher because of this gold trend. Also indigo because that's my favorite color and it very fits this color combination. I'm going to intentionally create mistakes so that I can show you how to reattach them. I have one pro tip here. If you are going to create watercolor illustrations like this, I'm going to draw everything. I have pre-sketched the whole to have the pencil marks to remove in Photoshop. I'm going to use an eraser before that, but you will see that there will be pencil marks all that remain under the painting, under the watercolors. My pro tip is to minimize the pencil marks on the sketch. You can think about where things will be, how will they look like. But when painting, try not to draw too much because the retouching process can be really demanding if you are overdrawing things, If that make sense. Let's see me create painting, and then see you each other in the digitizing section. 8. The Creation Process: 9. Scannning: Welcome to digitizing section. In this first video, we're going to scan our artwork. Let's just do it. I have an epson stylus as SX 130 printer scanner, which is a pretty old one. It actually never printed because it is a low-quality printer but its color is is pretty good and it's very cheap. If I will have an A4 size paper, I would simply put it inside the scanner and scan it. But now I'm going to scan it twice to get the whole artwork. What you need to do before scanning is to clean the scanner. It can get dusty, you can have eraser leftovers or paint splatters there, mainly if you are doing this regularly. So make sure you clean them so that you don't need to retouch them from the picture later. After cleaning it, place the painting inside and pay attention to aligning of the sides so that it is easier to align the two pictures later in Photoshop. Now, let's see what settings you need to look for in your computer. Open your scanner, I'm going to scan, open scanner. It is creating overview right away. Now, I can see if it is aligned, drawing a line like this is useful for this. What I need to do is to change the resolution. I have 50 dpi, which is very low. For a good scan, I'm going for 1,600 dpi. Anything below 1,600 will not preserve your artwork too much, and about 1,600 on the other hand, creates too big file and too much detail. So 1,600 works best. Make sure you are scanning in color, you can start the place you are scanning to, we can name the scan autumn wipes, and make sure you have a tiff. Select it as a format. This file format keeps the most information about the skin. It is as if it will be a row with a DSLR camera, select that here to scan the whole. Hit "Scan" and make sure that during the whole scan again, it may take a while, that you are pushing the paper towards the scanner glass. Because mainly if you have a bigger painting like this one, bigger paper, it might get a bit away from the glass and it will make the scanner be blurry and not good. Just make sure to hold down, be patient because this process can take a few minutes. One side is down, let's go for the second one. Make sure you're putting the bottom to the place where you had the top before and trying to align in the same position. Hit "Overview" to see if it's alright. Great. We have slime straight. I'll now makes sure the settings are the same, so 1,600, and hit "Scan". Again, make sure that you are pushing the paper towards the scanning gloss. Now we have scanned the painting, let's align the two. 10. Alligning Process: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a seamless design from the two scanned documents. Let's just get started. This is the time when we are going to use Photoshop. Open it up if you have it installed on your computer. If you don't, just get the free trial from the Adobe site. We are going to create as a first step, a new template. I'll click "File" and "New". We're going to create a preset that we're going to save and you are going to be able to use it over and over again. As you can see, this is mine and this is going to be yours. Set the width to 6,500 pixels, to height, 8,500 pixels, and portrait orientation. It depends what art works you are doing. This works best for me, and we're going to work in this course with these settings. But if you're going to use your own artworks, set the dimensions which fits them. But make sure that the shortest part is 6,500 pixels, so that it will look good when it's printed on bigger products. Set a resolution to 300. It is the goldenrod for printing. It will look good mainly for smaller projects. I just love to set it to 600 so that it is sharp enough. We are going to stay on RGB Color mode and name the preset. Here, you will actually name the file. I'll name it Aligned Original and to save it I will name it My Art Template2. Click "Save Preset" and click "Create". Now I have a blank document into which I'm going to insert the scans. Click to the scan select it with the selection tool or click "Command A" or "Control A" on PC, and copy with Control C or Command C on Mac. Click on My Art Template, this one. Paste with "Command V" or "Control V". There you have it. Now we are going to transform it. Just hit "Control T" or "Command T". Scale it down. Make sure you have a 90 degrees. This is showing here. This transforming process is going to take a while because we are working with their files. Place it into the middle. You can play with the scaling little bit more and do the same with the second part. What are we going to do now is to set the blending mode to Multiply. This will help us to see through our image. Why I love to draw these lines around is because I can see if they are aligning. They are not. I will click "Command T" again to scale it down a bit more and double-click. Now click the selection tool and just drag it around. Keep holding down the Control key, which will help you to move around your artwork by pixel. I think they are looking good on both sides. What I'm going to do is to click the Polygonal Lasso Tool and go through the artwork. Make sure you have selected the bottom layer. The reason for that is that if you can see this top part of the illustration is a bit more blurred. I want to make sure that everything is sharp. Actually, what I'm going to do is to select the areas which is good and then blend the two by that line. If you have an artwork that is not with this separate elements, but it is just drilled like the paper or the canvas is filled with the artwork, just cut through it and you will see what is just going to happen. I will leave these bubbles out, I try not to cut too many parts. Make sure you are selecting around the artwork in the layer you have chosen. Now hit "Mask". What Mask does, is it actually creates the copy of your selection from the layer you selected. It is a nice tool because if you select Brush and choose black color, you can hide things. If you change the color to white, you can re-wheel things from under the layer you put the mask on. Now I want to actually get rid of this sharp lines, and to see how it will look like in real, you need to change the blending mode to normal again. Like you see, it is not too sharp anymore, but I want these lines just to look good. This is okay. I have a line here, going to make it better. This part is a little bit blurry and I know that it looks better at the second part, like here. I'm just going to go through with the white brush. This is just okay. You see if I just go through it as if I would just erase it. I don't want this, I just wanted to show you. Go back and that's alright. This is what you can do and make sure that the brush you are using is, if I were to tell you, its hardness is set down. You are not creating sharp eraser marks around, but you are smoothening the both. I think it looks good. What I'm going to do is I'm going to flatten the image. Select all the layers with holding down the Shift key and clicking around. Right-click and "Flatten Image" or hit "Control E" or "Command E". Now we have a nice seamless design. What I'm going to do is to save this file as a JPEG. "Save As" I have it named already. Click here, "JPEG" and just save it into the PHOTOSHOP FOR ARTIST CLASS FILES. You will find it already there. It is in the resources section so that you can compare your process with this or the result of your process with this and that you have a file to work with if you don't go through this process, or you mess up. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask them in the questions and answers section. I'm just going to show you the recap of this process. You can find this file in the Class Files. I hope you will have luck with this one and see you in the next video where we are going to do a little retouching. 11. Pro Tip - Make a PRO Art Template: My pro tip here is that if you have better computer, set your PRO Art Template at least to 10,000 pixels at the shortest. It is good to have a square form so that you can apply your artwork to several products. In the video, we talked about the 6,500 pixels minimum. They sit on the shortest side. Making bigger template increases the file size so you need to have big storage and a good computer so that it can process this big file and that you can work in it smoothly. Sixty-five hundred and 8,500 pixels is the minimum for a good quality but an average working flow in an average computer. If you have a good computer and you are going to create several designs and you really want to go for quality, just create PRO Art Template with 10,000 pixel and 10,000 pixel or different dimensions and just go higher That was my pro tip here. 12. Retouching: Amazing. Now we have aligned artwork and now we can get a retouching. It totally doesn't matter if you're making this retouching first and then you are removing backgrounds or the other way. I love to do it this way because I love to make everything right at first. At first, I'm going to get back the vibrancy of the painting because as you see, the scan itself dolls the colors. Simply, if you don't have the artwork open, just open the aligned or regional JPEG with file open. If you don't see the adjustments, click window adjustments and it just pops right here, or click Image, Adjustments and you can find brightness contrast. You can just play around with the settings. I'm just going to deliver a contrast, play with the brightness. Click Okay. You can play with the exposure. I know to play with that one. You can see. Don't make the artwork too harsh. Just play only around so that it is a bit more vibrant. You can set the vibrance here. Vibrance. Yes, that's the one. You can play with the saturation. You can desaturate and make it black and white but now we want this. I think it is enough for now. The second stage now is removing pencil marks. Take stake spot-healing brush. You can find it here. We can right-click. Here's the healing brush, patch too, etc, but you need to choose the spot healing brush tool. What it actually does is that it gathers information from around the brush and feels the brush stroke with it. Basically, it is a content-aware fill in the form of a brush. As you can see, I will just zoom in. For example, I have a pencil mark here. I'm set to size the bigger one. If I go around it, it just disappear. It gathers information from around and fills it. I can go over edges that I don't find too nice. Let's see one example here. Where's the necklace? Extra splatter. I don't want in the artwork. Now, I don't care about the background. We are going to remove it. This stage can take a bit of a time, but it to play with it because your artwork will be cleaned up more quickly. This is why it is good to minimize the pencil marks right at the painting stage so that you don't have too much work afterwards. Also, don't forget to go where you're painting with an eraser before the scanning. I will now go over the whole painting and clean it up. I will speed it up because it will take a while. You can try to with my artwork or use your own or just watch the process. Then I think it is good enough. I cleaned it up. Now, I'm going to deal with these V letter. If you watch the creation process, you saw that I started to paint it with the wrong color. It was intentional because it just can happen even if you prepare your paints. Then you realize that, oops, this color doesn't fit, etc. You don't need to throw the painting away, but you need to make sure is that the letter or anything you do this with, has the shape you want it to have. In this case, the shape of the V. I went over it with this dark indigo. I'm going to loosen up the texture and make it fit with the other letters with the clone stamp tool. You can use this also when the healing brush tool doesn't work. Here's the stamp tool. Choose the clone stamp tool. It works on the basis of copying. By pressing Alt or Option, you will see that this arrow changes. You can set it to the texture that you want to copy and simply click around and copy what you want. I will just zoom in and I will loosen up this dark color. As you can see, the color of my brush is texture I set it. If I set it here to this texture, I will make it bigger and just hope it do a clone stamp. I will try to add texture but keep in mind that the brush, the spot following the direction of your brush. I will just click around and add this texture into my V. I can choose it here because it will be longer here. I will just add textures from around, let's say to the middle of my V. It will fit the other letters. To smooth the edges, I will do the same. With the spot-healing brush tool, I will just go over and mix them. Oh, yes, and I know what I forgot. This mushroom has too bright. Thank you. I will use the clone stamp to paint a little edge here. In the third stage, we can get a composition. This is the case when it is good to have separate elements that you can move around. This stage is best done after we removed the background so that you don't need to pay too much attention when selecting the object, but you can freely manipulate them. Let's get back to this after we remove the background. I just saved this file as Cleaned Up Original so that you have something to work with. If you don't want to go through all these cleaning up things, you can just simply use my cleaned-up file. I'm going to just save as to the class files and name it Cleaned Up Original so that you can have something to work with in the next stage. I'm including a PDF file with the steps for you so that you can have a reference. Now, let's go and remove that background. 13. Removing Backgrounds: [MUSIC] We arrived to the part where we're going to remove this white background and create a nice cleaned up artwork like this one. Now you might ask, why do we need to remove backgrounds? You don't need if you are going to use your artwork only for mockups or framed artworks that when you have a nice artwork we do nice background, not like this one but it has several positives to it. Basically, you can place your design on any colored background, include them in Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, websites, real objects, t-shirts. You can create postcards digitally and add them to them, or create a bundle for the same topic and sell them online. Of course if you are going to be an illustrator or you want to be an illustrator, clients expect to have the backgrounds removed from for example elements like this. There are lots of possibilities you can have within one artwork if you remove the background and of course have a nice cleaned up original. Now if you're working with your own artwork and you don't have a background to remove, just open the the aligned set file. I have included in the resources the cleaned up original, or just watch the video and do nothing. It is always useful to notice things even if you will not use it. Here's what I'm going to do. Open the cleaned up original. First things first, we are going to unlock the background. Click here, or it became a layer and we're going to duplicate the layer, Control C Control V. This is the easiest way or Control C Control V to duplicate the layer. We're going to hide this one and work with this. Basically what we're going to do is to create a selection of these separate elements so that we can simply delete the background. The complication is that I'm having now the Magic Wand selected Magic Wand Tool. If I click now to the whites, it is selecting like everything like this, small splatters. This not really nice texture down here from the scanning process and all things like that and I don't want this. Now I'm going to like deselect what helps a lot is setting the contrast up. I'll click "Image Adjustments," brightness, contrast, and just put the contrast up as possible. Your artwork will look like this. This is simply to have this edges so that when we're selecting, we're not selecting anything we don't need. Now make sure you have the contagious on so that it doesn't select the whites inside the objects and just click on the white. Now you can see things are selected for example this white in the bubble isn't. But here on this mushroom it doesn't really matter right now. We're going to deal with it in a minute. Now. Right-click and hit "Select Inverse" and now we have the background selected. What do we are going to do is to throw a mask on it. Click here, hit "Mask." As you can see, it's deleted the background, this jagged thing, it means that there is no background, so it's transparent. This is the time where we can bring back this texture. Make sure you are in the mask. Click, "Brush." Make sure you are painting with the white and as we did in the previous video, we can bring back things from the mask with painting with white. Now you can see I brought back a little bit of this white also. We simply change it to black, to fully black and just go there and just delete what you don't want or don't need. Now this mushroom is all right. You can just simply go over your artwork and just see, take a look on things you don't want. Second thing is that it didn't select this part and I don't want that white. Just simply click the Magic Wand Tool and just hit "Delete." If you want these white dots from the mushrooms or the bubbles removed, you can do that. I don't want that now. This is great. Deselect. What I'm going to do now is to create a color overlay. Click here, whereas the FX Select Color Overlay and choose any color. I'm going to work with black. It doesn't really matter. What it does is, it is creating me as if just silhouette of the artwork so that I can select everything. What I'm going to do is to flatten this. Add a new layer like here. Select both bit holding down Shift key and just clicking and hit Command A, which is merging the layers and making an easy silhouette. Now use the Magic Wand tool and choose the elements, all the separate elements. I'm going to speed this up, hold down the Shift key and just click to demo. To know if you didn't forget something, just throw a mask again and something like disabuse like this. You didn't select it, so just go back and select it again. Everything's fine. I have my selection and now I'm going to turn this background layer again. I have a selection and I'm going to get rid of this layer. Right-click and click "Delete" layer. Yes. What I have now is the background with the clear selection. Now hit "Select Inverse" and simply hit "Delete" while. We have a transparent, nice cleaned up artwork. Deselect. I have included a simple watercolor paper texture in the class files. Simply Open File, open and here is the watercolor paper texture. It has a simple watercolor paper scanned and cleaned up with the size of the yard tantalum we are using in this course. Select this artwork, hit Command C and paste it into the watercolor paper texture and wallah, we have nice cleaned up artwork. You might have some problems for example we have here is absolutely simple to make it right. Just get the eraser and just go over this edge to make it nicer. If you find pencil marks like this, you can just simply hit "Spot Healing Brush" so I can simply continue making the artwork as nice as possible. To make it a blend to the watercolor paper texture more, just hit "Blending mode." Set the blending mode to multiply again. It will bring the shadows back. You can save this as a transparent PNG. Just hide the background and hit "File Save As" and name it transparent. You already have this file in the class files. But choose PNG. This PNG is a format which supports artworks without a background and hit "Save" and turn the background on and save it as a JPEG. File, save as JPEG and just name it like remote background. You can find that file also in the class files. I have included a document with the steps for this process in the resources. Let's go to the next video where we're going to see what else we can do with this artwork. 14. PRO TIP: Expand Selection: My pro tip here is to expand your selection with two pixels at least to have a difference in your artwork. You can see here it is a little bit of a sharp cut, but here it is smoother, but it is expanded selection. You will have a little bit of white around your artwork. It will not fit with a different colored background. But if you want your artwork to blend better into the texture of the watercolor paper or the white background you are putting it on, just follow this pro tip. We're going to follow the same steps. I'm going to just quickly do the same that we did and setting the contrast stay up. I'm selecting the white. When I'm selecting inverse, I can click, Select, Modify, Expand, and expand the selection with two pixels. Click Select, Modify, and add one pixel of feather. This will make the selection a bit more smooth if you see it is actually just expanding the selection with this few pixels. This will make the artwork blend better to the white watercolor texture, but it will be seen with different backgrounds. It depends on your desire, what you want to do with your artwork. As you can see, all these little paint textures remain better as it would without that expanded selection. You can see a little difference between the paper texture and the selection it can cause here and there a little bit of distraction, but I'm just going to show you that it is not that smooth. See, here you can see that it is the watercolor. Here you can see that it is like cut off. That's the difference between the two selections. But again, I'm saying that this white, will be seen if you put this artwork on a black background. Again, what is your desire to do with your artwork? Just try this out and see how it fits your creation. 15. Playing Around: In the last video, we pasted or transplant PNG onto a watercolor texture. What I want to show you now is that, now that we don't have the background actually attached to the design, we can do so many things like there are endless possibilities within one painting. We can resize elements, reposition them, create duplicates, and just fill things that we think there should be something. For selecting an individual items, we're going to use the Polygonal Lasso tool, you can find it here. I'm just going to select this leaf, which one I like the best. Let' say this one. I'm just going all around it, make sure that the layer is selected, the layer of the artwork, and hit Command C as a copy and Command V. Now we have the duplicate of this leaf and hit Command T to transform. Holding down the Shift key you preserve its demands. You can flip it over which size I just want to place it here. Because why not? If you miss something from your composition, you can just simply add even more things. I'm going to add the little of this little mushroom. You can simply play around with the elements you have painted and you don't need to paint them again and again. I'm going to speed up, I'm going to add some more details here and there. I think it is enough. The second thing you can do is to change the color and not everything together. These elements you need to connect to the main artwork. This is my main layer, I will hold down the Shift key click here to select all the layers, right-click and merge layers. The design will become one again. To preserve the original layer, I'm going to duplicate the layer. I'm going to work in this one and hide this first original and I'm going to change the color, adjustments, use saturation, and just change the hue. You can see several options, well, this looks good. I love this one. For the next experiment, I'm going to duplicate the layer again, and add this one, and play with this one. If I want my artwork to be this and this variation, you can just have saved it in one PSD file. For saving this artwork, you'll just select the one you want to be seen and hit File, Save As, and save it as a JPEG, and let's say Blue-Brown Copy and just save it. For the next one, turn off and turn on the second layer and I need to reposition it because it is a little bit off. File, Save As and I will hit like Pink Green copy. Save as a JPEG, save. I can save this whole PSD file. Save As the Photoshop file, and just name it Variations PSD. You can just play around with everything. I'm going to save the original. That's it. Here's what I can do, I can manipulate the elements, I can create patterns. If you don't have, for example, lettering inside, you can just grab the elements and create nice patterns which actually are really good on some products which you don't want, for example, the lettering. There are endless possibilities and I think that's all I wanted to say about digitizing watercolors. In the next two videos, I'm going to show you how to digitize pencil drawings and bigger canvas. 16. Digitizing Pencil Drawings: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to show you how to digitize your traditional pencil drawings. So as you can see, I have some eye studies here. The process is similar with the scanning. Apart from that, you need to make sure you are scanning in a black and white mode so that it doesn't pick up any color around. It doesn't really matter, but it will still make a little difference. The resolution you can keep at 1,600 again and scan in tiff. Hit "Scan" and now I have it scanned and opened it in Photoshop. This is really in a high resolution, it looks really nice. What I can do now, I will make something like this. That looks amazing, right? This effect I cannot reach with simply setting or playing with the contrast. Just take a look. If I set the contrast, it will just slightly change the original and I don't want that. I want to look amazing so I will play with the levels. Here you can see if you change it, it brings out all the blacks from the paper which was scanned. Here you can take the light down and just play around with these settings. I will just choose one. Let's say this one. With the Polygonal Lasso Tool, I'm just going to select it around, hit "Command C" and copy. Now open the watercolor texture because it is similar to a sketching paper and it will just create a nice sector for this pencil drawing and just hit "Command" and paste it into that and simply change the blending mode to multiply and see. What I can do with this sharp edges. Let's see. What I can do is Image Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast, and set the brightness a bit higher like this so that those hard edges disappear. "Command T" we can make it bigger and time to play. We double-click and now we have a wonderful, nice digitize pencil drawing. Let's see what we can do with the Canvas. 17. PRO TIP - Blend Into the Background: It can happen that when you are doing the steps described before, you cannot get the background, that light so that it blends into the background of the watercolor texture. Let's see an example. I'm going to just cut off again this eye, come and see, and eye will just paste it into the watercolor texture. When I hit Multiply, it isn't blending into the background that much. What I can do, I can set the contrast and brightness up as I said before. [NOISE] I can still play with layers or levels. [NOISE] Great. But maybe I have little bit of this edge. I can use this spot healing brush tool, but only if this is emerged into the background. What I want to do now is to select the layer and hit Command "T" to transform and transform the drawing to the size you need it to be, because afterwards, you cannot do that, after you blend these edges into the background. I will just de-select and play with the layer levels. Let's say we leave it like this. I'm going to select this both layers and hit Command "E" to merge them. Now, this selection is part of the background, the watercolor texture. Now I can choose the Spot Healing Brush Tool and just go over these edges to merge them into the background. Now I have a nice blended drawing. This is my pro tip for this process. 18. Digitizing Canvas: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to show you how you can create a nice digital image from your Canvas painting. As I already mentioned, either you find a scanning service or you get your DSLR and study to the highest resolution and shoot in row. Why is shooting in row important? Because it preserves the most information about the image you have taken. You have more opportunities when it comes to retouching. Let's see, I have an acrylic painting I have done lately. It is 50 centimeters and 70 centimeters acrylic on Canvas. What I need to make sure is to use natural light and try to shoot it without any major highlights because it is varnished with glossy varnish and I don't want it to shine too much. As I said, I'm mostly going to use this painting in social media posts and art prints. I will not need to go through the process described before. To prevent the bouncing light, I will need a black background to shoot on. I have a giant canvas painted black that I use as my black background usually. But a simple dark floor is going to be good or a black sheet of paper or textile. It doesn't matter because it is going to be cut out. Try to show it from the front. It doesn't matter if you have a slightly different angle. I will show you how to use the Perspective Warp tool to make it right. Just take an image or use mine if you can find in the resources and import it into your computer. Now we are in Photoshop, Click "File Open" and open the file named CR2. That is the name for the row picture. If you have set your camera to shoot JPEG and row, you will find them both in your folder. If you have one of the latest versions of Photoshop, when you open a row file, you will get to a different window that you can see here. Don't close it. It is a time for us to play around with the colors, clarity, and white brands. Row photos don't tell the colors as much as canning does but still, we can make our artworks pop more. I'll just play around with the settings. Now, don't click "Done" but click "Open Image", because if you click "Done" it will just disappear like your settings will stay, but you will not be able to edit the picture. At first, I'm going to rotate the picture, Image, Image Rotation, and Clockwise. Now I can see that I have a slight difference in the angle and now I'm going to try out this Perspective Warp tool. Then just click "Edit" then you have the perspective warp. What I can do is to choose the area I want to make right and click here upwards. Now you can manipulate your object. Now you can just simply play around to get these lines as straight as possible. I think I can get this one like here. Some bits like here. This is just a slight difference I had here. You might have bigger one. If you take a picture, I can see that I don't have this line lined up. I can see I selected wrongly, don't do this just make sure you selected well. Not just click "Okay" and you will have front of your picture. Now I'm going to just cut off all the background. Just select the area of the painting. If you still have this slight difference, it doesn't matter. Click "Image", Crop Image, then Deselect. First thing I'm going to do is to get rid of these edges. What I'm going to simply do it again to use the spot healing brush tool and just to go around the edges, it will just make it seamless and simply, we will get rid of that edge that Canvas have. I have some unwanted brushstroke texture I would love to improve but only for the art prints. It is not a good idea to manipulate too much if you want to sell the original work, which I want. In this stage, do what you need to do based on your needs and preferences. I will not do anything. Just clean it up a bit. Cool, amazing job. I'm just going to say this as a JPEG and I can print it or as an art print, or use it in social media posts and everything else. 19. Shoot on a Background: Now I have a pro tip for you again. For the future, it might be a good idea to shoot your photos on a bigger background. When you want to share your artwork without placing it in a mock-up, you will have a space around to show. What I mean here is that for example, I have a 50 and 70-centimeter rectangle. When I want it on Instagram square sides, it would crop from the painting. What I need is a space around the painting so that I can simply shoot it on the back black ground. But I'll place some objects around to make it more interesting, for example, here, this is the best I can think of. Yes. That's my project. I can share this on Instagram and my artwork is simply preserved. 20. What is a Mockup?: [MUSIC] What is a mockup? Mockups are used widely by artists mainly on social media to present their artworks. A mockup is basically a photoshop scene where you place your artwork on the wall, on a piece of paper, into a frame or on a product. You can basically do it one time by inserting, cropping, wrapping your picture where you want it then hit ''Save'' and use that image once. But there is a possibility to create a file which you can use over and over again, and the only thing you need to do is to just place the artwork with a click. Creating mockups is very useful where you want to present your artwork in a real-life scene or on the product. It makes your artwork more soluble because the client can imagine how will it look like and can connect with the artwork. Think about it as of clothes. You are more likely to buy a dress when you see it on someone beautiful rather than just seeing it on the shelf. In this section, I'm going to teach you how to do a simple mockup that you can use once, then a reusable mockup that you only need to insert your artworks and save. Then complex-framed art mockups where you can change multiple things like backgrounds and frames. Finally, a product mockup. Now you'll be able to place your artwork on a product as if it was really produced. I will also give you tips where to find stock images that you can use and also how to make your own images to make your brand outstanding. This section includes a lecture about resizing your images to various social media sizes. Sounds interesting. Let's demystify those perfectly stage art images. 21. Stock Photo Mockup: [MUSIC] So this is our first scenario, the stock image mockup. You might ask, what is a stock image? If you don't know, they are basically nice state images shot by professionals and sold online for a little fee. You can find them also for free. There are several free websites for getting a nice image, for example, Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, or you can pay for ready mockups. This is Pexels. I really love this site because their images are really nice. Just search for the keyword blank, and it will show you blank pages and watercolor papers office papers, and things like that, which you can download and use. Or you can pay for ready mockups as I said for example, on the Creative Market or Adobe Stock, which is actually buying all the stock photo sites. Anyways, now we're going for free images, but keep in mind that these images are free for everyone in the world. So others are using it, which makes it less original. But let's just try it out. So I already downloaded one. I have a license for it for commercial use. So I can add it to the classifiers so you will find it there. File open. Here you have stock photo mockup, and here is the stock photo JPEG. The second thing I'm going to show you is this stock photo is my stock photo is my stage photo, which I can use again and again for cleaned-up original. So I don't need to stage my originals and have them not cleaned up. You know what I mean? But simply just paste the transparent PNG into this and it's good to go. So I'm going to open that one also. So file open. Here is the my stock photo. That's my okay. I'm also giving you that to you. You can use it for free. The third thing we need is the transparent PNG. You might already have it, but I included that also in the folder for this lesson or for this lecture. So we have everything opened. First thing we need to do is to select our transparent PNG with the select tool. Or we can hit ''Command A'' and then ''Command C'' or ''Control C'' to copy and click our stock photo and paste it with command we, as you can see it as a bigger file. So I need to hit "Command T" for transforming and holding down the shift key, I can preserve the dimensions of the artwork. If you don't have background removed, you can do the same with these white spaces, but using the transparent PNG is always better. So just scale it to the size you need it to be and double-click. After you double-click, it just says that's okay. I'm done with the scaling. Holding down the control. You can move with like better because it doesn't jump. To blend it more into the black round, we're going to change the blending mode to multiply. As you can see now we can see through it. I have an overlapping thing and you can have bigger places like, I don't know if there's a mark on the paper. You just need to delete the artwork from around it. We are going to throw a mask on this layer. Like here. Take your black brush again. I'm going to set the size to small one. Simply go over these overlapping places just through wheel, what's underneath? There's a little bit of this white which I don't want. So I will just simply change the color and just go over it like this. Wait, so what do you say to this one? I really love it. I'm going to do the same with my stock photo so that you can see the process again and just try it out. Cool. So now we have nice mockup. Two of them, which I can use like for once. Anytime I'm going to paste an artwork into this, I need to go through this process. When there's a thing like the real mockup, where you are just simply changing the artwork and everything, the scaling and there's masking is already done. Your artwork just jumps right into it. I'm going to show you in the next video how to do that. So now, I'm just going to show you the process. You can find this PDF also in the class files. 22. Reusable Mockup: In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a mockup file which is reusable. You can just simply drop in your artwork and it will just show right here. First things first, open the stock photo. You can do this with any photo we used before. We could use any other ones. But I don't want to get too complicated with this. This is the basic process you will need to learn in order to create a more complicated mockup. This is the practice, actually the simplest way to create it. We have this stock photo. You need to choose the rectangle tool. We're going to create a rectangle. Simply just drag it around. I have cited only for this frame so up here I'm going to change the stroke to none. The fill color I will choose this magenta. I will hit Multiply again so I can see what I'm doing. Now I'm going to click here and convert it to smart object. Now my rectangle is a smart object. It is actually the area I'm going to insert the artwork to. Now hit Command T. It is little bit different. Transforming as if with a normal rectangle. I can do several things. With right-clicking to this smart object, you can scale, rotate, distort and the warp. I'm going to show you the distort now so that you can know how to move this object. You can simply drag and drop the corners where you need them to be. Now we have this. As you can see, this is not a regular rectangle. This distortion is good when you don't have a flat paper lying, but I don't know something in perspective. Now you can hit Okay. As you can see, we still have this overlapping object here. I'm going to throw a mask again. This is actually my favorite tool. Simply take the brush, make sure you are painting with the black one. Resize it to smaller, this is too big, and just go over the overlapping elements. Now I have a mask on it. Actually, my file is already done. Now I can save this file as a PSD so that I can reuse it again and again. Let's just do File, Save As. here you can find the template so you can just name it reusable stock mockup template and hit Save. I'm not going to do that now. How you are going to use this? Double-click here, the Smart Object thumbnail, and it will open the rectangle in a new window. This is the place you are going to just drop in your artwork. Let's take our transparent PNG copy. Yes. Here's my rectangle and I'm going to just simply paste it. We're scaling it with Command T. I'm not going to comment on this process again, I'm sure you already know how to rescale your artwork; apply, and resize it. What I'm going to do now is to turn off this colored layer and save this one. Now when I click on the reusable mock-up template PSD, my artwork is in it. You can see it is masked through. When I want to change the artwork, I'm just going to delete this layer. I have a different artwork here. I'm just going to simply select Command C. Open the rectangle, Command T to re-scale. This is a large one. I'm going to simply paste it here. Double click, File, Save. Now there it is. You can reuse this template as many times as you want. You already have the masking done, the scaling done, all you need to do is to open this rectangle with double-clicking here and inserting your artwork and saving. I need to save it in order to get this artwork in here. If you want to save this hit File, Save As, and save it as a JPEG. Desktop, I'm going to just simply save it as there's still magic mockup, [inaudible] save, and I can use it in my social media posts. Now we're going to do a little bit more complex thing. We are going to create our own framed artwork template where you can change even the background. That will be a little bit more complex, but let's get to it. 23. Framed Art Mockup: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a reusable mockup, or this framed artwork, which you can reuse multiple times so you can change the background, change its color and you could also change the frame itself. Here we have only one, and this is my frame that I shot. I'm just going to show you this is the image I've taken. This is my personal photograph with my husband at Paris. We are going to cut it off. I didn't include just a blank page and because I wanted to show you how easy it is to create your own framed art mockup. There are several possibilities to get a frame. You can take your own picture. I'm including this picture in the resources section so that you can use it or you can go online and use a stock photo sites, download a picture where there is the picture frame you like for example let's say this one with this wooden edge or you can also download from creative markets or other sides, picture frames and also mockup files which are these complex but it is not a big deal to create it and I'm just going to show you how to do it. Let's get started. What I'm going to do is to select the frame and I'm going to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool and to carefully cut it. Now select Inverse. We are going to add a new layer. I'll lock the background, change the arrangement, and just hit "Delete". By this, we deleted everything else around this frame. Now I'm going to select the inside of the frame. I'm not going to deal with it as precisely because we are going to insert the rectangle here. Now, I de-select. Now we have our frame so we can use it in our mockup. Now, click the rectangle tool and create a big rectangle. Change this stroke to none, fill it with a color, let's say this blue one. You can resize it actually with Command T, Control T, resize it, double-click and then you can again change the arrangement. When you're changing the arrangement, everything that is up here is going to be at the front of the layers. Say if I take this layer down here, it will be behind our rectangle. Now we have actually a background and I'm going to create another rectangle. Change stroke to none field. Let's say it is going to be this green and I'm going to make it a smart object. Hit "Command T" and now hit "Distort." With distortion, you can fit it pretty well into the picture frame. Just drag these corners to the corners. As you can see, I have lines here that are not aligning. I can hit warp and what warp does, it will have these guidelines which I can drag again to fit it into the frame better. I can do it up here as well. This is what really matters, not the rectangle I'm cutting off it. I could've been a bit more precise with it but I'm just leaving it to you. I'm just lining it to the sides of the frame. I think we are good to go. The last one. Amazing. Now hit "OK" up here and we have a smart object, so now we can insert our artwork here. But this doesn't really look as if it was a wall. What I'm going to do is to add a drop shadow so that it will look as if it was on a wall. Click "Layer Style" and here is drop shadow. It is already here, but I can set different things like distance, how far is it from the picture? If you started too far away, it will make the effect as if it was too far away from the wall, so I will just make a slight one. I can move the shadow around. I know just add it here. I can spread it so that how sharp it is and I can increase the size of it. I don't want it to be too sharp, so I will just do this and hit "OK". We have a drop shadow on our layer. Now what I'm going to do is to link the shadow new layer with the rectangles, so choose them both, right-click and click to link layers. Now, when I'm moving the frame, it is taking the smart object with it and also the shadow that we need. What else can I do? I can hit Command T and resize it to make it bigger, double-click. I can change the color of the background, click on the rectangle, and double-click on it, and you can simply just choose the color you want, any color that will fit your artwork, hit "OK" and I can do one more thing. If you go for the stock sites, if you search for the wall keyword you can get wall textures. For example, this one's a really nice painted wall. You have a brick walls, you have these textures. I want a brick wall, I already have downloaded one. You can have a white one but I have this one. I'm including this also in the resources section and I'm going to insert it into my mockup. I'm just going to select the whole column C to copy. Here is my command we change that, and it is in my mock-up. I'm going to just resize it a bit. Smaller one. Amazing. I can add any background that I want. I can just simply save this, and I'm just going to do it. "File" "Save As" and you will be able to find this in the framed art mock-up classifiers as the framed art mockup template. Make sure to save it as a PSD so that you can edit it and have these layers. You can add as many layers as you want. Well, when you are going to save your files so just turn on and off the layers you'll want to be seen. You can save warm colors that are fitting your brand and look. You can import several frames, you are finding online or you download them and just inserted it. I'm just going to add my artwork in it. Again, double-click on the rectangle. Where is my artwork? Here was the original. In this case, it is good to have the white background with your artwork because if I wouldn't have, I would have seen the brick wall behind it. Command we into the, I didn't want it. I'm going to select, copy, paste it to the rectangle. As you can see it has white at the background Command T to resize it , to fit it. Double-click, Command S or save. Let's see. Here it is. We have our artwork framed. I'm just going to save it "File" "Save As." I'm just going to save it as a JPEG. Save. Now I can use it anywhere I need it and I think it looks really great. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can place your artworks on products and on things that are not flat. Let's look into it. 24. Product Mockup: [MUSIC] In this video I'm going to show you how you can add your design on different products they're not flat, and how you can align your artwork to just fit these objects. I'm going to use this photo. I'm including it in the Resources section, both of them, but you can download your own. Again, go for a stock photo site. I'm using Unsplash now. I was searching for white mug, or you can search for a coffee mug, or blank mug, or something like that, and just find what you like. I like this one for example, but let's just do it with what I downloaded already. I'm just going to delete this one and let's work with this one. We're going to do same things as we did already. We will need now a transfer into PNG of the artwork. Go to the stock photo, and we're going to create a rectangle again. Click, Stroke none, Fill, fill layer to any color, and change the blending mode to multiply so that we can see what we are doing. Place it on the mug, and now we're going to convert it to smart object, and hit "Command T", or "Control T" to transform it. Right-click, and we're going to use the distort function at first so that we can move these corners around the mug. Approximately, find the corners of it. Now, right-click again and click on "Work". This guidelines just came around, and by this, we can just drag these dots here to align with the mark. As you can see here are some these rulers that I have to call them that you can just simply use. It is only a bit of a playing game because you need to drag them around to make it all right. One thing to pay attention at this mug, as you can see curves like this, and we want this to curve similarly. I want this to be up here and approximately at the same size to half this one. Also with this lower part, and I can manage this curve with changing this guide, and this one, and down here I can just drag it down. You can still connect the wedged corners. As I have a transparent PNG, I don't really need to care about this sides because I know that my design will be right here. But if you have like a complex design which would fill the whole rectangle, just be more precise. Just take care of it. We can manipulate the inside of this shape by dragging these, and make sure that it curves like similarly, as this one. I'm going to add dimension to it by dragging these bits apart so that the cup has really a dimension. My artwork when I placed it to this smart object, will align with these guidelines. I think it's all right. I will hit "Okay" up here, and I can just double-click on it. Copy my artwork. Control T to resize it again. Place it where you want it. If you want it to the center and the sides of the mug, and make sure to turn off the color layer and File, Save. Now, when we click on "Our mug" it is in there. I don't like how it's aligning. I think I gave it too much of a dimension. I'm just going to File, Save. What is good about the work tool, that it remembers. If I hit again "Command T" and hit "Work", it will remember what I did. I'm just going to play around with it a little bit more, and make it less like distorted. Let's try it this way. Turn on the layer, turn off the color layer file save. Let's see. That's better now. I think I can highlight it, also like this one, and to see how it looks like. As you can see, because we have to multiply on the shadows on these objects, remain realistic. I will just take okay, and I like it. Be alluded here we stays this a white on the cup, it really makes it like realistic. You can also save it as a PSD so that you can just change the artworks within it, or just use it once as you wish. In the next video I'm going to show you how to resize these images to fit social media posts. I'm going to include social media size guide so that you can make these photos you created to fit these posts. 25. Real Life Mockup: In this video, I would love to just talk about real-life mock-ups. The best way to be original and customize your brand is to make your own mock-up photos. It is always easiest to just simply grab your camera and make photos of your own. I carry around a blank sheet of paper when I'm traveling so that I can get amazing backgrounds. For example, this summer we traveled to Croatia and I managed to make some nice photos which I will be able to use for some dramatic images, for example, for summer or, for example, seascape or something relating to sea. It is always better than just create an artwork, can just stage it. Mainly if you don't have it ready. For example, we heard at this trip and I just couldn't manage to paint only in the last night. I painted this and if I would want to, I just can digitize it and place it on any other I like. This is differently oriented but you know what I mean? This is always better. If you really want to be original with your brand, it is great to create an image with yourself holding, for example, a frame or a piece of watercolor paper. You don't even need to be on the image. Just, for example, half of your hand as you are looking or something. Just be creative with these mock-ups because they are useful, but they can be cliche and not interesting. But if you really want to stand out from the crowd of artists presenting themselves on Instagram, just be creative and create your own mock-up files. That's my advice and that's the advice I'm trying to follow. Now you have the skillset to just be successful with this. 26. Templates for Social Media: [MUSIC] In this video, I would love to talk to you about sizing your pictures to fit the social media posts. The best size guide I have found online is on the Red Website Design. This is the ultimate guide for social media image sizes of 2018. As you can see, here is image sizes for Facebook. You can find this if you write social media size guide into Google. Here is Instagram image sizes and as you can see, it is a square format. What I do is to create actually a template in Photoshop and I simply just put my images into it. Here, we can find Twitter, Google Plus, LinkdIn, Pinterest. Let's just see how you can create a present for yourself for these sizes. Open Photoshop, click "New." Let's say, as we saw Instagram has 1080, resolution can stay 300 pixels and I was going to save it as Instagram photo template, and save present. Now, here you will have it. Click "Create." Now, you have a blank template. Now, open the image you want to include in it. I want to use this image that we have created. I'm going to hit "Open." What I do is to select the whole artwork, copy it with Command C or Control C and simply drop it inside. Hit "Command D" to resize. Now, this is actually how I can play around with the image if I want it bigger or smaller. I want it to be like this. Double-click and you're good to go. Simply just export File Save as, let's to say, there's still magic Instagram. You can save it into a folder which you can keep for this Instagram images. I hit "Save" and "Okay," and you can upload it to Instagram or Facebook has different sizes, so just check the sizes online. They are usually changing, so it is good to research and create a template and just drop your images inside or scale and save. Be right at the end of the mockup section. In the next section, I'm going to show you more possibilities to use your digitized artworks and even how you can monetize them. 27. Monetize Your Artworks: [MUSIC] In this video, I would love to give you tips for monetizing your artworks. These options are good for a side hustle or a full-time job, depending on several things like, do you have a following? How many artworks or designs do have? Are they good? You need to consider these questions. There is a crucial thing and that's the following. Here's my tip. Basically, you need to make good art, have an audience and create and post consistently. The first step, if you don't have already, create a Facebook page for your art and create an Instagram account for your art. Mainly Instagram is visually oriented, so with art you can reach more people and with Facebook, you can add more of stories behind your artworks and more of behind the scenes things. With these two pages, you can build your following. It can take a long time, but if you are posting regularly, at least once a day, there's a good chance that you will grow slowly, but it is like a snowball effect. It will just grow and grow. I need to work on that because I'm doing so many things that I don't have time to post, but I'm building slowly but steadily. Let's just see what options you have. 28. Etsy: [MUSIC] First option to monetize your artworks is Etsy. I'm sure you notice that you can sell physical goods with your artwork on it. This means that for example, you print your artwork on art prints and sell them through Etsy. But by this, you need to package, ship, and print the artwork. But the pro is that you can sign it and make it like a limited edition and you can change the quality of the prints or you can sell digital art prints, meaning that you are putting actually the files you have created by the process I shown you only at the site and who purchase it, can download it and prints for themselves. There's a product, there is no packaging, no shipping, and no printing on your side. But the cone is that you cannot sign it and or check the quality. The person who purchased can like print it on a simple office paper and it will not look as good as it should look. But that's his problem. The customer decides how to print it and hopefully, this will not make them like not satisfied. You know what I mean. I will just show you an Etsy shop of south-pacific. She sells lots of art prints like this. Let me just show you. Now we are at her Etsy shop. As you can see, these are all mockups. You are already able to create pictures like this. They look amazing. As you can see, there are like letterings, or illustrations, watercolor illustrations, so many interesting things. I'm sure this wasn't painted this color but manipulated digitally. You can see the low price, five pounds. You can just purchase it and just print it on the paper that you want. As you can see, this is the same artwork as this one, with a different color. You can just have as many as you want. They are like, she creates mockups and uploads them. Let's see one. Let's see. [NOISE] She includes several mock-up files. You can see this is a white wall background. [NOISE] These are simply mock-up twice put into the auto, put into it. She markets the other designs within it. [NOISE] We didn't do one. If you can see in the description here as it files are 300 dpi, perfect quality for printing. Watermark will not be on purchased files. Print as many times as you want. There's a download link that you will get after purchasing. Yes, she's doing that and she does it well. She has more than 1,000 items and it's just amazing. I'm not sure if she has like physical products, more than 16,000 sales and that's just amazing. Let's see what options you have. 29. Creative Market: [MUSIC] Let's get to the next option and that's creative market. On creative market you can only sell digital products. The bad thing about it that is invitation only. You can send them an application with your portfolio that you want to open a shop on creative market and they decide if your creative style fits their region. I was rejected because they said in my [inaudible] niche but that doesn't hurt me because [LAUGHTER] that's actually a compliment. But I would love to create bundles for them because they are selling mostly bundles, meaning that you have several illustrations with the same topic and you can sell them as clipboards. You might now wonder who would buy watercolor clipboards but there are graphic designers who create a wedding invitations. This is just like tools for their business. It is like on-demand right now mainly as every company needs to communicate visually and not all graphic designers can create things like this and not everyone wants everything digitally and is traditional approach, it's just amazing and it sells well. But again, it is hard to get recognized because there are artists who are already doing this for years and they have giving them a bundles create more than 600 files and things like this, crazy things like that. But here when it comes that you have a following and you can spread the word about you and if your art is good it will be recognized. Just pay attention to research the trends as I've shown you at the beginning of the course. Make a quality digitizing process and I think you'll be good to go. I would just love to show you an example of the creative market. Here we are in the creative market in the shop of Sandra graphic design. As you can see, she created Clip Art bundle of cacti and there are some rest of these objects absolutely easy to create. You paint separate elements and displays them around. You don't need to mess around with the composition if it just looks right or not. You just create these nice separate elements and just place them around as you want. You can create patterns from them. As you can see here, the separate elements, you can create the heart, it's a nice one, a bot and place it in the mock-ups. I think this stage I don't think this is a mock-up but I might be wrong, but this is a product [NOISE] with these things. As you can see it again, 300 dpi PNG files. They are transparent backgrounds. You can do this. I'm sure. As you can see, buy this and you pay some dollars, I don't know how much it gets. To be honest, I just takes a cut from the sales and creative market I'm sure takes a cut. But I think you can set your own prices. 30. POD - Print on Demand Sites: [MUSIC] Let's see the third one. This is the best option and they are the POD sites. It means print on demand sites and they print your designs of products for you that are demanded. Basically, they have an easy-to-use platform. You upload your artworks into your gallery, and when someone sees it and wants to buy it on a product, they purchase and print on demand site simply print it, packages it, and sends it, and you will have a cut from that purchase. There are lots of platforms out there. Society6 and Redbubble are, I think, the most known. Inktale is really quickly growing one, and Displate is not really printing artworks on products, but they are creating metal arch brings, and I just love this idea so much that I wanted to include it in this video. I'm just going to show you these sites. There are hundreds and more emerging every day, new and new ones, so just research them. But be sure to upload your artworks all of them, because you own the copyright of your artwork so you can sell them everywhere. You are not exclusively creating for axial creative market or this POD sites. If you have a nice artwork you can just spread it into the POD site and adds in creative market everywhere and you just maximize the possibility of being recognized. Let's take a look on this sites. What I just totally love about Society6 is that they have so many products. Just look, wall tapestries, art prints, framed prints, furniture, wall hangings, phone cases, wall murals, backpacks, shower curtains, and you name it. They are amazing and the print quality is good also. I will walk you through uploading an artwork to Society6 in the next video, but let's just take a look on another. Another sites,I guess Redbubble. I find Redbubble a bit limited with products, but lots of artists say that they are doing well here. I think Redbubble is the second most known POD site. Here is Inktale, they have almost a million products to choose from. I really love them. I just love these companies. Look and design item is so easy. I find it very, very user friendly. Let's see Displate. As you can see these are these metal art prints. Let's see the best selling, are these ones. They're mostly like posters and they can be put on walls like magnet. [LAUGHTER] This is stuff. Just take a look on this one, this fox. This is my daughter digitally, but I just wanted to show you that their mockups are really nice. This is the metal poster. Anyways, I just love these sites and there are so many more. Just do your research and just upload your artworks so that they can be purchased on any site. When someone is looking for something they can find you, make your customers easy to find you. See you in the next video where I'm going to show you how to upload an artwork into Society6. 31. Upload Your Artwork to a POD Site: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to show you how to upload your artwork into a POD site. I've chosen Society6 to show you because they have the most products. I think this is the site you are going to upload your artworks for sure. Let's just see. You can create your account, you can upload an image, a cover image, etc. But let's just click on cell. Here you can see that you can upload a PNG or a JPEG file and at least 6,500 pixels at the shorter side, they are writing 72 DPI, but 300 is the best. Maximum file size is 150 mega bytes. Here's a seller guide which is very useful, I will just show you it has every pixel dimension you need for products. For example as you can see, none of them are higher than 6,500. For example, use leggings but I will show you that some products have like downloadable templates, which you can edit your artwork in and then upload it afterwards, but here are some unusual dimensions. But as you can see that most of the artworks will fit the 6,500 pixels at the shortest side. Let just see and go back, we're going to click Upload your artwork. I'm going to choose a transparent PNG because it will fit most of the products, and I will add the PNG with the watercolor background separately. Click, I own all rights and go to the next step. It can take a few minutes to plot the image, but here we are at a stage where we need to enter the information about our artwork. At first, let's give it a title obviously it will be autumn vibes. Let's choose a category. It is a painting, but you can choose from drawing, collage, photographic, graphic design, but let's painting. There are suggested tags. Choose the ones that fitted. I will choose watercolor, typography, digital, its a pattern. We can add our own tags and up to 20, I really recommend you to use them all, because it will create a search engine optimization for your art work, it means that it will have a method data which will help your customers to find your artwork. Now you need to think as your customer. How can a person who would buy an artwork or a product with this design, what would he think. I will answer obviously, autumn. It will be a wall decor, it is lettering. I can talk about the object at topics that it has, for example mushrooms autumn leaf wipes is a nice keyword. Because I'm sure you know the expressions like good vibes and creative vibes and this is autumn vibes. I'm just going to include that one. What else? I have folkloric elements in it. Folk motives, I can talk about the colors of the artwork. I will add like magenta, yellow, ocher, indigo. It's a wall art. I can also include like fall design. Let's say cozy. I have the 20 and in the description, what is the backstory, what inspired this P is provide some additional context for fans to get excited about. It will just make your customers to connect with your artwork more. I will just write something like this. Now you can hit Continue to create products. It's going to take a few minutes to load the artwork. As you can see, it's already like putting it on the product. They're looking so good. Wow, I just loved this. Great, amazing. The first thing I'm going to do is to click on Edit and this art print framed art paint and canvas print and poster. These ones, I'm going to change to the JPEG with the watercolor texture. Let's just do it, I click on Edit. Here is the part where I can change the price at some products, I can change the price, for example here, I just upload a custom image. I will choose original, at this one, I had the watercolor texture and I want it. I will just add it, wait until it's uploading and hit Save and Close. You can turn on and off products, for example this wood wall art, I think it looks good. I will just turn it on. Don't lose anything which is turning on. As you can see, I can scale it so that it looks like good. I will just keep it at this dimension and hit Save and Close. Now I have it, wall hanging looks pretty amazing. I will turn it on the wall tapestry, it look so really great. I will hit edit and scaling a little bit , Save and Close. I love this wall clock, I will try it with this one. It looks amazing on this window curtains, I will enable it and I think it looks good. There are these furnitures, I don't have experiences with them yet. Our world is throw pillow looks amazing. I don't like this rectangular one, not this one. Shower cartel looks good, but I don't want this product who would buy an autumn wipes like shower curtain, like I don't know. Nor the beach towel nor the hand them back towel. So just being mindful of the products you're putting it on. This coffee mug will have a different dimension, I will just show you in a second. The serving tray, however, looks good. I love this cutting board, stationary cards sticker looks good. Now we're at the phone cases, I love the iPhone case, the iPhones skin and clear iPhone case. As you can see, this is why I upload it to transparent PNG. It just looks transparent on this clear iPhone case. I will leave this one like this, I don't want these one because these are landscape oriented and don't fit my design now. But what I love are these clothes like look at this, this T-Shirt, unisex v-neck, long-sleeved shirt, hoodie, unisex tank top, biker tank, also the tote bag. I think these are just amazing. I will now hit Publish. Please note it can take up to 30 minutes for your post to appear in your shop. I will just hit Publish and look at the mug. Open Photoshop, I would just open it and look at the seller guide. I will just show you the dimensions of the mug. The mug has 4600 and 2000 pixels. I will just create a template for that. I already have actually. As you can see, my Saved templates has lots of the society sticks, iPhone cases, etc. Here it is. Here's the Society6 mug create. [MUSIC] 32. Customize Your Artwork: [MUSIC] I will open the transparent PNG again. Then Select All, command C to copy and paste it into the mug. Command T, transform. I can scale it and I don't want it to be like at the edge. But I would love to create a nice design for the whole mug so I will just play around. I will cut off with the Polygonal Lasso Tool elements from this original design and just place it around. I think it's good enough. I'll just save it. File, Save As, and let's save it as autumn vibes mug as a JPEG, hit "Save". If you want to just manage your posts, click on your Profile. Click "Manage Your Posts". Here is the my articles so every design you have, you can see that enabled products at 24, 20 tags and where are the mugs? Here is the mug, coffee mug on, and I'm going to add it. Drop your image. Autumn vibes mug choose. Maybe there's a little bit too much, but okay at least I wanted to show you just quickly what can you do. Hit "Save Enable" and now you will see the mug here. Great, I think it looks good. I just spend some time looking at your products so that they look good and if it needs a little bit of scaling, just do it. These products represent you so just be aware of that. I wanted to edit this t-shirt because I think it's two way too high I needed to sign, so I will just move it a bit lower scale in a bit down. You can enable the colors. Your design can appear on and I will just show you for example the backpack. If you click on Edit, you can download the backpacks template. In Photoshop or Illustrator, you will get a template like this and you can like manipulate your artwork to fit the sewing template or pattern, or how to call this so that your backpack looks amazing. I will not do it right now. I can include a video in the future about this, if you are interested just comment in the questions and answers section or contact me personally and I will include it but now I don't think that's too important. But after 30 min, if I visit my own shop, these will be there. My coffee mug isn't like refreshed yet. It will take few minutes with I think they are awesome. I hope that this is useful for you. I will have few more tips in the next video. But anyways, I hope that you will be successful and that your products will sell well, and that you will be able to do this as for living. 33. PRO TIP - Use POD Site Mockups on Social Media: My pro tip here is to use the POD sites mockup files and pictures like this. Let's say, for example, if I click on this wall tapestry, I can get a mockup file like this. I think it looks amazing and I can just use it on my social media. The easiest way to do it is to create a print screen, crop it, and remove these buttons from the picture. Let's just do it. On a Mac, you can create a screenshot by hitting Command, Shift, and 3. On a PC, you hit Control and Print Screen. It creates a print screen. If you don't know where it saves it, just Google it or just look around in your computer or a search for keywords like screenshot. Mine is saving on desktop. Now, I'm going to open the Photoshop and show you what can we do. Here is my screenshot and what I'm going to do is to select with the selection tool the area of this photo. Click Image, Crop Image. I'm going to de-select and click on the Spot Healing Brush tool and simply click on these buttons. Now, I have a really nice mockup image which I can save. I actually have a folder where I saved these images. You can create social media posts like this. For example, as you can see, I've included mockup file I did and included the products I put this design on. Or you can upload more images on Instagram too so that you can swipe through the images and you can just simply get use of these images. That was my pro tip for today. 34. Final Thoughts: We arrive to the final video. We learned a lot. I do really hope that the course gave you as much knowledge as it could, and that you will get use of this knowledge, and this gave a kickstart your art career. Please let me know how it went for you. I would really appreciate if you would leave me a review. Send me suggestions for more topics that this course could cover. I wish you good luck. See you.