Affinity Designer: Retro Monochromatic Poster Design

1. 1 Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on vintage monochromatic poster design using a famed designer. My name is Ben Nielsen. I'm immediate design educator and I will be your instructor for this course. I've done other courses on poster design and vintage design before. The difference this time is that we're going to be using just one color to create it. That's why it's monochromatic. This is a bit of a different style and it's going to be really useful for you to learn. What can you expect to learn in this class? Well, first off, you're going to learn about the design process. We are going to take this design all the way from a picture of the thing that we want to make, a post-stroke all the way to a finished poster product. That's really going to help you learn how to work through the design process. The second thing that you'll be learning is how to use both vector and raster graphics together to create a finished product. Particularly this is useful when you're trying to create a vintage project that has a really used or lived feel to it. Third rule, let me learning about color. We're going to be learning how to take one base color, turn it into a palette of tints, tones, and shades to create a poster that has highlights, mid tones and shadows. This will be a very useful exercise to you as you learn how to work within a constraint of a single color. If that's a little confusing to you right now, don't worry, we're going to talk a lot more about that in another video. But by the end, we will have combined these things to design process how to use vectors and rasters, and how to use a single color to create a stunning vintage poster. What do you need to already know in order to take this course? Nothing. You don't have to already have taken any of my other courses or other courses on design or other courses on Affinity Designer, take this course. We're going to start from the beginning and bring you all the way forward. Now that being said, if you have already taken some of my other courses on a theme designer and particularly the course is about vintage design. Some of this may already be familiar to you. That's okay. Repetition is one of the best ways we learned and we sell them fully get something the first time that we learned. If you do already feel really comfortable with vintage design from some of my other courses or other courses that you've taken or projects that you've done. Feel free to go ahead and skip around within this course to find the parts that are new to you, just make sure that you understand everything that you need to do in order to complete the project. Remember that you can always ask questions in the discussion tab for this course, and I'm happy to do my best to answer those. I would love it if you would go there now and introduce yourself to the class and to me so that we can all get to know each other a little bit better. In the next video, we'll go ahead and talk about the project for this course. 2. 2 Course Project: The project for this course is going to be to create a monochromatic vintage poster design. I'll be doing a travel poster for my project. And I would suggest that you also select occasion that you've traveled to to kind of be the inspiration for the poster that you're going to create. If you follow along with the assignments at the end of each video, you won't have any trouble having a finished poster by the time that we're done with this course, that you'll be able to upload into the project section for this course so that we can all see it and learn and grow together. I'm happy to provide feedback on those projects if that's something that you want, there's a few things that you'll want to keep in mind as you are creating your project. And don't worry, these will all be covered in detail throughout the course. So you don't have to worry too much about understanding them right at this point. The first thing is that you'll want to make sure you're using vector shapes in order to create the base layers of your poster. And we'll be going over how to use the pen tool to create those shapes. The second thing is to make sure that you are using just one base color and then using that color to create tints, tones, or shades in order to create all of the colors that you're going to use a poster. We won't really go more than 14th tones or shades of that color in this poster, it was a very limited palette and don't worry, we'll be talking more about that in the next video. The next thing to remember is that you'll be using raster textures to create that vintage feel on this poster. So that's what kind of takes it from a very modern, clean aesthetic into more of a vintage aesthetic. And we'll be going over how to do that and the tools that designers specifically has in order to make it easy to work with raster graphics and vector graphics together. And you can use any textures you want in order to complete this project. You don't have to use the ones that I'm using. There are many textures and brushes available for free online that can help you to create this vintage feel. The last thing to remember is that your poster will need to have some text on it, something about the place that it is representing. If you want to make sure that you follow along in the video about adding text. Lastly, when we are done with our posters, we will export them as JPEGs and then upload them into the project section for this course, please do take the time to make sure that you do export it and upload it because that is really the best way for you to learn. And I'm so excited to see what you all are able to create. Think about the place that you want to create a poster up. And in the next video, we'll start talking more about what monochromatic designers. 3. 3 What is Monochromatic: At this point, you might be wondering more about what this monochromatic design actually is. Monochromatic just means mono one chromatic color, one color. We're going to use one color in the design. And it's really helpful to see some examples so you can start to figure out where it doesn't start thinking about how you might like to use this. Let's go ahead and take a quick look. I have a poster here by John H. Clark. This is great basin and it's just a poster for that national part. And you can see that it just uses blue tints, tones, and shades of blue in order to create it. Now, you might be wondering about white. White is of course, a tint of all colors because it is the last color as you go lighter in the tenth. And of course, black on the other hand, is a shade of all colors. White and black can pretty much always be used if you need to. Although posters can be a little bit more interesting if you keep a little bit of the color in that care is another one of Clark's. I find his travel posters to be quite inspiring, but this one is done all in red. So you can see he is using some white, but that dark is not actually black, it's actually a dark red. Let me not come through on camera super well, but it is definitely actually still maintain some of that red color. And that's how he's creating his shadows there. That gives you a little idea from Clark's work, how you do this monochromatic designing using just those very, very simple color palettes. There's a lot of variety you can do here, even within these constraints. So let me show you a couple of ones that I've done. And we'll be following along with my style, of course, for this class. But you're welcome to take this whatever direction you want. You'll see I use a lot more texture in mind. I'm going for more of a vintage used feel in mind. Let's go ahead and take a look at this one, which is all TLRs blue. This is the Matterhorn and it just uses tellers blue for everything in it. And you can see where there's been some texture applied there. Next, let's look at one that is yellow. This is actually tomorrow. And so you can see that I'm using a very dark, dark shade of yellow here and then a light tint of the yellow right here, and then this base color of the yellow. So there's really only three colors in this entire poster, and yet you're able to get a very distinctive feel from it. Hopefully that helps you understand. You're going to take this base color, create tints and tones or shades from it, and then use that to translate into your mid tones, shadows and highlights. That's really important part to understand is that basically we are translating the mid tones, shadows, and highlights from the picture that we've taken off the place into the poster colors and just simplifying them down so that we create an iconic representation of it. Now I know that it can be a little intimidating when you're first starting out to think about working in a very limited color palette because it can feel like a creativity has been constrained. But hopefully you've seen from these poster examples, but there's actually a whole world of creativity found inside of these constraints. But you do need to really commit to doing it. And you have to wait until you finish it to actually see what it looks like because it might look bad in the beginning as you just have these very blocky colors together. But as you add in shadows and highlights, and then you add in texture, it becomes a much more rich experience. Let me just show you one more example here. This is a WPA poster which inspires all of this vintage designs. So you can see that this is for Jenny Lake and museum at the Grand Teton National Park. And it's just blue. It's all blue in there. That's what's going on with this poster. And that's kind of the historical perspective. This is where it's coming from. These old travel posters that were done with limited resources. And there wasn't a lot of options in necessarily printing. So you kind of had to work with what you had. So it's a great creative process to be able to go through this. I hope that you will actually commit to using just one color and your poster because you will learn a lot by doing that. Even if you decide that this isn't necessarily your style will really help you to learn something about the way color works as you try and do this. Now that we kind of know what direction we're headed with, with the color. You can go ahead and pick what color you would like to use for your base color. It just needs to be one of the basic six colors. Just, just choose whether you're going to use red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple as your base color. And then in the next video, we'll talk about choosing a reference photo for your company. 4. 4 Choosing a Reference Photo: Now it's time for us to select a picture that we're going to use as the reference photo for our poster. And there's a couple of things to consider when you are choosing a reference picture. The first one is, do you have more than one picture of that place? Because if you only have one picture of that place, then that's what you're going to go with. Now, it could be possible for you to go online and find a picture of that place, but for my own originality and also to make sure that I'm not stepping on anybody's copyright. I always like to try and use my own pictures that I've taken at the place, which of course only works if you've actually been there. So these are some pictures that I have from Disneyland and a continuing with the theme that we set up using the Matterhorn and Tomorrowland, I'm going to add another poster from here. Now. I want to do one of main street. And if I come over here to some pictures that I have from Main Street, I have this one of City Hall and then I have this one of the pumpkin leaning into Main Street during the Halloween celebration and that's pretty much all I got it. Main Street this time. So there isn't that much for me to work with. I have to choose which one will give me enough detail that I'll be able to draw that out into my poster. And in this case, I think it's gonna be City Hall. That's pretty iconic. It'll go along well with the other posters that I've done previously in this series. And so I think that's what I'm going to go with here. The thing to recognize when you are looking at these, this isn't a photography contest. This is really about having a picture that you can use to be able to create the poster from. So it doesn't need to be the best picture in the world. This is not a really phenomenal picture. I just shot this with my phone, but I'll be able to take it and pull out the relevant shapes that I need. One thing if you have multiple pictures to consider is how much space do you have around it? So for example, if I wanted to do a poster of the castle, I have a couple of Castle pictures here. When we look at this, this one has a lot more space around it, whereas this one is much tighter. Both of these pictures may be useful for creating a poster. It's just this one's gonna be a lot tighter and I'm going to lose detail on the side. So it depends on what kind of poster I want to do. Whereas on this one I can always crop in on it as I make the poster, but it's going to give me more area to work with, especially this area up in the top where I could put some words. I've got a lot more of that here in this area down in the bottom where there's this pavement space that would be dead if I wanted to put words in there, this will just give me more options for that. So as a general rule, wider is normally better when you considering these reference pictures for posters of a place. But it really depends on what you want to highlight and how much detail you want to be able to draw from. Because obviously I'm going to have more detail here in this closer one than I am here. I'm just gonna be able to discern more detail in the castle there. Another thing to consider is just if you have good contrast between your highlights and your shadows. Now this was a very sunny day, so I have some pretty deep shadows in some pretty bright highlights. In fact, there might be too much there, but it's good to have that differentiation because remember, we're gonna be dealing with a very limited color palette. And that's where this has the building all in shadow. There isn't going to be as much there to work with just because you can see where the position of the sun was. It's coming from behind the backlog. Not best, but I can work with it and figure out where the shadows would be. I think I'm going to go with this one of City Hall, but you can go ahead and select whatever picture you want. And in the next video we're going to talk about sketching out our posters so that we can start to get our ideas out on paper. 5. 5 Sketching: Alright, so now that we've decided on our image that we're going to use as our underlying concept for our poster. We're going to go ahead and we're going to sketch out what we want our poster to look like. And we already have a pretty good idea because we have that image. But we wanted to lay out like maybe where our text is going to go from that kind of thing. Anytime you start any design project, you want to do some sketching before we actually get into making it. So let's go ahead here. I just have my sticky notes in my little pencil. And we're just going to go ahead and draw it and it doesn't need to look good. It just needs to help you get your ideas out. So I'm just going to draw kind of a rough poster here. And I know that there's gonna be a building here with a flag. Again, it doesn't need to look good. It just needs to give me the idea that I know is there, I know there's a tree over here and some tracks. I've got that and I know where things are that I want to just start laying out my text. So I'm just going to go City Hall and I'm using real letters here, but you don't even have to use rule letters. You can just even block out the text down here. I'm just going to put something in like Main Street USA. I have this one concept but then I might go ahead and just peel that sticky note off and then I'm going to another one so I can do as many of these sketches as I want and I should probably try and do a few before I actually get started. So again, just kind of what we have here, building the main ideas. And then we're just going to try out some different configurations. So I might try putting the, all the texts down here. Then I might put some dates down here. I don't know what the dates are, so I'm just going to fill that in with just number of signs, but I might have like an established date there. So that's one idea. You can see how sketching doesn't need to take a long time for you to get a bunch of ideas out. Here. In this case, because I'm working with the same image every time. I've just sketching out the same basic parameters each time, then trying out different things with it. So it doesn't matter if your size and isn't exactly right. So obviously this is going to go off here. I'm just trying out these concepts that just lets me know if I had liked that or not. Not necessarily if this particular thing works. I know there's some distraction down here, so that's helpful in thinking about what kind of texts could I put down there? Mainly we're gonna be working with texts, but there's other concepts that we can work with as well that might hold text like a ribbon down here. And these are just simple shapes. But then I might try putting the date of establishment in the ribbon or something like that. These sketches are going guide how we design as we head into actually working in Affinity Designer. So go ahead and make some sketches and then we'll jump in and wash to start making this. 6. 6 Document Setup: Now that we have a good sketch of our idea, we need to go ahead and make our document so that we can start to make our design. This is a pretty simple process. We're just going to be here. And if scene designer go up to the File menu, which you can't see me just because of the way the screen recording works on mine, but it's just gonna be at the top of your screen and you'll click File. And then we're going to come down to New, and we see the new document menu. Now this may pop up right when you open a famous designer for the first time as well. If so, that's fine. We're going to select Print for this because we're probably going to print less poster out and we're going to come down and choose letter. You can see that our layout is now 8.5 inches by 11 inches. And our DPIs 300, you can leave it at 300. That's great for printing. That's very high-resolution for branching. And then we have document units. I have these set to inches, but you can select whatever you feel comfortable with. You won't want to go with large things like feet or yards. So that would be more if you were designing banners or billboards or something like that. In this case, we're just going to go with inches. That'll be much simpler. And then you have your orientation, which we want set to portrait. And then you have this important box right here, which is create art board. I like to always check that box because I like to work with art boards. If you don't check that, then you have to go through a couple of extra hoops to make art boards later. So just make sure that you've checked that because we're going to do multiple iterations of this poster. And so we want to be able to create multiple art boards of it. So just make sure that's checked. We have image placement policy here. The option is to prefer Embedded or prefer linked. In this case, I'm going to choose prefer Embedded just because there's basically only one image that we will be adding to this, that is going to be the city hall image. And then we will also be adding in some things that would be considered image files, which will be used for our textures. And you don't want those to end up getting separated. But it's not such a huge document that it's gonna be a problem to have them inside the document, which is where I would choose preferred linked. That's more if you're working on something like a newspaper or magazine or brochure with a lot of images you might prefer link just to keep your file size down. But we're going to go through for embedded here are color format. You can choose whether this is going to be RGB or CMYK, in my case, because I'm not going to be printing this on a commercial printer because I'm going to probably just print them out on my home printer. I'm just going to keep it at RGB. These other things we don't have to worry too much about here. We can either do margins or lead. We don't need any margins for this poster, but I am going to go ahead and just add in a quarter-inch of bleed around it. And that's just so that we know how far off of the document to place our objects so that we can have a full edge to edge print. If we're printing with a printer that can do edge to edge printing, I would set that to 0.25, just a quarter of an inch. And if this is linked here, then the bleed will be all the way around. If you unlink that, then you can change which side had bleed. But most of the time you really want that to be the same all the way round. Let us go ahead and click Create. And now we have our document setup and you can see it says Art board one. We have our art board. With this. Let's just go over the interface of Affinity Designer really quickly in case you've never used it before. Along the top, you have your options for your personas. So designer persona of pixel persona and export persona. That basically it will change the types of tools that you have available to you. And then you have a toolbar with a lot of different options. We'll go over the options that we need as we go through the course. So don't worry too much about what all these buttons do right now, on the left-hand side, we have our tools. These are the things that we're going to use to do things in our document. We won't use every tool that's in here, but we'll go over the ones that we need for this course. And then over here on the right-hand side we have the studios. This is where we handled the details of our work. We have things like our color, our stroke, my brushes. There's a lot of different options that can be found over here in the strokes. One of the really important ones is the Layers panel over here. So we want to make sure that we are paying attention to that as we are working. But again, we'll go into the pieces of this that we need as we work our way through the course. But that's the basic setup of the interface where different things are. Okay, now that we have a document ready, we can go ahead and place our image and we'll do that in the next video. 7. 7 Placing the Image: Let's go ahead and actually place our image that we will be using for reference. That's the first step that we need to do. We're just zooming out a little bit so that I can see my whole art board for placing it. You zoom by holding down Option on your keyboard and scrolling with your mouse. That's the easiest way to zoom in and out. Let's go over here and about halfway down the toolbar will find this place Image tool. When we click that, it's going to take us in to find our pictures. You just need to navigate to wherever your pictures. I'm going to scroll down until I find that picture of the city hall right here and click Open. You can see that now my cursor has this little download arrow on it. Now we can go ahead and place this image. So I'm going to click and drag to place my image. And it doesn't matter if he gets cropped off a little bit, that's fine. I'm just going to drag until it fills the entire art board. That's how you place an image. And of course this is embedded because we chose, prefer Embedded here. If we need to resize it, we just need to make sure we're selected on our move tool up here, which we were automatically after we chose to place our image. And then we can click and drag from the handles. If we wanted to just move it, we can just click in the middle and drag it around. And that's all there is to placing an image. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about how we use this image to find the highlights and shadows. 8. 8 Finding Shadows and Highlights : Now that we have our image gear, it's gonna be good to kind of determine where our highlights and shadows are in the image. And this isn't going to determine everything that we do. We still have a lot of creative freedom. It's just good to get this down as a guideline in your layers studio over here and make sure that you are selected in the image. And one of the nice things about working in FEM designers that we have all of these tools available to us from raster programs like offending photo or Photoshop right here in the program. And that's very helpful. It doesn't have every tool that fame photo has, but it does have a lot of the basic ones which help us to be able to work with these photos as well as our vector objects. So what we're going to do here is we're going go ahead and we're going to make this black and white. So if you go down to the bottom of the layers panel, you're going to find where you have your adjustment layers. And you're just going to choose black and white. Black and white to begin with, starts to give us some sense of the tone of this image. We're not going to worry right now about adjusting anything with the black and white image where we could actually adjust how the colors play out. We may do that later if we need to, but for right now I'll just click X. So now you can see right here, there is this black and white adjustment layer and it's being applied to the photo. And it's important that it's applied to the photo so that it doesn't get applied to everything. But if we want to see the photo and color which we might want to do, we're going to go ahead and uncheck that. And then boom, we're back to where we weren't. We can turn it back on. Now selecting on our photo, we're going to go ahead and apply a, another adjustment layer. And this one is called the threshold. So go down until you find threshold, click that. And this one is actually going to find the black and white in the image. And so this can be really helpful in seeing where our highlights are and where our shadows are. And you can adjust the intensity here by going either to the left or the right on the slider. So if I drag it all the way up here, you can see it puts pretty much everything in shadow. And if I go all the way, then it just becomes completely black. And if I drag it to the left, everything becomes a lot brighter. And it's basically just adjusting the threshold for what's black and what's white. If we just double-click it, it will return 250%, which is the baseline. The reason we want to do this is just so we can get a vibe for where our highlights and our shadows are as we are working on adding in the vector shapes that will help us determine which of our limited color palette we're going to be able to use. Adjust this until you feel like it's in a good spot, but don't do anything too extreme. Because this isn't adjustment layer. We can of course always come back and deal with it later. So just like black and white, we can turn that off and back on. If we turn either of these off, it's going to adjust the other one. Okay, so that's how we can find shadows and highlights by using our adjustment layers on this photo. Now that we've done that, our next step is going to be to go ahead and make our monochromatic color palette. 9. 9 Setting up the Color Palette: All right, Now it's time for us to go ahead and set up our color palette. We're going to basically only use three or four colors. And remember, this style of design only works if you really commit to this very simplified color palette. Let's go ahead and get started with this. Makes sure that you are on your swatches studio right here, and we're going to make a new color palette. So click on the menu in the top right, and we're going to choose to add a palette. Now there are three different kinds of palettes here. There's application palette, that means it will only be inside of a frame designer. There's document palette, which means it will only be in this document. And there is system palette, which means you could use it anywhere within this system, meaning your computer. So you just need to choose which one is right for you. For me, I'm just going to choose add document palette at this point and we're going go ahead and make sure that we rename it. So we're going to click up here and choose Rename palette. We're going to call this one. In City Hall. Currently there's no colors. Obviously, we need to go ahead and add some colors. And if we click this little Add button here, that's add current fill to palette. So whatever is in our fill circle will be added into our palette. There's other option here is to add the current color to the palette as a global color. Global colors are colors that you can adjust later for us, we're not going to do that. We're going to make our selections and stick with them. So we're just going to need this add current, fill the power. But first we're going to need this fill to actually be what we want it to be though, if we double-click on that, we're going to get our color chooser. So if you've determined what color you want, you can actually put in the code either RGB or hex, or HSL or CMYK right here. You can also use this color picker to choose. Now, picking colors at random often doesn't work very well. So you want to pick something that really works for you. So hopefully you decided at the beginning what colour of the six main colors you would want to use. Now you can go ahead and pick a starting point from there. I'm gonna be using red and I actually have a hex code. So I'm gonna go ahead and put that in. So I've got this reddish orange color there, but as long as you choose a color that works with your subject matter, it's fine. Whatever color you choose because we're going form all of the other colors off of it. So all the other colors that we form will work in harmony with it. Whereas if you're doing a more complex color palette, you want to make sure that you're using some type of color theory behind it. That's one of the beauties of going with a really simple color palette is it's really easy to work with. So we're going go ahead and click Close on this and then we're going to choose add current fill to palette. So now we have this color right here. And when the next thing that we want to do is go ahead and make tints, shades, and tones from it. So if we right-click on our swatch, we're going to get this create color code. We want tints, shades, and tones. So we just need to create the color chords for those. So we'll do tints and we get a bunch of tints. And next we will do create color-code for shades, and then we will also do create color code for tones. So tints are basically adding white to the color. Shades are adding black to the color and tones are adding gray to the color. This is a great place to start with now obviously we have way too many. We do not want to use all of these, but this is where we will start from. We'll use these to select the three or four that we will use. Remember, we're primarily dealing with highlights, mid tones, and shadows when we're making a poster like this. So three is pretty good, but sometimes we'll want a fourth one which will normally either be white or black or very close to it if we're going to add in a fourth one so that we can either really draw highlights or really deepen the shadows. So that's how we go ahead and make our color palette. But we're not actually going to use that right away because it's best when we're working in this kind of environment to just design using gray. So if you click here, just go ahead and choose grace. And that's what we're going to use to do our initial designs because then we'll be able to translate those grays into the color later. So go ahead and switch over to the gray. And in the next video we will talk about using the pen tool to create our shapes. 10. 10 Using the Pen Tool: Now that we have our document set up and our adjustment layer is put over our photo. We're going go ahead and start actually building out the vector illustration using the pen tool. I know that the pen tool can be a little intimidating if you are new to vector illustration, but just know that as you practice, you get better at understanding it. And after you have created the shapes for one of these posters, you will have had lots of practice with the pen tool because we are going to create a lot of shapes. The other thing to know about the Pen tool is you can always come back and edit the points later, so nothing is permanent. If you make a mistake, you can always come back and edit it later, even if you don't catch it right away. I'm gonna go ahead and just start with the basics. So let's go over and get the pen tool. Just looks like a little fountain pen over here. The first thing that we're just going to do is the sky. And this is basically just drawing a square. So go up to the top left corner and your point should snap into place there. If not, make sure you turn on snapping by hitting this magnet up here. So he's snapping to place there. Click that's going to drop a point down from which you can then continue to draw. I'm going to hold down shift as I do. So you'll see that that line becomes straight, so I can't get off of axis here. I'm just going to go right over to the corner and click. That's going to drop another point. And I'm just going to go down below where this guy disappears. So down below this kind of treeline here, I'm still holding down Shift to make a straight line. And then I'll click and they'll go across and click. And I can see that I might actually want that to be farther down because when I add in some of these highlights or cut away part of the vector shape that makes the tree up later. I'm going to want the sky to show through. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Command Z. I'm gonna hit Command Z twice so that I'm back to this point up here. And then holding down Shift, I'm going to go down further. Then I'm gonna go across still holding down Shift. And I'm going to come back to the top and click. Now that I've got that you can see over here in the layers panel that I have this curve, That's what I have created and I'm going to go ahead and just give that curve a color. So I'm going to click on white because we're just going to use a few gray tones as we mocked up this image, the white. Now I have this blank white shape on top. I'm going to go ahead and turn that off by unchecking its visibility so that I can continue to see the image underneath. One thing that you will often see me doing as I'm working on this is turning on and off this threshold adjustment because I want to use the threshold adjustment to see where the highlights, the shadows are, but I also want to be able to pick out those mid tones. So I'll turn this off and see what's going on. And I want to see which things go together. Using both of these in tandem can help us to get the right amount of detail. Alright, let's go ahead and just do this pavement down here. This is just a little bit trickier than what we did before. We're going to click to set our point at the bottom, come up here to right where that curve is click. And then going over here to where the curve ends, we're going to click there, but we aren't going to let go. We're going to click and drag and that's going allow us to make this curve as we drag out with this what's called a Bezier handle, were able to set that curve to be the curb. And remember we aren't going for photo realism here. We're just going for kind of the basic idea. Now, once we've created that Bezier handle, we have this curve here. Let me zoom in so you can see that a little bit better. There's a curve instead of a straight line. But we want to get another straight line coming down. And if we try and do that right now it's gonna be hard because this other handle that comes out here that we dragged, that's going to create a curve coming out the other side. So let me just show you what that would look like if I click here, I've got this curve and I don't want that. I want it to be straight. So I'm gonna hit Command Z to undo. And then when come back here, hover over my anchor point and you'll see there's little slash by my pen tool. That means I can get rid of a handle. So when I click that, that other handle goes away and now I can draw a straight line down and then a straight line over. And I'm going to give this just a 50% gray right now. If I turn back on our other curve, you can see that this is what we have. Not much so far, right? But this part is the simplest and he's gonna get a little bit more complicated from here. Also, what I can see right now is that both of these have black strokes around them. I don't want them to have black strokes. I'm going to select both of them by holding down Shift and clicking on them. And then up here in my swatches studio, we'll click on my stroke and choose this white circle with a red line through it. That means no stroke. I don't want to make sure that I put my fill back on top by clicking on it. So now we know basically everything we need to know about the Pen tool to continue doing this. So I'm gonna go ahead and uncheck these. And then we can go ahead and we can start drawing out some of the more complex shapes. I'm going to start with just the basic outline of the building here. A lot of this side will be obscured by trees. So by lines don't matter too much on this side because I am going to put that tree and we just have to be kind of the idea of the building here. But on the other side is going to matter a lot more. And remember that as you go through this, you can choose how much detail you are going to add in. So for example, this railing up here may or may not be important to you if, if we turn on our threshold layer, we can get an idea of how much detail comes out in the highlights and shadows. And you can see it's not much. So we might choose to not put that in. Now you might have noticed in those posters from John Clark that I showed you earlier, he does a lot of detail in his drawings and I tend to do less detail in mine. It just depends on what you are going for. You can make that choice yourself, but I'm just working with just a basic shape here right now, and we'll add in detail later. I'm choosing to ignore the railing for now, but if I decide I want it later, I can always come back and add it in. Okay, So we've done straight lines up to this point, but now we have a curve. I'm not going to pay any attention to the light bulbs along the top. I don't think that's gonna be important. So I'm going to go ahead and just click right there and then curve this just like we did before. If I want to move that a little bit, I can hold down Command on my keyboard to be able to get my direct selection tool and drag that a little bit. So if I wanted to just reposition it, just do that. Remember I click on it again to get rid of my second handle. Going to come in here, zooming in with Option and scrolling. Just come in here and get a little bit of this detail. I don't like my point, I just hit Command Z. Now we have another fencing thing here, and this one I think might be more important than the other one. It's hard to say. But for right now I'm just going to block it out and I can come in and erase parts of the shape later if I want to. Here we have two curves. So I'm going to just set my point here at the base of the first one. Just curve it out a little bit. Just my points. Click on that. And then curve this one out. From time to time, I will zoom out just to kind of get a feel for the overall shape that I'm going for to decide if the amount of work I'm putting into the detail is really important, or if it's not even going to show up. I'm not planning to put any figures in my image, any people. So I'm just going to ignore these people and just try and follow the line of the bottom of the building as closely as possible. When I get back over here, I'll see that I probably want to include this planter. So I'm going to keep going over to here. Then just back to my original point there. Let's go ahead and just fill that with black for now. So that gives us our outline. Let's turn on our other images here. And as you do this, you can kind of see it start to take shape. And when you turn it off, you can kind of start to see what's missing. Obviously, I'm going to add in the flagpole there because that seems to be a pretty distinctive feature. And I need to do something about the sidewalk down here, so we'll have to work with that. Okay, So there's gonna be lots and lots of these shapes that need to be made. So I'm going to go ahead and just speed this up so that you can kind of see me work, but you don't have to watch the whole thing happen in real time. 11. 11 More Pen Tool Timelapse: Okay. Good. I think I've just about half the main stuff blocked out here, which is kind of where we want to be at this point. And you'll notice that I rearrange things over here in the layers quite a bit because how the layers are stacking is really important so that the right things are behind in the right things are in front so that you have the proper layering. So at this point we're going to go ahead and start adding in a lot more of the detail work with the highlights and the shadows will go ahead and do that in the next figure. 12. 12 Highlights and Shadows: Okay, So as you make these posters, you can always go back and change things, of course, but now we're going to move on to mostly focusing on highlights and shadows. And this is where the threshold adjustment layer is going to come in really handy because we can start to see where things are, it really bright and where they are really dark and where we might want to add in highlights and shadows, but we won't use that exclusively because some of the details can get really lost in this. And so we'll also continue to use the black and white photo to find out where we want those highlights and shadows to be. And we'll be turning off and on our layers a lot. That's just part of what you have to do in order to see where you want to be. So I can see that obviously I'm going to want to add in a highlight around this lamp because I made the whole thing black and I'm going to want those to be bright. And I can also see that I'm going to want a shadow right here on the curb so that it creates separation with the curb and the sidewalk there. So we're going to add these in exactly the way that we did before. The difference now is basically just that we're working a lot smaller objects most of the time. Switching to my pen tool here, I'm going to go ahead and create just a, another round shape to it here from the side. And when you're doing these round shapes, if they're fairly symmetrical, you don't have to do the click to stop the handle here because that's going to be basically the same. So when you click over here, you wouldn't get mostly the same shape there. Now, highlights in this case are normally going to be white. Then we'll use whatever our lighter color is. When we go back to our color palette. Then I'll just turn off the photo which I've put in front now to be able to see what we have down here. And then we can go in and we can make adjustments. If we hold down command, we'll get our little direct selection tool. Even while we're using the pen tool, we can just make a few adjustments based on how we would like this to look again, I'm just holding down command to get this direct selection tool here. Then when we ready to move on to the next one, we'll turn back on the photo. And let's go ahead and get the curb here. For really long curves like this. You may have seen this when I was doing the railroad track for really long curves, you want to kind of zoom out so you can have plenty of room to drag out because these long shallow curves can be a little bit tricky to get right. And you need enough room to drag your handles out. And of course, shadows will be primarily black. Will just want to make sure that we match this up so that we don't have a little bit of gray showing out there. So you can see how these start to add in more dimension. And you'll be doing a lot more of these, but you'll be making them smaller. And of course placement is going to be important. Just keep turning this off and back on again to kind of see where my highlights are at and where I want to go ahead and emphasize those or emphasize the shadows. Do you want to go ahead and bring in this shadow of the tree that's going to be important. Now, there's a lot of highlights in here as well, which I may trace some of them, but I also may just use a texture mask similar to what I'm going do on the tree to bring in these highlights here, not all your highlights and shadows have to be with the pen tool. You can also use a texture mask, which we'll get to in another video. Just trace around this. This is a really large shadow. Normally, shadows are actually pretty small, although they do tend to be larger than Highlights. Highlights tend to be pretty small. To just convey that idea of light glinting off of something. I'm not being too careful here. Just basically giving the idea of the tree's shadow. I don't need an exact tracing because this of course, would be very specific to the day that I was in this location based on where the lighting was and everything. So it's not important that this be exact. Just important that we give the idea that yes, there would be a tree shadow here. There's just a lot of drawing, a lot of clicking, adding points during this whole thing, but especially during the highlight and shadow phase, we're just going to be doing a lot of little lines and paths. You may look at something and be like, I'm not sure if I like that, but leave the shape that I don't go ahead and delete it. You can turn it off if you decide you don't like the way it looks because right now, I feel like there isn't a connection between this tree up here and the shadow here. But we might be able to make that happen when we get it back into the coloring of this. If you don't like that shadow right now, go ahead and just turn it off for now, may look better when we add texture to it as well. And just keep working through this. It is time-consuming and not particularly a lot of fun, but it can make your work look a lot better in the long run. So go ahead and find out where those shadows need to be and go ahead and put them in. Obviously going to speed this up so that you don't have to watch me put in every single one of these shadows, which will take a long time to do. If you find yourself just not feeling like you can put in the time to make this happen. You can go ahead and just tell yourself, I'll just do one shadow and then I'll go and I'll do something else. Then just come back and do one more shadow. And eventually after you've done that a number of times, you will actually have something which is pretty cool. So it just takes a little work and some people don't love to sit there and do it for a long time, that's totally fine. You can break it up into multiple sessions if you want. Go ahead and speed this up. You guys go ahead and work on your highlights and shadows. And I will see you in the next video. 14. 14 Subtracting Shapes: Okay, So I have the basic shapes and the highlights and shadows where I want them, but I'm sure I will make further adjustments to him as I go along and as they start to bring in color and see how it takes ship that way. But it's really good to kind of get this done in grayscale first so that we figured out exactly how the shapes should look. And then if we need further shadows and highlights later, we can always come back and add those in. The next thing that I want to show you is just how to cut something out of another shape in case you don't know how to do that yet. So if you look here at the top, you can see the flagpole should be showing through here, but I need it to be behind the black. And so I've added in the highlights on here to make the terrorists, but I really want to see the flagpole come through. So I need to subtract these highlights from the overall black shape. So let's go ahead and see how we do that. I'm going to come here and I'm going to select all of these curves. Now they have them all selected. We're also going to go down and we're going to find our main black shape, which is right here. And I'm going to hold down Command and click on that so that I have that selected as well. The next thing that we're going to do is go ahead and subtract them. So if you look up at the top, you'll see your geometry operations and we want to subtract those from the black one. So we're just going to hit the minus one, but I'm going to hold down the option key on my keyboard. They can make this a non-destructive action. When I click that, what we get is this compound shape. And if we click down, you can see we have all of these curves inside of here. So all of those curves are part of this lattice work. And I can then come in and I can still adjust them. Whereas if I didn't hold down option, it would have been a destructive operation. So it's just a good idea to hold down Option so that you can change it later if you need to. Now if we go ahead and we click off of here, you can see that these are now creating holes and we can see the flagpole between it. So that's a really good skill to know how to do. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and learn how we can change the color on here. 15. 15 Adding Color: All right, Now it's time for us to go ahead and add color to this poster. And you can see I'm selected on my city hall color palette here. And of course I'm only going to use three or four of these colors in order to make my poster. And the next thing that we need to do is duplicate our art board so that we still have this grayscale version over here in the layers panel where it says Art board one. I'm going to go ahead and click on that and then click again so that I can change the name. I'm going to change this to grayscale. Now with that selected and making sure that I'm on my move tool, I'm going to go ahead and hold down option on my keyboard, click and drag to duplicate. And if I want to keep them in line, I can just hold down Shift. Then when I let go, I will have a duplicate version. Now of course I want to change this name to be color. And I'm probably will have multiple colors. So for right now I'm just going to call it color one. When we want to change the color of something, we want to use the Select same command, and it's a little bit tricky and we have to do a workaround to make this work correctly. So just make sure you're following me here first, I want to go ahead and change all of my grays, my mid-tone colors to my main red hue. I'm going to go ahead and click on one of my gray objects. I'll just click on the trees here. And then I want to go up to my top menu and you can't see mine, but it's right up there where it says Select, click on that. And then you'll see this menu. Then you want to go to Select Same and choose Fill color. This is going to select everything that has the same fill color. Now you will notice that it has now gone across onto the art board whose color we do not want to change in your layers panel, scroll over, find your gray scale art board, hold down Command and click on it that will select the entire art board and then click on it again, which will deselect everything on that art board. Now we just have our color one art board selected and only the gray objects. Then as long as we have our fill selected here in swatches so that it's on top. We can go ahead and we can click on our red and everything will become red. Alright, let's repeat that for our blacks. Clicking on black, go to Select, Select Same Fill Color. It's selected the grayscale art board. So we want to hold down command on our keyboard. Click the art board in the layers panel, click it a second time to de-select. And now we have just our black objects selected. Now we can go ahead and select one of our darker red shades. So we don't want the one that's pretty much black. We want the one right next to it. I'm going to click that and now I have dark red shadows. Next, let's go ahead and click on one of our white objects. Then go to Select, Select Same Fill color. Now of course we're going to hold down Command, click Grayscale, click it again to de-select. And then we can add when one of these tints, I'm going to go a couple of pins down from pure white and put that in there. Now you can see that we have easily just add in our colors. Now we want to do some iterations. We might want to change up some of these. So I'm going to go ahead and select this artboard Color one. I'm gonna hold down Option to duplicate it again while I click and drag. Now I think that I might want to actually go a little bit lighter on some of these. Just to brighten up my highlights a little bit. I can actually see down here where I have a problem, where there's actually some of the art board showing through. So I need to come back here, grab my selection tool and pull that up. I'm just testing this out to see what I like and which color like better. And if I need to tints there or just one K, We also want to try and create some separation here. So this might be a good place to add in a tone. This would be a fourth color for us. Forgot to change these. Let's go one tint lighter there. They're just barely pink. And then this might be a good place to add a tone because you see we have the main red overlapping care, which we don't really want. So let's go over in our tones and let's just see if there's anything good here where we can come up with a fourth option. We've got pure gray, but then if we back it up a little bit, you might find something else. Let's get there. I'm just experimenting with a few different things just to see what I get here. 16. 16 Adding Text: Alright, now let's go ahead and add text into our poster. We're going do this using the Artistic Text tool. So if you go down along the left-hand side and the tools, you will find the Artistic Text Tool. And the reason we're using the Artistic Text tool instead of the Text Frame tool, which is right here, is because we want to be able to adjust the size of this on the fly. We don't want it to be bound to a frame size. We want to just be able to adjust it to fit whatever we need it to fit. So let's go ahead and come up here and we're just going to click and drag out to size that we think is going to be good. And then we're going go ahead and change our font. We're going to change our font to something that's kind of an old style. Now, I have a lot of different fonts that are more retro and you may or may not have fonts like this just depends on what's on your computer and what you may have bought. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to be using one called Gothic outline shaded. This is from the wild-type revival set. So I'm going to come here and there is Phil, distressed and regular I want distressed. Let me go ahead and hit distressed. And then I'm just going to type in my text, which in this case is City Hall. The reason I'm using a distressed font is just so that it gets these imperfections in it here that you can see that just makes it seem more vintage. Let's go ahead and expand that out. I wanted to just kind of sit around the flagpole, go ahead and turn on my magnet here to make sure that's close to centered. I'm just going to drag it over a little bit just so that it's centered on the flagpole instead of being centered on the page. And then for color, I'm going to go ahead and choose my darker shade here. Looks pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and make another set of text down at the bottom, grab my Artistic Text tool here. Select parlor. And then I'm just going to put Main Street USA. I'm just going to make that bigger. We might try a different color here. And now we've got Main Street USA here. Okay, so that's how you go about adding text and make sure that you add in some texts that will be meaningful onto your poster. And in the next video, we're going to talk about adding a border to this poster. 17. 17 Adding a Border: Next to finish this up, before we come in and add in the texture, we're going to add a border. And we're just going to do this by grabbing a rectangle, going up to our top left corner, clicking and dragging across the entire thing. Now obviously we don't want to fill on it right now. So we're going to go ahead and just hit the little white dot with a slash through it. Choose our stroke here from the top. And then we just need to add in a color for the stroke. And I think in this case we're going to try and go for that tone that we're using. Let's go ahead and select that. And then in the Stroke Studio right next to the swatches, we're going to go ahead and drag up to get more of our stroke coming out. And we want to make sure that we align this to the inside. So going to where it says a line, we want to align the stroke to the inside so we get the full stroke coming in, probably go up to around ten and we get to decide if we'd like that color or we can try one of the others as well. I think I liked the main base colors the best there. So now that we have a border around it which you can choose whether you'd like that or not. Now we're gonna go ahead and add in texture to the poster itself. 18. 18 Adding Texture: Okay, So I made a couple more tweaks to the text here before we got to this video, but we're going go ahead and add in some texture. There's a lot that you can do with texture and you can find free textures online or you can pay for them, or you can make your own. But adding in texture is really important, I think to really giving the vintage feel that you want out of a poster like this. We're going go ahead and we're going to duplicate this art board again so that we can add texture but still have a clean version. So let's go ahead and duplicate this artboard by selecting it, holding down Option, clicking and dragging. And then we're going to call this one color to texture. And the first way that we're going to add texture is by using a raster image, but we'll also learn how to add texture by using a brush. So let's see how to do it with a raster image first, right here in my Finder, I have open this folder called dirty surface textures. Now these are some free textures that you can get online and I'll go ahead and leave a link for them. These are Pharma created are called Spoon Graphics and boom graphics does some really great tutorials on vintage design. And he also has these textures that he gives away for free. He also had some for sale, of course as well, but these are free ones that are dirty surface textures and I'm going to leave a link for those if you want to use them. I have lots of textures that I've paid for it, but I wanted to show you some that were free as well. Let's go ahead and we can look at these on a Mac. You can just hit Spacebar to open these up. And the important thing to know about working with texture is that you're going to use it as a mask in this case, because we want to create a print field where you can see things behind it. And so that means that anything that's white will allow stuff to show through. Anything that's black will hide the layer that it's on. We're obviously going to want more white than black, but these are more black than white. So we're going to invert them when we get into the program. So just looking for one of these that might be useful. A lot of good ones here, I'm going to go with, I think number ten, just as an example, and I'm just going to click and drag that out onto here and it just places it on the page just to show you how this works. Let's go ahead and we're going to drag this down to right above our kind of our main building image here. So just that curve right there. We're going to drag it down on there. And we'll want to resize it just to make it big enough to cover the whole thing. And then we need to invert it. So we're going to use an adjustment layer. They just went layers look like a yin-yang symbol down here at the bottom of the Layers panel. So go ahead and click Adjustments. And then if you scroll down, you're going to find invert. What inverts going to do is it's going to flip the whites to black and the blacks to white. And we can use it to make our mask. Let's go ahead and click on this layer, then right-click on it and choose Rasterize to mask. All right, that is currently masking everything down beneath it. But what we want is just to mask this layer, looks like we are in the wrong spot for that. Sometimes it can be hard to keep track of all your different layers. We want this compound layer here. So let's go ahead and drag this down to the correct spot of our compound layer. And now we're going to mask it. So we just want to drag that onto the thumbnail of that layer. Now it is clipped to just that layer. You can see, if I zoom in here, you can see how that texture is allowing what's behind it to show through. That's one way for us to add texture. Let's try and do that again. But this time we're going to make a group of all of these base colored objects that are on that particular piece. We're going to take all of these window objects and these ones. Want to make sure that we get them all grouped together here. And we may have to do some rearrangement to make sure that everything is in the right spot because we want this white facade to be on top, but we want these orange ones to be on top of that white one. So it can get a little bit tricky, but you just have to kind of keep track of where you're at. So I'm going to group them together and it looks like we might have missed a couple of them. So let's click on these and we're going to drag those down into the group. Open the group up like these, and drag them inside the group. Now that we have all of those grouped together, we also want to add in this one because it's sitting against that same piece. And the problem with moving that behind is we need to get these guys and put them back on top so these guys cannot be in the same group. We move those out, create a separate group with them. Now let's move this back piece into this group here, and then we will move this facade on top. Right now we want to apply a mask to this group. So let's go ahead and grab another texture. Pop that there and we want to do the same thing that we did before. So it looks like we left one of these out of the group. So there's always a little bit of going back and forth here to get these in the right spot. All right, so let's go ahead and invert it. I'm just showing this to you guys again so that you can remember it and be able to use it again later. Rasterize to mask. In order to mask this group, we need to turn this group into a compound shape. So let's go ahead and select everything in the group when we come up here, just like we did when we were making the compound shape for the lattice holding down Option, we're going to click Add, and that's going to turn them into one compound shape. We then want to make sure that this group is not here anymore. So let's go in and ungroup it. And then we'll go ahead and we will take this mask. We will just clip it into that compound shape. And then you can see how we've got this texture, which is allowing the dark part to show through. Alright, so that works pretty well. Now let me show you what I wanted to do on the trees. I want to try out on the trees a little bit more texture. Let's go ahead and grab another one of these. I wanted to do one that has quite a bit on it. I might need to switch to a different texture pack for something a little stronger if we can't find something that works well here, that one has quite a bit there. We'll go ahead and drag that out. And then we want to go ahead and grab these trees. Of course, we're going to group those together, make sure that we've dragged those up on top. And then with this dirty surface texture, we're going to try and apply one of those threshold adjustment layers to it that we used previously. So we're going to go to this threshold. And when we do that, you can see we can select how much is black or how much is white. So we want to make sure we have quite a bit that's white. And this is just trial and error, figuring out what works first, let's take our group and let's turn them into a compound shape and ungroup them. Then we're going to rasterize this to a mask and clip it into our trees. And it looks like we need to adjust its placement a little bit. What you can see there is we don't have enough. There wasn't enough that was white on there. And so we'll need to do an invert on that as well. Let's get back to here and we'll go ahead and we'll get rid of the threshold adjustment. And there's just a lot of trial and error. Let's reposition that right there. And then let's go ahead and get our invert. We've inverted to this and let's see what that looks like. We might want to apply another threshold adjustment if we need to rasterize, to mask, and there's just not quite enough coming through here. We want to get more texture in these, just so they look maybe a little bit more tree-like. So let's go ahead and hit Command Z to get back to where we were. And let's go ahead and apply another threshold adjustment layer. We're going to want to find a happy medium between the white and the black. And what we may want to do is use more of this bottom part where there's a little bit more texture going on. Selecting our mask and using our move tool, we can adjust which part we're using here. We can rotate it to try and get the right amount of texture in there. You could spend a lot of time looking for the right texture to make those feel like trees. I'm not gonna do that right now. I just want you guys to get basically the idea of this and how it works. So those work pretty well for kind of bigger blocks of color, but for smaller things like maybe this lamppost or places where we want things to not be quite as even It's good idea to use a brush. So let's go ahead and learn how to use a brush to add in some texture. Let's select the lamppost here. I can see we actually have a problem where these trees need to be brought forward above the facade. Sorry, there we go. That looks better. Let's look the lamppost here. Let's go ahead and group it with its bulbs here, so that we have a group. And now we can go ahead and we can apply a mask to it. On the mask. If we paint with a brush, we will be able to apply a texture. So we'll need to switch to our pixel persona for this. So up until now we've been in the designer persona. In the top-left, we're going to switch to the pixel persona, and then we're gonna get our brush tool here. So here's our brush, and you can see our brushes on the side here. So there's lots of different brushes that you can get. I've got a bunch of different ones here. I think a good option is either the textures or the sprays and splatters. Those come with Affinity Designer so you can use them. But just to kind of show you how this works, when we have a white mask, everything is showing through. But if we want to apply some texture to it, then we can go ahead and brush black onto it. So let's try the grainy air brush here and just see what that looks like. And we're just going to switch our color to black, so make sure that we're painting in black. And then let's zoom in here. And when we come through you can see how that's masking it. We don't want to mask it that much though. So let's go ahead and turn down our opacity significantly on this brush. Okay, I don't love that particular texture, so that's fine. We can just go ahead and delete this mask and add a new one. Make sure you're selected on the mask, right-click and delete. You can add a new mask by clicking the Mask button again. And let's try a different brush. Let's look at our textures here and see what we got. Try this grunge pattern. You can kind of see how that is applying a different texture. And the nice thing about the brushes is you can really select where that texture gets applied. Whereas with just a mask using a file, you can't do that as much. So we just apply the texture that way. Experiment with different brushes and experiment with different texture files. If you can't find any texture files, again, I will leave a link for that pack that I've been using. But also if you can't find any texture files, you can definitely go ahead and use the brushes. You just need to spend some time really adding texture because texture is going to give them much more authentic field to your entire poster. So I'm gonna go ahead and keep adding in some texture. We're using both files and brushes, and that's going to finish up the poster. So in the next video, we will go ahead and talk about exporting the poster. 19. 19 Exporting: You can spend a lot of time putting on texture and it is worth it to spend a significant amount of time figuring out how you want the texture to be because that will affect the overall feel of your poster. But once you have it where you want it to be, then it's time to go ahead and export it. The way we're going to export is go up to File, which is on the menu that you can't see because it's outside the window. But once you click file in the top left, then you can go ahead and choose Export. When you export it's going to pop up. And there's some different options here for different things. You might want to choose a PDF, but in the case of a Skillshare project, you do want to choose JPEG because Skillshare your handles JPEG better than it handles other kinds of files. So I have this here where it says Color to texture. That's the area. If yours is set to hold document, you want to make sure that you go to Color, to texture or whatever you've called your final art board because you don't want to export the whole document as a JPEG, that wouldn't work out very well. So make sure that it's on color to texture. Then you have this quality slider right here. You can choose to adjust that based on how big you want it to be. You can see down here the file size changes for submitting to Skillshare. I would try and keep it around two or three megabytes. You don't want it to be too large and they can't get big depending on how many of those raster textures you've gone ahead and added in the two to three megabyte range is good for Skillshare, I will still be able to see it even if it's a little bit lower quality, you just don't want to go down really low, like less than a megabyte or a megabyte and a half, because then things can start to get a little bit wonky and pixelated. Just around two megabytes is good. Then you're just going to go ahead and click export and then choose where you want to save it to. I'm going to save mine as City Hall and click Save. That's it. You've now export it as a JPEG and you are ready to go. All you need to do now is go to the project section for this course and upload your project as a JPEG. In the next video, we'll go ahead and talk about the next steps you might want to change. 20. 20 Next Steps: All right, now that you can play your posterior, you might be wondering what are the next steps you should take in your design journey. And really the most important thing in any design journey is to practice. You need to put into practice what you're learning and you need to practice a lot in order to improve as a designer, designing something that comes with learning principles and practicing. And so it's not just going to descend upon you one day you need to practice. I would say go ahead and make another poster like this to really get some practice or keep iterating on the poster that you've already created. If you do make new posters or new iterations of your poster, I would love to see those in the project section as well. If you're ready to do something new from monochromatic poster design, you can go ahead and check out my other courses. I have lots of courses on the affinity programs within Designer affinity Publisher, and if any photo that you can check out. I also have some basic courses on the principles of design. Those principles of design will help you improve your design as you start to recognize them in the world around you and as you start to practice them in your own work, if you are really interested in the theme designer. Besides my courses, I also suggest you check out the courses of day week to Minsky here on Skillshare because he has really good courses that teach you a lot about Affinity Designer. Don't forget that you can also follow me on YouTube at Ben designs in order to get weekly videos about design topics. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next homework.