Transcripts
1. Class Overview: In this class, you'll
learn how to use digital graphics resources and the printer to transform
plain paper and scrap card into a beautiful
piece of home deco. Whether you're a beginner
or a season cluster, you'll be able to
create a pretty wall hanging for your home
or to give as a gift. I'll take you through all the
steps from start to finish as even a bonus mini class on making your own paper
flower embellishments. So if you're ready to get
started, join me in class.
2. A Brief Introduction to Digital Crafting: Before diving in, I just wanted to give a quick description of what I mean by digital crafting. There are lots of different ways to craft digitally. One way is to do it in a purely digital space. So you would download your resources, import them into a graphics program, and then created design digitally their way. Then you would export the finished design, for example, to make a greetings card. Another way is to use your digital assets in the same way that you would use physical products. So print them out and use them the same way you would an item that you bought from a shop. You could also do a combination of the two. So you could create a digital design and then use physical embellishments to enhance the design. You might be wondering what the point is that digital crafting and you can get everything you need in a shop. Well, digital is a lot more cost-effective. There are lots of costs built into physical products like manufacturer, packaging, labor, transportation, and so on. There are much fewer overheads with digital products. When you buy a digital product, you are effectively buying an infinite resource. You can print and use the items as many times as you like. Also, digital products don't take up any physical space. They only take up space on your hard drive. A huge benefit is the versatility that you get when you buy a digital product. You are effectively buying multiple products. Because if you know how you can change the color, change the scale, make things smaller or larger, change the orientation, rotate, flip, and so on. In fact, you'll see in later lessons that they actually do all of these things with the images that I use for the class project demonstrations. So join me in the next lesson where I'll show you where to find online resources for your projects.
3. Finding Digital Resources: Before we start, we need to find some digital resources. So there are loads and loads of websites out there where you can download or purchase graphical resources to use in projects. One of the ones I use quite often is the hungry to apec.com. Now and many of these websites, there'll be a freebie section or a discount section where you can find all manner of things from clip art to backgrounds, to textures. So I've used the mixed media painting butterflies set, which is a set of 25 different types of butterfly, which we'll be using for the crop class project and the examples that I show. Another website that I use quite a lot of his career to fabricate.com. It's the same sort of principle. You have all sorts of graphical resources that you can purchase or down or download for free. And then they also have a very extensive freebies section. So you can get fonts, you can get mockups. So if you enjoyed this class and you think you might want to try some more crafting and you're looking for additional resources, it's worth taking some time to check out some of these sites to see what kind of products they have. So I will link, I will put down links to all the assets that I do use in the class resources section so that if you want to craft along, you can. One of those resources is the fantasy of watercolor digital paper said, now it's important to just take a minute to have a look at the commercial license or the type of license that comes with each asset. Most of them will be commercial licenses, which means that you can create products to sell bait using these assets. Some of them will be for personal use only. So it's definitely worth looking at what the terms are so that you don't violate any of the terms and conditions. And every website will have slightly different terms, slightly different limitations for use. So it's worth taking some time to look at each, every time you use a different website, take a look at what their terms and conditions that are so that you're not violating any of those terms and conditions. So yeah, if in the next class being gather everything that we're going to use and start our project.
4. Gather your Supplies: In order to make the projects, we're going to need a few things. You'll need card to make the base. I have. I'm using old cereal boxes here and you'll need four layers. I have printed off a sheet from the dual tone watercolor background set that the link is in the class project resource section. Also printed off a sheet of the floor fantasy, sorry, watercolor fantasy background said. And for this one, I printed several scientists. Explain why. Later on. I also took a selection from the rose gold floors sprays selection. So I chose these two designs and imported them into a graphics program. If you don't have a graphics program, you can do that in Word as well. Just lay them out on the page. I also flipped the design to that I've got mirror image. Because when I come to do my arrangement, I want to have some symmetry. But if you don't wanna do that, you don't have to. And finally, we need some butterfly. So this is from the mixed media painted butterflies set. I'm actually only going to use one of the large ones, possibly two. And again, one or two of the small ones, but it seemed like a waste to not fill the page. So that's really done. And also it just means that if I want to do another project, I don't have to print it all up again. And finally, just basic things like Citizens for cutting out a pencil, glue. It also wouldn't hurt to have a couple of pieces of plain paper to hand as well. In terms of people wait, I've printed on 16T GSM card stock. It it's fairly sturdy. So if we went will give the pieces some structure. They weren't, they weren't flop around. It's not so important would be faced sheet because that's going to sit on the base and the base is just going to cover it. So you can just print this on, on bog standard copy paper if you want. Okay, so now that we've got our supplies, let's get started.
5. Making the base: Okay, so let's put the base together. Get your cereal box. And I recommend that if you're going into a shape, that you make a template. So this is just r. I'm gonna do a hanging heart. You don't have to do a hanging heart. I just I really like I'm very partial to a hanging hearts. And, but if you want to do just a straight up rectangle or square or something to that, that's fine as well. But if you are going to use a shape, make a template so that at least all the shapes that you cut out are of a similar, have similar dimensions. And then all you have to do is put it down on your cards and trace around trees around the shape. And then obviously cut it out. So when you've cut it out, you're gonna do four layers. And the reason for that is when you've put it altogether, you see it's, it's very rigid and stiff and it's kind of it's a good it's a good, strong base to work on. Okay, so when you've cut it out, glue all the pieces together and then stick that stack underneath something heavy to encourage it to dry flat and not war because it's drawing. Now as you can see, the edges aren't very well lined up. But that doesn't matter because we are going to be covering the edges so mixture of and cutting and also the fact that I freestyle the shape means that the, you know, the, all the layers are not the same, but that's okay. One mistake I did make was that I left the pattern on the back. When you're gluing yours together, try and have both sides looking like this because when it comes to covering this surface, depending on what type of paper you're going to use, you might be able to see the underneath pattern through it. So just to be on the safe side and try and remember to do that and don't don't make the same mistake I did. So now it's time to bring in the piece of patent payment that you printed out. And incidentally actually, I probably should have said this earlier, but it's important to note because we're gonna be covering this. We do need this shape to be slightly smaller than an A4 sheet unless you have a large format printer. If you just have a regular A4 printer, then you need your shape to be slightly smaller than a4 so that we can cover, cover it. Otherwise, it's not going to work out very well. So all you have to do then is on the wrong side of the paper, again, trace around your shape. And then you want to cut, to cut around this shape at about a centimeter, all around, that's about three-eighths of an inch. You can probably sort of eyeball it or you can kind of just trace it in, but you want to leave a margin so that when you come to, yeah, you can fold the edges over the, over the shape. So now you can see that the heart has a little halo around it for the, for the covering paper. So you just want to glue that down. And then we'll come back and finish it off. Okay. So the paper now is been stuck down onto the base. And I don't mean, don't worry about the fact that these has printed all the way to the edge because obviously we're gonna fold it over asset. Okay, so now we want to fold this over. And if you've got straight edges, you can just fold it along and it'll be fine. So if you just don't use your thumb to kind of encourage it into place. But if you've got a bit of a curve just to be on the safe side to get it to fall it to bend over poverty, you're gonna have to snip the paper. So just at regular intervals, centimeter apart, all around the curve. You want to snip right up to the want to snip up to the edge of the base. So that when we come to fold it over, it goes over nicely in there and increases. So do that all the way along around. When you get to this part, just snip down to that middle like so. And then when you reach a corner, try and cut cut straight across like that. Don't go right up to the edge. You wanna leave a little bit of space, but not too much. When you've gone all the way around. Just grab your glue and start from one side, and then glue each tab down slowly. So just use your fingers to press the paper across around the edge of your heart Bayes and then press it down onto the glue. Try and make that as tight as possible. Because then it will look, make the edges look really nice. Just carry on and do that all the way around. If you get to a point when you're going around the around the edge of the heart where it looks like it's not, it's not going round, not hugging the curve nicely. Just make an extra snip in the paper to get it to hug nicely into make the edge as smooth as possible. So as you're doing that as well, you can just turn it over and make sure that there are no sharp bits. Just press it to into place, make sure that it's nice and tight, and just carry on doing that until you get to the other side. Once you've finished folding over the edges, you should end up with something that looks a bit like this. The next step then is to get some like white paint but already Color. And then just draw around the holidays again. But this time, we want to cut inside the line slightly. The aim is to make a covering for the back of the huts to Newton said to hide all this mess. Just position the sheet on the back, the covering on the bag. And then you'll have a nice neat covert HOT
6. Basic paper flower tutorial: So as part of our declaration of the hanging part, I want to make some flowers, so I'm just going to quickly show you how to do that. So get your piece of paper or cards that you've printed out. This is the fantasy worlds appellate that ground. And I printed it double-sided, which will become clear why as we go on. So what you do is just cut a strip about an inch or so roughly in in width. Mind that when you make a flower, the finished flower will be twice the width of this strip, more or less. So just keep that in mind when you're making your flour because she might want to go bigger or you might want to go smaller. Okay. So once you've got your stripped, all you have to do is move along and cut a series of pointed ovals out. Just like so. Just keep doing that all the way along the strip. And then you'll end up with a number of petals. Now, how many petals you need really does depend on what sorts of flour you're planning on doing. So you might want to do six paddles, you might want to do eight petals. You might want to deal with single layer, or you might want to do multiple layers. So obviously what you decide will determine how many petals you need. You can get quite a few just from a single strip. So what I would recommend is just cut loads more than you probably need. Keep them in a box or a pot or something, and then you can always make additional flowers later if that's what you want to do. So once you've got your petals, Get a little scrap of paper or card, and then cut out a small circle. That's going to be the base that you're going to secure your pedals on to. Then get a little bit of glue and just add it to this little circle you've got right here. And then just start adding petals around. Now, it might be useful to have tweezers or something because it can be a bit fiddly, but just stirred, but she can't. So the way I like to do it is like so I'm going to do eight petals Now. Let's do pheno, north, south, west and east. Oops. Then all the gaps in-between. So just fill in. The space is the. So now you can see why I said that the petals would be the flower, sorry, would be twice the size or the, twice the width of the strip of paper that we cut earlier. Because we just keep doing that all the way around. And eventually you will have a flower. Okay, so just let that dry somewhere and we'll come back to it. So the reason I talked about double-sided is because, so at the moment you can see this one is quite flat. So to give the, to give the petals and dimension, it's good to curve given some shape. So you just basically, you just run your finger along the underside and it will curve this way. But if you do it the same thing over the top, it will curve the other way. See that? So if you're doing flowers that curve upwards, you'll be able to see the underside of the petals, which is why it's good to have double-sided. If you're doing petals that curve this way, then it's not so important because you really be able to see the bottom of the petals. So now that you've, if you do that all the way around, you'll have a nice dimensional flower. So you can keep it like this, a single layer. Or you could take the two layers that you've got and offset them and then have a double layer flowers and things like this, which is a little bit more full. You can keep adding layers if you wanted to, to make it sort of even fuller than that, it's really up to you what you want to do. So once you've once you've done this, once it's had time to dry, be very careful about how you shape the petals. Daughter pull too hard and sort of destroy the entire thing.
7. Assemble the elements: So now it's time to assemble all of your elements and then put your composition together. So I've cut out some foliage here. I have for butterfly. And then I've made a selection of different flowers. Got some big ones, small ones. We've got some with eight petals and four pebbles, some five petals. Just a whole range. I'm not really sure what I'm going to use, but I just made a few K So, you know, just get your things. So I had my idea. I wanted to have a flower here with some foliage extending up at the sides. The butterfly kind of hovering over the flower. So that's ongoing for, but you take your elements and player answer. You might want to see what it looks like with the foliage here at the bottom. Or you might want to do something completely different. So before you glue anything down, just have a play laid out, see what it looks like. And if you like it. And then of course you're not limited to you can cut these down as well. If you don't like the shape, if you want to adjust something. So this is kind of what I was thinking about, layout like this. And then get one of these large flowers I made. It really is like super large flower here. I don't know if that's too big just to just to see what it would look like. I think it's too big. But you can have some flowers here. And it's nice to have, I like to have things overhanging the edges a bit. So you can make like a multilayer flower like this and have the foliage coming out and then maybe took a couple of smaller flowers into the side like this. And then maybe have a few of these smaller flowers just dotted inside the foliage just for a bit of interest. And then because there's bit of a space here, maybe a couple of small butterflies just to balance out the composition a little bit. So I've chosen this particular arrangement. I've, I'd like the blue in that, in the butterfly, it's sort of reflected in the blue in the flower. You've got the pink background coming through a little bit in some of this butterfly here. I've tried to, The reason I chose this rose gold foliage was because I wanted it to kind of pick out the dark elements of the gold in the butterfly here and also in the, in the background there. And it has, it's quite nice. It looks quite nice. And so just yeah, play around, dope, feel free to move things about. If you don't like that. You can see what it looks like with a slightly different arrangement. And we have these all down at the bottom and the butterflies kind of coming up with this. Play around and see what composition that you like. The most.
8. Ideas & Inspiration Part 1: So the class project is for you to make your own wall hanging. So this is the layout that I just showed you. I'm just going to bring in a couple of different ideas here just to give you some inspiration. So this was my prototype project. This is what I ended up making the first time I attended when I came up with this idea for the class, I wanted to make. So similar to the one I just showed you that the flowers doing along the side. But instead of having the butterflies sitting flat, I decided I wanted to just have it on this side on view and have it sort of almost coming out of the coming out of the of the hanging. So I so I am basically, you know, when I was talking about having the butterflies, the mirror images, that was because I was thinking about having them folded back. So you can, there's two ways you can do this. You can either print these to print and cut out two opposites, mirror images of each other, stick them together. And then when you fold them on your piece, you'll see that both sides then have the wind pattern on them. Or the other way is to get your two mirror images and cut down the middle. And then position the position the two pieces so that you get the same effect. So you just put that one down, stick that one down completely and then just apply some adhesive just to this part here. And then stick that on top. And then you can pop up the wings so that it looks like it's in flight. To make this, I mean, you can use them like a double-sided tape or double-sided phone pads, you to do that. But I made I decided to make myself a little spring, which is very easy to do. You probably did this when you were a kid. You just get two pieces of cod, swept carve or about the same width and length, glue them together at 90 degree angle. And then you just fold. Keep folding one over the other. So you fold one way and then fold the other way. And then fold this back and back over. And you keep on doing that. And then when you get to the end, you just basically secure, secure it with some glue. And then you'll end up with like a spring like this. And the beauty of using this method is that you can make it as long, as short as you want, and also it compresses. So if you were thinking about packaging or transporting that something to think about. So basically because I did this with the butterfly, obviously took up a lot less room in the composition. So I just added some words. I just typed this out into a word processing program, cuts it, printed it, cut it out, and then use the same paper as the flowers to frame the words. So you can see that two side-by-side ads are very similar, but different result.
9. Ideas & Inspiration Part 2: This one is a work in progress. I wanted to see how it would look with the foliage down at the bottom. So I've already glued that down, some fairly edge down here. But I think, you know, it could probably even be tuck some extra pieces behind just to give it a little bit more to fit up a bit more of a space. Once again, we're going to bring in the butterfly here. And then scatter some of these blue, little blue flowers throughout the foliage Just to pick up the blue from the, from the butterfly. Tie everything together. I like it like this with a little bit of a space here. But if you feel like it's unbalanced, you could maybe throw in a couple of the liberal additional butterflies just to even things out. Now what I really like, I really like to have dimension in my, in my pieces. So I, what I would do, what I tend to do is especially with the butterflies. As I said before, you fold up the wings on either side of the body and then just glue the body down. I've been playing with this one. So it's, it's very floppy that you glue the body down and then prop the wings up. And it just gives the whole thing a little bit more dynamism that makes it more interesting to look at. And the same with the little butterflies as well. If you just kind of glue them down so that the wings are sticking up, it just makes it all look more alive. So there's another potential composition using the same elements.
10. Ideas & Inspiration Part 3: So for the next one, I thought I wanted to see what it would look like to have like a statement butterfly. So I printed out a and one over different butterflies actually, but I made it large, so it's six inches, 15 centimeters wide. I also took the foliage and I adjusted the color using my graphics program. But you don't need to do it. You can also do that just in Word or another word processing program. So this is the original and this is the adjusted. So all I did was turn up the green on here. And it made it more of a yellow, gave, gave it more of a yellow tint. And I did that so that it matched up with the gold in this particular butterfly. Ok, so then I've got my foliage or cut out. And I thought the idea that I'm thinking about is to make like a, like a reef, I guess. So just take the elements and arrange them around the heart. Like so all the way around. And once again, I've printed mirror images of the the foliage so that it hubs around both sides symmetrically. So your i would just arrange the foliage like so. Just say you had like a nice read effect. And then place the butterfly directly in the middle. Now you could make it, it's kind of nice like this, but I think it could do with thermal sort of bringing to life a bit more. So you could get through the backing paper that matches this kind of turquoise e shade. This, I think this is one of them. And then just make some flowers just to bring out the shades in the butterfly. So just taking some of that turquoise, picking up the turquoise from the wings, if you scatter a few of those flowers around the reef, it just, I think lifts it a little bit and makes it less monochromatic. So there are things you can see, I think that just adding that little bit of extra color, lifts it and remember to stick to shape the petals as well. The shape the flanges and sorry, rather than to keep them flat.
11. Final Thoughts: To finish off, I just wanted to show you a slightly different example. So I've used a rectangular base and I've made a sort of grassy effect by just cutting strips of this green paper. And then these are petals that I actually cut up. It's going to make flowers out of them. But then I decided I was going to stick them in the in the grass originally. I thought they might look a bit too. They're blind, but actually they kind of look like butterflies hovering in amongst the grass is just kind of nice. And the spots in the paper look a bit like flowers. But I just wanted to show you this example because it's a lot less cutting here. I know this, that the, all the projects involve a lot of fussy cutting. So if you don't want to do all of that cutting, you know, you can still adapt the idea and create something that's still looks nice. So yeah, I hope that I've given you some inspiration. So now you can go off and make your own creation. Please do post your projects in the project gallery. I would love to see what everybody creates if you've made it this far. Thank you very much for sticking with me. I have the flanks of the new and the US political often creates, make something of your own. And maybe I'll see you in the next class.