Transcripts
1. Introduction: If like me, you are into interior decoration, then you will have noticed that there are hundreds of possibilities to create custom design, personalized decoration for your home. If this is something that you would like to pursue, but you're not too sure how to go about it, then you may be in the right place. I've created this brand new Skillshare class on how to transform your watercolors into stunning miracles. In this intermediate class, we will be designing, painting, scanning, importing the work into Photoshop, and transforming it. To end up with a beautiful mural. We'll be talking about the different companies that we can use to get the five printed. We'll be talking about getting samples to make sure that you can select the right paper for the right finish for your home. All that and more. I am Beatrice Edney, self-taught artist, IT professional and most of all watercolor lover and I am based in Belgium. Are you ready to become your own decorator then see you in class.
3. Class project: For your class project, I would like you to showcase the design that you will have made in class into the mockup file that I provided in the project and resources section of the class. However, you have a choice between two projects. The first one is the full design project. This is for students that have a very clear idea of what they want to design. And also maybe are more proficient with scanning and Photoshop. And the second project is the draft design. And this is for people who want to try out the whole process, but are not yet too sure about what they want to design or maybe need a little bit more guidance with Photoshop, whichever project you select, Don't worry, we will be doing things step-by-step and you will feel supported along the way. In both cases, you will be able to showcase your beautiful design at the end of the class. Little recap. So Project 1, the full design. You know exactly where you want the mural, what you want to design and are at ease with Photoshop, then go with this one. Project 2: the Draft design. You're not too sure where you want to place your mural or what you want to design? Or you may need a little bit more practice with Photoshop. Then select this one.
4. Designing your mural: In this section we will cover inspiration and all the custom designs you may find on different sites. The typical questions that you may have once you've looked at all these choices, around, for example, color modes, resolution, and print sizes. What to actually do in practice in your home. And of course, what we are going to paint. You 've probably got favorite sites that you go and check out. What is trendy and you see some beautiful stuff and you think I would like to do that with my art. One of those sites for me is it etoffe.com they've got some fantastic murals and wallpapers. But you can see that it can be very pricey, specifically for large sizes. And sometimes you may think, actually, I'd like that but not quite that color and you can't find exactly what you're looking for and you see so many designs and maybe it also reminds you of the type of watercolors that you may do yourself. I'm showing you a few of those websites here. Rebel walls, absolutely fantastic site, also for murals They have a lot of choice. And you can see, you know, where it would be inserted into your home. They've got different rooms available, different style of wallpapers like florals, more geometry, clouds, mountains, landscapes. And it's all a very beautiful, and it is the opportunity to actually see towards what kind of design you would like. To orientate yourself. If you do an internet search for custom mural, you will see that most of those websites not only offer their own designs, but also for the possibility for you to create your own custom designed by uploading your own file. whilst making this class, I did a lot of research. And basically every website has got different guidelines and it's quite hard to know, what am I supposed to do? I spent some time calling people to understand exactly what they were expecting from me, you get different responses from different companies. So in the end, I came up with a list of questions that I think is worth answering so that you know exactly what you need to produce in order to get things right. The typical questions are around the color mode that you have to use. The resolution, the image quality, how many megapixels, file dimensions, it is worth really spending a little bit of time on each of those questions to really understand what it is that you have to do in order to get things right. Let's have a look at color modes first. So which color mode to select? You will either see in the guidelines from the companies you will use for printing your mural, either RGB or CMYK. So very simply, RGB is used in digital printing and CMYK is used in traditional printing, offset printing. And this is important because when you are in Photoshop, you will need to create your file, selecting the specific color mode that is requested of you. Now let's talk about resolution and print size. Two very important notions that we need to understand, especially when printing out format. So we talk about the resolution of an image or the resolution of a scan, and it references the number of pixels per inch of that image. The print size is to What dimensions, your image is going to get printed. Let's take a look at an example . for the scanning process. If you scan, let's say a piece that is 10 by 10 at 800 DPI. And you change the resolution to 400 DPI, so you divide it by two, then you are actually multiplying by two your print size, and so your piece becomes a 20 by 20. If you lower the resolution again to let say a 100 DPIs, so you go from 400 to 100, you actually go into multiplied by 4 your print size. And so your piece becomes an 80 by 80 piece. This is the process that we are going to use to go from a watercolor paper size to a mural size. The reason why we can lower the resolution is that you have to take into account the viewing distance of your mural, which potentially is meters away. And therefore, you do not need a very high resolution and the print quality will still be very, very good for the mural. So let's have a look at the workflow I use in order to get the murals printed. So this is the end-to-end process. And we start by painting our individual watercolor items on a specific piece of paper size, which I have taken the example here of a 40 centimeter by centimeter or 20 inches by 15 inches, and we will scan it at 800 DPI. The example I have taken on here is that we would then bring that the 200 DPI, as we've just seen, this means that we can increase by four size of the actual watercolor element. So our 40 by 30 centimeters would be printed at a 160 centimeter by a 120 or in inches, eight inches by 60 inches. And the way that we build the mural is that we put next to each other the different elements, meaning that we can then have a wallpaper size which is several meters long by several meters high. So that's what we are going to see together, how we put that in practice. One little disclaimer at this point is that I do not work in vectors. I find that the beautiful watercolor textures do render extremely well when using this way of working. For those of you who have selected the full design project, you will need to use the large watercolor paper size. So let's say forty centimeter by 30 centimeter. For those of you who have selected the draft design, you could actually work on A4 because your aim is not to get the mural printed, but just to get your draft file setup. So quick recap. We will be painting. Let's see an element that is 15 inch wide that we will scan at 800 DPI. So we'll have a TIF file that will be then imported into Photoshop and we will do a little bit of cleaning. We will create a canvas that contains our mural design to a certain width according to the size of your wall. And we will drag and drop the cleaned element into that new file without changing its size. And we will build the image bit by bit. That means that when you end up with the final file, you will be able to print it at four times the actual Photoshop. So what does it mean in practice? So first things first, measure your wall and to ensure that the design that you're about to create is reflected in the wallpaper, then you need to make sure that the proportions of your image is the same as the proportion of the wall. Otherwise, you may miss an important part of your design. It is also important to think about potential furniture that may be in the way. So your design would be hidden in some parts. And I think it's an important point to take into consideration into the overall design. Also. The second thing is something we've already mentioned previously is that the resolution of the image should be the best. But you also need to manage your file size. And in Photoshop you probably know that you can get a gigantic files and it gets quite difficult to work with. One thing that works to our advantage is the viewing distance. A mural is not meant to be looked at from very close up. So the print resolution can be lower than for printing smaller items, for example. So this is something that will basically allow us to have manageable file size. So what does it mean? Oh, we're actually gonna have a very simple way to work. And what I do is that I create a file that is at a quarter scale of the design dimension of the wall. So in practice, you've got your room. In the example below, we have a width of 3.6 meters, or a 180 inches, and a height of 2.6 meters or about a 120 inches. And in Photoshop we have a quarter scale file, which means that we have a file that is 19 centimeters wide by 60 centimeters high at 800 DPI, so 45 inches by 40 inches. And you notice that as we've said before, the proportions are the same. So quick recap. In Photoshop, we will be creating a file that is to a quarter scale to your wall and we will keep the 800 DPI, wants to build the mural to write the design of urea. Or now, in this class I'm going to create a abstract landscape. You've seen at the beginning of the class with the inspiration piece. You can go whatever takes your fancy. You can go for florals, metrics, purely abstract. Forests, trees, seas , skies really. You know, or maybe you have some very, very clear idea of what you're going to do. So just, let's get started. So my room is a little bit like that. Go to Window. And my sofa is actually like so it goes around the corner. Like so like that. So basically this area to feel in. So I want maybe some skill and some mountain. And here I want something fairly bland. So maybe some, some things a little bit like that. The height here is 2.5 meter and the width this way is 3.63 m. So what are we going to paint According to do projects that you've selected. So if you have selected the draft design, you will be painting on A4 size. And here is one example of a draft new road that worked on. So you will see that we can place quite a lot of the various items on an A4 piece. However, if you want to go for the full project, so you will be working on a much larger paper size and the items will be therefore bigger. So just decide which one you're going for and that will determine which paper size you will be using. This is the view of the finished draft file. And you can see by just looking at it, that the resolution would not be good enough to print to a full-scale size. However, for the full design file, you can see that the image is a lot crisper. There's a lot more elements to it and it will print perfectly to its full-scale. Right? This is the last recap of defection. Your image mismatch, you will proportions. You need to consider the elements that make up your image. You need to think about the different sections that you want to have, bear in mind the furniture that may be in front of it. And also of course, you need to think about your color palette. So let's go and pick up the brushes and do just that.
5. Preparing the palette: All right, So now it's time to actually think about the color palette that you want to use. So as for me, I know I won't integrals, I won't greens, but I also know that I do not want to get an overall Luke which is too dark. So I will need to keep in mind that when I actually paint the various elements to get some very nice light colors as well as some strong accents. So this is the paint materials that we will be using. I've got some Japanese Cooley-Tukey watercolors as well as some pens from Windsor new turn of good, some Daniel Smith, those two colors I particularly want to use. I will probably be mixing any way the rest of my colors as I go. And I am using this 12 size brush. Mostly. I've got some other brushes, but I don't know yet if I need them. And lastly, my watercolor paper. This is the big size, 40 by 30, right? So I'm gonna stop by spring water on my watercolors to activate them, as well as actually in my porcelain dish. I spray everything because I'm not too sure yet what I'm going to add. The one thing I do know is that I want this indigo by Daniel Smith. It so gorgeous color. And I also want on the sea green from Daniel Smith. Well, so I'm adding that to my palette. And I'm going to start working on the right consistency by adding water. Right? So I think quite a lot of water. And I'm going to speed up the video a little bit for that section. I'm now going to mix my accent color. So I'm starting with a permanent rose, which I think is going to contrast nicely with my darker colors. I know that I do not want permanent rows per se, so I'm going to add something else to eat. And I'm going to add some of my current AQI watercolor. I'm going to go for the more orangey tint and mix them together until I find what I'm after. So I'm adding the second one. You can see that it's a very creamy, beautiful bright color. And I'm going to start mixing them together and use my watercolor paper pad to check the actual value that I want to use. It's important to do this, to do your research of corners so that you will be very happy with the final overall look of your mural. And you could have be looking at those colors for quite a long time. So take your time in the research review comments. I want something a little bit paler, a little bit more pink, so I am mixing carefully those two together. I still want something maybe closer to the permanent rose. So I'm going to add a little bit more of that until I find exactly what I'm after. I'm trying to get some things small, pink and probably slightly lighter. This is better. I think I'm going to see all my colors, my three main colors together next to each other. This beautiful indigo. And the undersea green and I fin do three really nicely together. So I get my three main colors and I'm going to mix all of that together. So I end up with many, many, many colors or blending very nicely together. Recap, do spend a little bit of time researching your colors, your column mixes. Think about the overall feel. The darkness or lightness is the room. Got a lot of some can be mean, how will that impact the look and feel of the mural? So this is the moment to really delve into the colors and choose something that meeting please. You.
6. Let's get painting: Well, before we start on the actual new rule, I want to give you a few tips on how to create beautiful textures. This is something that I really want to see in my mirror. So first of all, don't be afraid of food, seeing a lot of water on your paper. This is going to allow the paint to really travel in the page and you're gonna get some beautiful, beautiful texture as a result. And you can also mix like that very easily different colors. And when it dries, you will get those beautiful gradients and you will get those beautiful cauliflower texture. The other thing that you can do also is to add salt. This is in order to create lovely sorts of snowflake lie structure in the dried watercolor. And it works really well. So here I'm using some very large salt flakes and I will show you the results when it's dried in a moment. There are other elements as well that you can use in order to create some quite distinct shapes inside the watercolor. And one of those things is alcohol. So I've got concrete see, but I've got alcohol in that job. I'm going to use one of my little brush to pick up some alcohol and drop it directly into the wet watercolor. And you can see straight away this lovely effect that it has. And this is something that you can play with as well. When your watercolor is very well, of course, it's very easy to add some different colors to it to get these gorgeous blend. And the other way to have some feeling quite soft, as I was saying earlier on, I do not want whoever very dark overall effect. So putting just Walsh also just water first and adding very likely your colors to the wash. You get those very nice soft gradients. And again, it's very easy to have those lovely watercolor textures happening. I'm going to show you the results when it's dried. So you can see there was fabulous effects. And this is what I will be doing in my mural. I really love watercolor for that and is quite unpredictable. What you're going to get, but always beautiful. So let's get started on the different elements of our mural. I'm starting my design by painting the background. For those of you that have chosen the drafter design, you can do your background on an A4 piece like so. For example, for the other ones, for the full design, we go for the larger paper or 40 by 30. In a way, this is the easy piece because it will be mostly by other elements. On the Miro. I said that I wanted my mural to have something very light near the bottom of it because first of all, it won't be seen because it will be hidden by my sofa. But secondly, I would like to go to a lighter color towards the, let's say third part of the wall. So I'm doing this gradient. I've got my 40 by 30 and I will actually go all the way from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. And I need to make sure that I use a lot of water so that I'm going to end up with a lovely. Soft gradient. So the more I go down, the more green I will be adding to the gradient. And I really need to make sure that I keep that water flowing. This is one of the way to ensure that when it dries, it's very lovely and soft. I will now accelerate a little bit of video. Now that we have, we want to have the mural. I'm going for this abstract landscape. So I'm going to create what looks like mountains, maybe. Valleys may be walkways, little alleyways. And frankly, if you like this abstract style, you do not need to worry too much about the shapes that you create in watercolor. Because in Photoshop, we can actually transform that a little bit. You can cut a bit surveillance. We will flip them to create more variety in terms of the elements that we can play with to build the mural. So just trying to get interesting textures, as well as different levels of light and dark elements. Light elements. It's very important for when we will be assembling these together. So the other thing to take into consideration is enormous for the Photo shop cleaning to happen not to paint filling, you can actually leave a little bit of space between the different elements so that it will be very easy to either remove the background if we do it this way, or to actually pick up those shapes one by one. So as I showed you in the few tips and the beginning, I'm going to use some salt and to create those lovely textures. And you just do it when it's, when it's wet. And you'll have to wait for it to be very, very dry, completely dry. In order to remove the salt. What you can do so actually be because we're never going to use the watercolors as a stand-alone item on the paper. So once it's dried, you can actually use the other side of your paper. So like that you do not waste any bits of paper. Now, I was talking about creating something really light at the bottom of my new role. And I'm creating those little snaky like elements. And this will be quite good fun to make something of it in Photoshop. This is typically the type of items that you can really transform and duplicating Photoshop in order to create something that will look quite different to what it was in the first place. Of course, you can also keep it very close to your original watercolor. And those little additions that I do there is to really give me more possibilities with the building of the elements. Nami testing. Pink sky or at least pink element. It is possible that I end up not using all the elements that I create, but it is a very good practice to create as many as you want, because you really want to have a good choice and you really want to have a good variety of terms. In order to have loads and loads of possibilities in Photoshop. I would accelerate the video a little bit. So I continue building my shapes. And I always mix my various colors together. And I tried to, because I'm still not decided to merge, rebounded pink or the Peachy. I'm trying both. And you see here, I'm actually painting a lot closer to the other shape. And this is because I want them to fit like a puzzle in Photoshop pounds. So I want them to have the same profile. And we will do a little bit of separating in Photoshop. But that's why I paint them very close to each other in that case. So you continue building the various elements like iron during, until you feel like you have enough variety. Here, I am testing again, a different shade of pink. It is slightly darker. And I am adding the Indigo and also a lot of color to go this towards this very nice, lovely gradient. And then I'm going for my very dark indigo colors. When studying a little bit of salt to keep the texture interesting, adding a little bit of alcohol. And I finish with some more indigo slideshow green shapes. Let's now paying the sky. This one is a specific element in itself. And for me I know that I want a sky that is very, very light and because of Goodson, quite dark elements otherwise. So I'm going to search for the exact color that I want to use and the depth of that color. Just to make sure that the result will be what I want to have. So I'm doing a little bit of mixing to make sure that I end up with exactly the right depth. And so adding water to pigment until I am satisfied with the color, the type, and the bread. I know that I wanted to hint of pink as well in my sky. So I'm going to do a little bit of pink mixing again to make sure that once again I have the right depth of color. And then I am going for a wash first. So I am going to cover the first half of my paper with water. And I make sure that the water is evenly distributed on the page. You can not see that very well. But if you sort of tilt your head a little bit, you can check that your water is properly distributed all across the page. I could use a bigger brush and that point, I am so used to using my 12th size brush that I keep it from good time. But I get there. The page is properly wet and it is evenly distributed and I'm ready to start on my sky. So I keep in mind really the lightness that I want to achieve and the dots, indigo, this is really to make sure that it's going to spread and it's going to look. Quite interesting when it dries, I want to get this cloud effect a little bit. And I'm also gonna add some pink to the sky. So we get to sort of morning light or UV light. But as you see, there isn't a lot of pain there on the page and the overall finish will be quiet, point-like. So they are what I think about when I do that is that I'm going to have a salt of the top part of the mural that's going to get the sky. And I want this pink section to be the link between the mountain part and the sky part. So that's why I create this, this pink line, which will probably end up being a little bit hidden. But we will be using that in Photoshop also to get some nice lighting behind my mountains when they will be creating. So I'm creating a little bit of contrast there. Do you think about the fact that when your watercolors I'm gonna dry, it's going to dry a little bit lighter. So they're the most part two of my sky is extremely light and it will get even lighter when it dries. So I'm adding little bit of a darker touches here and there to get a nice contrast. I want to really nice finish when it's dry so I remove the excess water and the blend will be softer. And now creating some texture with a little bit of ankle, a little bit of splatter with the indigo, and a touch more salt. Now if you add your pigment on the top of the salt, it will react because we are very much still in wet phase of the water column. Let's recap on what we've just done. If you are on the drafter design, you will have created some elements. If you go for landscape like I did, you probably have something like this for your elements as well as a background. For example, you may do one more, maybe another sky or something like that according to how busy you want your draft design. If you are on the full design project, you will have produced your background. Some landscape elements, for example, continued elements, different skies, different parts of your new role, your sky, and further elements as you see fit. So we've done the really fun part painting. We're going to move to the scanning.
7. Scanning the artwork: So this is my absence, Renner. I've had it for a long time. It's working perfectly fine. And we are going to start scanning our first item, which is the background pizza. So this is of course, larger than the A4 size of the scanner. So we are going to do it in two sessions. I am placing one side of it very carefully. And then we're going to launch the software on a computer to stop the scanning process. So this is the window of my absence scan. And I do not change a lot of things at all settings. The only thing that I may change is the DPI. So we are going to scan at 800 DPI. The other setting that I have is the file saving setting. I have created a specific folder and I am saving as tiff files. And we launched the scanning process. It takes a little bit of time. You have to be patient because we've got a few to do so I'm going to show you this one. And then I will show you the results in in a folder that I use to receive all the scans input. So the higher the DPI, the longer it takes to scan. But this is the this is at normal speed. So it's not taking too long. So you've seen in my font settings for the scanner, I have a specific folder that I use where all my TIF files get saved. And I think I would recommend that you create a specific folder for that project. It's a lot easier to find all your files together when we're going to import them into Photoshop. Now we're going to do the second part of the same data. So we've done this side. So now we're going to do, then I will show you a nifty trick in Photoshop to put them back together. Just make sure when you do the scanning of a single piece into two scanning sessions that the middle part is overlapping. This is very important because we will use the photo merge technique in Photoshop. And it's very quick and it does it really well, but it needs to find a commonality between the two facts are in. So let's finish the scanning of the second part of the background. So we see the second C5 being created in the TIF file folder. And then we need to repeat the process for all the watercolors that we have painted. And then I'll show you the end results in the TIF files folder. And then we can start importing into Photoshop. So design the TIF files if you are doing the full design projects. And this one for the Trust design. We are at the end of the scanning process. We have scanned all our watercolors. For the larger paper size. We did it in two sessions for each watercolor paper that we had, and we scanned at 800 DPI. Now we are ready to import our tiff files into Photoshop.
8. Photoshop - Importing TIF files: Maybe the moment you've all been waiting for this is time to open Photoshop. So we're going to import all the trips via that we have scanned. And we're going to do it bit by bit. So go File Open and find the folder that you are using where you have saved your scans and do select one that has come into bits. Because I'm going to show you the photo merge functionality of Photoshop to put your outward back together. So whichever project you are following, either the full design or the draft design, this way of working is the same. So I'm going to be showing me using the full design. So I'm opening my first two files, which game as two sides of the same Upwork. And we are going to use the photo merge functionality. So this is something I use when I have two scans that need to go back together. And sometimes it doesn't work. So it is well worth helping a little bit Photoshop by making sure that the two files are in the same direction. So we will be rotating one of them in order to make it easier for Photoshop to find the commonality. Right? My two files or opening or they are open, we are going to rotate one of them, so they are both facing the same direction. So this is for the top menu Image. Then select Image Rotation and I am going for the 180 degree rotation. But of course it depends how you've scanned your items. Maybe they already in the right direction. It is now facing the same direction. So we are really to use photo match. We will keep the auto setting and we will click Open Files. Click Okay, and you see the magic happens. Photoshop creates a third document called the panorama, and it will add the two layers into that new file. And it will create a seamless composition by creating layer masks on top of the two firms so that they make one seamless composition. So when the photo merge is finished, you will see that we end up with two layers that have both a mask on top. And we will need at that point when it's all finished to merge those two layers together and to save the panorama file as the final fine. So let's go ahead and merge or two layers. So you right-click on the layers and you merge layers. And this is how you get your seamless composition. And now we're going to do a Save As and save the panorama file. And this time we're going to save it as a PSD file. So go ahead, save it and we're ready for the next one. Before we move on to the next one, I want to assure you the image size. So you can see that we have exactly the size, roughly the size of the paper that we started with. And you can see that when you move around, the elements are very well defined. And it is very apparent that with care to all our nice watercolor textures, what we were just done for the first work we need to repeat for the other outward, but it's the same policies. What I have done is I created another panorama for my sky. And then the rest, I actually just open them directly one-by-one in Photoshop because I'm going to transform them and it's not necessary to have the full image as such. So let's have a look at what we've got to stop with the building of on your own. Quick recap before we go and cleaned up our phones. So you will use for to merge when you want to have your full work in one file. Otherwise you don't need to do this. You just took burn your TIF files in Photoshop and we would extract bits of it as we need. And now you've got them all up when we are ready to clean them up.
9. Photoshop - Removing backgrounds: Now it's time to remove backgrounds. So we'll be using the magic wand and playing with the tolerance level to make sure we only remove the background and not bits of the watercolor that would be very transparent, for example. So let's have a look how to do this. So we're going to, first of all adjust the level a little bit. So you go to image adjustments levels and we're going to tweak that a little bit because the scanning process removes some of the depth of the water colors. So we can fix it like that. And then we're good to the Magic Wand, will probably need to adjust the tolerance level so it doesn't remove too much of the artwork that we want to keep a quick explanation about how the magic coin is working. So when you select the magic wand and you click on the white of your paper background, then Photoshop or select everything that he's white based on the tolerance level that you that you have. So if the tolerance level is really high, then it's going to select the Lord. And if it's really low, then it's going to select very little. So make sure that you're happy with what Photoshop selects. And when you are happy, you can click Delete, and it will delete all the selection that it has so that you are left with your watercolor items. When all the marching and sell bear, I'm deleting and I am left with my watercolor items. And what we need to do now is to place them individually on their own layers. So I am using the Lasso tool to go around. It doesn't need to be extremely precise sexually because, you know, some of the items will be hidden behind other items and we can create interesting shapes anyway. But the first job is to really get them individually on their own layers. And then we will clean them up individually to remove everything that we do not want. So you can go quite quickly doing night. You right-click Layer via Copy and place yourself back onto your original image. Otherwise it will not find the pixels that you're after. So this was the work where I painted quite closely on the paper. So you can see that we will need to be slightly more careful with that one. And I've missed a little bit there, so I'm just selecting this extra bit by selecting shift, it adds up to the actual selection. So I'm just checking that I've got everything I need. I'm going to deliver a bit more here. And then I'm going to right-click and Layer via Copy. Replacing myself. Back on the main image. We've got the blue one to do now. So we continue doing this same lasso tool selection to go around my Blue Mountains Right-click Layer via Copy. And now we've actually got all our layers onto separate layers. So we are going to do a little bit of clean up. We're going to remove some of the white of the paper that stay there. This time, place yourself on the correct layer and you can use the eraser tool to do that just to remove what you don't want. You can change the size of your eraser. And there wasn't a lot to erase. So it's probably okay. Now, let's have a look at the second piece. We are going to remove the peak. So again, using the arrays, placing ourselves on the right layer and off we go. We just want to keep the Green Mountain. You can do Control Minus and control class in order to sort of zoom in and out of your layer to see a little bit better what it is that you're doing. I am using a PC, so my shortcut for a PC. So you need to see what it is for a Mac. And I'm going to rename my layers so they make sense to me. And it will be easier for building the new role to know which layer represents which part of my design. Quick recap on removing backgrounds. So we've used the magic wand and played with the tolerance level to make sure we only remove what we want to remove. We also use the Razor Tool to remove extra items from our layers that we created. And we have used the Lasso tool to quickly isolate our artwork onto a new layer.
10. Photoshop - Cleaning & creating individual Motifs: We're going to continue cleaning and placing or individual motifs on their own layers. So we've got all our files open and we're going to drag and drop all our individual layers into the same file. We do a little bit of a selection for the sky. We're going to cut that layer via cut. And we're going to drag and drop that new layer into other file so that we can have all the different layers together. It's taking a little bit of time to do that, but the new layer is going to get created. We're dragging and dropping into previous file and we're gonna do the same with the other. So you will keep on me one file actually, you do not need to save. You do not need to keep the other files. So this one will be our main design file if you like. So we've got our background piece. We're going to drag and drop that one into our document. So it's gonna get a little bit crowded in there, but then it's much easier for when we build the model. We can close that. We take the next one and here, okay, So we're not going to remove the background, but we are going to select the actual item that we want using the Magnetic Lasso tool. The reason why I use the Magnetic Lasso tool here, it's because it's a very quick way to remove your bits of watercolor from the ground. And I also like the jagged edges that it creates because it doesn't really matter that I haven't got all the little bits of my watercolor, but it creates actually a nice jaggedy edge that will look quite good on the meal. So it's a neat tool for what I want to do here. So I'm speeding up the video. So when you reach the other end of your selection, you will see a tiny little circles. So at that point, the Lasso tool has done its work and you can right-click the layer via cut. And then you continue with the second item on the page. And we're gonna do that for the rest of the items. With the lesson tool. Like if you go somewhere where you don't want to go, you can actually clean dV, dV, dV, dV, dV, until it goes back to the last point that you are happy with. And also those you have to start again because things happen. Now it's time to make some sense. So all those layers and give them some little names that will help us in the next phase of the project. So it's up to you what you call your layers. Here we've got different colors, we've got different shapes. So I'm going with this kind of descriptions to help me later on. Now we're saving the file. It's going to take a little while. And then we should be ready to go. Our final is greater than two gigs, so we need to save it as a document format instead of PTSD. So the file saving is taking a while when the size is big, like that. So let's have a quick recap on what we've just done. We have separated our artwork into individual layers with then dropped all these individual layers into the one file. So we now have our design file and our class ready to stop building the mirror. So let's go and do that.
11. Photoshop - Building the mural: So we are now finally ready to build our file. And I've said several times that this whole thing is a labor of love. And here you really need to let your creativity flow. You really need to rethink what you want and it may take you a long time. So that's why I think for when you want to stop this process first, it's quite a good idea to go for the Trump design because it goes a lot faster, faster because there's less elements. But if you're doing the full design, please do take your time and play around with the elements. I'm going to speed some of the videos, but not all the time because I think it's very interesting for the students to see potentially how long it takes, how many different manipulations we do in Photoshop and all the sort of moving things around and duplicating layers and all these kind of things That is all part of the game. So let's start on the middle. So important point here. You need to create your file to your room dimension. And because warms or usually an event, it's good practice to add a few inches or centimeters to your dimensions. So I'm going to add ten centimeters in height and a width. So my final dimensions for my wall of 373 bind to 60. And I'm going to create my CTO scale file as 95 centimeter wide by 65 centimeter high. And I'm going to use the CMYK color mode. Let's go and do that in Photoshop file new. You choose your dimensions, took autoscale for me, 95 by 65, Eight 100 DPI. You choose your color mode and you click Create. The first thing we're going to do is to save our file with a proper name. So I'm going to go for the fact that this is my working file and it will contain all my layers. So trivial name, but make sure that you have something like working file in there. Okay, so now it's a case of bringing in the different layers that we have. And so I have my designed in mind that I drew very lightly at the beginning of this course. I know that I want my sky, my mountains, I want little alleyways. And it's going to be a case of finding, finding the right sort of Lucasfilm to the overall mural. So you've noticed here, I've imported my background and I am actually using Control T or Command T to transform. And I am stretching it. So this is the almost only one layer that I'm going to stretch. The reason is it doesn't really matter because I want something that is soft at the back of the room, so it doesn't need to be super, super sharp. But actually I've got a little bit of leeway to extend it a little bit. So that's why I'm doing that for the other layers. They either not going to be touched to tune in terms of their size. They're going to remain the same size or slightly extended. Like the sky here. I'm just going to transform it and pull it a tiny little bit. I want it to fit almost the top of the screen. I need, of course, to cover the right-hand side of my sky. So this is going to be my first duplicate layers. The first of many, as you will see. And this is how you beyond the mural bit by bit with the various elements. So we're going to do a lot of duplication of layers and also transformation of layers. Like rotating it here or transforming it flip vertical, flip horizontal. And we aren't going to see that. As we move along in the building of the mural. The other thing that we're going to do is making sure that things that are next to each other that are copied like the sky. We can use layer mask to hide the monk to correct some of the hand lines that get created when you put next to each other. Two layers. So let's have a look at that in a second. I need to duplicate again my sky because I'm missing a little piece in the middle. So I'm going to take the very light part of the sky and just copy that piece and centering it. So I'm just selecting a piece of my layer. I'm copying that piece and I am moving it to where I want it to be. And you see that when you do that, it creates some harsh lines that we will need to remove them, or at least make less obvious. So I'm going to use a layer mask for that. This is the little icon at the bottom. And make sure that you select the layer mask. For this particular layer mask, I am doing a specific video to show you just that so you can see a little bit better. So I'm selects, selecting the brush tool. And I made sure that I've got the black and white in my colors there. If you don't have the black and white, just click on the little double arrows above and it will put them back there. And then you can interchange between the black and the wind by clicking once more and those little cameras. So I've got that. And I'm going to use my my brush on the layer mask, so make sure that you select the layer mask that we've just created. So click on it on the right there and it will have the little rectangle selection around it. And then we're gonna go and select a Soft round brush. I've got my hardness at 75, we will see that. So k, Otherwise we can lower it. And size is a 199 pixels. So what we do is we are on the Layer Mask, we are on the black in the color. And basically what it does, it removes the pixels of that layer to show through what is below. So this is how we get to soft transition. Because we remove that harsh line below, you get the watercolor that is coming through. And you do that quite gently. And it will make it a lot softer transition. And when you do that, you will see is quite hard to see on the layer mask itself because we are working very, very softly and we're working only in a very small area of the layer mass, but you will see some black lines appear on the layer mask itself. And this means that it is totally transparent in that part of the masker. And therefore the layer that is below is showing through. So this is the method that I use when I want to remove harsh transitions between two layers. And to really show you what it does, just disable it. So you can see that very tiny black line. And if you disable the layer mask, you will see that harsh line coming back. We've got our skies, we've got our background. Let's bring in the other elements. So I'm going to go for my Blue Mountain, drag and drop. I'm going to go and grab my green Mountain. And straight away I see a volcano. So this is a happy accident, but I love it. So when I remove, when I drag and drop into my new file, the different elements that make them invisible in my design file. So I know what I've got left to import. And I'm going to speed up a little bit. The video wants to import all the items. So once you've got everything, you can close your design file. Don't save it, so you keep everything as it was and we can start arranging things in here. I'm just placing very loosely the different items according to what I have in my head as the design. So we've got the top part of the Euro, which is this guy. Then we will have a band which is going to be the mountains. And then I'm going to have my little alleyways, pale green, meandering lines that will come near the bottom of the mural. I'm adjusting again some levels that I didn't do before. I'm trying not to change very much what I had in the first place, but is just to tweak following the scanning process where you lose a little bit of depth. So I'm picking those, those items one by one, by selecting the layer. And I'm playing a little bit around here with the pink. I'm searching to see what that thigh warm term. So I'm doing some transformation flip horizontal, flip vertical. And this is to get variation on my different shapes. And because the watercolor, the different colors or mixed nicely together, then it fits quite well when they are touching each other. It creates a lovely depth in what will be the landscape. So really now it's a case of playing around duplicating. Again, we continue with transforming the layers. And you also have to play with where they are in terms of in front of others or behind others. So you see that I move my layers up and down according to if I want them to be hidden a little bit behind something else or if I want them to be a more prominent or completely visible. So the layers that are at the top of your Layers panel, they are visible, fully visible, and then it's going more into the depth of the layers. So the bottom one is your background layer and just above that, the sky. And then all the different layers that you want to have created. Also sometimes will grip my layers so that it is easier because I know I'm going to keep those elements together so I can do some grouping which helps them. That's less layers in the Layers panel. But you need to make sure that all the, all those layers that they won't be visible together. So you will see that sometimes you've got shapes that all not exactly like you want them. So I'll be using the Lasso tool to remove some of the little bits of layers that I don't particularly want. And you can also create, create different shapes also when you use the Lasso tool is quite good fun to do. So for example, that pointed bit here in that particular layer, going to remove it. So I'm using the lasso tool, selecting the piece I don't want and click Delete. And then Control D or Command D to deselect. Then I know that I want to do some blending options with that layer. So it looks like a little glow behind the mountain. So the soil, I'm trying to have something that is just slightly above the blue with that hint of orange and pink. To do a nice little contrast. Ie, you won't have to play around for a little while until you are absolutely happy with everything that's happening on the mural. Now I'm taking my background down because as I said from the beginning, I want something lighter and I think that it creates a better contrast with my little wavy lines. So I am taking the whole thing slightly down so I get this lighter color, which was actually the bottom of my background when I was painting it because I started with the dark blue at the top. So again, I'm going to use the lasso tool to remove some of the very harsh line. And you see you can create some lovely themes. And I need to go the bottom as well to remove nothing the layer below as well. So Control D, command D to deselect and you can create new lines like that. It's very easy to modify what we had in the first place. I'm going to lock my background because it keeps moving when I actually only select something else. So just select the background and click the little lock above the layers in the Layers panel above there. Here again, a little bit of less so to to make the shape more with what I want and I continue to build my little lot of duplication transformation. I want something that is going to be going left to right and up and down in a very nice soft. So I'm going to play a little bit with that until I get something that is pleasing to the eye. Now this is for my blending options. So you right-click on your blending options and inner shadow to create the sort of back that I want. So select that and click Okay. So you can see it can take quite a long time to replace all the elements in the right place. Like you want to create something really pleasing to your eyes. So don't hesitate to really spend quite a bit of time doing that. Now I'm going to show you for fun the final file, and we are going to see it being built in front of us. Recap on the building of the file. So we have used many different functionalities, duplication of layers, layer masks to blend with neon bi-layers, adjust levels to saturate the colors. If needed. Free transform rotation, flip, vertical or horizontal. Blending Options in a blue in the shadow, you can try other ones as well. The Lasso Tool to cut new shapes or to remove the bits that you don't want. And have patients play with the elements until you like it and save your file intermittently.
12. Photoshop - Finalise your file: So build a new role. And now we're going to do a little bit of preparing some files, saving as PDF, exporting as a JPEG to use in a mockup file. And we will be talking about samples. We've got our files which contain all the layers. I've placed it in a group. I duplicate the group. And I'm going to merge all the layers in that group to find myself with the one layer that contains the object. So I'm going to merge the group, Right-click Merge Group. It takes again quite a little while because there are many, many layers. I think I've got about 50 layers in there or something like that. So once the layer is appearing, renaming it final, and I'm going to save it into a new file, which has got the same specification. I'm going to drag and drop my final layer into my new document. And you can see that my layer or hanging from the side, but just replace the mural correctly in the center as it's supposed to be. We're doing File Save As, and saving it as a PDF. I have the little jump in my video, but you will have to go from ps d or PSB to your PDF and just change the settings here. But I don't change anything. My settings are okay and I click Yes to the dialog box and it's going to save the final your file as a PDF. And this is what you'll be able to send two companies that will print the mural, as well as providing you some samples. So you notice that we live the cities at 300 dpi. So we're going to, well, it's going to resample in the PDF. And we're going to check that PDF now by opening it simply with Adobe Reader. And we're just going to check that everything is okay. So the quick way to check is actually to put your file at 400 percent. You can go in various stages to check that everything is okay. But putting it at 400 percent and checking every area, sometimes you will have left little things and you need to go back to your working file to make sure that you remove any lift things that you do not want to see in your mural. So putting it at 400 percent is exactly how it will be when it is printed at full-scale. And you can see that we have all the nuances of the watercolor texture. And it is very crisp. And it is absolutely not pixelated. And you can move around and have a look at the depth of color, depth with God, the very nice definitions between the different elements. I do recommend to check the PDF file. You know, really, really carefully go from top left to top right and then go down and do the same all along and then up and down. Because sometimes it's very easy to miss something and you wouldn't want to have that printed. So we have now the PDF fine, which is at 300 DPI and it has resembled between your PSD file in your PDF file. Therefore, the size of your file is a lot more manageable. The final pdf Phi is around a 100 and 90 megabytes. And we were working in Photoshop with files that were several gigabytes. So you would use things like WeTransfer, for example, to send over your PDF to companies that usually what they recommend. And it's very easy to do. Now we've got our PDF, we're going to save as a JPEG specifically to use with our mockup file. So you go to File Export, Export As. And we are going to select J peg. In the drop-down list for the format. You select. Jpeg and quality. Excellent. And then we are going to save the file. So recap for this section. And there's one thing that I would like to point out that I haven't talked about yet and it was the color settings. You may have noticed when I saved my PDF that I had this ICC profiles selected. This comes from the color settings in Photoshop on the Edit Color Settings. And you can set it to your geography. For example, here I've got Europe and sometimes on the guidelines from sides, it will tell you exactly which one they require. So in this session, what have we done? We have saved as a PDF file in order to keep the font size manageable so that it can be sent quite easily to printing companies. We've also export the file as a JPEG, and this is in order to use it in our next section, which is the mockup file. See you there.
13. Photoshop - Mockup File: We've reached now the moment where we can use mockup file. We've got our J peg, so now we need to go and get the mockup file. If you have not done so yet, please go and download it and open it in Photoshop next to the other file. So this is the mockup file and you can see in the layers panel if you're used to working with mock-up found, this is a very simple one. You've got the little icon in the top right-hand corner there, which indicates a smart object. And we're going to double-click on the smart object and it's going to open the object itself where we can go and replace this design that says your design here by our own design so that our mural will appear in the mockup. So you drag and drop your J peg onto the smart object. Of course, it's really big, so we're going to do a bit of control minus or Command Minus to be able to see the outlines of our file. And we're going to make it fit the size of the mockup file. Then you need to accept the transformation. And once that's done, you need to save that file. And it's going to automatically update into domain mockup file. And you will see now that we've got our beautiful mural showing nicely as the mockup. So I hope you have a great moments here that you see your design in the mockup and that he pleases you. It is quite a long process to get there. And I think it looks really, really nice. And it gives you an idea or so of, you know, what it will be really like in real life. Even though you have to be a little bit careful with mockup files, because they make everything look pretty. But it gives you a good indication or the proportion of the mural, what is going to look like according to furniture that may be in front of it. So it's the first step towards imagining your room with the mural in it. And now what we need to do is to talk about getting samples to make sure that the colors and the definition is absolutely spot on. Like you want.
14. Ordering samples: So now for the samples, I've had different experiences according to the companies. Sometimes they would do it for free, sometimes they will ask you for a small fee to print the samples. We send the samples. So you will have to try. And basically the little bit of everything. So some companies will print a sample of your file for free. Some companies will print a sample of your file for a fee, but usually if you then order with them, they will reimburse you that. Some companies will send you their samples. So they send you a little booklet with everything in there and you can really feel the different finish. But of course you won't get to see your design. So shop around and call them and discuss with them and see what they can do. I voted several samples. The first one, I received this, this one, this is printed fully at a quarter scale and the fabric is a linen texture. The paper should I say it's like a linen fabric. But the blues are really going towards the purple. And I did not like that. The second one is the same company. The colors are much brighter. However, the paper here is a little bit waxy and glossy. I was in particularly keen on that finish, but definitely the colors or coming out closer to the original. So I decided to continue my search and ordered a third item, which is this one. So this is printed at full-scale. It's a little piece of the mirror room, and I absolutely loved the colors. They are exactly what my original watercolors looked like. And the quality of the paper is excellent. So for me, this is the one I'm going for, for the printing.
15. Final thoughts: Wow, wow, wow, what a journey we've had. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope this has been really useful in understanding the whole process. So we started from designing, looking for companies online. Then we went to the palette preparation, which is really choosing the colors that you will want to have in your design. The watercolor painting, which I hope we'll see some beautiful stuff coming from you. We also did the scanning and scanning the artwork at certain resolution. Of course, the big chunk of the course was in Photoshop. And I hope that the tricks and tools that I've shown you can really help you to digitize your art and do let me know if you've gone for the full design, how you've been getting on with getting samples. And I'm super happy to see anything that you've produced during the class and also after the class. I know this was very, very extensive class and its own projects if you do it in the full design. But you'll be so happy when you get your samples in hand due to COVID restrictions and unfortunately, the delivery of my actual mural has not yet turned up, but I will do my best to update the course once I've received it and you can see it on the wall. So thank you so much again. And we'll see you later.
Beatrice Edney, Art as a great healer
