Card Making with Digital Assets 101 (working with Digital Stamps)

1. About Card Making with Digital Assets 101: Hey, guys, welcome to this class. It's called as cardmaking with digital assets 101, and here we will be focusing on utilizing the power of digital stamps in cardmaking. Let's see what we have. Okay. First of all, what is in it for you. We are going to learn together what the why, and the how of digital stamps. You will understand what digital stamps are, why it's a good idea to invest in them and how we can do so many different techniques with digital stamps. We will be looking at adding a whole new dimension, a completely new skill set to your paper crafting area or paper crafting expertise. We will be busting submits for sure. I have heard several different things about digital stamps that they are not easy to work with. You don't exactly get what you want when you print it, they waste a lot of paper, you don't get great results. Only limited techniques are possible. We are going to prove all of these wrong. In this class alone, we are going to explore ten or 11 different techniques, and we're going to have a blast using digital stamps in cardmaking. Some of the prerequisites or skills that you need before taking this class. They are not must, must have, but some familiarity with this is essential. For example, I expect you to understand some basics of card making, like the different paper sizes because I'm not covering a lot of that information in this class. I'm pretty sure Skillshare has several different options, many more classes which are focusing on just card making in general. But I'm not covering that in this class. It will really help if you know your paper sizes, you know your typical card sizes and so on. It is also essential since we're dealing with digital stamps. It is also essential that you be comfortable using computer and Internet. Okay. And most of all, be curious to learn and explore, come with an open mind and we'll have a lot of fun together. And last but not least, these are the supplies we'll use digital stamps. I am an illustrator who sells digital stamps. You're welcome to buy from my store. You're more than welcome to buy from any other store. There are plenty of stores that have free options. Even my store has some free options, if you just want to dabble in it and Just take a look and see what this is about. You're welcome to do that. If you're interested in buying from my store, I'll be happy to offer a coupon code of some discount. Reach out to me, give me a student ID, and I'll be able to help you out. But even without that, there are plenty of free digital stamps options over the Internet. Don't let the availability of digital stamps limit you. That's not a limitation. Okay. A printer that can print on card stock. Most of your home printers can. If you have access to any printer, maybe at your workplace, if they allow you to print a few things or if you have a home printer or if you don't mind spending a few bucks and getting it printed at a local printing shop, then yes, that is essential. Paper. I have tried to keep just the basic expectation from paper. I'm not recommending any specialty paper. I'm not insisting you guys use any specialty paper or what have you. But depending on the medium you want to color with, you will have to choose your paper. So if you want to use alcohol ins, then make sure you print on the paper, which takes alcohols. I highly recommend cans and mixed media paper. It takes Copics as well as watercolors beautifully, and of course, color pencils or markers, and what you have. Yes, the paper will bleed on the behind side, on the back side, but that doesn't stop us from using it in card making. The front where you're actually printing, that looks beautiful. If you are looking for what paper to go with, I highly recommend cancel mixed media paper. That's what I've used in all my examples in this class. You will need the extra things that you use for paper crafting. Paper trimmers, to size things, coloring mediums of your choice, adhesives of your choice, if you want to put some bling, by all means, go for it. If you want to put some bla, so the standard card making supplies. I think that's about it. That's all we are going to use. Nothing out of the ordinary, no requirement to buy a particular tool or a particular machine for this. This is something that we My focus with this class was to use what you have. Other than being able to print, I think rest everything is something we all have access to. Let's go for it. That's it. That's about this class. Let's dive right in and get started. Shall we? Okay. 2. Lesson 01 - Introduction: In the first lesson of the course, let's understand the what and why of digital stems, and then we can focus on how and deal with so many different techniques with them. So if you notice, I have named this class as cardmaking with digital assets, not digital stamps. Because I wanted this series to not just focus on stamps, but also on other different things that are also available when you work with digital stuff for cardmaking. What is a digital asset? A digital asset is any image or shape that can be manipulated with software programs. So anything that you can use a computer to change, that's a digital image, and that's a digital asset. Some examples can be digital stamps, of course. They will be line art, mainly art stamps, cut files. The equivalent of that in physical world is dies. You will use dies for making different shapes out of your paper, you'll use cut files and a digital cutting machine for the same thing. Printable papers, especially if you have colored printer, then printable papers can immediately expand your stash of available printable papers. Of course, printable clip art. Again, that can be compared to your stickers or some washi tapes that you cut out. But clip art that you can print on preferably colored printer, and all of these are examples of digital assets. For the purpose of this class, we will focus on digital stamps only. This is the beginning entry into the world of digital stuff being used in card making. That's where we are starting. What are digital stamps. Mostly line art, they can be printed, they can be colored, they can be cut, or they can be used as a panel. For all lessons in this particular class, I have kept just the panel. Not everybody is comfortable with fussy cutting. Not everybody has a digital Cannon cut machine, so we have just kept it at basic. But if you have access to those, and if you prefer using some of those by all means, I'm not going to stop you. Okay. Digital stamps are mostly used in paper crafting, but it's not to say you cannot trace it out on a fabric or a canvas and use it that way. That's totally applicable, totally possible. After printing, these are as good as your stamped images. Here on the paper. There is a line printed. Once it gets to the paper, it's just like any other image you might have stamped. Also, depending on the printer and the paper, the things that you can do with these images can vary. For the purpose of this class, we are going to limit ourselves to different techniques that we can do digitally and print and then color and basic cutting. But just like if you use hot foil machine and hot foil plate, you can get filed sentiments or filed images. You use letter press kind of a device and letter press plates, you get that pressed image or a card. Embossing gives you a completely different look. Just like that, if you do use laser printer and glossy kind of a paper, you can use a laminator to foil on digitally printed images. Similarly, if you have a printer that is not quick drying. I know that is not quick drying. You can add embossing powder and emboss it and get the embossed image just like you would do by putting embossing powder and heat setting it. Different techniques are possible. Because this is a one one class, we are going to strictly stay within the confines of simple. We are going to do manipulation on computer, print, color, cut out the panels and use it. There is a little bit. I could not leave it at completely simple. You know me. I hope you know me. I have added just a tiny bit of advanced stuff in there just to tickle your fancy, but that's about it. I am not expecting any special tools, any special devices, or anything like that for this class. Now, the most important question, why digital stamps. Am I saying that the digital stamps will completely replace your physical stamps and you will be choosing to go completely digital? No, I am not making that claim at all. I am myself not doing it. I wouldn't like to do it. I love digital stamps. I love working with them. But I also equally love my physical stamps and my babies and my My physical steps are my babies. But yes, I'm not saying this is one or the other. I'm not saying you have to give up one to get the other. No. This is just another thing you will add to your arsenal to get more from your card making or to explore in another, like I said, in another dimension of your card making. For example, not everybody, any cardmaker will not say I will do only stamping, I will not do heat embossing. Will you. Will you say, Oh, I will only use watercolor and I will never look at a CPC No. Just like you are trying to incorporate all of these, digital stamps deserve your attention, and they can add so much value. Definitely not something you should ignore. That's my only claim, and I completely stand by that claim. You will see lots of benefits of using digital stamps. The biggest one is cost effectiveness. Typical digital stamp set, which has three, four images, maybe a couple sentiments and things like that, will roughly cost you anywhere $4-5, maybe $7. Similar kind of a set in physical world like the physical stamp set will at least cost you $10, if not more. Minimum, and then you also have to pay for shipping. You have to wait for shipping, if there is a delay, then again, it takes time and material and everything. Plus, there is a whole lot of production cost for these physical stamps, and then there is a lot of wastage. The outside material, the one which is you'll have a sheet and then you'll cut out your stamps. Whatever is not used is wasted. All of that you can avoid if you switch to digital. Also storage. If you have a box, you will probably able to fit say 30, 40, maybe 50 this size box. But if you have a this size, a small, hardest, you can fit thousands of digital images. So the physical storage required is really very less. As you add more, you're not actually buying boxes to fit your stamps. They're right there on your machine. Not only that, there are some techniques that you can do only with digital images. One big one that comes to mind is resizing. Your physical stamps, once they are created with a certain size, that's it. You cannot change it. There are ways to get around. You can say, I'll stamp only this much and then I'll t some more and then I'll t some more, but it's a lot of tricky, glochy way if you have to do extending or something like that. With digital stamps, it is just so easy. Also, several different techniques, as you'll see later on in this class, several different techniques that you do with physical stamps that are tricky at best, or difficult at worst are so much easy when it comes to digital stamps. So considering all the I think every cardmaker should definitely explore working with digital assets and digital stamps. Especially if you have access to printer and a decent computer Internet connection, you should not let anything stop you from exploring the world of digital assets in card making. With that, let's. Let's get started. I'll see you in class. Okay. 3. Lesson 02 - Basic Card Making: Hey, guys, welcome to the first lesson. I mean, second lesson, but first time when we're going to create a card here. So I am very excited, as you can tell. We are going to do two things today. First, we are going to see why I recommend using Microsoft PowerPoint instead of Microsoft Word. In other words, why do I recommend using something like a tool that helps create slides or presentation as opposed to a word processor. Not necessarily Microsoft, but those are the tools I will be demoing with. I'm sure similar things can be done with online Google tools or MAC tools, and anything out there, which is intended to create presentations or slides versus intended to create documents versus word processor. So that is going to be part one of this class. Then we will go ahead and create our first digital card. I am very excited to walk you through this journey. Let's do the first part first. Why not Microsoft Word? I know most of you have seen creatives recommend Microsoft Word. You might have tried using Microsoft Word. For using digital images. But the biggest reason why I do not recommend Microsoft Word for designing or sizing or printing your card fronts for digital cards is because it's a word processing engine. It's a word processing tool. I'll show you what I mean. When I insert pictures over here, let me do two of these. Why not? When I do this, look what it did. It automatically put one below the other. If I want to put it somewhere else, no, it's going to do something which is still treating it like an image that will be embedded within text, not as an image on its own. So if I want to do something like layering or if I want to get them to work in a certain way, place them in a certain location. Although I can do all this rotate flip, blah, blah, blah, working in general with images on a word processing tool, it's going to be slightly more trickier. And that is probably going to dissociate you from saying, Okay, I want to do digital stamps, I want to incorporate into my crafting, but just this is going to turn off your excitement, and we don't want that. Now, let's compare how Microsoft PowerPoint or any kind of slide creating tool helps with working with images. I'm going to create a brand new presentation. Before I do anything else, I like to do at least a little bit of setting up so that my printing becomes easy. I'm going to delete whatever is by default in here. We're going to go to design and slide size. Go to pay setup, and I'm going to pick the paper size that I'm going to print on. In my case, it's going to be letter paper. I am in US, so I'm using the paper sizes which are more common in US. I will also be using the greeting card sizes which are more common in US, namely e two, but we'll come to the card sizes and everything in just a little bit. For now, pick whichever size that you are going to use your paper with. For example, if you are in probably India, A four is more common or maybe you in Europe, A four is more common. Pick that size, depending on where your depending on what size your paper is going to be. It's going to ask whether you want to scale up, scale down right now, I don't have anything, I'll simply say scale, why not? With that, my printable area is as close to the real life paper on which I will be printing. So this is step number one. We will refine this further in the next lesson or so. But for now, this is the minimum thing you should do when you are working with digital images and trying to print something. Next step is to actually go and get your images. I am going to pick the same two images which we picked on the other one. But see, even by default, it is already layering those images. So if for example, you're going to put a sentiment on top or you want two images to work in a certain way, that's not going to be a problem here at all. Because this is not going to restrict you to place your images around text or work it in a paragraph kind of a way? No. So This is what we're going to do. By default, if the stamps are set for a certain card size. In my case, most of my stamps are sized to fit a two cards by default. But you might want to resize them, you want to make them bigger, you might want to have only a part of the image show large enough to cover your card front and so and so forth. How do you make sure that your design will fit the intended card size. What I like to do to ensure that is to get myself a sizing guide. So I'll drag a rectangle. Basic rectangle by default, it will come with 1 " by 1 ". I want my cards to be sized for a two portrait. So tall tall side. So my height is going to be larger than my width. I'm going to make my height as the e two cards height and this as my e two card size width. Then I'm going to check this mark to lock the aspect ratio. That way, even if I'm resizing this, if I'm making this bigger and smaller, it is doing it proportionately. I don't have to worry about not being able to fit something on a two sized card. With that, next thing I'm going to do, I'm going to remove the fill. No f I want this to be a completely transparent rectangle. This is going to be my size guide. As you can see, now this image and this rectangle are playing nice with each other. If I want it to be exactly centered, then all I need to do is come to the align. And then select both of them come to the align and then align them. Now they are perfectly centered with each other. You might or might not want to print this. That's totally up to you. In this case, I don't want to print it, or sometimes what I like to do is make sure the line is a very light color line so that I can cut over it and it doesn't make a difference. I might also want to size my images and Since they are digital images, you can do anything. You can skew them, you can make them taller, wider, whatever. But if you want to preserve the proportion of the image as it was intended, then the trick is you resize from the corner if you want to be even extra extra extra sure, hold down the shift key. It always resizes it stays true to the original proportions of what it had. That's what is going to get you the image perfectly sized for your car fort. Again, I want it to be centered. I'm going to select the tube and go to picture format, go to align and center it, and then put it in the middle. In my case though, because I'm not going to the last level of optimizing my print area, I will still have room around for die cutting or cutting my card front when I'm doing it like this. But the sizing options become even more important when you're trying to optimize the print area. We are going to work on that in the next lesson. I didn't want to go that complicated yet. So let's stay here. Another cool thing you can do is me I didn't lock this one. Okay. Another thing you can do is you can lock your sizing guides that way. You don't accidentally shift them. That's another cool thing to keep in mind. You can also play a little bit with the line with the line itself. You can make them wonky. You can give them dashes, you can do all sorts of fun things. If you want to use it, if you want to print it that way and you can even go to the level of doing something like this, and then maybe select Let me unlock this and I'll show you something cool. We might be able to do maybe that. Then play with the sketch, make it a little more wobbly ish or the previous one was better. Make that. Make it slightly smaller than my sized card and let this hang over Like so. That's good. In my case, though, this seems to be on top. That's why you can see it. I want this to go back. Again, go to range and send back. Now my petals are going over and they're covering the area. That's another cool effect. Okay. And I think I'm good with this. I want to double check the size one more time, so I'll drop another rectangle and go through the motions, what we did again, 5.5 by 4.25 and then lock this. Make it like this, remove the field and make sure this whole thing fits inside my a two card, which it does. I'm good with that. I wanted to make sure with this overhang and things like that. It will still fit inside my A two card and I might want to select both and then recess them slightly so that now that's better. I think I'm good. Now the next thing we are going to do once we're satisfied with how my images are sized and they're looking good, I'm going to remove all the size rectangles and I'm going to go to print. When I'm printing this, I have to keep certain things in mind. I want to make sure that Here, I am picking up the media and quality. I don't know what it is. What it will be called in your own printer. You might have to play with that a little bit. But in my case, it's called as media and quality media type. I want to make sure I'm picking heavy weight paper. More often than not, I find myself printing on cancel mixed media paper, which is at least slightly heavyweight, heavier weight than a regular printer paper, and even your card stock is going to be heavier than normal printer paper. So make sure you pick he heavy weight paper or something that indicates thicker paper in your printer settings and make sure you don't do scale to fit paper. So that between what you're seeing on the screen and what is getting printed, there is no extra scaling happening. Nothing is changing between what you see on the screen and what is getting printed. These two things you have to keep in mind. In my case, I also like to make my output black and white. That way, I know, there are no shades of gray. It is going to be very crisp and fine black image, and that's what I'm going to send for printing. I will go ahead and do the printing part and I'll show you what it looks like and we will take it from there. I'll catch you in a bit. The next step is cutting out the printed design. I have or I had before I showed you how to cut it on a card stock. I had printed it on a normal paper, just to make sure the sizing and everything is right. And I'm not going to waste this paper. I use this paper for planning my other designs or even scribbling. I can't even begin to tell you how many times my scribbles on paper I ended up becoming designs which are digital stamps. So yeah, paper is not going to waste. This one I used dies like physical dies with the die cutting machine, a manual di cutting machine. I use pel binders platinum. But That is absolutely not necessary. I only did it because it's a matter of convenience, and I wanted to communicate. I wanted to make sure you know, you don't have to restrict yourself to digital designs to be used only with digital diktic machine. If you have dies that fit like these or circles or any basic dies and you are already using a normal dictic machine that by all means, feel free to mix and match. I do that all the time. But for the purpose of the course, I am not going to introduce any of the technique where physical dies or physical die cutting machine, et cetera, is going to become necessary or mandatory. No. The same look, you can achieve with a normal paper trimmer, whatever you use even the exact knife or a pair of scissors. The same look can be achieved by what you have in hand. Whatever you use to trim your papers can totally work with this. You don't have to have dies. I just want to make sure that If you already have them, do not restrict yourself from using them. If you don't have them, you don't need them. Just get that point and let's move on. I'm going to color these with Cpkes. This is my small collection of copies. I'm probably thinking I will do this card. I will convert this to a card. This will probably sit on my desk to be used later. I'm thinking the color scheme of yellow purple and green. That combination speaks so much like spring to be. That is spring definition for me. I'm going to create that and then I will probably add a sentiment or leave it like that. We'll see how that goes for now. I might just add a sticker to get on with this project and market as complete. In real life when I make cards. So this is also real life. But when I make cards with the intent of giving it to somebody, I typically design it with the sentiment on it. So everything gets printed at the same time. For some reason, I got carried away while showing this in course kind of a setup and explaining how to size and all the good things about dos and don'ts for using PowerPoint. I missed adding a sentiment. So I will add maybe a stamp sentiment from my own physical stamps, or I will use a sticker, or I will use a die cut, which is done by physical di cut or using a cut file by a digital di cutting machine. A options are okay. In all honesty, I might just leave it as is and decide depending on when the occasion comes, I will decide what to do with the sentiment. That is also totally fine. I don't want to bore you with my coloring schemes, coloring skills. Sorry. I can't speak. I don't want to bore you with my coloring skills. This course is not intended to teach you anything about coloring. To be honest, I'm learning it myself. I'm a student of how to do better coloring and I have not reached any level of mastery yet. I will just do it offline and then show you the final result as the output of this lesson. Talk to you in a bit. Here is the card. Done. I mounted it. I adhered it with the double sided tape on one of the card bases. This is a two size card. This is what we had printed the design for. These are the colors I used, the two yellows, two violets purple and the two greens. That's it. That's for this lesson. Go ahead and give it a try. Set up your cards like this, give this a try. Create one project and upload it. That's going to be your homework. Create your project and upload it. Tell me what your experience with working with digital images in Microsoft PowerPoint was, and we can start a discussion on what you like better. That's all for now. See you in the next class? Okay. 4. Lesson 03 - Playing with sizes: Hey, welcome back, guys. Today's lesson is all about sizing our images. One of the biggest advantage of digital image or digital stamps over physical ones is that they can be resized. The same image can work beautifully across different sizes, especially because the most common formats out there are PNG formats or vector formats. So you will be able to place those images and size them without getting any pixelation or without getting any wonky edges and so and so forth. Also, just that you can size images is a big deal when you compare the same thing with a physical stamp with a physical stamp. Once you have that image, that is it. But we are going to do something even more better when it comes to sizing our images. The better is we are going to solve one of the problems or one of the complaints that I have heard mostly when people talk about using digital images for their card making. And the complaint is about, there is a lot of paper wastage when you do digital images. Really? I think we should be able to solve that, right? Okay, let's go. If you look at our previous example, let me open that file and show you. If you look at our previous example, we actually did waste a lot of paper, didn't we? We created a presentation, and I mean, we created a slide. We left a lot of white space around. When I printed this, this area is pretty much useless. I can't create another card with it. If it was a real paper example where I would be stamping, I would probably cut this either horizontally or vertically and get at least two cards out of one letter size paper, right? Um, so that's exactly what we're going to do today. We are going to create a card, which is mimicking the size or the creation of a two sized cards from letter paper just like we would do in normal stamping or physical stamping. And the way to do that is let me close this file and start a different one. The way to do that is, we are going to tell our printer to not force margins on us. Remember what we did last time. Let's do some of those steps. So I'm deleting this I'm going to design slide size page setup. And remember what we did last time, we did this. We picked up the paper size that was given by PowerPoint or given by our program. But even though it says the letter paper size is 8.5 by 11 ". It is letting us have the principal area of 10 " by 7.5, which means it is leaving 0.5 inch margin on each side. So 1 " on the width and 1 " on the height is gone. I'm going to push PowerPoint and my printer to go use the entire area. In real life, though, when I print this, what is it going to do? It is still going to leave about one eighth of an inch on all sides because almost all home printers or office printers are not borderless printers. They do have to have some level of border around their printable areas. There are borderless printers. They exist in the market, but I think they're mostly used for food printing don't quote me on this. But I think they are very specific kind of printers, not usually available. But instead of wasting a whole inch, we have reduced it to one eighth of an inch, and that we can easily incorporate in our designs. So that's what we're going to do. It's going to ask, yes, do you want to scale up or do you want to scale down? I'm going to say scale up, doesn't matter, and this is the size I get. Okay. With this size, I can create landscape cards easily. I mean, it will make it easy for me to understand landscape cards or plan my landscape cards, not understand. Plan my landscape landscape cards like this because if I create a rectangle here, and I do my sizing. I have set up my paper to be landscape. I've set up my slide to be landscape. This is how it is getting divided into four. But more often than not, I tend to create portrait cards for portrait a two sized cards. I'm going to change this even further. Let's delete this, start over. One step back, but I'll show you both the way. If your design is a landscape design by all means, stay here, don't change. But for my particular example, I want to change this and I want to make sure that my width is 8.5 and my height is 11. I want a portrait size paper or a portrait size setting. Now I can make a portrait size card. Or portrait a two size card by doing 5.5 and 4.25 and I can lock this and see now this is perfectly one four. This is typically what I do. I do slice it here or cut my card stock here and I get two cards or I cut it like this and I get two cards, but then I'm folding in the middle. Anyways, I'm creating portrait sized cards. So in today's example, I want to create a top folding card. So what I will do is I want to create a top folding a two card, and I want to create the card front of a slimline card Because I want to showcase to you how the same image can be used for different sized cards. Just because of that, I'm planning it like this. I'm going to copy paste the same thing here. And I'm going to create one more size guide, which will be the height needs to be 8.5 and the width needs to be 3.5. I'll have to remove the lock on aspect ratio, and I will have to size it. This is going to be my slimline card. Now I'm all set. I can start placing my images and I can start printing. Again, going back to maximizing my printable area or getting the max out of my card stock. If I want to do just a top folding card, I can place my image over here. This will become the fold line and it will become a top folding card. Let me show you if I want a side folding card, then I will place my image over here, cut it like so, fold here and that will become my side folded portrait two card. Totally up to you. You can play with the sizes and make sure to keep in mind that towards the very edge of the paper, there will be a little bit of space which the printer will not print one eighth of an inch, very tiny space. The printer will not print there. Make sure your images are somewhere towards the edge of the paper. Okay. Let me get rid of this slide and we'll focus here. I'm going to get my images. And I'm going to get the exact same image and we'll play with that one. Yes. Yeah, I think that's good. It's anyways leaving that much area. I don't mind if it doesn't print all the way very bottom. Let me do slightly size it like that. I think. I'm happy. Now, this is an image. Even if I skew it when I enlarge it, it doesn't look bad, at least in my opinion. It looks pretty decent, even stretched out like this. You can't really tell that it is looking wonky or anything because florals and you can easily have larger floors or taller florals. I'm going to go with that and when I print it, I'm simply going to fold here, have a top folding in two card, and I'm going to cut this out and use it for my slim line. I grab the sentiment. And do the same thing, adjust it and add it here. So for sentiment, I'm going to bring intake wishes. I think it looks nice nestle like that. Sorry. When you work between Windows and Mac, sometimes you use incorrect cut. Sorry about that. Okay. And in this, I want to make it a little bit taller. In a normal font of scenario, it will be not as easy to make the adjustment I'm doing adjust only the height but not the width. But since my sentiment itself is a PNG, it's an image. I can manipulate it like this. In real life, though, I would not encourage manipulating so much if you can avoid it. But if it floats your boat if it looks good, why not? Now, this is what I want to do. My entire slide and everything is set up here and sizing guide and everything is in place. But before I print, and this is something I find myself doing very often. I want to make a duplicate slide, remove all the rectangles that we used for sizing size guides. I don't need them and print that. So when I print that, it will leave all the open areas, and I will be able to manipulate my page in terms of where I cut it, where I fold it, and so and so forth. So that is what I'm going to print. Okay. So I got my printed to my trimmer, and I have cut out Oh, I did 4.5. I think I should do four and a quarter. So I'm going to do a little bit on each side. I'm going to do that. Okay. And now, I'm going to do that. Yeah, not a big, but we'll make it work. So now it is perfectly four and a quarter. Sorry, my blade is not the best. Then we're going to fold it in half. And crease it and use a bone folder. Because the blade on this is not the best right now. I'm going to use my trimer to make it look polished or look proper. You don't have to do this. You probably get a I get a better blade and fix that problem. I should get a grim that is bigger. Okay. There you go. A two sized card, top folding and I need to fix this. And we could have actually printed the inside of the card also. But we'll have to do a front and back. There is a little more manipulation to do with that. So in real life, mostly I don't do this. My cards have at least some dimension. So I do print only the fronts and I assemble them that way. I will print the card front and then put it on a card base, which is separate. I need to have at least some dimension. But I just wanted to show you that you don't have to be restricted by the fact or limit the space options and all that just because you're doing digital images. That's what you have. For this one, I want to use my trusted di, which is slimline size die, and I want to cut it like so. This is, again, I could totally do this with the gin and the other trimmer, but the die is just convenient or I could even do it on the cutting machine, but the die is the most convenient for me, so that's what I'm going to do. I will color both these cards. I will assemble them into cards, and I'll see you on the other side. One thing. Yes, I am thinking of using my trusted cop again, maybe some other combination, but we'll see. These are the two cards and this made from the same digital image size differently and printed on the same card stock. There is one thing that I'd like to point out. It's like a moment of truth here. Although I can make cards like this where on the same page, I have printed something, I folded and I made a one layer card. Most if not all of the coloring mediums like cops will bleed at the back. In real life, more often than not. Although I'm printing it like this, I will not create cards like this. I will only use this part and just like I did here, I'll use only this part, mount it on another card base, and that's how I'll make cards. In all honesty, if you want to maximize your paper usage, you could print four different cards or four different card fronts on the same letter size paper to make four different panels for a two cards. That's more real life scenario as opposed to doing something like this. Here, I wanted to showcase how you can use same image by resizing it for completely different card sizes, and that's why I used my paper the way I did. I also wanted to make sure that you can there is a way to maximize your printed area, and that's the reason I put together my sizing like this. But in real life, I would probably make four parts, not probably. This is how I work more often than not. I make four parts, four eight to size cards, and I plan my images and sentiments or multiple images and what have you. And that's how I plan and print my cards. With that note, I will wrap up this class. Show me what you've got. Use some digital image to create something like this and showcase your projects onto the class and let's see. Let's take a look at them. Thank you so much. I'll see you in next class. Okay. 5. Lesson 04 - Mirror Stamping: Hey, guys. Welcome back to the next lesson. Today, we are going to look at the next technique, which is mirror stamping. This is something interesting, but a little tricky to do with physical stamps. Let me first show you how you do it with physical stems so that you appreciate how easily it can be done for digital stems. First of all, what is mirror stamping? You see these two leafy brant images here. They are almost mirror images. They are designed in such a way that they're facing opposite direction. If you take this and look at it in the mirror, it will show in this direction. These are this is my own stem set and I designed it in such a way that when you're building a wreath, you should have something to go on both sides. But in most cases, your stamps will have a specific direction in which they curve or in which they move, or if it is a criter, its face will be in a particular direction. Mirror stamping lets you change it to the opposite way. It's not rotating. If I take this stamp, for example, and if I rotate it, the direction will still be the same or if I rotate it this way, the direction will still be the same. But if I mirror it, then the direction will be the opposite. I want to show this to you with this particular one with this particular again, another leaves. I love to draw leaves, I think. No, I think I know. This one, if I stamp it as it is, If I stamp it as it is intended, then you will see what you're seeing there. It looks like this. Ignore me if my stamping isn't perfect, that is in the point of this particular exercise. I'm not focusing and this is just a scratch piece of paper, so I'm not focusing on getting my stamping, right. I just want you to convey the understanding of mirror stamping. You see this. If I rotate it Okay. Then the way the direction of the curve still stays the same. It's still going this way and the lined part of the leaf is still on the same side. Now, if I want to if my car design demands that it needs to be on the other side. I have an option of stamping it on another surface, which is not porous. Ideally, I should be using another stamp which is large enough to hold this. Today, I don't have any of it like that. I could use the alter new stamp field because the inside plate of it is like a large stamp, but I didn't want to go down that path. Not everybody has that tool. I'll showcase it with just another stamping block. This is something commonly people have. Again, as I said, non porous surface, you will stamp the image on it, make sure all the ink is transferred. Now when you stamp with this non porous surface onto your paper, watch, you can actually see it happen already. Again, my stamping may not be perfect. That's not the point of this. I just want to show the direction, but this is where you have it. Rotating gave you that. Mirror stamping gave you that. See how the face is flipped. We had to go through several things like stamping it on another non porous surface, making sure the surface is right, making sure that the ink gets transferred perfectly and the lines don't get washy because not all surfaces take the ink properly. Yes, there are ways to do this. You have to have a stamp stamp, not a stamping block, a stamp that is large enough to hold your entire image which you want to flip basically, and that should help. But it's a little more trickier than I would prefer. That's why I do not do a lot of mirror stamping really honestly, I don't do till now, I don't think I've done any mirror stamping ever except maybe once or twice, and I've been crafting since 2012 because it's a little bit tricky to get it right and it's not my first choice. Okay. Now, let's go back and see how a similar thing can be done so easily when it is a digital image. All right. Let's go to that part. All right. We're back in our favorite program, Microsoft PowerPoint. I'm reusing the same file that we have used for resizing and you'll see me do this over and over again. For most of my work, I do not see the need to create new files every single time. I do not see the need to keep the things that I have already printed and used and I may not use again. So I tried to use my storage in a frugal way as much as I can. You don't have to do it. It's completely your personal preference on whether you create new file for each project or re use the same one. But it's totally okay to reuse the same one. In fact, if you have a file where you have set up your size guides, it's easier to simply reuse the same one, which is what I'm doing here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this slide so that I still have the size guides, and I'll delete the things I don't want that much. For this card, I am not going to create a slimline card or a mini slimline card. I don't need this, so I'll simply remote that also. We'll use just these two where I will show you how simple and how error free it is to make mirror stamped images with digital files. You ready? Here we go. Inside the picture. In our case, this is the picture I have picked. I have the bird who is looking towards his right from the left side. I'll keep them like this before I put them in the size guide. This is one way I made a copy of it. I'm simply going to go to this tool over here, which has the rotate. I can rotate also, but that's not what I want. I want mirror. All I'm going to do is that see how easy it is. Now my body is facing the other way, my flowers are the other way. My entire image has changed from facing one way to facing another way. While we are here, let me also show you what rotate does just so you understand the difference. It's not rotate. For mirror stamping, it is flip. Rotate is something you might use, if you want to create the same thing, maybe like a wreath, use the same leaf pattern and create the whole wreath, just by rotating it, every few degrees every one time you're copying and pasting. We'll probably do that in one of the lessons. But here we are completely focusing on flip that is the mirror stamping. Just for understanding the difference, let me show you what rotate does. If I do rotate, remember, my bird is facing towards my right. If I do rotate 90, he's still facing towards his right. If I do again, the other way, he will still continue to face from his left to his right or whichever way, the other way. But he'll still face in the same direction. Unlike when we did the flip, he is actually facing C. If I make it straight again, he's still facing the same way, but if I do flip, he's doing it the other way. Now just for printing purposes, I'm going to align it so that it looks it looks nice. In fact, let's do that also using PowerPoint. Why not? This one, I am going to rotate it this way, and then move it that way, I know it is centered, and for this one, I'm also going to rotate this way and then move it and I'll let the red lines that come up as a guide guide me to where I want to position it center and center. That's it. There you have it. Before printing, I think I want to do the b Davies. Let me copy that also. Again, for this one, let's do the rotate. Just so you know, I went to the picture format menu on the ribbon. That's where you'll find all the rotate and flip tools. Bird devices, and then copy paste this already rotated one and Birdves we could do this and do that. Bring them together. Yep. Looks good. Now, I will go print this out, color this, and convert them into two cards. I hope you like this lesson, and I do hope you give it a try, especially if you have a lot of critter digital stamps and the ones which are directional. This is a very fun and easy way to get so much more out of those images. Do give it a try. Okay. The next step is printing. What you see me do here is add paper to my printer and do the print setting and then print. But instead of repeating the steps in each and every lesson, I have combined all the printing dos and don'ts, best practices, et cetera in one of the lessons towards the end. I think it must be the last lesson or something. I recommend you pause your video here, go to that lesson and begin. In fact, what I did here, what you can tell from these images is I did recording and setting up of all the classes in this entire course, and I set up my cards, and then at one go, I printed nine different cards. Great use of your time, your resources, your papers, your printing. This way of batch producing cards is a big help not only for business processes, but also for mass producing or things when you want to create a lot of cards in a short span of time. Okay. So after I trim these panels, I will go offline, and I will color them. All right. So I have printed and colored. The cards that we did mirror stamping with. In other words, we did flip in Microsoft Power point. I'm ready to assemble there. As you can see, the paper is warped like pretty badly. I should say. Two things. First, the printer, it's heat, and then watercolor. That's why I got so much warping. There are multiple ways to get rid of it. You can either use a die, which will cut rectangle and going through the digtic machine, this will pretty much fix itself at least a little bit. Second option is heat gun. If you have a heat gun, then heat set it or heat it from the back side both sides really till the time it unwarps itself or warps itself from the other side and everything, it's fine. If you don't have any of these tools that I'm talking about, simply I put this on a piece of card stock that is plain or even printer paper and leave it overnight with the heavy weight. You can keep your laptop on top of it. I've tried books, laptop, some kind of heavy weight which puts pressure on the river side of it, and that should fix it. For now though, I'm probably going to hurry up, hurry up and do the heat method because I feel like that's the fastest or the di cutting method. I'm not going to demonstrate any of these because none of them are mandatory. Okay. For all you want, you can use what you have. You can even the other thing that works is spray from the backside, a light mist of water and put it like this on plain piece of paper and put it. The other thing to the other way you can actually avoid so much warping, which I missed doing is before you start adding water color on it, tape it on all sides to a firm surface, and that should avoid so much warping. So there you have it multiple ways to get rid of the warping and then assemble the card. Card assembly is again straightforward. I have my card base, which I want to make gray, and I'm going to cut it, fold it in half, and then go ahead and assemble. 5.5 That's my e two card size, and I will fold it. I know my blade for this particular cutter is not the best. So I have to fix it with my gear trimer, but I'll do all that. Card basis, and then I like to use a little bit of adhesive or foam dimensional adhesive on the back. But before that, I'm going to die cut this, make it a little bit smaller. So the gray and the gray can match. I will have a little bit of a gray border all around it. I'll do the same thing and that's how I'm going to assemble this. For each card, I might do something different, but that's totally fine. You do what you feel is best. I'll leave it at that and I'll show you final cards in just a few minutes. So these are the final cards. This is what they look like. And as you can tell, without using a large stamp or something to do the mirroring with just one click of a button and a particular option in PowerPoint, we managed to do this. I hope you take advantage of this feature and create something with the stamps that you already own. We'll continue this journey and just one tip. Go and check out the printing lecture or printing lesson. Before you proceed any further. That will give you lots of tips on what settings to use for printing, how to save those settings so that you don't end up having to reset every single time and maybe forget something, how to deal with the warping of the paper, a lot of good tips and tricks that I have shared in that lesson. Please do check that out before you go to any other lesson and then come back and continue this journey. Enjoy. I'll see you in next class. 6. Lesson 05 - Rotate: Welcome back. We're going to dive into the next lesson right away the lesson is about rotating. In real life, you would probably just eyeball it or if you want to do it precisely, you would use something like either a turnabout jig from Concord and ninth or you would use something like to new SM wheel tool. In PowerPoint with digital stamps, you don't need any special tools at all. You can just let PowerPoint do all the math or all the precision or even normal rotating for you. Let's dive in and see how. We're going to do what we have been doing. We're going to create a copy of this slide and then get rid of the things we don't want, that is these images. And then let me do something. For this particular lesser, let me get rid of this. We go ahead and design our wreath in a completely plain paper, and we can size it based on these guides later. I think that will be so much easier to understand. Nothing else on the screen, just the paper or the slide that is resized to what it should be doing on the printer itself. Let me bring all the images that I want to do that I want to use, and we will end up creating a wreath. That's the idea. I have already picked my images. They're all here. I'm simply going to keep them separated like that, and I'm going to start with the guide. I want it to be a circular wreath. It doesn't have to be, it can be an oval, it can be a hexagon or whatever. There are two ways to create perfect circle. First way, you drop it in, it comes with 1 " by 1 ", and then you see here, you will first lock the aspect ratio. That way, they will always increase or enlarge proportionately. And I want to make this a large enough wreath that will fit an eight two sized card. So I'm going to make it 3.5 by 3.5. I could have gone all the way to four, but I'd like to leave a little bit of a room on the other side. Okay. You see how it automatically arranged or enlarged the other side proportionately. That is because I locked the aspect ratio. Watch. If I don't do this and if I make this four, the other one doesn't change, and it will become an oval. If you want, we could do this, or we could stay with 3.5 by 3.5. Let me lock if I lock the expect ratation it will move proportionately like this. Let me revert it back to 3.5 and we can start with this. If you see right now, these images are looking too big, which is good because in real life, if I print these images as it is, they will be large, but they will have their details perfectly how you see them on the screen. If I'm going to make them bigger, since these are vector images, they should scale out beautifully. Even making them smaller, they should scale in in the same way. You can do resizing for either ways you want. For my purpose, I don't want my circle to be filled in with any color, so I'm just going to go here and pick only that line. I can actually make that line to be black just because then we can start playing. I want my I want this to go all the way to the back, I'm going to go there and say send to back. That's the arrange. One. Then I'll start placing my florals, how I want them. At this point, I'm just going to free hand rotate with this here. And I can even enlarge and see what it looks like. Then I can get my leaves. I can get my leaves to be that if I want more precise rotation, we go here, and then I do more rotation options and I can put in exactly the amount of rotation I want in this box. Suppose I minus is for clockwise and positive is for clockwise. If I want minus ten, see how it moved that side. If I want to move with the other side. The more positive I make it moves towards clockwise, the more negative I make it moves towards anti clockwise. That's how you get it to be precisely how you want. Again, this is two further on top for me, so I'm going to go to, I'm going to go to send backward and move it behind my flower. I can get it to show some more like that. And I wanted to move clockwise. I'm sorry, anti clockwise. You can play right here. That's the best part. You can see and you can play right here. Then this leave. I think I want it I want it there. And I wanted to go behind. So sorry, my picture format. And then and backward. I want more want it behind the flower. I'm going to get rid of this or better still. I'm going to keep it as a guide, but I'm going to change the opacity of this or transparency of this to be more transparent. Sorry, I changed the wrong transparency. I'm going to make it like that. So that it doesn't distract me from what I'm doing. There and I want leaves to go like that. I want it to be more tightly filled in a rest of them, I just want to fill with more leaves. I'm going to go with this one first, paste it, and then rotate it and send behind maybe more of this. We can even play with flipping it copy and paste, get it over here, then send back. I want to do that. Why not? It's ours to play with, I can bring it here. Send. See how rotating and adjusting these is just so very simple. Let me get this leaf and leave with this a little more here. I want to flip it the other flip. Yeah. Then get it to be Send backward. Yeah. Like so. And again, I can even try to do precise rotation. So This one, where we go. I want it to be t clockwise. More clockwise. Send backward. I think I I'll show you what I. I want this guy to go here. And Oh. Sorry, my cat is acting up. She wants her attention. And then I can get these two. To be coming out like that. And then this one to be there. Perfect. I think I will go with that as my w. I might want to flip this. Okay. And see, it's no biggie. You can just do all these adjustments over here. You still haven't done anything with your paper. None of your supplies are wasted. All the changes I'm doing here. If I had to change my mind that many times on the real piece of paper, I would have wasted a lot of things. But look, I'm doing it with so much ease over here and nothing is wasted. This is another best part I like about digital images. You can play all you want and only when you're 100% sure, that is exactly how it looks or that is exactly how you want it to look. That's when you print. Okay. Okay. All different things I've done here. I have done flip. I have done rotate. I have arranged them backwards, forwards, all different ways. I have layered them one behind the other. I might want to put one more of this one or one more of this, but a smaller one. Here it looks a bit empty. That's what I'm going to do. Again, size. I want this to go behind and I want this one to come forward. I want to bring it all the way to the front. Make it slightly larger. Now I'm going to get rid of my circle. I don't need that. And I will group all this and then size it so that it fits my card front. Because right now, if I look at it, I think it's bigger than a two sized card. I also want to add a sentiment here. I'm going to grab a sentiment and add it here. Let me do that. Step one, let's group this together. Now that we know this is how we want it. Group this together to group it, select everything, right click group and group. I might want to tweak this, but for now, I think I'll just go with what we have and we can make any adjustments after we have done the final sizing. I'm going to set it aside. This will move together as a group, which is what I want. I'm going to go back to the previous slide and get my size guides. That way, I know exactly how much sizing or resizing I need to do for this group. Now I'll bring it to front bring forward, bring to front and see, I thought, this is a little bit more than what can fit into an e sized card. Because even though our circle was 3.5, we have let the flowers and the leaves go here and there. We are going to resize this. I can even make it elliptical or I can make it circular, doesn't matter. For now, I'm liking the shape. I want to change something over here. It looks a little bit, not exactly how I want. I'm going to change that. To do that, I will have to Ungroup this. But I want to show you one more little bit of a trick. If I click on a particular shape, I can lock it in place. Now, even if I move this, even if I move this, my rectangle, the one below is not moving. Which is what I want. I don't want to accidentally move around things. I'm going to keep the ones I don't want to move locked. That's another little bit of a trick that you can do with PowerPoint. Now let's group this and move the slightly I want my wreath to look nice and full. I don't want to see weird gaps here and there. I don't mind if it is not having enough length or enough coverage here, but I want the areas to not look blank. I think that might be better, but then I'm not liking this sticking out. What do I take this away. That looks good. That looks good. I might have to adjust these just a little bit more this like this. Backy here and then this coming up like so. Yeah, I think I like that much better. That also gives us a little bit more open room here where we can add our sentiment. Now for the sentiment, I'm going to bring in more images pictures file. I went and I added these images. I want this to be a thank you card and it says, thank you for everything you do. I want to be here for everything you do. I want to make this slightly larger. That way I can color in the sentimental color inside the letters on the sentiments. I like that. I like that a lot, actually. Let's see what happens here. I think I'm good with that. I can move this slightly there. Okay. That's it. I think we have done a lot of different techniques here playing around with images. We have rotated them. We have seen how we can do precise rotation up to the angle. We can rotate it to be anti clockwise or clockwise, we can flip the images. We can layer the images, we can even lock images or shapes, we can group things together, and so many things that we can do with digital images. And best of all, we're not wasting any of our physical supplies in everything that we did. So much of trial and error we did, so much of playing around, but not even a single paper has been put to use or wasted. That's the beauty. I think we'll leave it at that. I will go ahead and print this out and I will color this, complete it, put it in the card, and I'll show you the results of it. In x class. But to mention one tiny little thing. See how we locked this rectangle. We can also do that to images, not just shapes. You can just right click and say lock and then you won't be able to move this flower no matter what you try. The way to move it is to unlock it first. Feel free to take advantage of this when you are designing or putting your things together. Once you know you want a certain image in a certain location or a certain place on the card and you don't want to keep shifting it accidentally, simply lock it in place and it won't move. Okay. Next step is printing. I have given I have shared two different flavors of how you can do it. One in the basic card making class or another one with zero inch margins in the overall printing lesson. I followed the one in the overall printing lesson because I did mass printing of all the cards that I have made for this class. Total nine cards is what I printed together. Here is the card that we did with rotate technique. Just like I showed in one of the previous lessons, my paper is wopped, Multiple ways to fix it. I'm going to do one of these ways and then get this little bit unwarped I've created several card basis on which I'm going to assemble this. This is the vinyel output. This is what the card looks like. I have watercolord with different watercolor mediums from ganz B to intespencil to Daniel Smith watercolors. Then in the center of all the flowers, I have added gold paint with gold paint pen. I think that's about it for this lesson joy. 7. Lesson 06 - Shadows: Me to the next lesson. We are going to start as usual. There is a reason why I keep showing you the same file and keep walking you through the initial steps. Because in real life, this is what I do is the most convenient way of setting up your size guides and reusing them over and over. Once you get into the habit of this, it will just become second nature. So I keep starting here instead of a blank slate over and over and making us repeat the things, like repeat the size guides and everything. Because in real life, I would reuse them like I'm doing here. So I'm going to duplicate this slide, and I'm going to lock these two that is already locked. I'm going to lock this one, and I'm going to select this and delete. Okay. Now, I want to showcase how you can add shadows to your images. And how this is possible with only a certain type of images. You need to do a little bit of trial and error to figure out what kind of image you have, how the shadows will look in real life, what to pay attention to before you actually use this feature. So I want to highlight all of that before we actually create a card. To be able to see those shadows and really appreciate them, I'm going to make both my size guides have some kind of color filled in it. This is just for demonstration purposes. We won't be printing in this color. You are welcome to if you want, but I'm not intending to print in this color. I'm just putting it here so I can show you. In fact, there are three files or three types of things that I want to showcase. I'm going to make a third size guide rectangle. Okay. Usually when you buy digital stamps, you will either get them in PNG format or JPC format. These are very common image formats that are used, especially for line art, which is what stamp images are. The JP format in most cases, does not respect transparency. So it will have a white background. Even if the image is say a floral bouquet, you will get a white background, even behind make the entire rectangle, not just the bouquet have white. On the other side, PNG in normal circumstances will have transparent. Even inside the petal of a flower will be transparent. These are two extremes. One is just giving you the line that format. The other is giving you the format with a white background or the linear with a white background. JPEG being the one with the white peg round PNG being the one with the transparent. In most cases, what I have seen is either it is one or the other. There is no in between. But for this particular technique, you need something that is in between. Let me demonstrate what I'm saying with one example. For the purpose of this class, I've created a tiny floral image and I've created multiple flavors of file types for it. Let's get started. The first one I want to show you is JPEG. It's called a JPEG, or it is called a JPEG or it is called a JPG. All of them are same, the specialty of this or the way this file type works is that in most cases, it does not respect transparency. There is a way to make it have transparency, but it depends on the program in which we open to respect that transparency. So if you're using GPC files in PowerPoint, they will come with a white opaque white background. That's not what we want for today's class. Today's class is about adding shadows. And if I add a shadow here, the way to add a shadow is select that, go to format, and pick for most of the images, you would not want to add inner shadows, you will stick to the outer shadows because obviously, the petals or anything will be opaque and they will cast a shadow behind them, not inside. I haven't played with creating inner shadows, but you're welcome to try, see if you like it. If I add a shadow and when I increase the size of it, it's actually giving me the whole rectangle shadow, not what I want. Now let's see PNG, which respects transparency. In most cases, the PNGs are designed to be completely transparent. They will have line work and that's it. They will have line work and everything else transparent. PNG files mostly will look like that. Again, if I add a shadow here, I'll pick up reset, maybe this one. But look See, even the inside portion of it has its own shadow, which is not what happens in real life. In real life, if you have a flower, only the outside or the full flower will cast one shadow, not its individual parts. That's what having a shadow on normal PNG will do. Now, there is something in between, and that is how I like to design all my digital stamps because I like to use them this way. This particular lesson and the next lesson is relying on having that kind of special thing done for PNG files. So what I do when I design my stamps, and I'm not saying this to boast or anything. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm saying this so that you know what to look for when you're designing your card. Depending on what kind of image you have, you will be able to do certain techniques with them and not do certain techniques with them. Just like when we have certain type of material. With clear stamps, you can do something with rubber stamps, you can do something, some of the things you can do with clear stamps. You cannot do with rubber stamps and so forth. It's just a matter of what you want and for that, picking the right kind of file or the right kind of image. Now when you see this, this is the best of both worlds here. The inside of all the flowers and leaves are opaque. They are filled in, but the outside is completely transparent. When I add a shadow, this is very much like what will happen in real life. You have a flower and its shadow goes like that. I did this in a really big hurry. So even I have missed some parts in the middle. That is easily fixable. In real life, if you look at proper stamps, which are on the store, you won't see this mistake. But this is what you want. Unlike that or that. You will have the flower and you will have a shadow being cast. And the inside part will not have its own shadow. It won't have a separate shadow is what I mean. These are the kind of images that you want if you're going to add shadow. You could do the same thing with adding shadow with watercolor when you're coloring or with pencil or any other medium that you choose, even acrylic, if you're using that to color your images, but doing it in PowerPoint is so easy. When your card front gets printed, it automatically has a shadow. One less thing for you to color. Quicker way to get things done, in other words. I think That should make things very clear. Even if I remove the background now, you will still see let me remove the background on all of these. You will still see when you're printing it on a white card stock or even colored cardstock, colored card stock will also look like this. It this background will have blue, but then the rest of it will look like this. So that's exactly what you want. Oh. Important thing to note. If you're printing this on colored cardstock, you will get the shadow printed, but this inside part will be the colored cardstock because that's how white is interpreted by your printer. Again, something a little bit of trial and error is required, but the point is shadows and you can add them in PowerPoint and get them printed like that. For this particular lesson, I am not going to print these. I am going to because this was just a 5 minutes sketch that I did. I'm not going to use this. I'm going to actually use some other images. I just got these. Let me still save this. I just got these to show you the different type of files that we have. Let me bring in the real images and create a card. I think I will go with. I think I'll go with that. Maybe like that. And then. And a shadow like that. And then I want to have the sentiment that says you are bauti my life is bautiful because you're in it. And again, you can align them their centers. Maybe group them. And Aign them to the middle and also align them to the center. Why not? Okay. Do you think I should bring that flower and end it here? Maybe. Let's try. Why not? Okay. They'll look good. Let's see if I want to do it with the other image. That might be better suited for this. You can tell I love to play with these, can you? I love to play with these. See, because my flower is opaque. It's actually looking pretty nice when I add it like this. If I had the transparent one, if I if I had added the transparent one here, the background or the behind of this mug or to go container would have shown that would have looked really weird. Now let's shadow. And something like that. Yeah, the flower looks like it's floating on top. I like it. Then I want sentiment. I will go for espresso. What's the espresso? How much I appreciate you. Yeah. Let me group these two. And then I want this group to be centered and I want, first I want these to be center aligned. Then I want to group them. Then I want this whole thing to be center aligned and middle aligned for our car. There you have it. I think That's all for this lesson. I'm going to go ahead and print this and then come back and show you what the cards look like. Next step is printing. I have given I have shared two different flavors of how you can do it. One in the basic card making class or another one with zero inch margins in the overall printing lesson. I followed the one in the overall printing lesson because I did mass printing of all the cards that I have made for this class. Total nine cards is what I printed together. Here is the finished design for shadows. These shadows, what you see were completely done by computer. I did not have to do anything. Even this fine shadow that you see of this twig over here, completely done by PowerPoint. I did not have to do anything. I simply watercolord it and the panel is ready. I'm going to do one of the things to unwrap or sorry, unwrap this and assemble it on one of my card basis, and I'll show you the final card. Just a little bit. One thing to one thing to note. I have used multiple different watercoloring mediums on this. I have used ganz B watercolors. I have used watercolor pencils. I have used Durant ink tense pencils and even Daniel Smith watercolors. When I watercolor, I try to just see a particular shade of color that I'm wanting to get and I go with whatever medium I has that. I'm not a particular watercolor list or pro watercolor list or anything. So here is what I made. Use what you have. Okay. I'll show you the finished card in just a little bit. Here it is. Here is the finished card. I simply trimmed it a little bit and mounted it on gray card base. That's it. For this one in particular, or all these cards that I made, I challenged myself to stay away from Bling. If you know me you know how hard it is, but I did it. I love the result. I love just the simplicity of a watercolred image and the words that are fitting for a short of Espresso. All right. That's it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one. Okay. 8. Lesson 07 - Masking: Come back to the next lesson. Today we are going to learn something about masking. Masking is used when we want one object to appear in front of the other object. In this case, the purple one, the purple part seems to be in front and the navy blue one seems to be behind it. Similarly here, this one seems to be in front, this one is behind. Again, this architectural piece is behind. The way we do that is using a technique that's called as masking. Masking can be done in multiple ways, at least two different ways that I know of. The most common one is to create a mask with a paper, and even there are specialty papers called as masking sheets. You could even use posted node or some paper with a temporary DSA also works fine. The way this is done is you first stamp the object in the front. Okay. I'm going to use these two colors just for the demo purpose. What we're going to do is we are going to stamp the object in the front first. And please ignore any imperfections in my stamping. This lesson is not about stamping with physical stamps, so I'm not paying too much attention. Okay. So when we do that, the next step is we cover this. With something like a mask. We call it as a mask. It can be a paper mask like what I'm doing here. There are also liquids that come masking fluids they are called as they temporarily cover this stamped area or colored area and protect it from getting any more ink. That when you stamp the object that is supposed to be behind. Now I'm stamping my second part. It will protect that much area, which is covered by this particular pot. And the appearance will be since that much area is not stamped. The appearance after you take out the mask will be as if this pot was in the front and this pot went behind. In physical stamps world, this is what we'll do for masking. We'll cover it either like I did with the paper. This is specialty paper for masking. You can also use temporary posted notes, you can use normal paper with temporary adhesive on it or you could even use a masking fluid. The fluid is a little bit different and it's much more in use for very delicate kind of objects that you want to mask. You would put the fluid you'll stamp the object that is front most, you'll put the fluid on and let it dry. Then you'll paint around it or behind it and do all your stuff. After all your coloring is done, that liquid gets dried and forms like a thin film with your fingers, you can gently ease it off. Just like you would when you get mot page on your hand, you can simply ease it off. That's what that fluid will do. It will protect your previously stamped or colored object and give it the appearance of one appearing in front of the other. That's what physical world masking is about. Let's go and see how it is so much more easier to do the same thing in digital world. Okay. All right. Let's start by creating a new file today, just because repeating what we want to learn enforces the learning. I just wanted to take a moment to recreate the file, not reuse what we have so that you see me do it over and over and that's how we learn better. We are going to go with new and blank presentation. I'm going to eliminate whatever is there. Just control A, delete and or command a delete and everything is gone. Go to design, go to slide size, and go to patetp. And then I'm going to go with custom. I want my width. Again, today, also, I'm going to do it in a portrait way, not landscape way because my design requires it that way, but by all means, feel free to keep your width bigger than the height, and if you're creating landscape cards. Doesn't make a difference. I'm going to keep my with smaller than the height. I want it to be 8.5 " and height to be 11 ". Doesn't matter scale up or scale down. I don't have anything in here yet. Again, I'm going to go back and place my guiding rectangle. Let it appear as one by one, 1 " by 1 ". My height needs to be 5.5 and my weight needs to be 4.25 after I'm done, I'm going to lock the aspect ratio. If you move it to the corner, you'll see that this is exactly one quarter of your page. I want to remove any fill in it, and then I'm going to go ahead and lock. Okay. So my basis set up on this, I'm going to start playing. Just like we saw in physical stamps world, masking will help us create that front or the back lock. It is just that we don't have to worry about being remembering to place to stamp the front most object first, and then anything you want to be behind it. And if there are three layers, then you have to decide up front and how you want to mask and all that stuff. There is a lot of planning that should happen before you do anything when you're trying to stamp a masked scene. Here it is relatively so very easy. The only thing you need to keep in mind is we need to have specific type of files. Just like the ones we saw yesterday when we were doing or in the last lesson, when we were doing the comparison between a JPEG file, which has that rectangle, which is white around it or a square, which is white around it, and then there is another one which has got completely transparent and even the inside lines are showing up. And then the third one, which is the middle, like the best of both worlds. That's the kind of file we want. Just like I showed you with the shadows design, let's take the same example, and I'll show the same thing to you here. Let's bring our files. Okay. Before that, let me just add color to this. That way, it becomes easier for you to understand what's going on. Okay. I'm going to bring in my files. Let me bring in these three. Let me bring these later. I'll bring in the files I want. First, simply set them aside for now. I'll just keep them here for now. Let me use the example of a balloon. I want a balloon and I want a string, maybe reduce the string I want. That works. Then now, if I go ahead and bring in my JPEG file from yesterday, the one we used for the shadows lesson, if I bring in my JPEG file. See, It's covering a whole lot of things. It's covering even this design because of the white rectangle around it. This is not the type of file I want. The second type of file we are going to try is the completely transparent PNG. That somehow you can make it work by editing the image and cleaning out the lines behind yourself. It's too much work and has limitations. Again, not the best fit, you can make it work, but definitely not the best fit. Now let's bring in the type of file that we saw yesterday works best for shadows, that is PNG, but the objects are opaque. And this is the perfect fit for even masking. The lines, the outline of this balloon, which is right behind the petal is hidden. But anything that is not covered by a leaf or a flower or a stem is not hidden. That is the kind of thing you want. That is the kind of file you want. All the files that I have pulled for my example today are same kind of files, so let's go ahead and use them. See, they are not having the white rectangle, but inside of that flower, it is still empty. Let me go back and remove the fill from this rectangle just so that we can figure out what my balloon will actually look like. After all this discussion we have done, the actual masking is just a single step of arranging something to come in the front and something to go back. Almost anticlimactic, isn't it the way we build up so much anticipation. But this is what it is. That's all. That's all there is to it. You simply place an image and decide which one needs to be front, which one needs to be back in this arrange button over here does exactly that for you. We can create different flavors or different styles of this balloon and let me create a different one. This is another advantage of digital You can make multiples very quickly, extremely quickly. You can do multiple edits also very quickly. Let me lock this. In this second design, I simply want to have a different kind of flower. Maybe that one, and I'm going to keep it there, bring it to the front, and I'm going to flip it because I want Yes. I want that design. Yeah. That design or should I do? See, the amount of changing my mind I can do with digital. I just so very simple, extremely simple. The actual doing of changing my mind. The actual execution of changing my mind is so very simple with digit 12. Okay. Perfect. I think that's how I want them. Yeah. That's how I want them. I think this one I will flip. Yeah. Perfect. Yep. And then the sentiment I picked and so the adventure begins. It's like a balloon. Maybe it will work for something like a hot air balloon also. But with this one, I just wanted to have it with a simple balloon. We can also have a happy birthday one over here. I think balloons Happy birdy also looks nice and I can bring it all the way to the front. Tuck it right there. That looks really nice. Or how about here? Yeah. I like it. This one probably I'll leave it without a sentiment and then maybe add happy bird or something later. There you have it Masking. I actually debated creating this as a separate class in itself in my head, but I wanted to make sure people, my students understand that yes, this is really what you're doing when you are layering the stams front or back, the kind of images you need to choose. In real life if you had to do it with physical stamps, what it will take. There you have it. Enjoy. By I'll see you in next class. Bye. Okay. Next step is printing. I have given I have shared two different flavors of how you can do it. One in the basic card making class or another one with zero inch margins in the overall printing lesson. I followed the one in the overall printing lesson because I did mass printing of all the cards that I have made for this class. Total nine cards is what I printed together. Feel free to pick one and either one will help. This is the colored piece from the masking example where we had a balloon and then we added this. We were able to mask by layering them one in front of the other, and this is what we have. Again, I will finish the card and I will show you. It is. Here is the finished card. Please ignore the top part that got ched just a little bit because of I did some mistake with the fa I'll fix it. I did not want to take apart the entire card right now, but the point of that lesson was to mask images by placing them one in front of the other and you need a certain type of images. I think as long as you learn that and implement, the lesson is successful. There you have it example of masking. Okay. 9. Lesson 08 - No line coloring: Welcome back, guys. Today, we are going to take a look at printing our images to facilitate no line coloring. No line coloring is a very popular technique, especially amongst watercolor artists. What the technique is that it's stamping an outline of an image with the barely their ink. The t cleaner in from distress line is a very popular one. I have often seen people do it. The advantage of using that is that the ink blends really well with the watercolor paper, the texture and the color of watercolor papers, the cotton ones, especially, make anti cleaner in really suitable, and the lines because it is distressing and it is water soluble in, it blends when you color on top. That way, even if you had stamped lines to begin with, when you finish your coloring, those lines are nowhere to be seen, and it's a seamless process. It's a seamless work of art. Showing no lines. People do it for critters, people do it for florals and all those things. What we are going to do is we are going to print our image so that the lines are barely there. And it facilitates no line coloring. Just like with the rest of my classes, let's start with prepping our file. Again, I'm not going to use the file which we used earlier. Let's reinforce our learning. Today, I also want to show you how you can use the file in landscape mode because so far we have been doing a lot of portrait mode setup and all that. I wanted to show you that's not something you have to do always. You can set up your file. In a portrait mode and have a landscape mode, and the printed output can help you create landscape style cards. I've created a brand new PowerPoint presentation, going to pay setup and pick custom. In this case, I'm going to pick my width to be 11 and my height to be 8.5. That way, it is wider then taller. My guide rectangle is also going to be correspondingly landscape. I'm going to make my height as 4.25 and my width as 5.5, just like what you would have in an A two landscape card. Log the aspect ratio, move it here, and you'll see that it is perfectly one quarter of your paper. I'm going to remove the fill in this and then lock it. Sorry. Okay. Lock it in please. Let's go get our images and then I'll show you how to make it ready for the length gtering This lesson is going to be one of the simplest lessons ever. So, let's go ahead and get started. Insert pictures. Bringing in these two. And I want to make it a big Magnolia. I love Magnolias. I love the flowers. I love their leaves. I am a huge fan. Magnolias. I love them. Absolutely adore magnolias. This side? Yeah, maybe this side is better. Okay. Then just an can go here. That's perfect. For this one to be suitable for no line coloring. We're going to go to design, sorry, we're going to go to picture format and we are going to play with transparency. There you have it. I personally prefer the second last option. You can even change transparency yourself, second last option is 80, I think the last option is 95, I prefer 80 because my eyes see that the best. I have seen even with 95, it works fine if your eyes are able to see it. I even like to go sometimes 90 or 85%. Another thing I've noticed is if you are an advanced crafter who plays with something like scan cut. Even printing them at this transparency does not hinder your cutting, does not. Your brother cannon cut or the scanning machine is easily able to figure out the lines and cut through them. It works just fine. I'll have to leave it at 90 80-8590, something, but 90, that works for me. Sometimes I even go up to 80. But these lines are prominent enough, I think, 90 will work just fine. And you can go from there. Now when I color with really dark pink or green or any kind of I'm planning to use watercolor. When I color them, these lines will not show up as prominently, and they will be really blending with the color. So that's what this is about. That's how you get line coloring or that's how you get images stamped for line coloring when they are digital images. As for printing, we can follow what we have been doing in other lessons. We can either print it with normal margins or the way I have set it up in this particular file, we'll have to print it with zero margins. You can understand all about zero margin printing or close to zero margin printing in the lesson dedicated to printing. I mass printed my cards, so I'm going to follow that and show you the cutout pt line coloring. I think this is not the best. Example of line coloring. But as you can see, there are no printed lines. That was the point of this lesson. There are whatever printed lines came up, they are easily covered by the colors I added on top. It didn't take much to do it. That was what we did by adjusting transparency and that's the point of this lesson. Please do not take this as a good example of line water coloring or line coloring. But do take this as an example of how you can get your digital images ready for line coloring. I'll show you the card. Here is how it turned out. The final no line coloring card. As you can see, it's not the best. I keep saying it, it's not the best example. But the point is you're not seeing any printed lines and your image was printed correctly so that you can do no line coloring on top. That's all. I'll see you in the next lesson. Okay. 10. Lesson 09 - Dark Background: Guys. In today's lesson, we are going to do something that is trending right now. That is having a dark background and your images in the middle of it. I have seen Yana Smucul even design better press plate also for it where the dark background is already stamped. I'll show you how easily you can do the same thing over here with digital stamps. Let's get started. You know the drill, we are going to size our page to be custom and I'm going to keep my width map five and height as 11. I'm going for a portrait mode card or portrait mode. Paper sizing first and then the card. I'm going to insert a shape and size it to be 5.5 by 4.25. I'm going to lock this. Okay. Hoops. I should not do that. I should do 4205 first and then lock it, leave it there. I'm going to lock this just so that I don't accidentally move it. Ready? We are going to bring in our image and our image is going to be this beautiful water lily is one. I'm going to size it to cover almost the whole of my front and you'll see y in just a little bit. I want to size it like this. Maybe just a tad bit smaller. On this particular card, I'm planning to not have any sentiment. I will add sentiment as a ti card or something else on top. But while I'm designing this, I'm not going for a sentiment. I want this to be completely centered. I want to have dark background over here, and then I want to have a nice white border just because I'm going to get both of these to align in the center and in the middle. Okay. Now for the fun part. We are simply going to go to Phil. Let me go to I'll show you the bigger I'll show you the easy way to do it. When you go to format picture, you get this fil and line. There are plenty of things you can do here. All these things, you're welcome to play with them. Depending on the type of image you have, you might want to do, you might want to play with this three D format, rotation, what have you. In this particular class, I'm not planning to incorporate any of that, but I do want to incorporate mainly because it's a trend. These days. I love it. I mean, I'll be honest with you. I love it to see how gorgeous that instantly turned out. It's amazing. Look, there. You can also do gradient feel. If you want you could do gradient feel. I'm going to do this color or maybe Let me see maybe do it with black. Then, I don't want radial, I want this, but I want the color to be black. The other way. On this side, I want the color to be white. On this side, I want the color to be black. I just have to click on the particular location where I want what color. If I want that also to become black, I can do that, or I could do a little lesser black, and that I could do a little lesser black. Yeah. You can totally play with this. You could even have the topmost not be black, like not be white completely. There is a lot of gradient and this allows you to change how much of a gradient. The biggest reason I'm staying within black and white is because I want my printer to do black and white. I don't know whether the levels of my colored inks are appropriate or enough because this is going to use a lot of ink while printing, obviously. I want to make sure I get a good print. That's the reason I'm staying within the black Color only. But you're welcome to try others. You're welcome to try other color you like or even dark blue, especially if you have a colored printer, then by all means, have fun with it. Let me copy. I think this is what I want. I want this level of darkness in lightness. Just for giggles, I'm also going to copy this and show you another thing that you could do with the same fill option. Okay. So when you go to fill, see there are pictures or textures that you could put. There are plenty of options here that is available, especially especially if you have a good colored printer, then you can go to town with this totally get it printed that way. You can even insert your own picture if you have some kind of texture or background kind of an image already there, you can pick that up, or you could do pattern fill and there are lots of patterns. You can decide what color you want. I can probably do Yeah, get a dark background or that kind of a background. Okay. Or you could do this is also lighter. I mean, your imagination is the limit here. You can totally have fun. So both of them darker, that. I'm not going to do any of these for today's exercise, but I would love to see if you guys want to play with something like this and you guys create something like this. I love this one. I love this one. Yes, I do. And I believe. I thought there was a way to scale this. You see how the weaves are very small. I thought there was a way to scale this, but probably not here, not in this box or not in this particular when you're using the pattern as a background, but absolutely possible. You play with colors, you play with pattern, you get to fill it the way you want and with this dark, I'm going to use only this portion for printing, but by all means, you're welcome to do this. Try out. And then, when you print this, then you can there are two reasons why I did. What I did. Why I made sure I left a little bit of a border. As you might know, my printer or most desktop printers have to have at least one eighth of margin left. Okay. So even if I would have sized this all the way through, my printer would have left at least top and left side as white. It would have been white. My printer would not have printed there. So if I were to do something like that, then I cannot use all the way to the edge. I have to bring it in the middle, size it, and then print it. But I think this looks also nice with a little bit of a white border. I think that is one way that I can do it or bring it in the middle or at least slightly in the middle. That will waste a little bit of a paper, but if that's the look you're going for, that's the look you're going for. I went with something in between where there is enough white border so that my little inadequacy of my printer is not a big problem. There you have it created background. Just a few clicks, and You don't have to do a lot of ink blending, you don't have to do some fancy masking or coloring or any of that. And you have a dark background on your image. One other way to do this would also be to take advantage of this image being transparent other than the actual florals. So let me remove the fill that we did. And so this is what the image is. And as you will recall, we did have it in such a way that the florals are opaque, but the behind is not. So simply we will use what we did with masking by adding a rectangle behind and making that a darker one. Very simple straightforward. I'm drawing a rectangle and I'm going to make it black and then I'm going to send it back. That's another way that you could achieve the same look with a darker background. And this rectangle is completely free for you to play with whatever we did with the gradient fill, you can do the same thing. You can size it, and this is one way you can even avoid the partial printing. It will it will definitely be looking similar to this one because remember the one eighth one eighth of an inch that it cannot print. So I think I would like to size it that way. But whatever you did in the above example, the same thing can be repeated just by layering another rectangle behind by taking advantage of the way this stamp was built. Okay. All right. Let's try this out, show me what to do, and please share your projects. After I did the setting up and printing it, this is what the final panel looks like. Please follow the printing instructions from other lessons like we've been doing, and this is what you should get. The card with a dark background. I'm loving it. I like how this turned out. That to none of this was blended. I did not have to do any plending, nothing. PowerPoint did all that for me. Dark background, digital image, there you have it. Okay. Okay. So this is what the card looks like. I trimmed off the white borders that came from printing and I mounted it on a card base. There you have it knowing blending, but dark background. Enjoy. Okay. 11. Lesson 10 - Editing Images: Hey, guys. We're almost towards the end of these lessons, and I wanted to drop by for this very important lesson, which is about editing digital images. This particular lesson comes with a lot of disclaimers. Editing somebody else's work and then creating something out of it should be done with a lot of caution. As creatives ourselves, we should respect the right of whoever created an image to decide what happens with that image. Unless you have explicit rights for editing images and you're using it for the intended purpose or the allowed purpose, don't do this. I only wanted to include this as part of the course to show you what's possible. To give you a taste of a little bit of advanced techniques of what can be done. But just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. In fact, the image that I'm picking up to use is my own image. I have full rights to it. I know I can edit it, and that's okay. But unless you have rights to edit something, do not do anything with this lesson. I know our feelings. I will not judge. But if you do have rights to an image, and if you have checked all the boxes, make sure everybody is okay with it, the creator is fine with it, then you can follow the instructions here. In most cases, what I've seen is digital artists are okay with people editing their images as long as it is in limited quantities and for personal purposes only. Make sure if this is the requirement, then you follow it when you are using the edited image. Also, just because you have done some minor edits. Now, the image doesn't suddenly becomes completely yours, give credit where credit is due, respect the creator and within the confines of all this things, you can go ahead and do what I'm going to show you to edit the images. That's part one. Part two is about the tool that I'm going to use. If some of you are Windows users, then you might have done something like this with Microsoft Paint, may not be as advanced or as fancy tools that I'm going to show, but probably at least a little bit you might have done. Again, Well, please follow all the things we talked about in disclaimer one if you're going to use even Microsoft Paint. On Max site, I haven't found anything as reliable or in fact, even on Window site, I haven't found anything as reliable or at least the level of advanced little bit of advanced edits that I'm going to do. That is a free version. I haven't found anything on any of the platforms. What I'm going to show you is a free option of a tool that also has a paid version. Okay. If you see yourself doing such edits, pretty often, then I would highly recommend get their paid version because the free version has a limitation on the number of saves you can do per day. Their paid version for all the amazing things that you can do with it is not that costly, honestly, even if I convert it to worldwide currencies, it comes to less than $1 or almost $1 if you pay for the whole year up front. I will share the tool with you. It is completely platform agnostic. It's an online tool. But again, Okay. All the things that come with online tools, all the disclaimers or safety features that you have to have with online tools, should also imply here. Don't upload images and start to update them if they have sensitive information. Don't disrespect somebody else's maybe photo or something. No, I would not definitely know. I mean, in my books, that's bad. Please. Even if I'm showing you how to don't do it. If you don't think that is the absolute right thing to do. Now let's take a look at the tool. So the option I'm going to be using is called Pixel, plr.com editor. Okay. They do have different options. They have options for express and so many different things. What we need for the purpose of this lesson is just this. Like I said, they have a paid version. Their paid version is very, very reasonable, especially if you see yourself doing more and more work with digital stamps and digital assets, I would highly encouraged to go with the paid version because it gives you unlimited saves per day, and it's also value addition. Also if you're using somebody service, it only makes sense that you should be paying them at least something. They monthly Cost or subscription cost, especially if you're paying upfront for the whole year is $1. And I think it is worth it. I am not an affiliate. I am not a promoter or influencer for their team or anything. I just loved what they're able to do, so I'm sharing it. Okay. Back to the lesson. Let's go and get our image. I feel like this image is a little more complex than what I want for my card, so I'm going to keep only one flower and get rid of this. There are lots of tools available here. What I'm going to be focusing is maybe two or three tools. First of all, eraser, I want to erase this connectedness and I want to get rid of this flower. Here are the brush settings. I'm going to reduce my size and I'm going to completely remove the softness because I don't want blunt edges to be created. I'm just going to disconnect them like so and delete. For the bigger portions, I'm simply going to use this lasso tool, it's called as I can simply select all of this and then delete to get rid of it at one go instead of having to delete smaller portions, go back to my eraser. First, I need to deselect, go back to my eraser and get rid of all this. I want to get rid of this smaller leaf, but I want to keep the bigger leaf and move it and I want to move it to another side. That's what I'm going to do. Get rid of this. To be honest, I am not paying attention to deleting the white portions completely, simply because I know I'm going to be printing on a white paper. It won't matter that there are white spots. I just want to make sure there are no, there are no black dots or lines. Now for the leaf, we'll go back to my lasso and select the leaf carefully. Command X or control X to cut it and command or control V to paste it so that I can select it independent of the main image, and that will select it. I'll bring it to this side and I'll. Yeah. Now you see these two layers, unlock the layer and bring that one down or move this one on top. I think that's what I want to do. That's all I want to do. I don't want to do anything else. Okay. Maybe there. Let me zoom out and see what it looks like. I can now that it is selected, I can also flip it go to transform and flip vertical. We do that in there. That's a better position and I'll bring it down. I think that's it. That's all I want to do with this image. I can see a bit of black over there. I'm want to zoom in and go back to my eraser, make sure I've selected the right layer and get rid of all the tiny little black dots which may appear. I don't care much about the white. Just enough. That's it. Now I will say file export Quick export as PNG, and I will download it to whatever location I want. I'll save it. And we can go take a look. That's it. Very simply within 5 minutes. We were able to make some minor edits. The image is still true to its original image, and definitely we should give credit ware credits due. And from here on out, you can make these minor images completely free of cost or if you would rather than pay a little bit of a fee to use their service. It's worth it. And go from there. This edited image on your cards and go from there. I think that's about it for this particular lesson. I may or may not create the card out of it because it's pretty self explanatory. You use this. We have seen how we have created cards with different images. This is just another PNG now. I can put it on my slide. I can make sure it fits inside the sizing rectangle and I should be on my way to make another card. I did end up creating a card with that image, and this is how it turned out. Okay. I also added some splatters just because I added a sentiment. In fact, I combined two things. Thank you for your and kindness. These were two different sentiment images. I combined everything on my slide, printed it on cancel mixed media paper, water colored it, and then trimmed it down to size and mounted it on a card base. That's what is the final result. I hope you like it. Enjoy. 12. Lesson 11 Shaped Card v1: Today's lesson is probably going to be the most fun one. We are going to create a shaped card. We'll start with the blank presentation, clean everything up and size my slide to be fit for the type of paper I'm using. In my case, it's going to be letter sized. I'm going to make my id to be 8.5 and my height to be 11 ". And we're ready. To create a shaped card, I'm going to take advantage of all these different shapes that are available in Microsoft PowerPoint or Word or most of the slide creation tools. I'm looking at these ones here, which are easy to cut. My goal for this particular entire course was to not have any special tools mandatory including any kind of laminator for foiling or a make machine for filing or a digital cutting machine, none of that. I only wanted to focus on having some kind of a program or a software to work with digital images and a reliable printer. I wanted to give you as many ideas as I can using just these minimal set of tools, but how much you can expand on that. I am going to stick to that requirement that I had set for myself for this course and not use any external cutting machine or anything. I'm going to stay with very simple shapes. If you have a digital cutting machine, the possibilities become immediately manifold. You can use circles. In fact, circle, also, if you have normal dies or you're good with for cutting, you can definitely go for circle or a heart maybe. But I think this shape, this one, any of these great, this one, amazing even these where one of the corners rounded. You can go with that. There might be some where there are banner banner shapes, amazing, beautiful, speech bubbles. Yes, another great way to create a shaped card. Today, I'm going to keep it as simple as possible. I just want to get you started in this idea, but then I definitely would love to see how you expand on it. We are going to go with who I see a pocket. I would love to create that too. Sorry, I got distracted. I'm going to go with the hexagon. By default, it comes with some setting, and I want to have a card that fits inside a six by six envelope. So I'm going to go as far big I can as can fit inside that side. So none of my sides will be bigger than six. The simplest way to do this is to lock the aspect ratio and take the bigger side and make it six because that's what you want. It will automatically adjust the other side and you don't have to do any math. You don't have to do any fumbling around to figure out what should be the other side. Lock the aspect ratio. It will figure it out and it will it for you, one and done. And I want to make a copy of this and arrange it so that when I go to cut them, I can get by cutting one or two sides less. When I print it like this, I'm going to skip cutting on this edge for both my ***. I'm going to cut all around with my paper trimmer, I'm going to skip this, and this is going to be my fold line. I am going to make this the line color to be black or gray. Let's make it grey. Because I want to see it. When I cut, I want to be able to see this line. But that's all that's what I want to do with it. Again, this particular type of card making will not be very paper optimizing one because obviously, when in real life, when you're doing this, you won't have a lot of optimization on the paper. When you're creating a shaped card. But it is what it is. Sometimes you have to sometimes you have to pamper yourself or your recipient. Okay. Now we're going to get a picture and I'm going to pick this one. I'm going to set it here and then expand as far as I can go. I think I will just leave it at that. Should I try to get a sentiment? Maybe. Maybe I'll go and get a sentiment also. I think I'm going to get happy birthday. I'll pick a sentiment from somewhere else where I might have used it already. I'm thinking I had a happy birthday sentiment on playing with sizes or birthday wishes. This is one good one. Okay. Let me go grab a sentiment. For the sentiment, I think I want to make this a birthday card. I'm going to grab sentiment image and make it like that or right there. I sent. No, don't like. I'm not sure I like that either. I'm going to make this slightly smaller and probably leave it there and I'll move this towards the side. Let's move it so that it's coming from one corner or skewed towards one corner. I don't mind if part of the leaf gets cut over here because I'll cut on the line and that leaf can stay happily where it is. I think I'm good with this. So I will go ahead and print this, and I will show you exactly what I mean by cutting on the lines and assembling this as a shaped. I'll see you in a bit. Okay. So we are at my crafting table, and we are going to start cutting apart the panels that we have already printed. So on each paper, I have printed four card fronts and this last one is a shaped card. These are the leftovers from my nine by 12 papers. And I'm going to use my normal gear print trimer to the trimming. So let's start with the shaped card first. I'm simply aligning each one or lining up each of the lines that we have onto the cutting blade and trimming it off. Some final trimming or the final fixing things, like all that I will do by either Cesar's or separately. I'm trying to preserve that leaf. I don't know if I should say. I done, I am going to score here and fold it and then the rest. I'm sorry. My supervisor decided to pay us a visit. Very carefully. I'm going to extend it just because I want to fold all of it. No, at this point, I'm not majoring anything. I'm just making sure I'm scoring in the straight line. That's it. Okay. Is that done? I got my scissors. And I'm following the line. Okay. I don't know if I should preserve this, but for now, let's see if I can. There. Then I will trim these using the trimer again and I will fine tune. My this is simply it. Yeah, no point keeping it around like that. I know there are some lines over here. I'll try to get rid of them with my sand razor and rest of them, I will simply color and you have a shaped card. The other two sheets are pretty straightforward. Cut in the middle, then in the middle and I'll have my panels. I'll do all of them. I'll color and share them at the end of each lesson. This is how the card finally turned out to be. I used watercoloring with dent intense pencils and also ans B, the copper you see is done with the paint pen, copper paint pen. And I also did one extra step here. I die cut this entire thing using my hexagon die. Just because I wanted to get some proper size that will fit inside square envelope. I could have totally major date, but just because it was convenient, I have hexagon di, I used it, and that also helped this paper not warp as much. The thing to note is when you have a shaped card like this and you want to preserve the connection between the front and the back, you will line up your die edge to not cut this side. So you line up your die edge to be outside, at least the connecting edge the edge, which is going to go over the connection, and that helps keep the card intact. This also did not bleed as much. Only my paint pen left a little bit smudge here and there, and I was okay with it. So I just left it like that, and this is the finished card. I hope you like it. Okay. 13. Lesson 12 - Printing and assembling - Part 1: Come back. Today's lesson is all about printing. And although in the course syllabus, I might place this last. I'm sure this will become your reference or go to lesson even now and then, even in the middle when you are watching some other lesson, and it's totally fine. I'm going to talk from my personal experience, and this is just so that I can share my learning, but please take it with a grain of salt, do what feels right for you because I know when it is a global community that we live in, paper sizes, printer options, and all these things differ from place to place. I live in the US. I work mostly with the printers, papers, everything that are local here, my knowledge or my experience is going to be very much biased towards what happens in this country. Nevertheless, this is still going to be helpful and you can probably find something similar for your region wherever you are. With that, let's get to what I do when I print my card fronts. I am a card maker. I am not a water coolorer or a cop cooler and I don't pride myself in knowing very much or being the best in the coloring area. So I do not buy or I do not invest in any specialty paper. Not for CP, specifically for watercolor, although sometimes I might buy some good watercolor paper, but I don't heavily invest in any of these papers. I choose something which can work with either of the mediums and give pretty decent results. So my choice of paper, especially for my digital stamps is often can media mix media. Okay. In the US, this is what we usually see. We see cancel mixed media sized at nine by 12 ". There are also these mixed media, I'm calling them books, but there are also this mixed media wire bound pads that we get here for seven by ten size. Here it is seven by ten or nine by 12. I think there is also a 5.5 by 8.5 or different sizes. In my world, what I have realized is the situation is like this. My printer, which is a brother printer, the name of the company is brother, the maximum size it can support is 8.5 14. I prefer to buy my paper pad in the size of nine by 12 because this is the most economical in terms of scale for me. The nine by 12 paper here, even if you notice here, nine by 12 pad here costs somewhere around $11 or something. And the seven by ten is costing at least 12 point something. Plus, if I buy seven by 12 in terms of card making, I could probably do 60 sheets. I could probably do five by seven cards, print on the seven side and then fold it to become this half, five by seven cards. But out of one bound material, I would get 60 cards because each sheet here is seven by ten, and I will print one card front on each sheet, and that will give me exactly 60 cards. Compare this with what I can do here. With the nine by 12, I can see there are no sizes that are letter. 8.5 b 11 does not exist here. With this, I can trim it down, make it 8.5 b 11 on each sheet, I can get two A two cards or four A two card fronts. My designs. So one of one of the reasons why I pick this is the economy of scale. With this, I can get six at least twice. So 120 cards out of one paper, uh, sorry, out of one pad. This pad itself is at least $1 cheaper as compared to the other size here. Plus my designs are more suitable for eight sized cards being in the US and not five by seven. So considering all these things, the economics, the usability of my stamps, considering all this. My go to paper pad is mixed media nine by 12 from Cancer. So that brings us to this. My printer prints maximum 8.5 14, my paper pad is nine by 12 and because of all the reasons I explained. The sizing of my stamps being suitable for a two. It's not that you cannot re size, but by default, they are meant for a two cards, and the economies of scale for my paper usage and everything. I print in letter size. All the lessons we've seen so far, I have focused on letter size and e two. You can of course convert it to whatever region or local you are in, but this is what works for me. I buy a paper pad, which is nine by 12. I use my paper trimmer to make it 8.5 11 and then I use that to get my printer to print because now it can support 8.5 and it can definitely support 11. And that gives me two a two cards or four card fronts. My usual method is to go with four card fronts because like I explained in one of the previous videos, I like dimension, even if it is a single panel, I'll probably foam mount it or add something or die cut part of it. So I do a lot of fun and games. I've never play one layer card kind of girl. So this is what works for me. The second thing I wanted to highlight about printing is the way we have used in individual lessons, we have focused on one or two cards. Typically, when I'm printing or when I'm doing something like a showcase for an entire release of my digital stamps or something like that, I want to print a bunch of cards together. That works amazingly well for me because I get more out of my printing and more out of my paper. And the way I do that is I combine all the showcasing things that I do for my release into a few slides, and those slides are what I print. If you see this, we have gone through several different slides here when I was explaining things in the lessons, and then from here on down, I have created this was about the flipping or mirror stamping. This was about masking, this was about no line water coloring. This was about dark background, this was about shadows, this is about rotate, this is about editing images and this is a shaped card. So after doing all this, when I actually go to print, I will combine and try to get maximum usage out of my paper instead of wasting paper and my print time. So out of all the nine, ten, 11 number of lessons we have gone through. I'm printing three slides, and that is going to give me nine cards. Nine because the ninth one is a shaped card. Otherwise, it would have given me probably 12. But three slides, combine them together, print them three sheets of paper, and I'm going to get nine. In this case, this is going to be a whole card, but nine complete nine complete cards at the end of it. So that's how I do printing. I wanted to share this with you just to give you some more background idea of what happens behind the scene. And in the in the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted to make sure you understand what happens and how do you make decisions. And I hope it influences or it helps you make some of the decisions on your side when you're working with digital stems. Okay. So now that you understood my printing methods and paper choices. Let's actually see what we need to do to make this kind of printing actually happen on our printer. There are settings we need to manage, especially the margins because remember, by default, your PowerPoint and your printer will like to leave at least 0.5 " on all sides. We don't want that. We're going to change it and we are going to make sure my printer knows exactly what kind of treatment I want to give for this particular printing. Okay. So I'll go to my print dialog box. I don't want to print any of these slides. So the first thing I'll do is I'll print 6-8 because those are the only slides I want. And I will make sure this double sided is off. I don't want double sided. I want it to print one slide on each page because I'm going to cut it out and then use it. Use each cut part in a different one. Also, I want to make sure there are no margins. The way to do that, you might have you might be able to see I've already done some playing with it. But the way to do it is you will add a new Height and weight and user refined margins settings. Your printer dial might be at least slightly different, but that's all right. Somewhere you will still see the ability to manage your margins, and that's what you will use. I'm giving my weight and height according to my electric size paper, and I'm saying margins should be user defined and I'm giving all of them zero. Even if I'm giving all of them zero in real life, it will leave about one eighth of an inch and wherever I have designed, I have accounted for it. And I'm going to name this as zero margin. You can see I've already done this here, but I just wanted to show it to you because that's what we'll be using. Say there now coming down. I do not want any scaling. I wanted to print exactly how it is to make the lines more crisper, I'm going to say, I have shadows to be printed, so I'm going to say gray scale or black and white. Gray scale made it look a little bit bad. Especially there. I can leave this alone, I think. Let's leave this alone. Media and quality, definitely we have to change. I'm going to make it heavyweight paper because this paper, although not too thick, it is still thicker and heavier than normal printer paper. Definitely, we have to do this. I'm going to make sure my quality is best. Feed can be autoelect because I'm going to put it in the normal tray. Layout. Yes, I don't want any layout direction or anything to be changed. Paper handling, I can leave it as it is. I don't want to make any changes, and then watermark should be off. There is one more thing you can do here. I can save all these like you can see, I've saved here. I can save all these as hard preset ero margins. I know very creative. But So I'm going to save this as a preset just so that I can get to it quickly next time. And once I do that, I'm going to go to the printer. It's a wireless printer, but I still like to watch. I'm going to go to the printer, put my papers in there and get to printing. I'll show you. So Skillshare could not take videos that were larger than two GB, so I had to split this video into two parts. We'll continue in printing part to please catch both the lessons to understand the full extent of what we do with printing and then cutting and getting the card panels ready for coloring and assembly. Please check that part out. Thank you. 14. Lesson 12 - Printing and assembling - Part 2: This is part two of printing. Skillshare could not take a video size that was larger than two GB. So that's why I had to split it into two parts. Please watch both to understand the full extent of printing and assembling things that we need to do. So these are my papers that I have trimmed to size, and I'm going to put them in the normal trap for my p. And I'm going to go here and do print. It's receiving data, it's going to print, and I'll show you the output once it's done. Here is what we have. Yes, the pages get a little bit warped at least because of the heat, but nothing that can be fixed when you found this or adhere it to a flat card base. Okay. Okay. Let's color this, convert them to cards. So we are at my crafting table and we are going to start cutting apart the panels that we have already printed. On each paper, I have printed four card fronts and this last one is a shaped card. These are the leftovers from my nine by 12 papers. I'm going to use my normal gear trimmer to the trimming. Let's start with the shaped card first. I'm simply aligning each one or lining up each of the lines that we have onto the cutting blade and trimming it off. Some final trim or the final fixing things, all that I will do by either Cesar's or separately. I'm trying to preserve that leaf. I don't know if I should, see. I do. I am going to score here and fold it and then the rest. I'm sorry. My supervisor decided to pay a visit. Very carefully. I want to extend it just because I want to fold all of it. And no, at this point, I'm not majoring anything. I'm just making sure I'm scoring in the straight line. That's it. Okay. I done? I got my scissors. And I'm following the line. Okay. I don't know if I should preserve this, but for now, let's see if I can. There. Then I will trim these using the KP trimer again and I will fine tune. My this is simply met. Yeah, no point keeping it around like that. I know there are some lines over here. I'll try to get rid of them with my sand razor and rest of them, I will simply color and you have a shaped card. The other two sheets are pretty straightforward. Cut in the middle, then in the middle, and I'll have my panels. I'll do all of them. I'll color and share them at the end of each lesson. By for now, M. I did something monkey here, but that's okay. I'll probably anywn this one. In case you didn't realize I'm lining it up to my four and a quarter mark. That's how I know. That's going to properly enough. Here you go. All these. Bit. These are the cards we have created throughout all the lessons in this class. The first one was basic ranging sizing, using Max of PowerPoint. These next two using the same image to create something significantly different by resizing it, mirror stamping, which is nothing but flip. We saw how easy it is to do with digital. Rotating. Again, very easy to do with digital, whether you're eyeballing the angle or giving a precise angle. Shadows, masking, layering or arranging shapes in front of the other. No line coloring, please don't laugh at me. Dark background. Again, no kinding PowerPoint did all the hard work, editing. Remember the disclaimers and shaped card. This was such a fun journey. I hope you enjoyed it too. I hope you do give ideas from here a try and share your class projects. I would love to give you a shout out, catch me on social media, and let's learn from each other. Thank you. Bye.