Create a Card

1. Intro to Create a Card: [No Speech] 2. Lesson 1 - Coming Up With A GREAT Card Idea: The first lesson is how to come up with a great card idea. You know, the kind of card that you see in a shop from across the room, and you walk towards it and you grab it and you hold it in your hand, and you say, Wow, that's a great card. That's the type of card that I want to give to my friends and family. That's what we're aiming for here today. But how do you come up with a great card design? It always starts for me with paper and a pencil and creating thumbnail sketches. So the first thing I want you to do is to pull out a letter sized piece of paper 8.5 by 11 ", and you're going to make a grid so that you have space for eight separate rectangles. And these rectangles are going to represent eight different card designs that we're going to brainstorm together. You're also going to draw a small horizontal line at the top of your page, and that is where we're going to put the copy for our cards as we are brainstorming. Now is the fun part of brainstorming a great title for your card. So here is a handy tip. The number one best selling category of greeting cards is the birthday card. Birthday is a card that retailers are wanting to buy all the time. There are some other really popular greeting card themes. Mother's Day is popular Christmas, get well cards, sympathy cards, and, of course, Valentine's and love cards. Back to our brainstorming session. Since we are focusing on birthday cards, I want you to think about different ways that you could say happy birthday. I'm going to put two different categories in each block here. Brightest of birthdays is my first idea. Happy birthday dearest is my second idea. Have a wild birthday is my third idea. You get better with time. You deserve a slice of cake. I'm so glad you were born. Have a very great birthday. And I hope your birthday is lit. Now, if you don't know what a thumbnail sketch is, it's not a detailed sketch. It's just a general quick idea to lay out art or an illustration or a greeting card. I have just brainstormed eight different ways that I could say happy birthday on a card. Now the next step is matching imagery with the words. This is one of the hardest things that people struggle with because mixing art with typography or lettering can be very challenging. We don't just want to slap a font on top of an illustration. We want the image and the text to work together to create this story that we're telling with our birthday. The first thing that comes to mind when I'm thinking about brightest of birthdays is a light bulb. The next idea, happy birthday dearest. I'm going to draw a quick deer. The idea is that maybe the text would fit around this deer. For the third idea, have a wild birthday, I'm drawing a bear with its mouth open, and he's kind of roaring. And so the idea is that you would have a wild birthday is having a wild good time, right? Something that I want you to consider, there are two simple tips to start with when you're designing a greeting card. One, start designing vertical cards as opposed to horizontal cards. Whenever you go into a gift shop and you see a wall of greeting cards, you're gonna notice that a lot of them are vertical. Because if they're horizontal, they're going to sit in the shelf, and it's going to be harder for people to see them. Also, they'll take up more shelf space. And second, we need text at the top of our cards. If someone is looking for a specific message, if all of your text is at the bottom of your card, it's going to be a lot harder for someone to find the perfect happy birthday card. The next design is you get better with time. Now, what popped into my head instead of time spelled TIME is what if I make time like the herb? Then I thought about cute little planters, T ten planters where people put their little herb gardens in. You get better with time, THYME and it can be a play on words. The next design is, you deserve a slice of cake. I'm just going to draw a simple slice of cake. This one, I'm going to play with putting the text right inside the object as opposed to having the text around it. You deserve a slice of cake. With this design, maybe a baby and a baby carriage. It's okay if some of your ideas are not great ideas. In fact, that's part of the creative process. You can't find the good ideas unless you're willing to make lots and lots of work, so it's okay if you're not in love with all of your thumbnail sketches. Yeah, ah, not crazy about that one. The next one is straightforward. I'm going to draw a strawberry. The idea is that they would have a very great birthday. I'm going to work the text around the object. And then finally, I hope that your birthday is lit. The first thing that came to mind is a matchbox where it'll be open. I'm going to draw some matches and I'm going to draw the little top parts of the matches where they light. I'm going to finish drawing my box, and then I would put the messaging right inside of the shape of the matchbox. So now that we have eight ideas, we're going to decide which three are our favorite ideas. And of those three, which one do we want to move forward with to make a new greeting card. And here's the fun part. Even if you don't use all of these ideas right now, keep this thumbnail sketch page because it could be a jumping off point for you to continue developing your portfolio or your greeting card line. So for me, I know the one that I don't like, so I'm going to put an X through it. There are three designs that I do like, though. I like the happy birthday. You get better with time card. I like you deserve a slice of cake idea, and I like the I hope your birthday is a It idea with the matchbox. Going to pick one to move forward with to develop into an actual greeting card. And I've decided that I want to move forward with the G better with T Illustration. So I love T actually, so I happen to have a couple of TTNs. As you can see, TTNs have really ornate labels. Beautiful packaging to begin with. So it's kind of an easy idea to play off. We're just going to put in our own lettering and our own messaging. So we've just put together our thumbnail sketches. We decided on an illustration that we're going to move forward with, and we're going to start illustrating the front of our card. 3. Lesson 2 - Sketch, Illustrate, and Letter Your Card: Are you ready to take that initial thumbnail sketch and turn it into the front of your greeting card? That's what we're going to work on in Lesson too. When it comes to greeting cards, the message is as important, if not more important than the artwork. So we have to really nail that perfect marriage of art and messaging, and we want to do it in a way so that the words really jump off the card. We're really focusing on our illustration, but also practicing our hand lettering skills. And hand lettering is so important whenever you want to be a licensed artist or when designing your own product line. So this is a great practice step for you. So we are building this entire card inside a Procreate that is on your iPad Pro. If you have your Procreate program, I want you to go ahead and open it up because we are going to create a new Canvas. First things first, most greeting cards that I sell are sized at 4.25 " by 5.5 ", the A two size. Whenever I'm making a canvas for a greeting card, I don't set up my canvas at 4.25 by 5.5 ". No, I double it up to the size of a letter sized piece of paper, and I want to make sure that my DPI is at least 300. I'm going to make mine at 600 DPI. By starting with a larger canvas and a larger DPI, that's going to allow me to continue to enlarge my artwork later if I decide to use it for something else like a sticker or greeting card or heck, I guess, a billboard. Now click Create Canvas and Voila. Your new Canvas is ready to work on. First, I'm going to pull out a sketching brush. I'm going to open up the sketching brush library, and I'm going to select the pencil brush. With that, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to re sketch my thumbnail that we created in the last lesson. Right now I'm sketching, the T ten for my artwork and I'm creating a little idea for a potential label for the front of my T ten. Then I'm going to go ahead and put in my phrasing. You get better with time. Now I don't have this blocked perfectly yet. I'm going to actually draw my sprigs of a time, and then I'm going to write out happy birthday. Now I'm going to use the selection tool. It's a little S shaped blue button in the top menu of the screen, and I'm actually going to be able to use it to draw around my entire T ten and move it where I want it to go. Isn't that great? You have so much flexibility with the iPad and Procrete and I'm going to move around my lettering so that I have everything to scale and position where I want it to before I go on and do my final drawing layers. So now that I have my sketch all sketched out with the pencil brush, I'm going to create a new layer. Then I'm going to select the toolbar icon and I'm going to go over to the second button, which is called Canvas, there's going to be a little button called the drawing guide that I want you to toggle on and then I want you to click Edit Drawing Guide. From there, you're going to see some buttons in the lower portion of your screen, and we're going to go to the furthest right button called symmetry and we're going to select that. You're going to select Done and now we're going to test out the symmetry tool. So you can tell that the symmetry tool is activated in your layers because it will say assisted underneath the name of the layer. And whenever I grab a new brush, I'm going to grab this Nico rule brush. I'm going to now show you exactly how I use the symmetry tool to make lettering guides for myself whenever I'm drawing on like a shape. So here you can see, I have created one line, and it connects from the left to the right hand side, right in the middle because of the symmetry tool. Now I'm going to copy and paste this layer and I'm going to move it to the top of my lettering. And then I'm going to combine these two layers by dragging them together. Essentially, I have created a space, a guideline for me to write the words happy birthday, and it's going to look incredibly uniform because of this guide that I'm using. I'm also going to take the time to draw a middle guide, and that's where I'm going to have all of my lettering overlaps in the middle of the H in the middle of the A are all going to rest on this middle guideline, and that's going to help my lettering look really clean and uniform. So I've written the words happy birthday, but I'm going to create a brand new layer and redraw the lettering for happy birthday, making sure that the tops of my letters touch the top of my guide and that the bottoms of my letter touch the bottom of my guide. I'm going to retrace it in a new color so that you can see it really easily. Something I do for myself is I start drawing my text from the inside and then working my way out on each edge. Whenever I do this, I'm able to see how much more space I need for my text for it all to fit on my canvas properly. As you can see, I've run out of room for the H and the Y for my words Happy birthday. This tells me that I need to scale down the sides of my text so that everything can fit at the top of my canvas nice and tidy. Now that I'm happy with the positioning of my lettering, I'm going to delete the black layer of text underneath my yellow text and then I'm going to be able to see my happy birthday messaging on my canvas. Now to go the extra mile, I'm going to grab that S selection tool and I'm going to move around some of my individual letters right on the layer and I'm going to be able to add a little bit more even spacing in between the H and the A, for instance. We're going to leave our lettering alone for a bit because now we're going to build the actual illustration for our card. I'm going to use the symmetry tool again to quickly draw this rectangle. Once I have a solid rectangle, I'm actually going to drag and drop a color from the color selection area on my Procreate app, and I'm going to drag it right into my shape in Voila, the entire rectangle is going to be filled with turquoise. Then I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer. It's going to be yellow and it's going to represent the metal lip on the top and the bottom of the T ten. Then finally, I'm going to create the space that will represent the label part of my T ten. So for each color that you're going to use in your illustration, I want you to work on a brand new layer. This is going to allow you to have way more control if you ever want to change design elements or change colors of some of the objects in your illustration. Plus, you need to work in layers if you're going to be able to work with manufacturers for producing your own greeting cards or for licensing your designs for other products. Now on another new layer, I'm going to draw in my sprigs of time, and I'm going to use a green color. Sometimes during this phase, I will actually go to my sketch layer and I will hide it so I can get a good look of how my composition is coming along. And so now I'm going to work on filling in the composition of my greeting card, and I'm going to let you watch me work through this. I'm going to work on filling the space as much as I can. I'm going to move around some elements using the selection tool, the symmetry tool. And then this composition's going to come to life. I've decided to add a background layer of black to add some contrast for the inside of where the tin is. And then to add more depth for my time, I'm going to make a separate layer behind my first layer, and I'm going to draw the same time sprigs foot in a slightly darker green color to add some dimension to this piece. Getting the color just right is not important at this stage. We're actually going to focus on color in the next lesson, and that's why we work in layers so that we can easily change our colors. So don't feel like you have to be married to a color right now. Just grab a color and work with it. I'm pretty happy with where the composition is right now, so I'm going to go now to the label area and work on the rest of the messaging for my greeting card. And just like with the earlier lettering, I'm going to do my initial sketch layer to just lay out where I want the lettering, and then I'm going to create a brand new layer with the brush that I want to use. And I'm going to draw my lettering with the same Nico role brush that I used earlier. I don't like to use more than two lettering types in a greeting card. I feel like it gets a bit busy if I use more than two different lettering styles. So now, just like before, I'm going to use the selection tool to resize parts of my lettering that are too big for the space. I'm going to move objects around so that I can get this lettering just right. And I'm going to emphasize the words better and time by making them a heavier weight font. That way, they really pop off of the front of the card. And whenever I'm happy with the lettering, I can begin to erase the background texts that I used as my guide. I will repeat this process for the other lettering, the words you get and with. And as soon as I'm happy with the positioning, then I'm going to be left with my happy lettering. Remember, your final greeting card is only going to be a few inches tall. You want your lettering to be thick enough so that people can see the message from far away. Now that we've completed this composition for the front of our greeting card, we can move on to the next step in Lesson three, where we're going to focus on our color story and drawing in the final cute details of our greeting card illustration. 4. Lesson 3 - Choosing GREAT Colors & Final Details: Let's talk about color and final details for our greeting card. Oftentimes, I find that creatives are trying to work with way too many colors to begin with. So my best tip, whether you're doing greeting cards or working on your licensing portfolio or illustrating, is to work with a limited color palette from the get go. And here's a little cheat sheet of how I do it. I went through all of the work that I've made over the past two years, and I created this simple sheet. It's a color guide of the most common colors used at Giniber my Illustration company. And then I exported this document as a JPEG, and I air dropped it into my iPad. So then what I can do is every time I'm going to make a new illustration and I'm wanting to create a new color palette, I can go to my most commonly used colors, and I can pull up this sheet into a new layer and procreate. And from there, I can decide which colors I want to use to create my color palette for whatever project I'm working on. So you can do this same thing, too. You can create a document of master colors for yourself, save it to your iPad and use it whenever you need it. That's exactly what I do. So from here, I'm going to show you how I make my color palette. In the upper right hand corner of your canvas, there's going to be a little circle with color in it, and we're going to click that, and that's going to drop down the color menu. We're going to select palettes, and we're going to click that little plus sign at the top of palettes and select Create New palette. And now I'm going to title my palette Greeting Card Colors. I'm going to select Done. And now here's the fun part. I'm simply going to place my finger on whatever color that I'd like to add to my color palette. I'm going to hold it down on the color, and then I'm going to go over to the empty greeting card palette area, and I'm going to click there with my finger. I have been able to grab and drop the color that I want to add to my color palette. So simple, right. So I'm going to repeat this over and over again until I have all the colors that I want to use in my greeting card color palette. Feel pretty happy with this color palette. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to add or adjust it as I continue on. But right now I have this nice color palette, and then I can load it into my colors, and now it can be what I work from as I create my greeting card. Now I'm going to be able to go back to my layers. I'm going to hide the master color guide, and now I'm going to work on recoloring my layers of my illustration, starting with my background color. Go to the layers menu. You're going to select your background color layer, and then you are going to use your loaded color palette to select a new color. All you do is click the color you want the background to change to, and voila. You can try out all sorts of different colors for the background of your greeting card illustration. As long as you have that background layer selected, you can change the color. When you are recoloring other layers aside from your background color, the process is a little bit different. Select your layer, hold it down until a pop up comes out to the left hand side, and you're going to select Alpha Lock and then you're going to select fill layer, and then the color changes. Now that you know how to recolor your background layer and how to recolor your individual layers and your individual shapes and procreate, I'm going to let you watch me play around with finding the right color balance until I'm really happy with my final colors for my greeting card. Then I'm going to move on to adding my final illustration details. Now this part, there's no right way or wrong way to do it. I literally just try out color on each layer until I find something that I really like. Sometimes I'll try something, change it. I'll go back to a different color. I'll just repeat this process until I feel like everything is balanced. I want to make sure that my text is jumping off the screen that there's enough contrast between my background layer and my color for my lettering and that everything feels fun. I'm really happy with the colors that I've chosen, and I'm going to move on to adding the final details that really make this illustration special and feel like me the way I make art. So part of my signature style is that I add lots of tiny little lines and details to my art. So I'm going to do that here. I'm going to take my happy birthday lettering, and I'm going to draw some thin lines right on top on a new layer. And then I'm going to zoom in on the actual T ten, and I'm going to add tons of little flourishes and loupe de loupe lines, elements that I use and lots of my other artwork, but I'm going to use here to really embellish that beautiful T ten label. And again, here, I'm going to pull out the symmetry tool so that everything I draw on one side of my label will be on the other side as a mirror image. I will do a little bit more color adjusting on these flourishes to make sure that they stand out in the illustration, and then I'm going to grab the selection tool again to make sure that I'm happy with the final placement of where my text is at. One last round of little additional details on the label. And then I'm done with my greeting card design. And the next step is to actually lay it out into a PDF file write and Procreate so that we can print our greeting cards at home or professionally. 5. Lesson 4 - Layout Your Entire Card in Procreate: I'm going to share with you a special template that I've made so that we can create a greeting card from start to finish and procreate. And you can download it below this video lesson. We're going to click the Gallery button, and I'm going to show you the template that I set up, and then you're going to be able to do the same on your iPad. What I have done here is I created a brand new Canvas that is the full dimensions of an unfolded card on the right hand side, the front of the card, on the left hand side, there's the back of the card. And then I have these guidelines which are going to tell you where you need to keep your artwork so that it is safe during printing and production. So here's how you're going to set up your own Canvas. Whenever you go to make a new Canvas, you're going to create a canvas that is 8.75 " wide by 5.75 " tall. You're going to make your DPI 300. That's the size that you need to be able to professionally print greeting cards, and then you're going to click Done, and that is how you will set up the basis of your canvas. Then what you're going to do is use a template that I'm providing to you. Just insert it into your Canvas. Go to your tools. Click ad click Insert Photo. And you will have saved this P&G to your iPad. And look, it places perfectly right in the middle of your canvas, and it is its own layer. It's transparent, and you're going to use this as your guideline as you lay out the front of your card. What I like to do is I start with my template, and then I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to go ahead and name it front. I'm going to make another new layer and I'm going to name it back. Then I'm going to make one more layer, and it's going to be called logo because all cards on the back of them have a logo present to show people who made the card. So as you can see, my layer that is my template, I am renaming it template so that I can stay nice and organized. I'm going to go back to my gallery, and I'm going to select the toolbar, copy Canvas. I'm going to go back to my gallery, I'm going to go back to my card template. I'm going to go to the front layer. And I am going to paste that canvas in place. And now I'm going to position it so that it is where it needs to be on the template. I'm going to move my front layer below the template. And because the template is transparent, I'm going to be able to see those guidelines right on top of my artwork. If I were to just center this right in that template, it would be slightly off center. We would have plenty of space to the left of the H, but the Y, according to my template, is going to get trimmed and cut off. So that tells me that I'm going to need to reposition my front of my card to make sure that it doesn't get cropped off. Just so you know how this template works, the outermost edge is your full bleed line. That means that any artwork that you make needs to extend all the way to those outer edges for production. The next interior line is your trim line. That's actually where the card will be cut. That's where you get that final 4.25 by 5.5 inch size when the card is folded. Then finally, the most interior lines are your safe zones. That is where you want to make sure that no artwork or text extends outside of those lines because it could accidentally get cropped off during production. I'm going to make sure that my H and my Y are happily inside of that safe zone. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab that color pink by holding my finger down on that color, and then I'm going to fill in that white edge to the right of the card, and I'm just going to paint it in so that we no longer have a white strip. After I've painted that, we're going to have to go to the left side of the card where the H is at. And I'm going to simply erase that pink edge that is extending over the line, and I'm going to erase it so that there is no pink going over to the back side of the card. Now that I have this laid out as needed, I'm going to hide the template, and I'm going to just test it to make sure that everything is where it needs to be. Well, you also have the back of your card, and I always like to think of the back of the card as an opportunity to show off surface pattern design. I'm kind of known for putting my repeat patterns on the back of my greeting cards. So I'm going to show you exactly how I do it. I'm going to move on to the back layer, and I'm going to select the back layer. And I'm first going to decide on a complimentary color that I would like to make the basis of my back of my card. So I'm going to grab that red color and I'm going to actually draw a rectangle. And once I've drawn a full rectangle, I'm going to be able to drag and drop the color red from the color menu, and the entire rectangle is going to be auto filled with the color red. Boom, just like that. Now I'm going to move the back layer below the template to make sure that everything lines up right where it's supposed to be. So because I love to draw and procreate and create repeat patterns all the time, I can use what I already have, leverage existing art to put it on the back of my greeting card. So I'm going to find this fun little doodle that I made kind of a background pattern filled with lines. And I'm just going to show you it's one layer. It's just black and white. So I'm going to copy that one layer, that top layer. I'm going to go back to my card template. I'm going to create a new layer right on top of the back of my card, and I'm going to paste in that linework layer. And now I'm going to resize it so that it fills the back of the card template. Then I'm going to copy and paste that artwork again and I'm going to move it down so that it hits right where the pattern should repeat. As you can see now, I have this really fun textural repeat pattern on the back of my card. I'm going to combine those two layers that I just placed onto the back of my card by grabbing each layer in the layers menu and dragging them together, and now I'm going to play around with different colors for that texture to see what I like best. And now I'm going to add my logo. So here's a fun tip. You can heap a P&G of your logo on your iPad. I just go into my logo layer, and I'm going to insert a photo of that PNG. I'm going to resize it so that it is the appropriate size for my greeting card, and I am going to place it centered in that logo space. Now, as you can see, my logo that I'm using is not a square, but that's okay. I'm just using this as a guideline to make sure that my logo is centered on the back of my greeting card. And now that I'm happy with the back of my card, I can do any touch up work that I need to on each layer. Once I've checked to make sure that all of my artwork is within the guidelines, I am left with my greeting card ready to print, and I will show you how to print it in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 5 - Print Your Cards At Home Or Online: It is time to print your greeting card. We're going to go to our iPad. We're going to go to the layer where we have our template and we're going to hide it. We are going to go to our tools, and we're going to click Share as a PDF. Click Best Quality, and it's going to begin exporting your document. I'm going to airdrop my file right to my MacBook Pro that is near my workstation. And instantly, my PDF is going to be sent to my computer in my recent downloads file. I'm going to open up that PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Then I'm going to select my printer. I use an Epsin Sure Color 800. It is my favorite printer. We use it for color proofing. We use it for all of our art prints in our studio, and you can use it to print greeting cards. I am going to click Print. And now here is that piece of paper coming out of my Epson printer. We're printing on Epsin uncoded ultra premium presentation paper. That's my favorite paper. It's a lightweight card stock. It only takes about a minute for an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper to print from this Epson printer. Now I'm going to show you how close the color matches to my iPad. It's almost exactly the same. Now I'm going to take this to my old trusty paper cutter. And if you remember, we laid out this document with a bleed, so I'm going to trim a quarter inch from each edge of my card. And now I'm going to fold my card in half. We have a finished greeting card. Now, if you want to give your cards as gifts, printing them at home is totally fine. We went from our thumbnail sketch to working on our iPad to create the illustration to having a finished greeting card. It looks perfect. If you want to go the extra mile and actually sell your greeting cards, I'm going to show you now how to order your greeting cards on Uprinting, which is one of my favorite online greeting card printers. So you're going to go to Uprinting and you're going to select folded greeting cards. Once you're on this page, there is a drop down menu, and I want you to drop it down and select the card size 4.25 by 5.5. Your paper stock needs to always be uncoded paper. I'm going to go with 14 point, and we're going to make sure that we're only printing on the outside of our cards. If you wanted to order envelopes directly from U printing, you could absolutely do that, and it would save you a step when you go to sell your greeting card. When you're first printing greeting cards, you're not going to want to order too many because you don't want to be sitting heavy on inventory. So I want to show you that you can order 25 cards, and it's going to come out to $0.94 per card. That's fantastic because whenever you sell a greeting card on your own website, price it at $4.50. You have plenty of profit margin in order to sell your greeting cards on your website. Now we're going to click Upload your file and order now because we already have your PDF file on your computer, you're simply going to upload your card file, as soon as it is uploaded, you're going to continue. You have the option to either print as soon as possible or to get a free PDF proof email to you. I always when I'm working with a new printer, get a PDF proof to make sure that I like how everything is laid out. If you ever want a hard copy of your card before you go into production, you can pay $35 plus shipping to get a hard copy of your greeting card. Go ahead and title your project because you printing will save this for you. And if you ever want to reorder, you can do it super easy. After I've titled my card, I'm going to click Checkout. And in a matter of a week, I will have a beautiful stack of my own greeting cards ready to list on my website. And while I'm waiting for those cards to arrive, I am definitely going to upload this design to my licensing portfolio so that I can leverage that art even further. I always say you make art, and then you do as much as you can with it. So what else can you do with your greeting card design? Can we change the messaging from happy birthday to something else that will be a cute print? And just a reminder, friends, a pun intended, you're going to get better with time, too. The more that you work on your art and your illustration style, the more you practice your hand lettering, the more robust your portfolio is going to become, and the more confident you will be in your work. You can do this. Now, are you ready to go make your own greeting card and procreate? I cannot wait to see your projects. Be sure to share them online using the hashtag. Create a greeting card. I'm Stacey Bloomfield Thanks so much for hanging out with me. I'll see you later.