Create & Sell Beautiful Mixed Media Art Prints!

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. I'm an low folate illustrator, pattern designer and mixed media artist living in Mill Valley, California I'm so excited to talk to you today about my newest class. Create beautiful flora bouquets and sell them on society. Six. This is a mixed media class, and we will begin by painting loose vase shapes using acrylic paint and a scraping technique that I will demonstrate for you in class. Will then sketch floral elements and motifs that will become a part of our okay, will scan and digitize both the vases and the sketches into Adobe Illustrator, where we will create a color palette. Colorize are floral motifs and assemble everything together into a beautiful bouquet. Once our bouquet is finished, I'll teach you how to set up a free account on Society six. A print on demand service where you can upload your artwork and sell it as an art print. I will walk you through that step by step, so by the end of the class you will have an account and you'll be able to sell the work you created in the class as an art print. All you need for this class is some acrylic paint in colors of your choosing and an old beat up credit card. Some watercolor paper. I prefer hot press, £140 paper, but mixed media paper will work. Just find two your sketchbook and some pens and pencils to draw your floor motifs. And finally, an account with Adobe Illustrator, which you can try out for free. They offer free trials at adobe dot com. This class is great for everyone. No matter your abilities, I'll walk you through each lesson, step by step, so just follow along and will create a gorgeous floral bouquet together and you'll learn how to sell it on a popular print on demand site called Society six. I'm super excited to share these skills and techniques with you so hidden role and let's get started. 2. Vases & Floral Sketches: Hi there. In this lesson, we are going to get started with the acrylic vases that were going to make. And so I'm going to show you my set up. I just work at my kitchen table, and I have a couple of acrylic paints that you can see in this photo. They are just a yellow and a blue, and I'm using watercolor paper and I'm just taking the tubes of paint and I'm making those little lines. And then what you're going to see me do is take my credit card and I'm going to do this scraping technique where I basically scraped from the top and move down the page. Sorry, my hands a little bit in the way, and what I like to do is I like to have an extra pad off to the side where Aiken scrape any extra paint that I have and use that sort of as ah as, ah, overflow pad, if you will. And then what I generally will do is I will scrape several times to make a more organic looking shape. And so that's what I'm doing now and now I'm going to scrape the rest of the paint off on my overflow pad, and I just use that basically for collage and other mixed media projects. So this is what my blue and yellow vase looks like on there's my overflow pad. I also wanted to show you another version that I did that was with some pinks, sort of red and pinks. And then this one, it's it might be a little bit easier to see. I'm actually doing it using an overhead camera, and I'm going to use yellow and red this time and you can see I'm not using that much paint . And then I'm going to be using my credit card to scrape downward like I did in the prior video. But it's kind of fun to see it from up above. I like to then think a little bit about OK, where do I sort of want my vases to start? How do I want to handle the bottom? And in this particular version, I do really like to sort of scrape the credit card along the bottom of the vase so that I can create a little bit of either a shadow effect or I just like the sort of unfinished look that I get when I do that along the bottom. So I wanted to show you that as well. But it's very easy. And so I'm really looking forward to seeing the ones that you guys make. Let's move right into the sketching part of this class. What I like to do when I am sketching floral motifs is I either like toe have some images that I found on either Pinterest or on instagram or frankly, more often than that, I actually have usually have some flowers around the house, and so I will use those as my inspiration. And I have been participating, actually in 100 day challenge since the first of January. And so I'm also starting to feel based on having done sketches every single day so far in the challenge. I'm feeling a lot more comfortable just doing flowers from memory, and you'll see that I'm sketching here some of my very favorite flowers I love to do Ah, eucalyptus leaves. I think that they're really beautiful, and I also love their color. I also really enjoyed drawing daisies in of a bunch of different varieties I never tire of , of drawing and sketching daisies. And then you'll see that I'll also probably do a little rose, and I'm going to have these actually go fairly quickly so that you can see them in time lapse. And my only sort of comments here, in terms of tips and tricks for you in the class is I'm sketching, as you can tell, using Ah unit pen micro liner, and I'm comfortable just doing it from the get go without tracing in pencil first. But if you feel more comfortable drawing in pencil first so that you can erase, and then if that makes you more comfortable, what you'll want to do before we scan these into the computer is you'll want to make sure that you do use a nice black pen to trace over your work so that you can get a better result when we're actually scanning or if you don't have a scan or you can take a photograph of your motifs and that will work as well, and I'll definitely get to that and cover that in that when we got to get to that section of the class, I like to try to fill my whole page with as many motifs as possible. I may not use all of them when we're actually assembling our bouquet later in the class. But at this stage, I like to sort of let my imagination run free and capture different types of flowers that I think will look really pretty together. And I think this last one that I'm doing right now is just a small little rose. That may be a very pretty hero item in the bouquet that we create in the class. So have fun. And please don't forget to upload images of your vases as well as your floral motifs into your project area for the class. And I will see you in the next lesson. Bye for now. 3. Scanning: Hi there. Welcome back in this lesson. We are going to scan our artwork into the computer and we're going to do two things. One is actually bringing in our floral motif motifs, which I'm gonna do first. And then we will also scan are vases that we did with the acrylic paint. Or you may have done them in water color, and I'm going to do that next. So what I do is I go to my apple menu on my Mac and I go to system Preferences, and I click on printers and scanners, and I know that my scanner is actually this office jet. So I click on that and then on scan and open scanner, and then the scanner starts to warm up. I have my You can't see it, but I have my artwork on the flatbed. So up here, you can see under scan mode that it's selected the flatbed. It's taking a snapshot of my artwork right now. You can probably hear it in the background as it's doing this overview scan, and if that does not take very long, then once it brings my artwork up there a couple of different ways there, It makes a little bit of noise. So I apologize if you can hear it in the background, the there a couple of different ways that you can scan in your work. First, you want to make sure that these particular drop down menus have been set properly for your artwork. So in this particular case, this is black and white, and so I have it selected its black and white. When I scan in the vases, I'm gonna click back over to color because my vases are in color paint. Then I always pick a resolution of 600. Sometimes I picked something even higher than that if you're going to be working in photo shop. But since I'm working an illustrator for this particular project, I'm gonna leave it in 600. Then I scan to my desktop. I basically leave the rotation angle on the auto selection alone. I give my are working name. In this case, I'm gonna call it floral Elements. I scan in J peg. If you're working with watercolor work, I might recommend that you actually work in either tiff or paying to get even more resolution. But since in this case, we're doing it from a black and white sketch in ink. I'm gonna leave it as a J peg. You can do some manual color correction, at least on my scanner. I have a tendency to leave this alone because when you change the brightness or the contrast, you frankly are only changing kind of what's around the document. You're not changing your drawing too terribly much. And I just find that I can better adjust what I wanna have happening inside my floral elements if I actually do that Correction in illustrator, as opposed to trying to toggle thes switches manually on the scanner. So I go back to just restore defaults and then, in terms of type, I leave that alone on my scanner. It doesn't really matter if I pick picture or document, and everyone scanner might be slightly different. But basically, now that upset thes elements or these parameters, all I need to do is select my artwork, and in this particular case I'm going to select the entire page because I want to image trace all these elements, and I'm gonna be using him in the same document so I don't need to bring them in one by one . But what I mean by that just so that you know it's an option if I delete this box that I just put up here. And if I decided, for example, that I was really only going to use this element and this element and maybe this daisy, I can actually scan them in individually by putting a box around them. You just have to make sure that you click on the box. If you didn't properly surround Theo entire motif and then click on the side of the box that you want to extend and just click and drag it so that it's beyond the boundary of your element. And if you have elements that in this particular case when I drew them, they're not overlapping each other, although these boxes are and you don't have to worry about that, this will scan. This motif will scans completely separately from this motif from this motif, etcetera, etcetera. If you wanted to scan them in individually, as I mentioned, I don't do it that way because I know I'm going to bring in and use probably use all of these elements, and even if I decide that I'm not gonna use them all. At least I will have scanned them. And then they'll be in my illustrator folders so that I can use them on another project if I decide I want to. So let me click in drag over the entire element the entire page again. And then I'm just gonna click scan. I'm saving it to my desktop. And so it will take a couple of minutes for Well, maybe not a couple minutes, but it will take, you know, probably more than 30 seconds to scan because we do have it at 600 d. P. I. So it takes a few minutes, but not that much. You know, not that long, and once I save it to my desktop will be able to move. It will be able to move to the next step in the process. Now, one thing that I want to make sure I mentioned is if you don't have a scanner, that's totally fine. What you can do is take a picture off your motifs, and you can also take a picture off your water, your vases, your acrylic painted vases that we did in the earlier lesson. and I'll show you once we get into illustrator how to render Ah photograph of your artwork . It works almost the same way as rendering and what it's called. And it's actually called image traits and illustrator, and it works just as well for a scan to piece of artwork as it does for a photograph. Really, the only downside toe a photograph is there's more background material that you may need toe delete, and depending on what kind of background it is, it could be easier or a little bit tedious. And then the second thing is, if you're taking photographs of different items like in this case, are floral motifs are on a different piece of paper than our vases. You want to make sure that you're taking your picture to the best of your ability from the same distance, so that you're not creating kind of a dichotomy of scale on once you actually import those photographs into Illustrator and we move on to image tracing them so. But that is to say, if you don't have a scanner, you can absolutely take pictures with your smartphone. Just import those pictures to your desktop so that we can drag and drop them into illustrator in the next lesson. And here you probably heard in the background background my scanner finish up, and so I'm gonna close out, and it's right over here. I'm just going to double click on it to look at it and what I usually do, as I just rotate it to make sure it's in the orientation that I want. This is not necessary. You can rotate it once it's an illustrator, but I just have a tendency to do it here, and then it just save it, and it's not gonna cut off anything here on the right hand side of the left hand side. It just isn't showing it based on the window that I have opened. But if I expand my window, you can see that it's it hasn't actually gotten rid of anything that we scanned in. All right, now what we're going to do is we're going to scan in the vases that we painted earlier today, and so I'm going to open my scanner and it's going to need to warm up for just a minute, and then what we'll do is we'll see an image of the vases that I made this morning. I'm going to be scanning in the blue and yellow version that I worked on this morning, and my scanner is most likely different from yours because it's actually a really old HP office jet printer that also operates a scanner. So you may have even more capabilities in terms of how you can adjust for color for color. But but mine is good enough. I actually have been using it now, and I'm very happy with it. So up here on these parameters, it is already It's already selected color, so that's good. If it was on black and white, I would just go. I just used to drop down there, Select color. We're going to keep it at 600 DP. I I definitely would not do anything lower than that. I'm going to give it a name. And so these air vases, yellows and blues and I am going to keep it in a J peg format. What I'm going to play with for a minute is this image correction box. So if we hit that up and down arrow and then Tuggle to manual weaken, see whether or not it adjusts the image in a way that we like. And one of the things that I was trying to achieve when I did my scraping was I really did want to get these beautiful blues and bright yellows. But I wanted to get also a green when the two colors are on top of each other. And so having hit this manual color correction, it actually did a very nice job of making this green much more apparent than it waas beforehand and what my scanner does, which is great. And your scanner will probably do. This, too, is when you go to manual. It makes some initial recommendations based on the system software that it has. So I'm not even gonna play around with moving these sliders. But you can if you want to further sort of color, correct your image. So finally, all I need to do is highlight, click and drag across the vases so that I can get this entire piece to bring into Illustrator and I'm going to hit scan and it is going to start the scanning process. My scanner makes a little bit of a noise so you might be able to hear it in the background . It also sometimes has this progress bar, which is super helpful because you can see where you are in the process and 600 dp. I doesn't take that long. If you crank it all the way up to like 1100 it could take a full minute and 1/2 or so. So there you just heard in the background the little music it makes when it's finished. And so I can close out of both of thes screens. And why don't I double click on live vases so we can see them? And I think they came out or hate. They're beautiful and there's a little bit of a line here which I think is pretty. That's from the edge of the credit card that I was using. And, um, but they're very organic looking, and I'm really happy with them. So, um, go ahead and scan yours. And then let's move on to the next lesson where we're going to be importing both the black and white motifs that we created, sketches that we created and these beautiful vases, and we will move to the next step, which is to image trace those in Adobe Illustrator. So I will see you there 4. Image Trace: Hi there. Welcome back. So in this lesson, we're going to open Adobe Illustrator, which I have along the bottom my screen and we're going to create a new document. I generally like to work in a square format because I do post to instagram quite a bit. I generally just pick 1500 by 1500 pixels. I like to work in pixels. I'm just used to that and again because I use, um, I upload to instagram quite a bit. I generally work in a square format, so because these might actually be our prints, we The goal of the goal at the end of the class is actually to turn these into art prints so that you can sell them. I'm going to keep it in the color mode of C m y que, which is what you want for color, the color version. And then I'm actually going to make sure that we're at medium, 150 pp eyes so that we have really good resolution. The default is 72 I always like to crank it up at least a 1 50 sometimes even to 300. So, of course, your file size will be larger, but that's what I like to do. So I'm gonna hit, create, and we're going to get a new document. It's gonna be open right here on my desktop now and then I'm going to go to file place, and I'm going to find the two documents that I'm gonna work with right now. One is my floral elements that we scanned in earlier. And the 2nd 1 is the vases that my also just scanned in. And I think that because I actually work in the cloud or with I cloud that my There they are, my vases. We're not quite ready. But now they are. And so I'm going to place both of these documents by hitting place. And then I click and drag them across my screen kind of, you know, below. You can put them wherever you'd like. You just basically want to get them into this, uh, overall document. And what I like to do first is I click on the first document. Um, and I go over to image trace and image traces already open since I use it a lot with an illustrator. But if it's not open on your on your version of, um, of illustrator Just goto window and select image trace. So mine has a check mark next to it, which is why the boxes open over here. But if yours does not have a check mark by it, just goto window click on image trays and it will pop up. Um, because this is a black and white image. I am going to use what's called black and white logo, and as soon as I click on it, it's actually going to start to render my motifs. Since they're a little bit far away, I'm going to zoom in by going to Mile Zoom tool down here and then clicking and dragging over my motifs and then to stop using that tool, the zoom tool. I'm just gonna hit V like Victor on my keyboard to go back to what is essentially the selection tool. Now what I do now is I look at my the first render and or the first image Trace and I take a look to see whether or not I've gotten enough detail. And sometimes I like the fact that industries doesn't actually perfectly render my entire drawing and sometimes I really do actually want that additional detail. So the way to to correct that is to go back over to your image, trace options and under threshold. Right now, it's basically set in the centre at about 128 and I am going to on move it slightly to the right just by clicking and dragging to about 1 55 and it's going to render again and will be able to see whether or not some of those those definitely made a big difference Over here. They're still some bits that are not connected, but I think that's okay with the look that I'm going for. And so the last thing that I do here is under advanced, and my advanced is open because it's toggle it that you can see that this arrow is pointing down. If your arrow is pointing towards the word advance, just click on it and it will open up a bunch of different options. And what you're looking for is this. Ignore white and click on Ignore white because that will render the image one more time and actually get rid of the paper color that you can barely tell it's there, but it is there. And so you want to. You want to do that? Once you're happy with, you can continue to play around with some of these additional sort of dials and options over here and see if there's something that you might like Beth better in terms of how it's rendering your artwork. But those are generally my go to That's my go to approach that works really well for me. So when I'm finished with this stage, I hit expand appear along this menu bar. If you have an older version of Illustrator, you may need to go to object and click on expand right here. But in my case, I can actually I can just hit the expand button right here, and it will expand everything. And I know I've expanded it because they've all turned blue because it's now highlighting basically every single pixel that is in this artwork. Now what I want to do is I want to right click with my mouse and ungroomed them so that I can click off of that highlighted box. And now each of these is its own unit, if you will. Um, now what I generally do is I want toe group them together to make sure that if I do click and drag them that I'm actually not leaving any little bits behind. So, for example, it may be a little bit hard to tell, but when I move that to the side, I lost a little bit of this leaf. So I'm going to do command Z to go backwards, and I'm going to make sure I've selected everything. And I'm gonna hit command g to group it. And then I'm gonna move it off to the side one more time and just make sure that I didn't lose anything over here. Sometimes when you on group it will, thes items will still be viewed as illustrator as one entire piece like this motif is and so I don't have to go because it already is. But this one I can tell if I move it, I'm gonna lose all of those internal lines. And so I'm going to do Command Z again to go backwards. I'm going to highlight the entire motif and do command G. And now I know that it's all groups together and that I'm good to go and Sometimes instead of experimenting because it's just faster, I will just go and group them myself, because then I know I've taken care of it, and I'm not gonna run into any issues later. And that's probably just more efficient from, ah, workflow perspective. But you can decide how you want to handle this, and the reason it's important to group them is when we decide to color them and also, as we decide to place them into our bouquet, we want to make sure that we're getting the entire mood, the entire drawing and that we're not leaving any little bits behind, because as soon as you start leaving a little bit behind, it gets to be depending on how many steps you've taken. It's really hard to go backwards, and I'm also going to rotate this one and so to rotate an object. You basically, once it's highlighted, just could go to one of the corners until you see those two arrows with the Ark in between , um, and then hold down the shift key and rotate with your mouths and you'll move in 45 degree angles, and so you could move basically from to 45 degrees and then to 90 degrees and basically all the way around if you want, and then just release when you're in the location that you want. And there we go good to go. And as I mentioned to those of you who have been students of mine in the past, I kind of like to organize my work by with motifs that are kind of like each other together , because that helps me somehow or other sort of be strategic about, um, and think strategically about how I'm going to go about the color palette process. I'm gonna get rid of my date because I don't need that date down there. And now to zoom all the way back out again so that we can now go on image, trace our vases. I'm gonna hit command and zero on my keyboard, and it zooms me way back out again. So I can now see the vases I'm going to use down in this menu along the left hand side, the zoom tool, which you can also hit by just clicking the keyboard shortcut Z. And then, if you click and drag over the element that you want to zoom into you can make. It is basically a bigas you want to, and then what I do is I hit V like Victor on my keyboard to go back to that selection tool . Or you can click on the selection tool here so that you're no longer in the zoom mode and you're not continually zooming in closer and closer and closer now, since this is a color, obviously it's a color piece of artwork. We are going to use something different over in the image trace area. So under image trace were actually going to go to 16 colors. And because I only used two colors in this particular case, I think that 16 colors is going to be just fine. It's probably in fact, when we create a color palette out of that, it probably won't even be that many colors. But let's see what happens. So it basically digitized and created vector shapes for each one of the little elements that are inside this vase, which I think it's super cool looking, and I think it came out really great. I don't think I need to do anything else other than the ignore white, so I'm gonna click on Ignore White so that it renders one more time and gets rid of that background paper color. And is it, Um, continues its happening quite quickly. Then we need to expand it so you can either go object and expand, or you can click on expand if you actually have it upon the top of your toolbar. And now I'm going toe on group by right clicking and select on group, and I can tell that there are some stray marks down here because you're bounding box, which is essentially what this blue boxes. It should be right along the edge of your artwork, unless it's capturing little dots of, um, of pigment. No doubt that got caught while I was painting. So once you've on grouped it and you click away from the box, you can because you could. I could tell sort of where those elements were. I'm just going to click and drag until they get highlighted by my mouse, and I'm going to just get rid of them to clean up my image of teeny bit. And the way you can tell if you've got the ball is just click and drag over your image. And if now the bounding box is definitely touching for the X, the outer extremities of your piece of art, then you know that you've gotten rid of all of those little extra elements. So it is now in one. I believe it's all in one piece, but no, it's not. So I tried Teoh move a piece to the side. I'm gonna do command Z to go backwards. And I definitely want to group this because I wanted to stay one whole on item What? You can also I just noticed there. So let me just stop for one second. I noticed when I went to do command G that I also see to blue dots appear, which means these air also little stray dots of pigment. So when I'm going to do is click on one of a long and, um, I have to actually ungroomed by doing shift command G after ungroomed in order to be able to go back in and find those little teeny dots and delete them. And now, if I click and drag over the vases again and do command G very slowly, I'm gonna hit down. I'm gonna hit the command key. So everything turns blue and I can see I'm not gonna see anything that's not actually attached to the vase shape. And then it g to group. I'm now good to go, and I can move it as a unit. Now, what I like to do at this point is and we're gonna talk about color in the next video. But before moving to the next video, I like to do a little bit of cleanup on my desktop. And so what I like to do is I like to actually get rid of the canned colors that are in the swatches panel. And if your swatches are not showing up along this right hand column, go up to windows and just select swatches and minor open because they have the little check mark. And what I do is I click on the first color after black and white, and then I click again by holding this and I hold the shift key down on the last color, and then I drag all of them into the trash can. And then I just click on either white or black to make that read on square, Go away. And so Now I have a totally clean swatch panel, which is awesome. And what I like to do to begin the coloring process is I like to click on my vases and then go down here to the bottom right hand corner and click on this folder. And when you when you hover over the folder, it says new color group. And if you click on that, you're going to be able to create a new color group with all of the colors that are found in these vases, and I may want to use those either as part. I may want to use one of those as my background, or I may want to use one of those in some of the flowers themselves. So I like to start my color process by creating this before we move on to the next step, I usually give it a name. You don't have to give it a name, but I usually give it a name because I'm gonna save it. So I'm gonna call this blue and yellow from vases and just hit OK, And you can see that even though we selected 16 colors, if you remember when we were using image Trace. We didn't get that many because there just aren't that many in the paints that we used, which is totally fine. Then what I like to do is I like to make sure that I saved this, um, this color swatch by going to these bars over here that are to the far right of the swatches panel. And I click on those bars and I go all the way to the bottom to safe Swatch library as a I . And then the swatches folder, which is the default folder in Illustrator, will show up. I give the color group the same name. If I can remember what I called it. I think I called it blues and yellows bases. Remember if I had all those s is on it. But in any event now, if I go into another document, I can always find these colors again by going Teoh again, clicking on these bars over here, going to open Swatch library, user defined, and then I'm going to be able to find, um, blue and yellow bases. And in fact, it looks like I have may have done blue and yellow vases before. And so I have a couple of different versions of the off them that might be slightly different, but the point is, you want to save your color swatches because you may want to reuse them, and that's the fastest way to do that. All right, so I'm gonna do command zero so we can just zoom all the way back out again. So we have our vases. We have our elements that we're gonna create our bouquet from, So we're gonna move on to the next lesson where we're going to create a color palette. I will see you there. 5. Color: welcome back in this lesson, we're going to start to play with color and where we ended. The last lesson is I actually took all of the different colors that are in these vases and created a color palette from them, which we definitely will. I will probably pull from then. What I also like to do is I like to think a little bit about sort of complementary colors on the color wheel and so complimented colors for both blue and yellow are some oranges and some purples. And I had some prior color palettes that I've created for other projects that fall within those colors. And so I pulled them in here to from my saved color palettes. And I'm gonna play around a little bit with what I think might look nice here. And I do find it challenging to work on color while I'm actually recording these videos. And so I'm going to show you a couple of different ways to do color. But I don't guarantee that these air the colors I'm going to stick with. I might change my mind and decide to do something else off camera before we actually start to put our bouquet together. But the way in which I generally do this is I'll pick an element. And sometimes I like to play within families of elements. So, for example, here we have all of my sort of leaf or leaf like motifs. And over here we actually have more of my hero flowers. So I will usually start with one or the other group and try to kind of work through the different elements and pick colors that I think are going to be symbiotic are going to be pleasing to the eye and there a couple of different ways to to actually apply color. So the 1st 1 is if you select an item, one of your motifs and then you actually just pick a color from your color palette over on the right. You can actually change the outline of the element to that color. And so I'll go back and zoom in here again so you can see a little bit better what it is that I'm doing. Um, so that sometimes is a nice way to start. Then what I like to do is continue to have the high the item highlighted, and then I'll go over to my left hand panel and I'll actually pick the paint bucket tool. And the live paint bucket tool is the tool that's actually underneath the shape builder tool. So when you're going down your left hand menu, you may find the shape builder tool first. And then, if you right click on your mouse, the fly out menu will come out and then you can select the live paint bucket. Now this tool will only work if your motive is actually selected. And then what happens is you get these three little colors in little boxes like paint buckets. And if you click inside your motif, you're going to turn the item that particular color and to move across. You can see on the right hand side over here that it's actually on the same color that I did the outline, so I don't want the color to be the same. And so the way I like to work this is I use my left and right arrow keys on my keyboard in order to slide and change down this color wheel here or my color palette, rather to pick another color that I think is going to be similar, but not exactly the same. So I'm going to pick that one for now. And then Will you do is you basically click inside each one of thes motifs, And just so long as they're completely enclosed shapes, you can fill them in by using the paint bucket tool. And then what I do next is the paint bucket tool creates actually a an effect on your motif , and so you have to actually expand it in order to make sure that that gets applied and you'll be able to kind of continue to work with the with the item. So it's really important when you're using the live paint bucket tool that you actually remember that you need to expand before you move forward. Then, if I hit V on my keyboard V like Victor on my keyboard to go back to the selection tool, I can then click away from the from my element and decide if I think I like the way it's looking and what you may have noticed in my art. If you follow me on Instagram is sometimes I will start out with an outline and an interior color that's different But sometimes I will also either do the reverse where the inside color is darker and the outside color is later or I will actually go ahead and manipulate my item by using the eraser tool. And I will separate some of the some of the elements from each other so that I can actually apply color differently. And that's hard to explain in this particular example. But we will be able to demonstrate it better as we continue with this color lesson. So for now, I'm going to leave this as it is. You can see that there's some holes, actually, and where I drew the outline of this particular shape. Sometimes I like those imperfections. And so I leave them as is, and for right now that's what I'm going to dio. So then, if I pick another one of my items and I decide well for this particular item, I want it to be all of the same color. I am not going to apply this sort of, um, selecting it initially picking a color and then going to the paint live paint bucket tool in coloring in these very, very tiny areas that are that are that are white. I in my mind, at least for now, think that I want this to be all one color. So in order to do that, you actually want to pick the original tool that's in this sidebar. In that same area you want to right click again on the life paint bucket tool and go back to your shape builder tool. And what the shape builder tool will be will do for you is it's going to create one shape out of this whole motif when I click and drag through the open areas and what that will allow me to do. Right now, it's gonna colored in black because I left it black. But I can change the color later in one fell swoop. So if you drag basically through all of the open areas and order for the system to understand that you want to create one entire shape out of this element, then you don't have to expand it because it's not actually applying an effect. You just want to make sure you go back to your selection tool either by clicking on it up here on the left hand side or by clicking the or or selecting V like Victor on your keyboard. Um, now this looks like it's one whole element. I might have missed a couple pieces in here so I can go back to the shape builder tool and actually zoom in a little bit more so that I can see Oh, yes, There are actually a few pieces here that I want to incorporate into the hole. And you can scan up and down on your document, obviously, by moving your moving your mouth so that you can see if there any more tiny little pieces that you want to actually incorporate into the hole and all you need to do is basically click on them and you'll see that they disappear. And then once you're actually happy with the fact that there aren't any more sort of quote holes in, um, in this shape by zooming in really closely you can do, you can zoom out, and I like to zoom out by clicking on the zoom tool and then holding down the option key until my my magnifying glass changes from a plus sign to a minus sign. And then I just click in the center of the object that I'm working on to back it up, if you will. And now if I basically go to my selection tool by clicking on the on my keyboard. With this item selected, I can now decide what color I wanted to be by selecting a color over and like in my palette , and the entire shape is changed to that particular color, so that could be a very effective way to colorize certain motifs that you know you want to have in one call in one unique color. So then, if we pick thes elements, I want to show you 1/3 way to use the to colorize objects, and this one actually could be a lot of fun. So what I do it's actually called painting behind, and you're going to use a tool called the Blob Brush Tool, which is here again along your menu along the left hand side has called the Blob Brush tool , and it's actually the it's sometimes hidden underneath the paint tool. So when you first open illustrating eagerness, see a paintbrush and then if you right click on the paint brush you can pull, you can select the blob brush tool and this right now is like how enormous this this ah tool is. So I'm going to do command Z. To get rid of that, you can make this larger or smaller by using the bracket keys on your keyboard. And the right hand bracket makes the circle larger or the brush size larger, and the left hand bracket makes it smaller, and so I generally make it. What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be painting behind the shape in a color that's going to basically provide a filler effect, and it will be easier for you to understand what that looks like when we do it together. But the first step is to select the blob brush tool, which we did. Then I go over to my color palette and I decide, what do I want this actually to be? And since these air kind of like lavender stocks, I wanted to be a very light lavender color. Then I want to go back to my menu bar here. My up, all of my tools and down at the bottom, right above the this very last set of icons. There is a circle in the square in front of it. And if you glad is basically your drawing mode to tools, if you click on it, it's usually so. It's usually set to draw normal, which means you're drawing in front of something. If you click on draw behind, then what I can do is I can click and drag my mouth's to cull, arise around very loosely this particular item. And when I release my mouse, you can see that the black ink is still forward. And so this pretty lavender color is going behind the element, and we can still see my actual drawing. And I think that this is a really pretty effect, which I have started to use more recently. And the other thing that I really like about it is if I think, for example, that this element is going to be a little too stark in my overall composition with black on the inside. Once I've colorized the portion off this element that I actually want to put color behind, and so what I'm doing right now is kind of loosely going over the stem portion, and again it's coloring behind it. What I can do is go back to my selection tool. And then I can select the element itself. And Aiken decide I don't want it to be black. So I could, for example, change the opacity by going to my top menu bar, selecting this arrow right next to the word opacity and then changing the slider to make that not black but rather grey. And that could be really, that could be kind of a nice effect and still keep it in sort of the gray tones or what? I have a tendency to do more often. You can change it back by by either going command Z toe, undo what you just did, or you can just move this lighter back over when the object is selected. But what I haven't a tendency to do more than that is I will actually go over to my color palette and I'll pick something that is just a lighter variant on the color that is around the outside. And sometimes I'll pick a color that is slightly darker. Sometimes I'll pick a color that is slightly locked, slightly lighter. I'll probably play around with it until I find something that I think is really pretty and Um, And this may change, of course, again, when we actually play with it inside the vase. When we're putting together our actual bouquet, I think that my initial take on this is that it's nicer if it's actually a little bit darker than the exterior color, and I'm going to leave it that way for now. Now I can do the same thing with this element, or I could decide that I want to do something different. You It's totally, totally your choice. This is an interesting element because it's basically just a whole bunch of lines. And so, if I know, for example, that most likely in my final design, I'm going to have some kind of a colored background for behind my bouquet, then this element could be very pretty. Is a super super light color almost a white or off white and well could look very pretty against that backdrop. It's going to be hard for us to see it when we're working with it now because we're on a white background. But that will change as we actually create the bouquet and put a background color on our art board. So those air three different ways to colorize your your motifs. And I am now going to play around a little bit with these hero flowers and figure out what colors I actually want to use for them. I will continue to record so you can watch me while I work. And I will most likely speed this up and editing process so that you can you can see the way in which I work, but also not be bored to tears by watching my every mood at move at regular speed. I do usually like to zoom way in to see the element that I'm working with and then determine what I want to do with it. 11 tip I would like to share with you on this particular flower is I can tell already that my stem, which I'm probably going to want to make some version of a green, is attached to the flower itself. And as a result, I'm not going to be able to color it something different unless I separate it. And so I kind of alluded to that a little bit earlier. If you basically have your element highlighted, and then you go to the eraser tool. You can make the eraser larger or smaller by using those same brackets on your keyboard so the right hand bracket will make a bigger. The left hand bracket will make it smaller, so I want to make it as a kind of small as possible. And I may in fact even zoom farther in because all I want to do is create a separation here and also here along the pedals, so that I can color the stem. Some version of green and won't won't color the outline of the pedals, that same color, which is what would happen if I don't separate them. So I'm going to click on the Eraser tool, which is in my tool bar on the left. My racers pretty small, I see very small. I can make it, and then I'm just going to click and drag right along the edge of the pedal, and I need to do it over here as well, in order to separate these from the pedals, the outline of the pedals, and then I generally just try to figure out OK, well, what shape do I sort of want this to be? And I'll try to either loosely on make it a little bit more circular or some some type of a pleasing shape. And what I'm doing right now is I'm actually smoothing it by using this tool that's called the smooth tool, which you can also find along your menu bar along the left. It's hidden underneath the shape or tool, and so when you see this pencil with a circle behind it, if you right click, you can find this move tool there and then if you're element is selected, you'll see all those blew up anchor points, and you can smooth them by just dragging, clicking and dragging along the outline. And that can create a more pleasing and more sort of accurately drawn if you will stem. So I'm going to zoom out a little bit so that we can see this. And what I'm doing on my keyboard is just the command key with the minus sign to move out sort of little by little. And now what I can do is this shape is still being recognized as one whole shape. But if I do command shift G, I should be able to separate it now into two separate shapes. And if I wanted, for example, this to be colorized as one entire element, I could go back like we did before, to the shape builder Tool and Aiken drag across it to make it one shape. And then I can select a green, either a dark green actually have to do the selection tool first by hitting beyond my keyboard, and then I can go over and I can select a color that I think might be pretty to have in my bouquet. Then I can click on this element, and we haven't done this sort of version of color. But we've done this version of color before, but we haven't had these internal elements to play with. So let's do this one together as well. The my idea for what I would like this daisy to look like is I would like to be able to color around the outside using that blob brush tool and painting behind. And then I want to be able to select all of these lines and have the lines be white on that background and then most likely have the inner this internal part as well as the outlines actually in 1/3 color. So let's get started and kind of see what happens. But with this selected, I can tell already you may not be able to tell this on on your version of your screen, but I can tell already that this has been ungroomed. When I did that on group action to create the stem separate from this and if I were to click and drag it, I can tell that those a couple of the internal lines are going to get left behind. So I'm going to do command Z to go backwards, and then I'm gonna move my stem away from the flower just temporarily. And then I'm going to click the whole flower and do, um, and do command g to group it. The reason I did it twice as I could tell that this small piece down here had not gotten grabbed properly. And I'll show you what that looks like. A go backwards. And so I had gone like this to grab pretty much everything and then I can tell it's again. It may be very hard for you to see, but I can tell that this is actually black. This piece right years Black, it's not. Doesn't have a blue tinge to it. And so if I were to group this now and then move it off to the right, I'm gonna lose this piece, which I don't want to lose. So I'm going to do command Z to go backwards. I'm going to then click and drag over the entire shape. And now I'm going to do clan gee again. And I know off grabbed that piece. So if I click and drag away from it, I know I haven't left anything behind. And I can continue to have these two pieces fairly separate, or I can move this back towards where it was before. That's gonna be a stylistic choice as we put the bouquet together. But now if I want to click on this element and, um and I actually, when you're doing painting behind, you don't have to have the element selected. You just go to your blood brush tool and then you pick one of the colors that you want. You again go over to the left hand side to make sure that you're drawing mode is draw behind. And just so long as that's clicked, you're good to go. You can change the size of your brush. Teoh, go through this more quickly. This'll maybe also a little bit hard to see because I don't have a background color. But if this is a really, really, really pretty kind of neutral, almost gray lavender color that I think will be really pretty on this on this daisy. So I color in all of the elements, and obviously we're getting this really stark black, which I'm going to change once I've colored everything in what could be fun with this particular approach to drawing behind is you don't necessarily have to follow the outline of what you drew. You can be a lot looser with what you want that larger outline behind to be. And I actually find that that looseness can be really nice. And you're still gonna get definition around the flower because of the way the black lines are currently rendered. And even if we change those two white, which we may do as a next step, you can still tell that um, they'll still be a very nice contrast. And I find that very pleasing. So I've colored in, um, sometimes it's hard to tell if you missed any spots, but I think that have colored in the interior that this exterior part using the blob brush tool going to go back to my selection tool. Now click on this flower and let's pick something that's kind of Ah, very, very light blue. And that might be a really nice way to leave this flower. Or we may decide that we actually want to click on it and de select by or ungroomed fit by doing shift Command G and then deciding that we actually want each of these individual items inside these lines that we want them to be white. So what you need to do to achieve that is you have to ungroomed the element several times until you can click on a particular line and not have it be highlighting anything else as you're going around the flowers. I can tell already that some of these I'm not gonna be able to do the same effect with unless I go in with my eraser tool and detached them from the stamens area. So if we wanted to experiment right now, for example, with these with a couple of these, that we know are detached. I can click on one of them. Hold on my shift key, click on another and click on the ones I can tell are not attached to the statement area. And then I can come over to my color palette. And then, for example, if I just wanted to pick White White, I can click on White in the, um in that panel, and now all of a sudden, we have a really nice kind of, um it looks like a cutout almost of those internal lines that initially were black. And as I mentioned, we can achieve that effect. We can either decide we want it to be asymmetrical and leave it like this. Or we could decide that we do want all of them to be white, in which case we would take the eraser tool. And we just clipped them off right down here in order to create separate shapes so that we could then colorize them the way we want. So I'm gonna leave that one like that for now. It may be, too. It may need to be more when I'm bringing it over to my vases and may a need to be bigger from a scale perspective and also may need to be sort of much darker and richer in order to be able to compete and hold its own compared to how rich the blue and the yellow are. But we will cross that bridge when we get to it. So I am going to just for purposes of not having this be a really, really long lesson. I am going to pause the video right now, continue to do more colorization, and then I'll be right back and we will continue to start will actually move into the next lesson. It makes most sense for us to move into the next lesson. Um, so I'm going to stop now and finish colorizing my last three sort of hero flowers and I will be back to show you in the next lesson how we will go ahead and assemble our bouquet. See you there 6. Creating Our Bouquets: All right, So now we're in the home stretch of pulling our bouquet together where we left it off. Last time was we had made I had colorized almost all of my floral motifs, but not hadn't finished. And so offscreen I went ahead and finished and did some re coloring. And so now is kind of the fun part because we get to put our bouquet together. And I actually did do a little bit of playing around off line so that I could be a little bit more efficient in terms of how I want to pull this together. But some tips and tricks that I use is I generally will start out with my hero items. And so you can see I've organized my board with all my flowers on one side and then more of my sort of leafy motifs on the other. And I like to start to put together my overall composition by playing around with my big items or they're not necessary big. And what I mean by that is my hero items. And that usually will help me determine sort of where I want everything to go and how I want things to sort of play with each other. And if I think I'm going to need to change scale of things a little bit, so that's where I will then start to play. And this is a really pretty little red poppy that I think is important. To be kind of in a central location or or ah, location of prominence is maybe a better way to put it. I will, as I'm going through this, play around with what's in front and what's in back. And I would like my Poppy to be in front. So I'm gonna go to object, transform, bring to front so that I Seymour of that element. And then I may want toe move this daisy down a little bit more. I can then add in my additional sort of leafy motifs. What you'll notice from when you were here with me last is that I did resize some of these items and, for example, I made this leaf quite a bit bigger. It's very small in terms of its overall heft, and so I thought that I could definitely make it bigger without it feeling like it would no longer be to scale with everything else and then I create, definitely used, uh, and created. Quite a few of these motifs were using the shape builder tool that we used and played within the last lesson. I think that that has made them a little bit simpler. And I like this cleaner lines that you get with the shape builder tool. I think the other thing I'm noticing from where we were before is I really didn't use as many of the, um, coloring method that's called coloring behind. I think in the prior lesson. Thes items thes pretty little. I like to call these my lavender sprigs. I'm not sure that that's exactly what they are, but in my imagination, that's what they are. These were colored. I had also colored them from behind with another blue, and I decided that I thought that was a little bit too much. And so I just went back to using them with, um and and making them look a little bit more simple with just coloring them in, um, using a paint bucket tool. Um so that those are a couple of little changes that I made while I was off camera. And then what I also did is you may be able to tell that this motif is actually almost a duplicate of this. These air intended to be my eucalyptus leaves. And what I did with this one is I turned off the very bottom of it. So it doesn't have this big, long loop. And then what I also did is I shaved off a bit of this top element because I realized that even though I'm gonna leave this one alone, this one is a little bit more accurate to what they look like. The top. Because if you take a look at eucalyptus leaves, they actually really small leaves at the very top. And usually they have one little tiny pointing one that kind of looks like a heart. So that was my intention here? Not sure I was completely successful with it. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to sort of hide the fact that it doesn't have a, um, a stem that goes all the way down into our vase by hiding it behind a leaf. Um, what? I also want to make sure that I'm doing as I'm placing everything together in my bouquet and you can play around with this for a really long time to find the absolute perfect kind of rendition that you wanna have. The one step to not forget is we do want to make sure that none of our stems air showing in the front of the vase. And so I'm going to click on the vase and then I'm going to go toe object, arrange bring the front to make sure that it's actually hiding any of these little stems. And then what I try to do is just sort of zoom out a little bit too frequently. I'll leave it overnight and decide if I want to make some changes when I come back to it on the next day. I think that right now what I would observe is that there's a little bit maybe too much of a hole in the center area. One of the challenges with the vase that I made. I mean, I love this Foz. I think it's super cool, and it's really sort of two vases that are side by side. Um, it may need to be sort of fuller with more greenery, and I can certainly go ahead and do that if I want to continue to play with it. But for purposes of this lesson, I think you're getting a really good sense of how to pull everything together. And how did what I try to do is I try to make sure that it's this maybe actually looking a little bit too boxy for me, and they wanted to be more about a little bit of a triangle shape. Or I may want to make this daisy larger so that it has a bit more scale to it and is poking sort of up and out more. That may be good for us to do with this element as well, and I made What I may need to do with it is I may need to actually create a tale for it so that it's not looking like it's coming out of nowhere there and then what I may want to do with ease is I may want to bring them down basically into the vas a bit deeper, and I am going to be hiding a little bit of the top of a portion of it there, but that will fill in a little bit of the white space that we're seeing, and I could play around with that a little bit more. What I could also do is move this one out for now and reposition this one to see whether or not I like the way that sort of filling in the space a bit more. And then what I could do is go back to this one and then decide. OK, do I just wanna have this cute guy sort of poking up right here? And so it's filling in a little bit more of the bottom portion of of this scheme, and then sometimes what? It's not. What's nice to do is to make sure that the that thes I didn't didn't really want these to be sort of two lined up with one another. So it might be nice to make this yellow rose a little bit larger and maybe have it angle out even a little bit more than it was before, so that we're getting a little bit more of a triangle shape and ah, and maybe with this wispy item, we can even bring it out to be a little bit higher. I think that's kind of nice to make sure that we're getting a little bit more height overall. So what's fun at this stage is to just keep playing until you see something that you really like. Um, I could redo all of the colors in this. I did want to pull some of the colors from the vases. And so I did pull some of the blues that Aaron year some of the greens, definitely these yellows. And then this sort of okra kind of off yellow color or darker, darker, yellow, almost mustardy color, which I think is really pretty. And then I also wanted to make sure I had some pops. And this this definitely does the trick with having my really pretty red poppy. That could be sort of the If you have one element, that is its own color hours three only element with that color, it definitely will draw the eye. And I think that that actually is a nice effect in this particular case. So I am going to leave it there. I'm going to save the file, and then what we're going to do in the next lesson is we're going to switch gears a bit and we're actually going to go into society six. And I'm going to show which is a society six is a print on demand company there many, many print on demand companies. And they're awesome because as artists, you can upload your work and then decide what you want to put to your artwork onto. And in this particular case, I'm going to keep it really straightforward and simple. We're going t o use society six, even though there many, many other choices. And we're going to upload this actually as an art print. So I will see you in the next lesson and have fun with your bouquets. Please make sure that you post them in the project area, and I can't wait to see them. All right. Bye for now. 7. Society6: in this lesson, we are going to walk through how to set up an account in society six and then how to upload our art print into your shop. So go to your browser. I usually use chrome, but you any browser will work. Safari or Cromer? Probably the two best and type in society. Six dot com. It's gonna automatically populate my shop name Society six dot com forward slash and the fall it and I'm going to hit Enter because I'd like to walk you through what a shop looks like before I then show you where you would need to start to set one up. So I'm going to hit enter so that my societies six shop pops up. And so when you have one, it'll this is what it will look like and what the only things you need to do when you set up a new account is you're going to want to upload your photograph. And there's an edit profile section where you can both edit your cover image, which is this banner, and you can also add it. Your avatar, which is your picture. And you can also upload your bio and it's very important to do these three things so that you really are branding your shop. Because when people find you and find some of your artwork and they click through to see you, they will see a different version of this page that that shows more of my by bio on it. But essentially, they can tell from a glance that my company name is Anna Fallen Art. So I have my logo in the center. Then they can see that I do pattern design because I uploaded small little snippets of several of my patterns. And then I also do some photography. I haven't updated this in a while, and so I might actually change this out since I don't do that much photography toe actually showcase some of my most popular products like some of my art prints, for example. So what you will do when you go to society, six dot com is you are going to go to a there's gonna be a joint page, and so let me sign out of my account. And what will happen then is you will go to join slash log in, and there won't be any information populated in the log in and the password you will put in your email and then you'll create a password and then you will be able to log in. And when you first start, you will hit get started. So you'll put in your email and create a password, and then you'll be able to log in. Um, once you log in, let me show you where these what these different drop downs are. So Amla fall it is the name of my shop. And so when I click on that you see this area, which is where you would be putting in your cover image, your avatar and your bio information. Then what? I what I did next and what you would do next is you want to upload your 1st 1st piece of art. So we're gonna go ahead and do that right now. So I'm gonna go to manage my posts and I'm going Teoh Adenhart Post because we're adding art and on this screen, we're going to upload our our work. So what we need to do is we need to go back to Illustrator and what we want to do is create a new version of our artwork that is actually in the size that society six recommends. And the size that Society six recommends for the majority of their products is 6500 pixels by 6500 pixels. And so all you need to do is do command end to create a new document and then put in 6500 by 6500 pixels. You want to have a B C M y que. Because in this case, we are going to be creating art prints, and we want to make sure that they are going to print out in the right color mode, and then you can you want to make sure that your peopie I is at least 1 50 It will default generally to 71 72. Rather, and I always make sure that I up it to either 1 50 or 300 then just hit create, and then we're going to go back to our finished bouquet. And what you see I did when I was off camera is I created a back backdrop or background by just dragging and dropping, using my rectangle tool. I just did a dragon drop around my art board And then I put a color. I picked up one of my colors and, ah, very, very neutral tone. I just wanted to have something neutral in the background. And then what I also did is I added my signature, and I picked a color from my color palette for my signature That works with the piece of art. Not all of the artists in Society six actually sign their art prints. And when I'm uploading something that isn't in our print, I don't put my signature on it. But in any event, we just need to, um, now click and drag over all of everything that's on our art board and go command, see to copy it, go into our new document, which is now the 6500 by 6500 pixel size, and then do command V like Victor to paste it. And then now, to increase this size, this in size proportionally, just click on one of the corners or, ah, hover over one of the corners with your mouths until you get those arrows and then hold the option or all key and the shift key simultaneously, and then click and drag until you get out to the corners and then release, and now we have it in the size that is going to work for society. Six. So what we want to do is we want to do file. I don't generally save it as an AI file because I know that I haven't illustrator version that we already named. That's called Skull Share. Finished bouquet. So for this in this particular case, I don't need to save it so I can save memory, but I do need to export it. So we're gonna do file export, save for Web, and then when it comes up, we will have an opportunity to name it so that we'll be able to find it. You want to make sure that you're on JPEG high. There's a drop down menu here, So depending on what it might be set to make sure you pick Jay peg high, you want to make sure your quality is also high and just double check that it didn't change the size. The size is still 6500 by 6500 and then I usually here. It usually isn't none under this drop down and I usually do are optimized, and then I just click save and you can see over here on the all the way on the left hand side how big the file is. And it's not that big. It's a little bit more than a Meg, and that's totally fine. So let's it save and let it render and actually need to give it a name. So I'm gonna call it my my spring floral bouquet. Yeah, and I'm going to save it to my desktop. So I'm gonna hit, save, and it's going to save quite quickly. And then I'm going to go back to my browser, and, um, I'm on the right page that we left here. That is the society. Six. Upload your artwork page. Just click on, upload your artwork and then find your item, which is the spring floral bouquet that I just saved. Hit open, and it's going to open here and there. Just two things you have to do you have to click on or actually only click on one of them. You have to click that you own all the rights to the image because they're trying to make sure that we're not importing anybody else's work. Of course, we don't want to be copyright infringing infringers, and then I'm never uploading anything with mature content. But if you dio, you need to click on that next box and then we just want to go to the next step. And before we go to the next step, I just want to make sure we take a quick look at the few reminders that they give us down. Here is where they make the recommendation that you enable most products by uploading an image that 6500 pixels square or on its smallest side, and I usually make it a square. And then they definitely want to make sure you're 72 dp I or higher. And as I said, I highly recommend 1 50 and that your maximum file size is 150 MD's and I was significantly smaller than that of just one megabyte so on, and you can upload specific image files for different products later. It's just nice to get started where you could put this on a whole bunch of products simultaneously, and, um, that just saves you some steps. So let's go to the next step so that you can see what happens next. What? What I described, I believe earlier is that on once you upload your artwork and we go through these steps. So let's I'm gonna stay focused to get these done really quickly. I'm going to just call this spring Floral. Okay? I'm really bad at coming up with cute names through the category and add tags are required . They've got that little red Asterix next to them. And so I am calling this a painting because we started out with acrylic paint. I'm then going to use some tags. You can only pick one item up here, and But I think that's appropriate because it's mixed media and they don't have mixed media is a choice. And then under tags, I'm gonna put in that There was It was made with acrylic. It was also made with digital pieces because we vector rised are floral motifs. I'm going to put in the word floral in case someone wants to look for, um uses that as a search name. I'm gonna put in flowers. I'm gonna put in, um, floral bouquet and you can put in a zoo many as 20 tags, and it is really smart to put in, um, words that you think people might. So how about flowers in a vase, words and or short phrases that you think people would search for and I can come back and add more So I'm going to keep going for so that we can move to the next step. I will try to put in some kind of a description in this case. I'm going to skip it just so that we can move to the next step. So I'm going to do, create, continue to create products. So what comes up first is the art prints, and every print on demand website is different. And so Society six, which is the one I'm on the most on and on the most comfortable with is the one I wanted to share with you because I think it's a great place to start. And one of the other reasons that I like society six and would love you get some experiences. Society six is that if you do work that works as art prints, you can set your own pricing on the art prints. You can't set your pricing on any other items in this particular print on demand company for this print on demand company. So what it says over here in terms of pro tips is that you can set pricing individually for products that have this dollar sign. And they're only dollar signs next to your art prints, your framed art prints and your canvas prints. Everything else of the pricing is set by society six. Now, the way you get paid is that, um, for the our prints, where you can set your own price, you can you will get paid this markup amount. And so what I have done is I have done research around what people generally are setting for their prices on our prints of these different sizes. And so there are five different options. There's an eight by eight, and then it goes all the way up to a 28 by 28 size and generally people in society six air staying within about a 30% markup range, which is what I am generally comfortable with. And once you set your prices again, the the base price for this eight by eight is 14 99. Society six is going to sell it for 1999 they're gonna keep the 14 99 and on, and you're gonna get the $5 which you input into your mark in your markup. So let's move to the next item, which is the, um, framed art prints. And you make a little bit more money with framed art prints because they're more expensive . So so that is nice. I'm going to quickly put in my pricing years so that we can then go to the last one that I like to do it, which is, um, which is the canvas. The canvas prints, which you're really quite beautiful. And our fun are fun to have in your shop is well, and Ah, and as I mentioned, you can do your own research around sort of where you want to be in the pricing spectrum, but so that you make sure that you're not sort of over pricing your goods compared to everyone else who's on the was on. This was on this site. So these air all automatically turned on and you can turn them off if you want to buy just traveling on the switch. But I'm gonna leave it on, and then I'm going to scan down so you can see the variety of products that society six offers and what my bouquet looks like on them. We could sell it as a clock. It's kind of cute is oclock. I would most likely take my signature off of it and upload a different image without the signature. I really only put my signature on the art prints, and then I don't think I would sell it as a Has any of these pillow or do they items? I wouldn't sell it in. Any of the bedding items might sell it as a travel mug, but you know, probably not kind of pretty is a stationary card, so I'm gonna click on stationery card. Think that's pretty even with the signature on it and society six items. It's important for you to know, for example, that the cups will say society six on the bottom of them. They're not gonna have my name anywhere, so I still don't think it's appropriate for me to put my signature on the mug. But you should be aware of the fact that you're unless you want to have a small signature on some of these other items your name isn't going to show up on these. It's your but your you know, your friends are going to know that yours because they went to your shop to buy it. But I think that's important for people to know. I would probably upload a different file without my signature for the phone cases and also for the laptop skin. And I generally skipped the I don't do any of these T shirts. I do like the tote bag. I think that the fact is cute, and I like having my signature on the two packs of people walk around with it, know where it came from. So then, before you move on, you have to make sure you don't forget to hit publish. So it is now in the process, sort of behind the scenes of of saving and rendering my file. And I'm going to take a quick pause because I'm going to show you what it looks like once it's in the shop and how to add it to ah collection. And but it's not gonna be ready, probably for 15 or 20 minutes, and so I'll stop here and I will come back as soon as it's actually in my shop and we will do that next step. All right, I'll see you in a few minutes. Bye for now. All right, so it's been about 20 minutes. So let's see whether or not my art print is now showing up in my shop. I'm in on my shop where we have been before, and I'm going to have actually already clicked on order prints. I think I already clicked on our prints. And then what I do is I change the sort from popular to new to see whether Mount my very latest one, is in the system now. And there it is. So what I wanted to show you is you can create collections toe, highlight certain items for your customers, and it's actually a best practice. So what I do is a soon as my items are, my newest items that are part of my art print collection are in the system. I click on it and then you were going to go right below. Add to cart, you're going to add to collection, so click on collection and it shows you it's a little bit counterintuitive. All of my collections the three that I have today are, um, actually highlighted in green or they have a little green plus sign on them. And so initially I thought, Well, that must mean it's already and I'm gonna have to take it out of those. But no, it works the other way around, and so I want to add it to my spring favorites. And so you click on Spring Spring Fader Favorites, which actually turns into now a negative sign or it's a It's a minus sign inside a red dot , but it's in there. Having done this before, I know that this now does indeed work. So from now, what I like to do is double check it. And so I go up to this little insignia, appear of the head, and I go back. Teoh, click down. Now, instead of going to manage my post or my orders, I go to my collections and I click on that. And then I click on my spring collections or my spring favorites Rather, which is the name of that collection, and I should be able to see it at the very bottom there. It Isett did, in fact get added, and then what I like to do, since it's the latest one. The newest one is I click on edit here, and then each one of these has a giant big box. And so you can either delete it if you want to delete it, or I don't yet have a tendency to delete things. But I will move it up so you can click and drag. It's kind of cool. You can click and drag it and move it up to wherever you'd like it to show up in the scheme of things with your other art prints. And then you just want to make sure that you get saved. And now when someone goes to your spring favorites, they will see it first. It's right there. So that is actually everything that I wanted to teach you how to dio. We started Aziz. Well, I'll do a little wrap up in the next video, really quick sort of set of thank you's and also ah, quick recap and some final tips and tricks for you, but I hope that you have enjoyed everything so far again. Please don't forget to put your bouquets in the project gallery. I definitely want to see them. I cannot wait to see what you create. So bye for now, I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Thank You!: thank you so very much for taking this class. I had an incredible time teaching you how to do new, very organic like causes using acrylic paint and your credit card. And then I always find it incredibly relaxing to spend time drawing. I'm sketching, whether that's floral elements or whatever you prefer. Then when we brought everything into Illustrator, it's so much fun to see the progress from having digitized are items to creating a beautiful color palette. And then, finally, it's actually assembling our final Okay, that is always the most fun part of the process for me. I so look forward to seeing your projects in the Project Gallery. Please do go ahead and upload them there and then also, I really encourage you to explore Society six and set up a shop there or on another one of the print on demand sites that are available out there. You could definitely Google print on demand sites and see there are at least 20. I have just gotten used to Society six and hope that it was helpful for you to see how to set up your own account there. Also, before I say goodbye, I would love to make sure you're aware of my other two skills share classes. One is called from sketch to wrapping paper and the other is create awesome videos for social media. That class has been fully updated with new intro, and I have also added bonus lessons where we will find free music that you could use and also add to your videos to make them even more compelling. Please follow me on Instagram at Amla Fallen art and I'd love for you to join my blawg on my website, which is that an HLA fall apart dot com And don't forget, it's never too late to create bye for now.