Create and Sell Watercolor Illustrations Across Marketplaces

1. Create and Sell Illustrations Across Marketplaces: My name is Denise Palmer. I am a watercolor artist and illustrator located in Central Florida, and I'm so excited to be sharing with you today my process for creating digital products. This class is for artists and illustrators who have some experience with painting and design software such as Adobe Photo Shop and Illustrator, but want to learn how to create and so digital illustration products. In this class, I will show you how to develop a product idea and take you through the essential steps to create and sell your first digital product and then distribute that product on multiple marketplaces, including your own website. You will be able to turn your illustrations into digital products as we will cover digitizing, organizing product files and creating product images for marketplaces. I'm so happy to share with you today a blueprint for getting your shops off the ground. I cannot wait to see what you create. Let's get started 2. What it Means to Sell Digital Artwork: when you are selling digital products, you are the copyright owner selling a license to use your artwork to the person or company buying the license. You still own the copy rape. You are just allowing others to use it to create products for their buyers. 3. Marketplaces and Tips for Applying: Before you create your first product, you need to know where you want to sell it. There are many marketplaces, but here are a few to get you started design cuts. Their team is seriously amazing to work with. And they are, ah, highly curated digital product marketplace and bundle creator Creative Market. This is where I first got started, etc. It's a great platform for digital products, but usually smaller versions of your larger products. But I will get into this in a later lesson on files. There is also the hungry Jay Peg. I have not put a lot of time into my shop here, but it is one to check out and lastly, your own website. I want to mention to definitely read the licensing terms on the different marketplaces and make sure it aligns with how you would like to license your artwork. I recommend starting out I'm just one marketplace and get your shop going there. Then you can expand toe others with the same products. Here's a quick tip for applying to a marketplace for marketplaces like Creative Market. Have a shop application process show you work in a way geared towards them when I applied at Creative Market. I created a separate unlinked page of my Squarespace website and showed them my work with a nice introduction and showing them what I was working on. I didn't even have a finished product. This example here isn't the one I showed them since I deleted that page a while ago. But it gives you the idea. If you don't want to create a page, you can also link to your instagram account or anywhere that really showcases your work so they can see what you're capable of creating. 4. Product Category: Once you know where you want to start a shop, explore the site and the product categories. Product categories include graphics, templates, photos and mock ups, Web themes, fonts, add ons like brushes and things like that. Now that you've thought about some of the different categories, ask yourself, What can you create with your skills right now, if you're an illustrator or artist, you can create graphics. Letters can also create fonds, and photographers can create professional mock ups and styled stock photos for artist's and illustrator's to showcase their work. 5. Product Types and Kinds: Once you have chosen category for your product, it's time to think about what type and kind of product will you create in that category. For the graphics category. There are many types of graphics in this example are illustrations, and the kinds of illustrations include vectors and water colors. Another type of graphics are patterns, and the kinds of patterns are floral check, geometric, watercolor and vector, to name a few. There are textures, and these include paper textures, foil, marble, glitter, watercolor, vintage and overlays. Something to consider as you are creating a product is if you are creating a watercolor graphic set, for example, include things from these other product types in the set as a bonus feature of your product . If it pairs well with what you are creating, there are also object graphics, and these include shapes, overlays and seasonal elements. The templates category is huge, and if you're thinking of creating templates, definitely take a look through the types of templates. There are creative market, but a few are cards, weddings, presentations, social media, branding, email and so on in cards, their invitations, business wedding invitations and tons more. If you're watercolor artist, you could also create a wedding suite template in the templates category. I have not personally done this yet, but it might be a nice way to create different products. I want to show you an example from my friend Michelle, who's doing an amazing job in the templates category she created. Resource is for her students toe license to start their own printable business. 6. Special Product Kinds: these special product kinds, I'd like to call tool driven products. These products are creators, tool pits and mock up creators. They are very specific kinds of products that help your buyer do something. These products typically solve a problem for the wire may be a problem they didn't even know they had, or they help them accomplish something in a very creative way. Let's dive into this a little more, and I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by these tool driven products. I want to start out by saying that although, and going to cover this subject, I want to take the pressure off right here. Right now. You can be highly successful without creating the falling products I am going to cover. East products are not easy to create, and maybe you will create one of these in your career if you decide to. So please do not focus on finding what is missing or solving a problem for your buyer. These air great things to try to do but just be you. But for now, just know. These air called special product kinds for a reason because they have special features and do solve problems for their buyers in a very creative way. Now let's look at creators. Here is a collection of some that I put together on my creative market account to show you what I mean by creators. There are wreath creators, which are great for stationary designers and stationery products. There is a fun recipe creator and a moon creator. I'm going to link to the hits collections in the resource is document in the class so you can take a look at these in more detail. Here is an example of tool kits. These are exactly what they say. They are tools to achieve a certain outcome. There is a grid builder, which is great for lettering artists. There is a lead magnet tool kit, and the smoke toolkit looks really interesting to me. So again, this will also be in the resource is documents that you can take a look at these products in more detail, and finally it looks Look at Mach Up creators. I used to use a lot in my work. In addition to regular mock ups, these were used to create custom scenes to showcase your work. In the next lesson, we will go over knowing your buyer and how that will shape the products you create 7. Knowing Your Buyer: knowing your buyer is so important because it will really guide not only what you are going to create, but how you will present it in your product. Images start out by thinking. What industry could this product work for? Enlist out what products in that industry. Could you see your artwork on? Just brainstorm here and freely write down all the ideas that come to mind. Next. Write down Who creates thes products. Once you have listed out your industry focus and some ideas on what products in that industry, your artwork could be used for. Start researching that industry and those products. In the following example, I'm going to demonstrate how I would research the wedding stationery industry and particularly invitations for my buyer a wedding station. ER, this process could be used for any industry typing in wedding stationery invitations. On Pinterest, you get a list of products in the search bar. You see things like pro Tia festival and lemon. These are things people are looking for right now. At the time that I'm doing this search, you can search by all pins, boards, people and more. I am going to click on this one, the idea is to take a look at stationers and see you what goes into creating a wedding invitation set when doing this research. What I'm looking for is to see what pieces they create are there are SVP cards are their table number cards. Are there envelopes liners? These are things you need to think about when you're developing a product for a specific buyer. Getting to know your buyer is extremely important, especially if you have no experience in the industry and you don't know what type of products they actually create. You need to specifically just look at what they create in what pieces go into their products while doing your research. You should also research details about the products you're buyer creates. For example, when I first started designing wedding invitations many years ago, I researched what the proper etiquette waas for wording wedding invitations. So if you're presenting your product to your buyer, you need to make sure you know the details of how to properly present your product to them . You can also look at industry related blog's or magazines to get to know your buyer even more, and this might give you some insight as to what their industry standards are. You can also discover what they're struggling with by looking at online forms or groups or as someone who is in that industry. The point is to take your buyers industry into consideration when designing your products. And if you already have previous experience and that specific industry, it's gonna make it even easier for you to design products for your buyer. 8. Market Demand: If you want a product to do well, you need to think about the market. Ask yourself, Is this something I would buy, Or better yet, with my buyer like this to create their products? Let me give you an example of how I developed one of my best selling graphic sets and how my process for creating these sets took market demand into consideration naturally in the process. When I was working on creating my very first watercolor illustrations set, we had just gone to a cousin's wedding in the mountains, and it was at this gorgeous winery. I noticed that vineyard weddings were trending in the wedding industry. Hello. I had just attended one, but I couldn't find anything in the watercolor illustrations categories that really showcased a winery inspired mountain wedding with a rustic while flower theme. Well, we were driving to the venue. I saw beautiful mountainsides and little wild flowers growing in the area and used that as inspiration for my set. This is my very first set, and I named it Mountainside Meadows because I was inspired by the Vit Vineyard wedding venue and the beautiful mountainsides and wildflowers within the graphics category. There can be tens of thousands of competing graphics. But by being very specific with your theme, you're only competing with a smaller group in the search results shown here for watercolor wildflower, you will see that there is 1052 results, so anyone looking for wildflower watercolor illustrations should find your product. That's why deciding on a theme that you want to be found for, say, for this particular product, it would be wildflowers. You need to incorporate that into your product name to recap, create a design for a specific industry in design from real life observations, and connect it to a theme by creating a design from riel life observations. It also brings on authentic feel to your designs because you're telling story of what inspired you. You don't always have to create products based on your real life observations. It is just a great way to know not there is market demand for it. In the next lesson, I'm going to take you through how to develop a product thing. See you in the next lesson. 9. Developing A Product Theme: a theme is an idea that re occurs in or pervades a work of art or literature. It encompasses the story you're going to tell and the emotions and mood you're going to evoke in your work. If you've seen a movie, watched a TV show or read a book, you've seen a theme presented in the storyline. Artwork also needs to have a story line to start developing your product theme. Start with writing down 8 to 10. Highly descriptive were combinations for your product, for example, For myself, Order Shores graphic set, which is some of the artwork I've used in this class. The words would look something like this. Immersive sand, sunny shores vacation. Get away island destinations. And as I do this, I underline the words that represent the main look that I want for this product. For my mountainside meadows set, the words would look something like this. Once you have these very descriptive word combinations, read them out loud to yourself and then do some rough sketches of what these may look like . Sometimes I use Pinterest for images that represent the phrases to help flush out my ideas a little bit better and creates a mood board. Here is my Mountainside Meadows pinchers Mood Board I created. I gathered images that represented the words on my list to give me a feeling of what my product would represent. This does not necessarily have toe represent your actual illustrations, but use your immune board as a guy to really get you in the mindset of a theme you are creating. You can include things to represent colors, the industry you're looking at, developing the product for menus and locations that capture your theme. Another way, I gather inspiration for products that I'm creating is I use pictures that represent the descriptive words for my own real life experiences. When I created my very first watercolor illustration said, I did not have pictures of what inspired me, just memories of the location and venue. So now when we go anywhere, I take photos of all kinds of things that inspire me. Some of my photos are organized on my computer, but most of them are my phone. I need to get more of them on my computer. But here is a glimpse at some of the pictures. I capture flowers, landscapes and locations. We go to and organize them on my computer in my phone so that I can reference them later. Then if I need to print the photo out for reference while illustrating, I can do that, too. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about sketching and illustrating your product, seeing in the next lesson. 10. Sketching Your Elements: with your product theme in mind, begin sketching out all the elements you want to include in your product. You can do this on standard printer paper with a graphite pencil like I'm using here. Or you can use your iPad pro if you have one and are comfortable with using that for sketching. Once you're done sketching out all your individual elements, I recommend thinking your sketches and I do this with a micron pen. I ain't my sketches, so it makes it a lot easier to see the sketches when you're transferring the artwork to watercolor paper. If you are creating your graphics in Adobe Illustrator, then scale is not necessarily so important. But if you are going Teoh, you create your artwork in traditional mediums like water color. You definitely need to think about scale. It's okay to have some of the elements stay small, especially if they're going to be smaller elements in your overall designs. But if they were going to be a main element in your set, you will want to be sure to paint them at a larger scale. In these images, you may have noticed that my sketches are very small and I did this on purpose to show you in the next slide. How to enlarge your sketches. If you sketch something too small, it's really easy to make them larger. If you sketch your elements too small, you can always copy your sketch at a larger size. I do this by putting the sketch into my copier and setting it to copy at, say, 200% to double the size of my sketch. In the following lessons, I'm going to go over the process of creating digital products with watercolor illustrations as an example, but you can also create digital products with Adobe Illustrator as well. 11. Illustrating Your Sketches Separately with Watercolor: Now that you have your sketches completed, it's time to start illustrating your artwork when creating artwork for graphics collections . I design each element separately. I do this for two reasons when it makes it easier later on toe offer individual moments in the collection. Many times my buyers will want to have the individual pieces so that they can create their own layouts by painting each element separately. It makes it to the customer, gets the full illustration to build their own design, just as it makes it easier for my customers. It makes designing finish layouts fully customizable. For me, I can turn any of these illustrations into a larger design or create something new with them, like a powder collection or a single composition. It just makes your artwork highly versatile. Also, if you need to adjust colors later on in the process, you can do it on an individual level. Now that I have gone over, why I like to paint elements individually, we're going to talk about how to get your sketches onto your watercolor paper. Most of you already have some experience in doing this, but I thought I would go over this as a quick recap or for any of you watching this video that may not know how to do this. Now that you have your sketches ready, you transfer your sketches to your watercolor paper using the light pat like the one shown here to use the lie pan. You plug it in, and then you place your sketch on the top of the light pad first, and then place your watercolor paper above the sketch and then lightly trays your sketch onto the watercolor paper. And if you need it to in larger sketch like I showed in the last lesson, you would do that, print them out and then transfer them using the light pad. Once you have all your sketches, transfer to your watercolor paper. You can begin painting something I want to note. Here is, if you're sketch appears to dark on your watercolor paper, just gently race it with a white racer until your sketch is a little bit faded. Before you start painting, I want to quickly mention that your larger elements in your set should be roughly anywhere between four by six inches up to eight by 10 inches in size. But generally as large as you can go and still be within the size of your scanner. Bed is a good idea. As you start painting, just enjoy the process of painting all of your watercolor elements. I'm not gonna go over a tutorial over the painting process as you had, should have some experience with painting for this class. But I will do another class I'm painting in the future. So if you would like to see my classes on that, give me a following sculpture. I would love to have you in those. Once you have your paintings ready, it's time to get them from paper to computer, which we're going to go over and the next lesson I'll see you there. 12. Scanning and Editing Elements: Now that you're watercolor illustrations are finished, it's time to scan them in. This is a picture of my scanner. It's an absent perfection V 600 photo, and I absolutely love the scanner. It does a great job digitizing my artwork, and it also does not pick up the texture of my watercolor paper, which is a big deal to me. I don't want to see the texture of my watercolor paper in in my scans using Adobe Photo Shop, I'm going to import my artwork for my scanner. Depending on the scanner that you're using, your interface could look different than the one that I am using here. I like to scan my artwork in at 600 DP. I and I'm setting the colors to billions of colors. And I'm going to scan this to another document that I already have set up for this example and I like to create a folder called Scans and all. All my scans go into this folder. I am also setting the format as a tiff file and now we're gonna do an overview scan. I just want to point out that I like to use the n sharp mask when scanning, and I like to set mind to medium. But that's completely a manner of preference for you, so I would give it a try and t which setting that you like the best. But I'm not setting the in short mask in the scan so that later on I can show you how to do that feature in photo shop itself. Okay, so now we have our scan in a doobie. Photoshopped, open up the file in photo shop, and we are going Teoh do some adjustments by going to window adjustments and selecting several adjustments to make this artwork brighter and more saturated. I'm using the levels adjustments here and just adjusting the blacks and grays and whites until I see that the colors look the way I want. So now that I'm done with the levels adjustments, I'm gonna go into my adjustments panel and select another adjustment. I am going to use the vibrance adjustment, and this will give me control of the saturation and the vibrance of this piece. After making these adjustments with the levels and the vibrance adjustments, I'm happy with the look of the artwork, but if you want to make further adjustments. Just try playing around with it with the different adjustment settings. Teoh, get your or work the way you want. So now I'm gonna go into my layers panel and merge my adjustments with the artwork layer. Now that we've made color adjustments, I am going to go in, zoom in to my our work here and look for areas that I want to clean up. I'm gonna use the spot healing brush, and this will help me clean up the artwork and remove those unwanted blemishes that are in my scans. So I'm just selecting areas and dragging my brush all along the artwork where I see spots that I want to clean up to adjust your brush size used the open or closed bracket on your keyboard. I'm pressing and holding the space bar as I scroll through this document looking for any other areas that I may want to clean up. Okay, everything looks really good, So I'm just gonna save my scan. And the next lesson we're gonna go over removing the background and using the uncharted mask in a doobie Photoshopped 13. Removing Backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop: Now that your artwork is scanned and cleaned up, you need to remove the paper backgrounds. This will give you clean artwork to build out your product. Okay, so we're starting an adobe photo shop, and we are going to create a new document and make it the dimension slightly larger than the dimensions of our scan. So in this case, I'm doing 3000 by 5000 pixels, 600 resolution RGB color and 16 bit. And when I mentioned that, I'm only doing a 16 bit file because we still have to do the uncharted mask, uh, that I'm gonna do at the end of this video. If you did the uncharted mask when scanning in your artwork, you will not need to set your file up a 16 bit. So just set it up as eight bit if you did it that way. The reason for the 16 bit channel is it doesn't degrade the artwork as much when you are doing extensive at its like color changes and things like that. But you're gonna want to save out your final artwork in eight bit because of the file size difference. So here is our new document I'm going Teoh Teik the background layer of the scan and drag that into our new document. I'm just gonna center the florals on the center, roughly the center of my canvas. And now I'm going into my layers panel and just renaming these layers. This one I'm gonna call, let's call it transparent background and for our scandal earlier. Let's call it Bud and Leaf. Now I'm just duplicating layer and hiding the original layer this way. We're working off the copy. A copy of wood we created. I'm just gonna close out the original document and zoom in. Teoh this our Rick here using the lasso tool I am going to select around this stem and just select this piece of artwork because this is the one that we're going to work on First, I like to get as close to the artwork as possible and just leave a little bit of white around it as I go around the artwork. And then we just closed the lasso and we have our selection. Copy your selection. Now I'm going to go into layers panel and create a new layer and name it, but and I'm gonna make it the code green and hit. OK, now paste your selection using command V or control be and turn off the other layer. And now we have our floral stem isolated with very little background white to deal with next time to create a new Phil layer And I'm gonna do a solid color fill and I'm gonna make the color of the layer gray because I'm gonna fill it with the color gray. The great background is going to give us a really nice contrast between the white that we have to get rid of and are stunned. So now I'm gonna zoom in really close. Teoh are stem. Now that we're zoomed in, I'm going to select the polygonal lasso tool and this is what I am going to use. Teoh removed the left over white areas around our bud. I'm gonna start clicking and dragging the lasso tool all along the edge of this piece of our work. This way I will be selecting all along edge and we will make a selection of just the white going around this part of the plant. The polygonal lasso tool is my favorite tool to use for this because it gives you really nice, clean lines, and and it's really easy to just make big selections closing off the last. So I hit the delete button on my keyboard and that weight section is gone. Next, we're gonna zoom in even closer to the edge of our our work, and we're getting use the eraser tool to clean up any extra areas of the artwork. I also have my brush set, Teoh the 100% hardness, and it's just a regular round brush. And using the open and close bracket tool, I'm adjusting the size of my eraser Here, going along the edge. I am just cleaning up any extra areas of white that I feel needs to come off and any like little corner pieces that is made by the polygonal lasso selection. I'm just rounding those off a little bit and cleaning up the edge. I want to mention there are so many ways to remove the background white of your paper from your artwork, and this is just the method that I use in your process of creating your artwork. You're going to find the process that works for you. I have tried all the different tools and methods, and this is just what works for me. There. You can use the back or any Reser tool. There's, I guess, it so many different ways to remove the paper background, and I want to encourage you to find the method that works best for you. I've just found this method to be the best for me because it gives me really clean artwork , and I don't have to do a lot of adjustments later. And I've gotten really fast with this process by doing it so many times. Speaking of speed, I am going to fast forward through the rest of this video so we can move on to the next step. I want to pause and quickly mention it's probably a good time to save your progress. So save this document. Um, I named mine. Let's see, we'll name it but editing and save the file in your files, and then you can do more. - Okay , now we have all the white texture of the paper removed. I'm duplicating my color fill layer and going to use a white background and see how this looks. I'm assuming in and just taking a look at the artwork and making sure that there is isn't any other areas that I want to clean up further. I found a few spots that I would like to clean up further. I'm just using my eraser and going in and just straightening out the edges just a little bit. I don't like the edge here, so I'm the smooth that out, and I'm using the's space bar and pulling along this document in cleaning up any other areas that I spot. Now that I'm done cleaning up the artwork, I am going to change the color of the background layer to kind of take a look at this piece of artwork on probably different color backgrounds that I plan to use and just see how it looks. This will give you an idea of if someone's using the artwork and they put it on different backgrounds, what the artwork will look like, whether it's on winning invitation that uses a white background or a pattern design that has a darker color background. At this point, I'm gonna save my bio. Don't forget to save regularly as you're doing this, and now I'm gonna save this document as a new document and I'm gonna call it but export because we're going to delete the other layers that we have behind our flower. And so I'm gonna say this as a new file. Now that we've said this as a new document, I'm gonna go into my layers panel and I'm gonna select all the layers behind my artwork, and we're just gonna drag it to the trash. Okay, Now that we just have our bud, I'm gonna select the crop tool and bring in the size of the canvass all the way around, dragging the sides around the artwork and to apply the crop. I'm just gonna double click inside the campus to apply it. To see the size of your artwork, go to image, image size, and you can look at it by inches or pixels and see the resolution and the height within height of your artwork. Before we move on to saving out our final file. I'm going to show you how to use the n sharp mask here in a photo shop. If you did not use it while you were standing in good to filter, sharpen and uncharted mask, you can adjust the amount by using the radius, you see the difference and by just moving the slider up and down, and I would just play around with it. But I normally like to keep mine around 1.5 and about 50%. And I usually don't mess with the threshold settings. The benefit of using the uncharted mask here in a photo shop is that it gives you a little bit more control. Then you would have when you're scanning in. But ah, hell, you recommend doing it when you're scanning, it's just easier. But if you forget or whatever, you can always do it within Photoshopped turning on and off the preview button. You can see the changes that you have made now to move on to saving out your elements. Since my file isn't 16 bits, I'm going to go to image mode and change it to eight bits per channel. Gonna go to image image size, make sure that re sample images de selected, and I am going to change 600 resolution to 300 and hit. OK, now we're ready to save out our product file. I'm going to slip save as and go into my product folder, and he created a new folder called Deliverables and we're Going to say about the green Bud is green Bud one and select, save and and smallest file size. In our next lesson, I'm gonna go over how to determine your product features and how to create them. An adobe photo shop using the individual elements you have saved. See you in the next lesson. 14. Deciding On Product Features and Creating A Wreath: in this lesson, we're gonna talk about deciding on the features of your product. You're gonna want to ask yourself, How will your buyer use your artwork? And what resource is can you create for them that will make creating their products easier ? I usually have some idea of what I'm planning to create before it start creating my individual moments. But as you begin creating your elements, sometimes your ideas will just start to flow as you begin developing your products. A great way to get these ideas on paper is to list out each product that your ideal buyer may want to create with your artwork. For example, for a wedding station. ER, they may create invitations, no cards, table number cards. And so I mean, I think about what artwork and pre made layouts that worked best for each type of product that they may want to create with the artwork. This can include Reese frames, monograms, floral Bunches, dividers, textures and so much more. So let's get started on how to turn your individual elements into new layout. Something like this, Reese shown here here we have one of my reefs that I created for myself order shores set. And this is the actual design file, and I'm gonna show you how I put this together. So if I knew that, I want to make an oval shaped read, Then I create a shape that is in the shape of a noble as a guideline for the outline of my read. I haven't oval outline already in the background to create the outline to select the elliptical marquee tool and just click and drag until I get roughly an oval shape. And I'm just gonna do this on a new layer, Then at it go just make it gray. And now I have my shape. So this is just like a rough guideline for you. I'm gonna go ahead and turn this one off, cause I already have one here that made it kind of faded, but I'll bring it up just a little bit more so you can kind of see it more. I'm gonna turn off these layers so you can see how I started building this. It's this one here. I'm gonna select it, and I have auto select layer on so that automatically select this for me. Some just gonna drag it around, and then I brought in the sea. Fine. Can laid that kind of along here, Did the same thing with the other pieces. And just you start building out. You were layout. We'll add in some other things in here too. I'm gonna go into the product folder, and I have all my individual elements already in here. These are the individual elements for this set. Turn the view to this so we can kind of see them a little better. I want to add in and these air all the elements that I have scanned in and saved out for this this product. And so they're already todo and I named them very descriptive names as to what they are. I'm gonna just select this flower and drag and drop it into my document. I knew I want to make this a little smaller. I'm sick selecting this side bringing this over here, I think going to add this flower right here. We're gonna rotate it a little bit. All right? That looks good. Double click inside and there is our flower. And so I put it down here. I'm gonna go ahead and bring it, uh, in the layer order. And so if I want to put more of these flowers around, I'm gonna go ahead and copy it, select it and drag it over and see. Will put one right about here and to transformer. I'm gonna use community and transform the flower rotated a little bit and then I'm gonna duplicated again. We'll just put it right here. I don't remember where I had it in the design that had this one. So let's rotate flower. That looks pretty good. Since I'm not doing any editing to thes flowers, I have my document for photo shop. Any time I place an object, it's going to convert it to a smart object. This makes it so when you're transforming your artwork, it doesn't degrade it. Go Teoh Preferences, General, And make sure always create smart objects When placing ISS checked, you can go back in and uncheck this box when and if you don't need it. Let's go back, Teoh adding more elements into our design next time to show you how to hide parts of stems with layer masks. But this is part of this stem here, and I kind of wanted that I wanted to hide it because I didn't like how it looked to hide the stem on a layer mask. We paint with black or white using the paint brush tool painting Look black will hide and painting with white will reveal. That's an easy way to hide things that you don't want. And let's say we wanted to get rid of this leaf here who could do the same thing. I'm gonna select this layer and I'm going Teoh addle your mask and I'm gonna go in Gonna paint They're brush and just hide this whole leave because yesterday also think about text and what you don't want leaves coming in that will make it difficult for your customer too . Add text. So I just said that whole leaf there and that is how you can use layer masks to help edit your layouts. And I'm just going to show you I can disable this layer mask and bring the leaf right back when creating this wreath. I knew I wanted to created in its size so that my customer could be able to create something larger than a five by seven wedding invitation. The dimensions of this wreath are much larger than that. I'm gonna go to image, image, size and show you the dimensions you look care the image size of this document. I did it just in square. If I just go like this, can take a look at it in pixels. But you can see it's 5000 by 5000 pixels, and in inches it's 16.5 a 16.5 at 300 resolution, which is kind of the standard for print. This shows you you know, the size of this actual document. I'm just gonna hit cancel here. If you were setting up this file for the first time, you would create a new document and set your with and height to the dimensions that you want. The wreath to be set the resolution to 300 and then select creek. If you wanted to create a circular shaped wreath instead of an oval one, you would select the marquee tool, Then click and drag your selection Holding down the shift key. This will give you a circle. You layer. Did it go de select and we have a circle shape so you could build your flowers around the circle once you are happy with the design. Save out the design file, go to file, save as and save it as a photoshopped file in a product development folder. And then you can say about your final design. Turn off your back around layers. So you have a transparent background, and then I am going to merge, merge, visible, and then delete these layers and you have your final play out. Since this is a flattened version of your design file, be sure to save this out as something else. And don't overwrite your layered photoshopped file using the crop tool. Gonna trim the excess areas around the artwork and then save this out as our design. Thanks. We go to file same as then we're going to save it into our product folder. And since this is a wreath, I'm gonna save it in a reiss folder and we will save it out as a PNG file. Actually, I don't want to save it as a copy, and now you have your wreath design for your product. Next, I'm gonna show you how to create a wedding invitation frame design 15. Creating An Invitation Frame: we're gonna create a new document and we're gonna make it 5.253 inches by 7.253 inches. Resolution 300 RGB color with a transparent background. Now that we have our document created, we can start bringing in the artwork. This is an example document that I have already created and I've added in a fill layer to an NFL layer go to layer new Phil layer and select solid color. I'm going to fill the layer with a white background. We will delete this layer later, but it makes it easier to see your artwork as you place it into the design. Before we start designing, I'm gonna save this out with a new design file name. Here is an example frame design that I created using the process that I'm gonna show you in this lesson. I'm gonna hide this design and we're going to start bringing in elements to create a new design, these air the same elements we used in the last lesson, and I'm just gonna scale these down and place them along the edges of this frame clicking inside to apply the transformation going back into my individual Elements folder. I'm going Teoh Adan More elements scaling along the edges and rotating each element to fit along the edge of my canvas in selecting different elements to add contrast and texture, you can duplicate elements using the layers panel and dragging it to copy the layer and transform your elements by going Teoh at it. Transform and you can choose flip, horizontal or flip vertical. I'm going to speed up the video a little bit so that you can see more of a finished layout . Now you get the idea of how to build out an invitation frame. This one's not finished, but it gives you an idea of how to create one. Switching back to one of my finished frame designs. You would save out your design just like we did for the ref's saving out the design file and then saving out the merged design as a PNG file. You could also say about the design as a JPEG file with a white background if you wanted to provide that format as well. And the next lesson I'm gonna go over how to create a detailed shape 16. Creating a Detailed Shape: I started building how my seahorse design with an outline. Just a really rough outline of a See yours, the outline of the seahorse. You can draw it in procreate or you can draw it directly and photo shop. This one came from a piece of artwork that I had done that I didn't like and I just selected it and made an outline of it, traded a new layer and then created a stroke outline and hit the original layer. And now there's they outline of our seahorse, and the dimensions of this document are the same as the wreath design that we did earlier. It's 16.667 square at 300 g p. I to build out the seahorse. I added in different elements, and I have all the layers turned off. But I'm gonna start turning them on so you can kind of see how he was created by layering many, many elements to create him. The's green leaves kind of filling the shape of shape of the design, and since he's gonna be transparent as a transparent PNG, I wanted to have some elements that really filled out his body, and he was created with all the little individual elements that I painted and then digitized exactly the way I showed you in the earlier lessons. This is why having individual elements can really help you build out. Other resource is to go with your product. As I added in elements, I built out the main parts of his body and rotated and placed the artwork to fit within the outline. He was so much fun to create. And as I created him, I thought about where would some of the artwork that I already created, making him very interesting for what would have been a real seahorses fins. I used interesting quartile shapes to create those and for his eyes and lines that would appear on a sea horses belly. I used a really dark leaf, too. Provide the illusion of a sea horse. Also, as I created him, I made sure to balance color and texture with his layout and for the edges. Like his belly and lines. I used some of the straight stems that I had created to really define his body shape. Turn off the outline so you can see his finish Lee out, and I'm gonna turn off the background layer. I'm gonna zoom in really close so that you can see a better view of the individual pieces. As I arranged these pieces, I made sure the longer elements the stem like elements went along the sides of his body to give a little bit more definition to his shape. As you create arrangements like this, have fun imagining how your creature would look. Or if you're creating floral Bunches, you would do the same type of thing you would add in your elements and layer them to create a design that your buyer can use to build out products. In the next lesson, we're gonna talk about how to organize your digital product files and package those files for different marketplaces seeing the next lesson. 17. Organizing Your Product Files: When creating your digital products, you need to think about how you're gonna organize your product files. There are different different types of product files, but the main types of product files that you will be creating our your product development files and then product delivery files. Your product development files will consist of your original designs that you created in Adobe Photoshop. Or, if you're developing your product using Adobe Illustrator, it will consist of the original design files. Your product delivery files will consist of the files that you are going to provide as your download, as well as any instruction documents that you want to provide with your product. Now I'm gonna show you some example product files. Here is an example of my orchard perk graphic set. You can organize your product files however you feel works best for you. But this is just how I organize my product files, and I wanted to share this with you to get you thinking about how you're gonna organize your products. So let's dive in Teoh my Orchard Park set so you can see how each of these folders are set up. I store my product files now and ah, hard drive that I call big data because it's a big drive that has a ton of space on it to store these products files. I have different folders within the product file that I called deliver Bols, which are is the actual finished product files. So I'm gonna go ahead and click in here, and you can see that this is the actual file that I upload. It's a zip file, and this is the original file being clicking here, and you can see how I've set up this file. I have this particular product. The reason I wanted to show you this one is that I provide it in both illustrator and PNG format. This particular product and I also created an instruction document for this product. If you click into the P and G folder, it is divided up into other folders that are specific to that type of design element. So this product has border pieces and Bunches that I made, and these are all the individual elements that come in this set. It has some patterns as well as some different wreath designs, and in the illustrator set up, it's very much the same. Except these are watercolor illustrations that I converted Teoh Vector format and these air saved out as Creative Cloud files. I wanted to offer this product in two formats going back into the main product folder. You see, I have original scans, the product image design files, product images and then I also have a product development folder. And within the product development folder, I have the original files that I started creating as well as these are I. I always create what's called a file prep folder where I start building out product in that folder, and then once the product is finished, then it goes into a deliverables holder. Once everything's completed, so you can see it's very much the same. So this was where I was building it out, and I had the finished product and the district here. The design files are the original product development folders. So here's the Photoshopped version of the actual photo shop files where I was developing the product itself. I want to quickly show you how to compress the folder on my Mac. I right, click and select compress. Next, I'm gonna show you another product file as an example, here is another example of a product file. This is my saltwater shores set, and you can see this one's a little bit different, and the file set up deliverer bols product images. I have also a federal copyright submission for images that I've saved, so I know that those are the ones I've sent to to copyright. I have product development, the prep files, proud of images, image designs. And I had some promo images that I had photographed this product. Now this one is a little bit different in terms of the product files. Since these products are all PNG files, I didn't set it up, as you know, illustrator versus PNG, because this product is all Panji and and I think leader can't remember if I have Jay picked files and internal Yeah, I divided it up based on the type of element that it waas. So I have reefs and these air the individual elements that we were using. So I do have some JPEG files in here E and P and G and these are different textures, and I also provided full image of those textures, and this one has little islands that I created next. I'm going to quickly go over. If I was setting up a new product file from scratch, this is how I would create it. I'm gonna go back into my demo product files. Teoh, show you how you can easily set up your own product development folder. So I just came up with the name of Leaf and firm for this demo product, but it could be whatever you are going to name your product. So let's go in here and you can see that I already have a file set up as delivery bols product development and the scans folder thes these are images that I've scanned for this demo product. Normally, when I create a product, I go ahead and set up all the folders in advance. We're gonna go ahead and set up new folders, so I have to deliver bowls and I'm gonna just rename this tube product you've develop, match and then create a new folder, and I'm gonna call it product while prep. And what goes into this folder is files that you're gonna save out as bigger final product is gonna go in there. So say this leaf infirm product was going to be just PNG files. I would name the files that are in here. Like, if I'm creating reefs, gonna name them reefs, I would create another folder called Individual Elements. Or you could name it something that's related to your product name. So and then you would just create, you know, another folder say frames or whatever type of resource is that you're going to develop for that product. And then we're going to create a folder called Product Image Design Files as you're creating product images. Theory Journal. Product is image design files a go in there and then I'll create another folder with the finished product images. So finished product images. We'll go in here. Come on, hurry, Jim by you can just arrange in my name. Once you've built out your product and say you have all your designs already in here, then what I do is I just copy this product, move it into my deliver birth delivery, bols holder, and then I'm gonna put put that in there, and I will rename it whatever my product name is leave and watercolors. Maybe that's what I named it. And then you would just compress that folder, and you haven't already to g o as your deliver rules. So this is how you would prepare your files for large marketplaces like creative market design cuts and market places like that, where you can upload pretty large file sizes. And the next lesson I'm gonna go over marketplaces like etc. That require smaller file sizes. See you in the next lesson. 18. Packaging Files for Etsy: when packaging your product files for small market places like etc. You need to plan out your product files in advance prior to creating your product images. That's he currently allows a total of 100 megabytes her digital product and each step file is allowed 20 megabytes her file for a total of five files. So when I create my products for etc. I take my larger products that I've created for other marketplaces and divvy up the files. This requires taking a look at your file sizes for each of the elements that you've created in a larger product and then putting them together to make sure they don't exceed the file size limits. For each 20 megabyte file, you don't have to use all 5 20 megabyte files. You could sell just a single illustration like a single wreath or create a product like the one shown here. I'm gonna give you a quick demonstration on how I would divide up a larger product. Now we're gonna divide up the saltwater shores graphics at the larger set into smaller files. I'm doing this on the desktop so that you given easy view of how I would divide up the files. We have the delivery rules, Holder and I'm a click it and show you inside. I created specific folders for each of the files. Have named it Saltwater Tropical Wreath one, grease two, 33 and wreath for. And if you look inside, you can see that this read is 13.4. This one is 16.1 and this one's 19.5. So it definitely takes up one whole 20 men, right file, and then this one is 18.9. And then these are the upload files that I'm upload to this products product files and I just compressed it each one of those files and then I have the upload ready to go. If I was creating this from scratch, I would create these folders. So water tropical creates Flynn and I go into my main product, my larger product figure out what won't reefs I wanted to include in it. This one only has the four reefs that I have here. But if I wanted include some of these items in there as well I could if it fit within the file size limits. If you create a larger product, you need to go into it and divide up the files based on what you want to create in your Etsy shop. Because this is a copy of my original Saltwater Shores graphic set. I am just going to drag over the file to place it into the folder. And then I would create a new folder for each wreath that I wanted to be in its own zip file for etc. And then you just compress the folder and then place that into your upload toe, etc. Folder. When you divide up your larger product as specific items within that product, it makes it a lot easier to divide it up later on. Say he wanted to create a smaller product with just the frames. You could do that because it's already kind of set up for you. That way I would create new folders for each one of these and then created deliverables folder and then build out the product that way, and then you have the then you have the folders already todo for you to just pull from this to create your product images. For example, here is a product that I have both on my website and on etc. I divided up the larger product and created smaller products on both at sea and my website . I use Squarespace and squarespace does have a file size limit of 300 megabytes or less. So sometimes it's great to just repurpose my Etsy products at my website or I create a new product like, for example, this one. I created different volumes of this product. These volumes are only available on my website but also available on etc. In smaller sizes. In the next lesson, I'm going to go over how to create your product images. See you in the next lesson. 19. Creating Product Images: Creating your product images is just as important as creating the actual product. Your product images should showcase your product in a way that's going Teoh appeal to your buyer, and sometimes your product images can look different, depending on what marketplace you are selling. There are different types of product images, and they all play an important role in helping to sell your products. The cover image is the first image that your buyer sees. The product detail images shows your buyer exactly what they're going to get. Example. Use and mock up images will show your buyer how they can use your products and special features. Images showcases any special details that your product has to really highlight those details and ending images. Showcase your product in a special way or give something special to your buyer. For example, if there is a special bonus that's included in the product, now let's go for some example images. This is an example cover image that I have created for large marketplaces. This is the artwork that I created from doing my class project and this cover image. I really wanted to showcase the seahorse and all the special details that are included in this particular set. You want to make people when they look at the cover image. Teoh want to see what is beyond it. Include all the fun details so that they want to see more. Here's another similar cover image design, and I talk about it being a village map design set. Here are some example product detail images. You can create long ones like thes or create them the same size as your cover image. I will be sharing. My favorite resource is for mock ups, and the resource is document included in this class. And these mock ups are geared towards my buyer with some other ideas of how the artwork could be used. Here's some more example mock up images and I created one of the images as a collage type image to showcase those mock ups together. News air, some example. Special feature images. This product had some islands that could be used to create their own arrangement. But if you have a product that does something very special, like changes the way something looks or you want to do like a zoomed in kind of close up of the product you would definitely want to highlight that in your product images for your ending images, you can highlight something that's very special that's included in the product. Say, if you want to offer a bonus item, this is a great place to do that. Or you could talk about what is really special about your product. Say, if it's hand painted watercolor illustrations. You could talk about that in your process on how you created them, or used this as an opportunity to talk about how this product can benefit them and make their process of creating products easier. Now I want to go over creating your product images for a smaller marketplace like etc. Here is a cover image that I created for etc. And this product is just the sun flower wreath. But if you are selling a product that it has more than one download in it, you're going Teoh. One a highlight. What else is in your product in this image, just like you did with the cover images for larger marketplaces? Just images on etc. Are a little bit different in size, and you can play around with it to see what is best. But I recommend keeping your images 2000 pixels wide and keeping it at a 5 to 4 aspect ratio and with etc. Images. I like to dio a little bit more close up images and again highlighting what's special about the artwork and, in this case, their hand painted watercolors. Now let me take you through a walk through on creating your product images. I will be creating the cover image for my class project, which is thes sunflowers. We're going to create a new document, and I'm going to make it 3000 by 2400 pixels wide at 72 eight bit rgb color with you white background or you can do transparent. Now we have our new documents, and I'm gonna go into another document that I have opened. And I want to take this background that I used on this cover image and use it also on this product image. This is going to be the cover image for the individual elements of the some flower product , So I'm just going into the individual elements and placing them in the new document. We're moving them and rotating them, just like we did in some of the earlier lessons in this class. But instead of making more resource is for an artwork arrangements, we are arranging the product image. I'm gonna be using every element that is an individual element to really showcase it on this cover image. I'm gonna go ahead and speed up the process here a little bit because it's definitely going to take some time to get this fully arranged around the outside of this cover image. You. Our product image is almost finished. We just need to add some text in the middle to describe what the product is. I placed the text from my other product image, and I'm dragging guides to center. This text come in every name it to the product name, and I like to use thes same fonts throughout the same product line to keep it consistent. Now we're going Teoh reorder the layers and put the text at the very top of the document. I just duplicated the text layer and I am going Teoh, move it and change the farm in the fonts. I'm going to select different front and titled this individual elements. I'm just going to scale down this text using the keyboard shortcut for transform, which is command T, and you can adjust the line spacing in the character panel. I want to make this font a little smaller, so I'm going to adjust the sizing now that I have the cover pretty much how I want it. I'm going to select my text and adjust the color using the eyedropper. Just have fun exploring using different bonds and colors and layouts for your product images. I try to pick out fonts that seemed to go with the artwork. I'm gonna hide my guides so I can see how this looks. It's looking pretty good, but I think I want to add any rectangle. I'm gonna use the rectangle tool and just create a diviner line in between this the text and I just want to fill it with a color that complements the design. So I'm gonna take a a sample of the yellow from one of these flowers and then I'm just going to adjust the spacing of it. Okay? It's looking good. Everything's finished. We have our title and lay out. I'm gonna just add in my logo to the image and I'm going to organize this file by selecting all the artwork and then grouping it from the layers. I'm gonna zoom in a little closer because I used a water color texture background. I am going to select the group and change the appearance to multiply. It makes the artwork look like it's on the paper, and I know when we scan the our work in. I made it a very important point that I wanted to remove the watercolor paper texture. But I sometimes added back in just to make the appearance that this is what our color artwork and it drives home the fact that this is hand painted watercolor artwork in the product images. I don't always do this, but some images are like having it on and some images I don't to see about your images for the Web go to file export and safer Web, And I would just save this out as a J peg. And if your file is a little bit too large, you can compress them using a website like Tiny J. Peg and then just download your product image 20. Copyright: I want to briefly go over the subject of copyright registration. Working in the United States, I register my copyright for my artwork. If you are living in working in another country, you would need to research the requirements for protecting your artwork in your country. In the US, it's copyright Doug of and on their website. There's tons of information on how to register a copyright. There are also lawyers that can help you with copyright law. So if you have any questions, you can also contact a lawyer to help you navigate this process. 21. Class Project and Thoughts: It's time to get started on your class. Project these air The photos from my phone that I used for my class project thes beautiful . Some flowers were used in my sister's wedding. She was married in the fall at our home, and I just loved her. The some flower theme that she had. And this is my kitchen counter with her bouquet sitting on the counter the night before she got married. So once you have sourced your inspiration and developed your theme, you can get started on sketching your elements for your product. Sketch out all your elements and get them ready to be either be drawn out digitally or hand painted with watercolor or krill, ICS or whatever your favorite medium is. Then share your progress in the class Project gallery by sharing your inspiration sources, your mood boards and your sketches. You do not have to share your finished product in your class project, but if you do want to share it, we would love to see it, and I wish you so much doing and creating your products. I also want to mention that I did include a class resource is document that you can download that covers some things that I wasn't able to cover in the class, which is tips on pricing some of my favorite mock ups, example product instructions and product creation checklist as well as links two other things I mentioned in some of the lessons I want to share with you a little bit of inspiration before you head off to create your artwork. I believe that art sees the love that connects us and the wonder that inspires us. See the moments that bring you great joy and create art from those moments. Seeing the wonder and the magic that can be found in her everyday lives can inspire others and bring great joy to the people that your artwork touches. I hope you enjoy it. My very first skill share class. I will be doing more classes here on skill share, So give me a follow here, or you can sign up for my newsletter to find out when new classes and content is released by going to my profile and subscribing Thank you and have so much fun creating