Transcripts
1. Introduction: If you enjoy collaging
or scrapbooking or making wall art that you can
either use yourself or sell, then today's project is going
to be a fun one for you. We are creating some stamps together that are not
real stamps, of course. You can't use them on letters, but they are artistic. They are fun. You can make
them whatever color you like. And together, it's a
very fun project that will help you develop some
very basic canvas skills. Pretty easy to get
into. All you're going to need is a free
Canva account today. So if that sounds fun to you, let's head into the
first lesson together.
2. Designing Our Project: Before we dive into
creating one together, I'm just going to
talk you through a little bit of the design choices here so that you can keep that in mind as we start to create. Now, I made a Canva document
that is 8.5 " by 11 ", and that is the size
of a standard piece of printer paper because I'm making this so that I
could print it at home. But if you wanted to create it larger to be a poster
or something like that, you can certainly pick
different dimensions. If you were going to make this
to be a social media post, you could also do
it as a square. I've arranged this in sort of a collage style in that it could actually be a nice art print if you wanted to print
this off and frame it. But if you were making
these to cut out, you don't have to adhere to such strict visual guidelines. Actually only using two shapes. There's a rectangle
and a square, and that's just
repeated a couple of times throughout the design. The color variations and the image variations
are what kind of makes it look more
visually interesting. The stamps are basically built
of a few simple elements. We have the
background, which has this crimp, stamp like border. We have a rectangle
on the inside as sort of our base color. Then there's a couple decorative elements inside that make the stamp design and a piece
of text that says the price, which you can make
whatever you like. Because obviously, these are not real stamps that you
can use for the mail. If you are going to be cutting
these out, for example, with scissors that
are like crimped or zig zag so that they
look more realistic, you may want to just use a regular rectangle as this
background color so that you're not trying to adhere to these little zig zags as you cut them out, but that's
totally your choice. Depends on just how
you're going to use it. And if you have your own
art and illustrations, you can definitely use that instead of these stock images. I've just used these to make it quick and to give you an example of something you
can throw together without too much effort. Alright, let's open a new
page and get started. I'm going to go up
into the elements tab and then type
in stamp shape. If we go into frames, there are frames here where
you could click and drag art, but we're not really
doing that today. We're going to go into graphics. And then there's lots of
options here that are paid, but we're just going to
grab these two right here, which are a square and a
rectangle that are just plain, and that's all we're really
going to need for now. I'm just going to change the
color of these to something darker just so it's
easier to see as I teach. But we'll arrange the
color palette after. Next step is to arrange these however you like on the page. So you want to fit in
as many as you'd like. You can make them
as big or small. You could do a ton of them. You can do just like
four combined together. This is an example of we're
at collage nine together, but we'll just do four
just for this example. I'm going to duplicate these and we'll just
switch them around. I'm going to make this bigger
so it fills out the page, and this will be what we work
on for our class project. The next step is to
add the rectangles inside just to give us
a space to design on. I'm going to tap R
on the keyboard, which gives me a square, and then you can line
it up on your stamp, drag it to make it a
little bit bigger, and you should be
able to drag it, use the grid lines to
lock it in the middle. I'm going to duplicate that and put it on the other rectangle, and then we'll create
another square and put that on the
actual square tabs. So now we have basically these little picture frames
that we can work with. Now I'm going to
change the colors to design our color
palette for this. This looks really fun in
bright and vibrant colors, but you can definitely
do this in neutrals. You could do this in black and white with an accent color. Have some fun with it.
There's a lot of options. Obviously, this is a lot of
creative flexibility here. I think I'm going
to try something a little bit different for me, and I'm just going to do
gray scale with red as my accent color
just to see what it looks like. So I'm
going to do gray there. We'll do a white square inside. We'll do a light gray, and then a black frame. Maybe a medium gray
and a dark inside, and then we'll do
another white on the inside and a
light gray frame. There we go. So now we
have some variation. The next step is to
add your prices, and that can be whatever
price you want them to be. You can locate them
wherever. I'm going to hit T for Textbox. And I'm going to
start by doing $0.25. Now, I'm using a Mac keyboard. So to get the sent icon, I use the shortcut option and
then four at the same time, and that brings
up the sent icon. But you can also find things like that by just Googling it. And it will bring
up the text shape that you can copy and paste. Depending on the
style of your stamps, you can pick whatever kind
of font you like here. For this design up here,
what's a bit more funky, I use the TT Allens serif. So you're welcome
to use that one if you're going for
more of this vibe. For this one, I feel like I want something a little bit classic, so maybe like a Baskerville. Lieber Baskerville is what I think they'll
use for this one. And then you can just kind of arrange them wherever
you like on the design. There's no set rule as to
where a stamp price has to be. Could be in the bottom corner. You could put it on
a different angle. And of course, if
you're putting it on a dark background, you
can change the color. And I'm just going to
change the prices just for a little bit of
variety. There we go. So now we have our bases done, and we just have to add in
some interesting elements. For this design, I
basically just looked for floral shapes and
paper cutouts that were pretty simple and
that I could use to modify the colors so that it would match with the
overall brand design. I think, given the simple shape of the stamp that
we're going with, these kind of simpler designs look better than, for example, like a watercolor illustration, but that is 100% just
my subjective opinion. And you can do whatever
you like in them, and I encourage you to go against what I say if it
makes more sense to you. Some of the things
you can look for are I search for mod shapes. You can do geometric
shapes, aesthetic shapes, abstract shapes, irregular,
different things like this, also just creative or
fun shapes that can give you things like these elements that you can change
the color of, and you can filter out
the pro ones if you need to just by clicking on
Filter and hitting free. That gives you lots of
shapes that you can use. Or if there's specific
objects that you think would make sense for your
design, you can do that here. I think I want to
look for a telephone I think this one looks great. I'm just going to resize it
for one of the square stamps, and I'm going to change
the color of it to red to be sort of my contrast. I think I like a darker
red. There we go. You can also add other text or words or make these
however you like. I kind of like the
idea of this poodle, so I looked for a dog outline. And we can do that
one in red or white. I think I'll change the
stamp color to red. And I've got it layered on top of that design, which I prefer. You can put it down there
if you don't want it to be overlapping the head. For this last one, I'm pulling
in a magnifying glass. I thought it kind
of had this fun. I don't know. There's
some sort of vibe here. But you can see it's
got four colors and I don't need to
use four colors, so I'm just going to replace
some of them with white, and I'll relace this one with black and this
one with our red. And there it already
matches our color palette. I'm going to just hit flip just so that it doesn't
overlap. There we go. Now we have our stamps. Now, I might play around
with these to make them a little bit more
visually interesting. I'll add that little
star there and make it black just to fill
that empty space. I think something white
right here would be good. There, I just did three circles really simple, but it
just fills the space. And just like that, we have a very cute little
collage of some stamps. So really, no matter what kind
of style you lean towards, you can definitely create an interesting collection
that is fun to look at that you can cut out and use as individual
clip art assets. If you design each
of these like that on a separate page
and then exported it, if you have Canva Pro, you can do transparent
without a background, and then you would
basically have a piece of clip art that you. And you can use it for
all kinds of projects. So I hope you found this
fun as a class project. I think you can probably guess. I would love to see what
kind of stamps you design. So if you would like
to create a page like this or even just
a single one and then export it as a PNG or a JPEG and upload it to
our class project section, then it would be really fun
to see what you come up with. You can get inspired
by your classmates and see what direction they took it and what kind of
original ideas you incorporated. If you have any questions or you want to brainstorm ideas, then we can chat in
the class discussion, so feel free to
chat with me there. And if you like this class, not only do I have lots more fun ones that
you could try out, but also I would really
appreciate if you left me a review just
so other students know that my classes are
fun and so I can get some feedback from
you about anything you'd like to see changed
or improved in the future. Alright, we will wrap up here. Thank you so much for doing
this project with me. Hope you had fun with it, and enjoy your creative work. Bye.
Rebecca Wilson, Artist and Illustrator
