Create Watercolor Wall Art as a Downloadable File

1. Welcome to the Class: Welcome to the class, create and sell watercolor wall art as a downloadable file. In this class, we will draw an artwork in watercolor together, digitize it, and then prepare it as a digital download to sell it on your own website, on Ts or anywhere else if we have met yet. Hi, my name is Una. I'm an artist, a graphic designer, and a teacher. And I love to create digital products from my artwork to build a sustainable business. In this class, we will first draw our artwork together with watercolor. We will digitize it, optimize it for various formats, and then package it for sale. We will also create previews together. In the end of this class, you have a complete blueprint for selling your artwork on your own website and on C as a downloadable file. Join me in this class. 2. Material: Let's start with the material we need for this workshop that is of course first of all, is your paper, I'm using watercolor paper. I'm using it in 300 gram/square meter. You can see it is a pretty thick one. I personally really like it. It's also great because it can take a lot of water. It's up to you if you want to have something else, maybe 200, that's fine, but don't go under it. You will be annoyed when your art is ready because water color needs a lot of water actually. What else do we need is an eyedropper to because before we start, we need to reactivate all our colors, which means I'm going to go over all the colors with some water. We can quickly do that. I just go over it and activate all my colors here. You never know what you need. It's good to have them all activated. You see how much water I put on there because it really needs it. Otherwise, I have very dry colors here. Besides that, I have my color palette, of course. And I have three brushes I'm using here, brush number ten, number eight, and number six. These are watercolor brushes. Make sure you use watercolor brushes because that's not unimportant. They can take on more water. Make sure when you purchase some brushes, they are watercolor brushes, then your best friend will be your towel. Believe me, that's really necessary. Have a towel next to you. You can just use it to clean up your brush here. Okay. Of course, then I need all the colors or my colors here. You can have just 12 colors which is fine as well. It doesn't really matter because we can always mix it. Then you need a pencil because you will be drawing your leaves here. We need to get rid of the stroke of the graphite later on why I have a rubber here. But I also have this rubber because with that one, I can make it really light. I go over it and take off as much graphite as I can. This is a nice one, you might get that as well. Showing you here Faber case. You might want to have something like that. Yeah. As a pencil, I just have whatever pencil I had here flowing around. But you might want an H three pencil. H two pencil. The point is, it needs to be a hard one because you don't want to that much graphite on your paper. The more you have, the more you need to wrap it off. Because you don't want the edges to have a pencil around it. Maybe for this project, it's not such a big deal because we want to go over it with a pencil, with a pen. Actually, later on I'm going to show you that pen because later on we want to use this migrant fine liner and go around our leaves. But of course, that's not always the case, you might want to take care of rubbing things off. That's not so unimportant. Yeah, now we can get started actually. And we start by mixing our colors and then we move on sketching our leaves. 3. Mixing Colors: For our project. We need some blue tones and some brown tones. I want to make that up a little bit. A red brown, more or less. That's what I have in mind. And what's my plan for that? I'm going to add some colors to my palette and see how that goes. I will have a really sienna brown, something like that. You will see that in a second. I'm just going over the colors. As I said, it takes a lot of water to activate them and we need to see how that looks. Yeah, I like that color. Going to add a bit more. I will also add a few more tones. I want to have a brighter one and a darker one basically. I want that because I want to mix. Yeah, do really nice washy tone here to have all the tones into each other flowing into each other. Here's a dak brown. Now let's use that one usually. That is just the imagination you have as an artist. But most probably it turns out completely different. You never know. But that's not a big deal. We do, we will take whatever works. Let's see. Okay, here are some brown tone and a color here. Then I'm using a little bit of blue. You see it's a very strong one. Okay, let's see, Maybe we will use something else, you never know actually. We will start with these four tones and then we might add some yellow or a, or some more blue or a different blue tone. But that's the base actually, we start with that. 4. Sketching your Leaves: Now let's start by sketching our leaves. And for that, I just go very lightly here. I don't make it a big deal just drawing some leaves, three in a row. Actually, I have nine leaves later. You can hardly see it. I know that. But as I said, I'm using a very hard brush because I want to be able later on to wrap it off. Let's draw some leaves and then we can start filling them with color. You can draw them in different directions, of course, just as I did. Or smaller ones and bigger ones, maybe I'm going to make those a bit larger. Let's use this one. You see, you can get rid of it, and later on when we get it into the computer, we definitely can get rid of it. Okay, These are my nine leaves. That's the size of my artwork as well, so it's not very big, but I can scan it with a very high resolution. So later on we can sell it bigger. So make sure you have nothing from your rubber left on the paper. 5. Colouring the Leaves: For this drawing, I'm using the wet on wet technique. I get my towel and the brushes here. I guess I will use the eighth, the ten, maybe, maybe a better eight here. Then I start with the first leaf. I will use the clean water and make it a little bit wet. You see it turns out to be a little bit yellow. It's not a big deal, but if you don't want that, make sure you get clean water. Again, what I don't do, I don't go over the edges, so I'm not going into this graphiti. Actually, I can rub that off later. If I do, I will have a hard time to get rid of that. As I said, it's not such a big deal for this project, but actually I don't want that. That's why I just leave it like that. Now I go in with the color, I can control that a bit by adding more water, maybe a little bit more color, different. Really just let it flow in. So we have different structures here. It will look nice later on. You see, even if you are a beginner, can draw a leave and you can definitely fill it with color. You can always have it drying a bit. I'm now picking some brighter color here. I have that flowing in directly from my plan box. If you into the pencil drawing here, it's not in the end of the world, then we will just include it in our drawing. But you can take care of it. You can be careful if it happens. Don't worry too much. I'm adding a little bit of black to my blue because I don't want it to be that strong. I need to be really careful with that one. If you feel it's just too much, it might help. Then you use your towel and carefully go into it and take off a little bit of the color. You see I go now with my blue into the brown leaf. It might look good. Be creative at this point. You can basically mix your colors here on your paper. As you see, we can always go over it again. We just need a foundation for our line art. I even go in with my brush and take on some color. You see how well it works. Why I do that? Because I feel this looks good. I like that. It's why I take a bit of the colors to make it fit more to the rest. I guess I do the same on the other ones. Here you see you can always go in change or make it a bit darker. Don't worry too much. If it's not perfect with your first brush stroke, that's totally normal. Okay, I'm using now another yellow here, which is not that bright. No worries. When your colors get dry here, you can always reactivate them with a little bit of water. The beauty of water color, by the way. Okay, what do I see now? I see that I like the blue and darker brown. And now I have the problem with these leaves. Don't have these darker brown. I guess I will go in with a bit more color there and see if I get closer to the other toe. Let's get it right for a bit and then we see how it looks and we might go in again. 6. Cleaning your Artwork from Graphite: Okay. I waited maybe for ten or 15 minutes. It is not everything completely dry yet. But for what I want to show you, I can just do it here on these leaves. And you see I'm now having this rubber. And I go over it and try to get rid of as much graphite as I can. I just show you here on one leaf. Get rid of that. Go around it. Once you feel you have it all, then you use the other one and go around here, Get rid of as much as you can. It doesn't matter if there still is a little bit left because when we scan it, we can clean it on the computer. But the best thing is to get rid of most of it. Don't make the mistake and smear over it just yet. Because there might be something which is still where we can't see right now, but you never know. I'm careful with that and usually try to keep it like this. See, sometimes it comes a little bit of my paper. That's what I'm doing now to all nine leaves. You don't have to watch me doing that. You get what I mean here. If you are still not happy with it, you can always go in again. That's what I've done here to these leaves and I just tried to take out a little bit of the yellow, which I didn't like anymore. I like mostly the blue and dark brown. That's what I wanted to have present here for these leaves. You know how that works? Get rid of all of the graphite on your paper and then we move on. 7. Adding Line Art to your Artwork: Okay, now we will add some fun line art. It's an abstract painting. I'm just going in here and adding some veins here. We can do that in different ways. Let's maybe start with this one. I won't go around it exactly because I just want to show that it is somehow a leaf. But I don't want to be exact. I just go around like this. Yeah. Then I have my vein here in the middle. Then I can play a little bit. I just do it like that for this leaf. I just show you some patterns. Maybe you come up with something different. Maybe we get the center a little bit stronger. I have a fine liner here now in five, but you might want to have something bigger. Just go ahead and fill your leaves. You see, I don't want to have it that regularly. I just go over it and draw how it turns out. So it's always different. So I bet you can't do it the same like I am doing. And that's good. It's a good thing because we don't want to have the same thing. We want to have different leaves. Actually just move on just to come up with different ideas here and see how your leaves turn out. And now we can do a pretty regular one, and now we have the last three left. You see, I'm leaving that out for the last one. My purpose, just in case it's still not dry. Don't ask me why, but for this leaf I've been thinking of an onion. So that's why it gets now all the veins in the same direction. Okay. I think I'm done so far. Maybe there's one or other edge, I go over again, but basically I like what I see, so I leave it now as it is. 8. Adding your Signature: I believe that you should always add your signature under each artwork you do. You never know for what is good. You don't want it to be that present but also not seeable. Actually, you could do it with a pencil because we are scanning it, then we might go better with that or we don't like the signature so we can wrap it off again. But whatever you decide for, make sure it's somewhere here in the corner or somewhere there. Make sure you have your signature on your work. I'm just going to put it here because I might want to move it later on. That's the beauty of scanning and digitizing your artwork because then you can always just cut it out and move it somewhere else. Okay, that's it. You see, I don't have it to present, but it's definitely there. Maybe you also want to add the date. You could do that here or maybe just a year of your drawing. You go, go ahead, do as you like it, but don't forget to add your signature. 9. Scanning, Cleaning and Saving your Artwork: Now we want to scan our artwork. I just do it because I want to be able to print it much larger than it is already. Right now we have an A four paper, so not that large. But if I scan it in a higher resolution, we can easily have it printed in a higher resolution. Let's go to the printer and scanner menu. Use might look similar. It always is a little bit different for each printer scanner, both. In this case, mine is the absent. Et 77, 50. It's an three printer scanner. Yours might be different. Don't get this onto you. It's just a dialogue. And somehow you can scan most probably. You can already also started on your computer then. It looks something like that. When I now click on open scanner, the great thing is it starts scanning right away. You see waiting, and it gives me an overview scan. Now once I have it, I can say which area I want to have scanned. You see years of artwork we have just drawn. And here I can set my resolution. That's an important part. So you see, I can even do it much higher, up to 9,600 DPE. But I gather them, my computer will not do it anymore. I have 1,200 DPI, that is a very high resolution. Usually you have 300, that is, dots per inch. You have no 1,200 dots per inch. I believe that's a pretty high resolution if you don't want to have a just in a four but also in three or two, maybe a one. I don't know, we would have to check it. This could be easily done by setting the higher resolution. Right now, the size of my paper actually is about 6.7 by 9.4 So I can set that here. Now I have this area here and I can place it. I have everything I need in my scan. You see I have All right. Resolution here now. You could also set auto selection, but I prefer to have it scanned the same size I have. We will turn it later, don't worry about that. You can also turn it around on your printer. Doesn't matter right now. Correct image or Unsharp mask or whatever, we don't do anything here. Once you see something the same like here, you just click scan and make sure of course you have color and not black and white or text selected, then just skin. This is my result and you see already that it has a very high resolution. You can even see the texture of the paper here. I really like how it turned out. I also like that my signature is really, yeah, just light. I'm not that strong. Like if I had done it with my Micfinedlinern, it would have been very strong. It's very lightly here. That's why I think that's a perfect way to scan your artwork. Once you have done that, you can easily open it in Photoshop, then we can do some color corrections if you are not happy yet. Beside that, you can also save it in different sizes. Let's do that. It just takes a second until it is loaded. Now you can see here file. If I press now command and plus, you see what a high resolution it has actually and how nicely you can zoom into the artwork. Yeah, depending on maybe you want to get rid of that. I'm quickly showing you how to do that for that we are using here the healing brush, spot healing brush. Maybe you don't see it. If so, that's because there is a little triangle on the bottom right. And then you have to choose healing brush tool, spot healing brush tool, whatever. Then you just go over it before you, of course, need to define a source. Just click here next to it and that's it. Let's zoom out with comma minus and see if there is anything else I need to get rid of. Maybe, well, I don't think there is anything. Maybe here, something very lightly. Press out, pick the color here and then I go over it and it's gone. That's a moment where you can fix any issue you have on your paper, but in case you are happy with it, you can now set the ratio with a command zero. You have to screen here back to 100% You have your document fit to screen. You see it just 17% here. You can imagine what large size it actually is. Now we need to save it in different sizes to give that to our customers. If I go to file and then I can export as export export as I can set. Now the resolution or the height and width here is where might be an option you can sell in this size. And then people can just scale it down if they want to, but just in case you want to have it in different sizes, give your customers in different sizes, it's a good idea because not anyone is computer savvy. That's the moment where they will Thank you. If you have changed the sizes of the file, what you don't have right now are these ratio papers which are all these canvases. This is material you have in the class and you actually should download it and to offer your customer the best choices you can create with all these backgrounds here your artwork. Just drag and drop one of these into your Photoshop. Then you just drag by pressing Shift your artwork onto this paper. You see that not much happened. What happened is that it is not really positioned and that it doesn't fit 100% You see here is a little bit missing. Now you have two options. You can decrease it a little. Then what happens is that you have something here on the left and on the right when I double click, now we need to double check. Actually, if one can see something, if you look really behind, you can actually see a little bit. Actually it's so small that I don't worry too much about that. I can offer my customer that with full heart. I just export that and make sure now you export it, not for web click export. Then you choose JPG format. Once again, in this case, we want of course, to have high quality. Here is the artwork you see. There is nothing left. You can increase the quality to seven. I will leave it now as it is because otherwise the files get really large. Adding that into a new folder, actually, this is now the abstract artwork. I just call it artwork for now because I need to save all the files there. That's the first one. Now I keep going and do that again. I delete that file from it and close that one here. Then I use the second template here from my folder here. And now the two by three ratio and drag that into Photoshop and do the whole process. Again, I also do that for the other one. I won't bother you to show for each of them, but basically that's how you see here. It's larger, you just need to scale it down a little bit and then position it on the canas. Nothing can be seen. You can actually play around a little with just using here several options and see if something fits your needs. But basically, I think even if you don't do anything, it's okay. You won't see it. Or maybe dissolve. No, that's on the bottom. You could even increase the canvas. There are different options to do that, but personally, I prefer just to leave it as it is because you can hardly see it if you can always increase it a little bit because it's such a high resolution. For example, for this one, if you want to increase it a little, just get rid of the key here, this lock and then just pull it a little bit. One can hardly see that something has changed. Of course, if you are very picky, you might be not happy with that, but it always depends what you want and what you want for your customer. In this case, you gave him different ratios, which I really like. And that's why I make a little bit of a compromise at this point. I just click Save Export as before, and then wait a little bit. And then again we just leave it in artwork and export the rest as well. You see that's how it works. So you have several ratios for your customer and can sell those files. 10. Your Artwork in different Ratios: Let me show you another option in case you are really piggy, which is totally fine if you want to do it right just in quotation marks. Let me just show you what else you can do. I still have my artwork open and now I have the 11 by 14 ratio water color texture open again, Shift key, and I drag it over. Then command minus and have it a bit smaller so you can see that it doesn't fit. Actually, Make sure you have this locked and now we decrease it. It's the same problem as before. Have a thing here and double click, hardly can see it. But in case you really zoom in and you are really picky, you might think, okay, you can see it a little bit, but we can get rid of it because we have Photoshop. Let me quickly show you how make sure you are on the top layer with your artwork. And then you go to the selection tool and you select this edge. Actually, let me zoom in. You have the little edge here, selected here. You can hardly see it, but a little bit. Now I set the Fs to five. Maybe just press Return, then I click delete. Now I do the same thing. I just take that over here to the other side where you can also see a little bit. And do that again. Fes still to five. And do that again. Now it's gun, you can't see anything anymore. It's a little bit like it's scratched now. Yeah, I really like that. Here on the bottom, there's maybe also a little bit. Let's get rid of that as well. It was too much. Okay. So that's how you can easily get rid of that in case you want that, you can always decrease it a bit and then you have your different ratios. 11. Using Mockups and creating Previews in the right Size: If you want to sell your artwork, you most probably need a mock up, something which presents your artwork where you put it in. You don't have to hang it on your wall and take a picture and then get the picture and have that added. For example, to add or wherever you list your item, you can basically just get some mock ups. What I did here is mock ups from all about mock up he or she is selling on C. This is pretty inexpensive and they are really beautiful. Let me show you what I got. I got PSD files and this is what I want to show you now. Here's one of them. Here's how they are set up. You can see in the layers pet, there are just two items here, Two layers. One is the background and one is here, the smart layer. Nothing happens when I turn that on and off, but I can't double click on that, then just pull my artwork in. I press the shift key and then drag and drop it over. You see how large that is? I really need to make that smaller. I can just do that with press command minus, then I press Command. You see how big that is? Let me just scale it down to maybe 20% something. You see now it's even too small. I'm going to make it fit now and pull it on my background here, and you see it fits perfectly. Once I'm done, I just double click or just click here on the arrow. Then the trick is just to close it easy. I click Save. Now the magic has happened. The artwork is here inside and you see how beautiful that looks. That's how easy you can get your images. If you're listed in your store or wherever. You can easily do that. Let's do that again. Another more gap also from that set. I double click here. Again, I drag and drop my image over shift key command. Once I increase it, command minus then command, then I put it now to maybe 30% Now that fits nearly perfectly. Let's increase it a little bit again. I click the error and then close the smart object. It's now I have two beautiful images. And I can close that as well. I can use my images for presenting my artwork. The best thing now is to the right size. I go here to the crop tool. I say one to one, for example. If you elicit on C, one to one is the way to go. You see you don't have to crop a lot, it's just a little bit here. You decide where you want to crop. It doesn't matter to me right now. I just double click here. You have to do compromise and see what you want to keep on your image and whatnot. You can crop it like that, maybe something like that. But then you don't have a clock anymore or you go here and you have the clock. Just a little bit of everything. I think that's what I go with. And crop that as well. That's how it works. And now you have two beautiful images of your artwork. And you can start selling once you have exported them, let's quickly do that file and then export. And then say save for Web, because we need it, of course, for web. Now you see it's still pretty large. You don't want that webshop for Etsy's about 2000. If you are doing that on your own shop, you might to have it just in 1,000 which is pretty fine. Same thing here. If you choose medium, that's okay. Then you still have 291 for C, that's okay for your own shop, that's too large. I go 2000, and then I have 86 kilobytes, which is fine. Then you can save it on your computer, save the other one as well, and upload those files to C or any other shop. 12. Preparing your File for Download: Once you have your folder ready with your abstract watercolor leaves, you should zip the file with the files you are selling inside. Then also keep in your folder your original artwork. Then of course the previews we have created in both sizes. I have them in 800 from my website and in 2004 Es. Then also I have here the ratios. I can easily use them for the next file I create. I just move this folder from one folder to the next. I always have that handy. But this is a file we are going to sell and this is what we want to deliver to our customer. We can't because it has 101 megabyte in this case, since C just allows you to send 25 or 20 megabytes per upload to your customers and you have five of them. It doesn't really work out beside that each file has to be 20 megabytes. One had 19, but the next one had 21. It doesn't work, but there is an easy workaround for that. And I'm going to show you that. First of all, we have to create a document. You see here, I have created one with my logo just for your friend. Thank you so much for your purchase. Please click the link to the download. I don't have a link yet to download your products. The easiest, most secure way for you to download large files from my server, and here is also an e mail to contact me. Now we need to create this link. If you send people once they have purchased your product, this documents a PDF file. We are going to make a PDF out of that. They will be able to click on the link and then just start the download. Now we have to create such a link, and we can do that by signing up for Dropbox. I have the Dropbox now here in my task list under Favorites. You can have that to, you. Just need to sign up for Dropbox and download it. Let's quickly go to the browser. You see downloaded Dropbox app and installed on my computer. But make sure you choose the basic plan because that is free and you have 2 gigabytes. You see even if your product has 100 megabytes, there's plenty of space for now for you. You can start with that, yeah, have this free plan first. And then you can upload the files here, right over the browser. You see here. Just click upload, or you can create a folder first and then upload. Or you can do that here over your finder or whatever you have on your computer. I just do it here. I just create a new folder now and name it just like the one I have on my desktop because I always want to have these SKU numbers. I know what's inside, I don't have the name because it gets pretty long. Otherwise, click Create. Now you have the folder. I can just add my zip file from my computer here to the Dropbox. I can also do that from my desktop. As you can see here, the folder has been created as well. I could actually also go here, just open a new tab and go into the folder, and then just drag and drop the Sip file here. The same thing happens, it says move, of course. Okay, Now I have it moved. I prefer to have it on my computer as well. I just come and see and put it here. Again, it's uploading. You can see that it's uploading. You can see that here it takes a second. Here they are sending me notifications for that. But once once I have my file here uploaded, let me reload that, I can create a link to that file. Here you go. Now I need to click Share and get the link Copy link. That does a trick. When I have this link here, it's a pretty long one. I can add it to my document which I created. Let's see here. Please click on the link to download and I'm going to make this a link I just market do. Right click and then say a link at link to web page. Then I just paste my link here. Just click open link and you see it's working. That is where my customer is sent and can download my artwork from here. Yeah, that's the easiest way. Then you just go ahead now, you have a link here and just go ahead and export that as a PDF. Just say export PDF. Then you put it on your computer and upload that file to C. I always keep that here on my desktop. In the folder, I have it all together. I just click on that. I have the exact name here, and have that in my folder as well. Now I have everything together which is around this product. Beside ratio, which I move from one folder to the next, I keep that secure and can use it for the next work. Again, I will also just just say download and keep this file. You see I already have to keep that file. I can just modify the link for the next product and then send it to the people as well. Yeah, I hope that helped because I believe that the best and easiest way for you to send these large files to your customers. 13. Your Project: Now let's talk about your project for this class. By now, you might have already folded along and have drawn your watercolor leaves. You might have already done your preview and you have your product ready for upload. I just want you to show off what you have drawn. Maybe take a picture, make a screen chart or whatever, and upload that to the gallery so we can see your project.