Creating a Collection: Greeting Cards for Illustrators

1. Introduction: The best way to show off your unique point of view as an illustrator is through a collection. If you want to develop your drawing skills, take your ideas to the next level and attract potential customers, a collection of greeting card designs is the way to go. My name is Claire. I'm an illustrator and lettering artist. I've been working with businesses on custom illustrations for the last six years. I work on greeting card collections, brand illustrations, chalkboard menus, and more. The times in the past where I felt like I've made my best work and I've also had the most fun is when I've done multiple pieces in a collection rather than a standalone illustration. Creating mini collections of greeting card designs and patterns and more has really helped me to save time and has helped me to improve my skills and visual language over the years tremendously. In this class, we're going to build a collection of festive greeting card designs that can also function as standalone pieces. Creating a greeting card collection will teach you so much about planning, developing your unique point of view, and about scaling your work. It's also a really great way to practice your lettering skills and get to know the world of surface pattern design. We're going to break down this building process and kind of get rid of that stress and that overwhelm that can come with creating multiple pieces. In between our lessons, I'm also going to give you some bite sized info and tips on building collections on printing, lettering and more. I'm going to be using procreate for this. And if you want to follow along, you can use the brush pack that is in the resources. This process is going to be more about the planning and the idea creation than about the final execution of the piece. By the end of this hour, you should have your own mini collection of greeting card designs, plus a strategy that you can use in the future for building more collections. Building a mini collection might seem daunting and a bit overwhelming, but what I want to show you in this process is that it does not have to be complicated, and you certainly don't have to be a professional illustrator to make this happen. It is simply a way to scale up your ideas and to show off your skills in the best possible way. I'm so excited to show you my process and for you to make your best creations yet. Let's get started :) 2. Planning: Making a greeting card collection is a great opportunity for you to share your work, but also for other people to buy your work. Because you're working on a small size, it is a perfect way to experiment a bit. If you, for example, never tried lettering before, this is a really nice opportunity to do that because you don't have to worry too much about the smaller details. It's also a great way to infuse humor. I like using puns and wordplay, especially for greeting cards. So we're going to start with picking a topic for our collection. I would suggest picking something you're interested in that you don't mind making more designs of. I'm going to go with a festive theme because greeting cards are a perfect time to pick specific events or times of the year when people might be interested in buying cards. Holidays, Christmas perhaps specific seasons or birthday cards, for example. If you're looking for some inspiration or you're not sure which direction to take this in, have a look at the guide in the Resources tab. You might think that because it's not the time of year that a festive collection seems a bit out of place. But actually a lot of surface pattern designers, people who specialize in making greeting cards, they start really, really early in the year to build their collections for the holidays. Because that means they have enough time to plan and work on an entire collection and put it online in time for people to buy or for licensing, and for other art buyers to buy their collections. Even though I like to plan my collections quite a bit, I usually find that I run out of time anyway. So maybe this is the perfect time to start your festive collection. And that way you have enough time to build upon that and maybe add more pieces later and take your time as well. Our mini collection is going to consist of three pieces. The first one is going to be illustration and lettering together. The second one is going to be a pattern, and the third one is going to be an illustration. Again, we're going to start with the first piece, because that one is most important. And then we're going to repurpose visual elements from that into piece number two and number three. A great place to start is to write down a specific topic that you would like to focus on, something visual. I love everything to do with food and drink. I'm thinking of maybe mulled wine, which is one of my favorite things. Other things you can add to that are some spices, maybe orange slices and then spices like cinnamon, star and nice. I think it is what it is called, maybe some holly. Just something else, festive, like. Other visual elements we can add to this then, because we're doing multiple designs, maybe there's an opportunity to expand on this theme. A little bit of hot drinks, festive hot drinks maybe like hot chocolate, tea, coffee, maybe a hot toddy, like a warm whiskey drink. I think that's plenty of visual bits that we can use for our designs. We're going to start with our thumbnail sketch, and we're working in this vertical format, like a greeting card format. As I said, our first piece is going to be illustration and lettering. The lettering could be like a short quote. It could also be something like happy holidays or festive greetings, I don't know. But it could also be something that goes well with our theme, like sugar and spice and all things nice. Something like that. Just make sure to keep it short because you don't want something really complicated for a greeting card design. Remember that greeting cards are usually a small size, so you don't want something really long and difficult to read. We're adding illustrations to this, so we don't want to fill up our page too much here. I'm just making a really quick sketch to see how our mug, like a mulled wine, will look together with our lettering. I'm just using like big blocks to indicate where our letters are going to go. Then this quote, specifically the emphasis is on sugar, spice and nice, the words that rhyme. You want to make sure that those are biggest and then everything else can go in between. And then we're using this oval shape in the background. There's a bit more like unity. Like you're making sure that you're uniting the illustration with the lettering here. We can even do the same thing with maybe some steam coming out of the mug somehow. At this point, you can add your letter, see how everything fits, and if you're happy with everything, I'm just double checking that we've added all the elements we want to add here, maybe those orange slices as well. It's just a really basic sketch, but it just helps us to see how everything fits together. This first piece is going to be the start of our mini collection. 3. Mini Break: Collections: During this class, there are a couple of mini breaks. In these, I want to give you just a bit more information on how to build your mini collection. And obviously, feel free to keep sketching. So a collection is a cohesive body of work. The designs in this collection can be connected through concept or topic, maybe size, similar techniques or tools, a color palette or all of those combined. When viewing your collection, it should be obvious that they're related to each other somehow. And illustrators, surface designers, lots of other creatives work in collections because they want to work around a certain theme or a specific tool or technique, or maybe even tell a story. Creating a collection like this is such a good opportunity as an illustrator because you're able to infuse your visual language much more in multiple pieces than in a standalone piece. And when a potential client comes to you that is interested in your work, you can show that you're really flexible and that you can turn one idea into multiple solutions or multiple designs. In the past, I have used creating many collections or illustrations to build my portfolio and to kind of attract the clients that I really wanted to work with. So a few years ago, I did this mini collection of little chalkboard illustrations with puns on them specifically related to tacos. And then I made sure to keep that momentum and make a new design every week and then post it on Instagram, on Taco Tuesday. That really helped me to keep iterating the same idea and try it multiple times. And that really helped me to develop kind of my style and keep up that momentum of creating. What happened after a few months is that this got picked up by a couple of businesses and restaurants. They wanted me to basically hand letter all their windows in the restaurants and the mirrors, so they needed someone to actually not do anything digital. It had nothing to do with puns either. It was just different lettering styles on all of their interior design. Making a new design on a weekly basis really helped me to keep up the momentum of creating, not having to start over every single time. And it was really easy for an audience to understand. And when a potential client came to me for the first time asking about these designs, they had lots of options to choose from that would work for them. I personally like to work in a minimum of three. Three is enough for a collection, but if you have more ideas in this process, make sure to keep some sketches with you, make some notes, and then later on perhaps you could add to this collection if you want to. 4. Sketching: We're going to make our canvas, and this is our final size that we're using for our greeting cards. This is a big size, but I just want to make sure that it's really big enough. And then we can also still use it for printing. Perhaps even like a small poster. You can always scale your work down, but you cannot scale it up. Your work is just going to look pixelated. Keep in mind, if you want to print these cards or maybe you want to put it in a print on demand store that you know what size you need to work with. I like to keep my sketches on a separate layer so that I don't lose them and I might be able to reuse them later on. I'm just going to copy that layer to our final canvas. We're going to make our final sketch. Now for that, I'm going to be using the brushes from the resources. Make sure to download those if you want to follow along. I'm a very messy sketcher. I really need like an extra final sketch to help me out here. But feel free to skip this step and just move on to the final piece. I'm just blowing up this thumbnail sketch. I'm going to add a guide, because this is the moment where we can move stuff around a little bit and make sure that everything is centered on a new layer. I'm going to start with this mug. I like using these like graphic flat shapes because it's like a little bit retro. I think it just goes perfectly with like a festive theme for the mug. It's perfect because it's like we're looking inside the mug and it's perfect for being able to add some more ingredients and add some information there. Next up we're going to do the letters. I'm using the letter and guideline for that just to see the space that we're working with to make sure that everything is on the same line. And I'm going to show you a really simple way that I do lettering. I'm going to use the monoline brush for this. That size is the one that we're using. And I'm just adding these letters on top. Not really in a straight line, just kind of wonky as well. Then with the eraser, I'm going to cut off those round edges and make them flat. Now your letters look a lot more intentional. It's just a really easy way to add these big bold letters while still making them look really intentional. I just think lettering adds such a whole new dimension to your illustrations. It's not just about like conveying a message, but just creating this like visual harmony. The lettering, the right lettering style really helps to enhance the overall mood of your art. I think this works really well. If you're a beginner in lettering, you're not feeling very confident in your skills. I'm certainly not an expert in lettering. I have just found a few easy ways that I can add lettering to my work without making it too complicated. Then for those smaller words, I'm just using the smaller size. For those, I'm just cutting off all these edges. And now you can see that the letters are all very consistent. So I've just applied the same rules to all those letters instead of focusing on a certain style. Then for the two last words that we have left, all things. I was thinking we can try some script. This is a little bit more difficult, but luckily the words are smaller. Like there's not going to be too much focus on this. So we can try this out to help you out with those curves. You can turn up the smoothing a little bit in the preferences and that will make things a lot easier. With this as well. I'm using the smaller size of the monoline brush and then again just cutting off those edges the same way as your bigger words. This is just to show you an example because remember we're going to do the final version of this still. You can just follow along to practice, but you don't have to. I do like adding this stage. Because of the big blocks of text, it's easier to see if everything is placed well if you need to move stuff around still. And then we're adding this oval shape in the background as well, and all of our final visual elements to finish up this final sketch. Then I'm turning off the guide, and I think that's pretty much it. Next we're going to talk about colors. One thing to keep in mind here is that we're working in a festive theme and we need to use certain colors to add some information. For example, like a dark red for this mold wine, you can download the color palettes in the resources. That's the one we're using, which has some dark red, some lighter red, some green. And now it's looking really festive already. Some brown for our spices, some orange. And then to brighten this up, I'm adding some bait for the background. And then some very light pink, Because I love pink, you can add whatever you want. Just keep in mind that you need a few colors to add some information here too. If you want to make your own color palette for collections in the future, have a look at the color wheel and take advantage of that complementary, split complementary, all those options that you have there. I love using that for making a limited color palette for collections because you can just start with one color and then see what matches. Before we move on to the next lesson where we're going to make our final illustration. If you're working in a collection and you are revisiting designs or adding to this later on, it is vital to keep your stuff a bit organized. Otherwise, it's incredibly frustrating to revisit the project and you don't know where your brushes are or your colors. Keep your color saved in a color palette or on a layer. That's fine too. Keep your brushes in a separate tab or pin them to your recents. You can save them there as well. Also with brushes, What I like is using the brush memory tool to save those specific sizes. That is really helpful. 5. Mini Break: Lettering: While you're organizing your files and getting everything ready for your final illustration, I want to talk a bit about lettering and about imperfections and quirks. I love using hand lettering and work, especially greeting cards because it's a really nice way to show off your style. And as I said in a previous lesson, it's a great way to add to the overall mood of your work. Even though hand lettering has obviously been around for a while lately, in design, illustration in typography, we're sort of heading towards a time where people like a lack of precision and they prefer more unique pieces, unique type of lettering. I think it has something to do with how screens are becoming more advanced and everything is really easy to read. So that just really allows for more bold types of lettering and lots of like, powerful shapes. So I would say this is the perfect time to experiment and just kind of go crazy with lettering. If you were a beginner, I would say try to make it easy for yourself to start. Don't start with things like script lettering and calligraphy. Remember that lettering itself isn't writing. So you're constructing your letter separately. And you can try to keep three rules in mind when you're using lettering in your greeting cards. First of all, make sure that your letters are legible. Keep it simple. Make sure that it's still easy to read. And especially because we're working with a small size, it's okay to keep things simple and to the point. Secondly, stay consistent in the things that you do. Just simply set limitations to your letters and do that in a consistent way. For example, cutting off all of the round edges or your letters or using a certain shape in all of your letters or one color. Just be very intentional about certain rules that you set to your shapes and to your letters. And that will turn it into a style by itself. And thirdly, you can obviously experiment with certain styles and try all these different things, But it's okay to have go-to lettering styles and to stick to those. And they do not have to be complicated. I am certainly not an expert in lettering. I just have a few go-to lettering styles that I'm comfortable with that I really like that fit my work. And they can develop over time, they can change. But it's okay to stick to those because that also creates consistency in your work. When you're using procreate, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. There are plenty of great brushes that can help you out with letters. You've got templates, you've got guidelines. And these like monoline / duoline brushes to make sure that you stick to the same line width. I've used that in my other class, short and sweet lettering. And you can see how with one brush you're able to create a consistency in your letters. Also play around with the preferences you can turn up and turn down the smoothing and the stabilization. And that really helps with your curves, just like we did in the last lesson too. You also have these options in the brushes themselves if you want to try that out. Lastly, when you're making your letters, most likely you're zooming in and out of your canvas quite often. I do that all the time. What happens is that if you zoom in and out, your size of your brush is going to change, especially with lettering. You don't want that, you want to stick to that same line width. So make sure that in preferences, you turn on the dynamic brush scaling, so that size does not change when you zoom in and out. 6. Illustrating Design I : I'm going to make sure to put my sketch layer on top. And we're going to start with our background. So I'm going to fill that with pink. Then our oval shape is going to be beige, just to brighten it up a bit. Then I'm going to start with the mug. I'm using the monoline brush for that. For this mug, I really like to just stick to smooth lines and clean shapes. This way, you can always change the final look of your illustration if you need to, especially if you're working on a collection and you might want to revisit the project or make changes later. It's easier to stick to textures on top, which we're going to do later instead of having lots of different textures and maybe clipping masks in between your layers. Then for some details, I'm going to use this felt tip brush just for like a little bit of texture. And once you know the line width that you want to use, make sure to save that in your sizes so that you can reuse that same line width in your letters as well. Then we're adding our other visual elements too. And I'm just going to duplicate these to make things easier. I'm also going to add like a little pattern to this mug to make it a bit more interesting. I think we're done with the illustration. I'm just grouping all these layers for now. Then we can start on our lettering. We just do exactly the same thing as we did before. If your sketch is really can then you can maybe re, use those letters as well. But I'm just going to start over. I'm going to use brown for these letters and then maybe add some red later on. Because we have a lot of letters, we can reuse a lot of the colors we already used in our illustration too. And bring some of that color back. In 'spice', I'm using the red, but I'm thinking we can change some of the letters here to the dark to create a bit of balance in our illustration. And I'm going to use orange for the rest. And remember that you can turn up the stabilization in the preferences to make this a bit easier, the script lettering. It looks like our lettering is finished. Now we're going to add some details to this. I'm going to use the felt tip brush to create an inline on top of our letters with page. I'm just going to trace those letters. And I'm turning up the stabilization for this too. This immediately ,to me, makes the lettering look a bit more retro. Here comes the fun part. We're going to add some shading to our letters. We do that by simply duplicating our lettering, layer, Alpha lock, fill our layer with our pink, and then moving it slightly. I love how easy this process is and it immediately makes the lettering look so much more fun. I'm going to set this to multiply so we can actually see the pink and it doesn't just disappear on our background, on the edges. Then I'm going to use the monoline brush to just connect the corners a little bit. To finish it off, our letters actually look 3D. Adding touches like this to your letters also really helps to refine your letters a bit more. And it makes it look even more intentional. I'm going to do the same to the script lettering as well. Just keep in mind the smaller the letters usually, the smaller your shading is going to be. I'm not moving that pink layer quite as much in the small letters to make sure that you can still read everything properly on a small scale, I forgot to add a bit of red to the inside of this mug. I'm bringing the opacity down just so you have a little bit of a red color there. Let's see what we're missing, our steam. We're going to do that in white to create some contrast. I'm just adding that behind, not all of our letters. Just like the spice part and that's it. And then I'm using the noise brush as the eraser and just kind of taking some of that white away and that kind of changes of the opacity. It looks like our lettering is done. Next up is adding some filler elements. This is optional, but I'd like to add just little details that fill up some of the blank space and set the mood as well. You've got some stamp brushes in our brush tab, but you can also just do this yourself, adding these little red dots and maybe some little stars too. It just makes everything look even more festive. It's actually really easy to make a design festive without using too many like traditional themes, or visual elements or colors. I think we're almost there. A good final check here is to flip your canvas horizontal and vertical and see if everything is in the right place. That will help you point out potential mistakes that you've made or things that stand out to you that are not in balance. If you're looking at the right way, you're just going to focus on the text instead of seeing everything as graphics and colors. I think we're pretty much finished, or at least we're almost there. What I'd like to do is do a color check. We're going to be checking our color values. We do that by making a new layer and then filling that layer with black. And then changing the blending mode to hue. Value is basically how light or dark your colors are on a scale of black to white. It might not be as easy to see on your screen, but if a piece is going to be printed and certain colors are really going to stand out, it can be distracting. At the same time, the other way around, if there's not enough contrast, then everything just looks the same. Here you can see that the dark red, especially in some of our letters, and then in our mug is quite strong. I don't mind it too much, it's not completely black, it's not too distracting. But let's say you wanted to bring that down. You can maybe make that color a bit lighter. This is a really nice way to check where your colors are and see if you wanted to make any changes in contrast. If at this point you did want to make changes, you can copy your canvas and then paste, and then everything is on a new layer. You can experiment with changing your colors by going to adjustments and then color balance and curves. Both of those allow you to change the color slightly or maybe use an entirely different color palette and see how that looks. It might be a nice way to play with different colors without changing your entire piece all at once. Lastly, before we finish off this piece, we're going to add that texture. We do that by making a new layer on top, selecting black, and going to either that noise brush or the ink speckles. This is very much a trust the process moment. You're just going to fill that layer with those ink speckles or that noise brush completely. We're going to do the same thing on another layer. If you've taken some of my other classes, you already know how this goes. We're going to use the blending modes. This is just a really easy way to add some more textures on top of your illustration without having to apply that to all the different layers. Especially when you're making greeting cards, knowing that they're going to be printed perhaps at some point, It's really nice to add a texture like this because it makes it feel like it's printed and it just adds a bit of like that noise quality that makes it look more interesting. By now changing these blending modes to overlay and divide, you see that those layers change from black to colored speckles and white speckles. Then you can play with the opacity a little bit. By changing the opacity of those layers here, you can change the intensity of that texture on top. I think that's looking pretty much finished. 7. Design II: Now we're going to reuse some of our visual elements from our first design into our second one to make a pattern. Patterns are incredibly versatile. They work really well on greeting card designs, but also on other surfaces. They're a really nice way to also compliment your original piece like we're doing. But they can also go on stationery, wallpapers, textiles, gift wraps, home goods and more. If you're not familiar with the world of surface pattern design, maybe have a look around on Pinterest, and find some different patterns, some inspiration. Before we're going to start on our pattern, I want to quickly talk about scaling and moving objects in procreate. We're going to be maybe scaling a few objects, a few layers, and maybe resizing things as well. Because Procreate is a raster-based program, all of our art is made out of pixels. And you can see that pixelation when you zoom in or resize things or work on a really small canvas, for example. When we're resizing layers and moving them around, interpolation is the method that is used to adjust these pixels as a layer is resized. So basically the program tries to connect the pixels as best as possible, or tries to re-scramble them together. You've got different interpolation settings in the transform tool, and those change pixels in different ways. So in this first shape, if you zoom in, you can clearly see the difference. In this one, we used the 'nearest neighbor' to resize this circle, and in that you can see the pixels very clearly. The next one over here, you can see 'bilinear'. And in this you see slightly smoother edges, but the last one 'bicubic', is where you really see a smooth edge. It's not very sharp obviously because we resized this object, but at least you don't see the pixels quite as clearly. So when we're going to be using our layers and moving them around a bit, maybe resizing as well, you want to make sure that in the transform tool, you've got Bicubic selected, just to make sure that when that interpolation does happen, you get smooth edges instead of pixelated lines. This is not going to prevent quality loss altogether, but it does limit it slightly. Okay, so that's all for now. We're going to duplicate our greeting card so that we don't make any changes to our first design. And then in this, we don't really need our lettering and don't need our sketch either, so we can get rid of all of that. We're just keeping our mug and our background and our steam and our other visual elements. Our interpolation should be on bicubic because we're going to start moving some layers around. I'm going to show you how to make this pattern with our illustration alone. For that, we need to first make sure that all of our elements are a bit more compact. You can start moving stuff around and resize them, rotate them where necessary to make sure that we have a more compact illustration. You also want to make sure to keep a duplicate of all your visual elements so you can reuse them later. Now we can merge all of these layers and scale it down a bit. Duplicate that layer, and make sure that these two fit together nicely. Make sure that these elements don't overlap and that they don't touch any of the edges. You don't want to cut anything of your illustration off. It doesn't matter if some of your canvas is looking empty. When you're ready, let's move our background up and merge it with our mugs and duplicate that layer again. Now we go to transform. And we turn on, in the settings, magnetic and snapping. Now we're going to start moving our layers around quite a bit so that everything connects the right way. And then slide one layer to the right and snap it to the middle, the other one, move it to the left and snap to the middle again. Now we've got the edges of a pattern. It might not make a whole lot of sense, this process, but trust me, we're going to get there. And now we're going to use our other visual elements, move them to the top and use that to fill up the space in the middle. You might want to toggle off snapping and magnetics for this. Again, make sure nothing overlaps, just fill up the empty space. When you're ready, merge all of these layers together, just keep some of these visual elements in one layer separate and merge everything else, duplicate, now again to transform, we're going to turn on the magnetics and snapping again and move our layer to the bottom edge until the exact middle and the other layer, same thing, but to the top. Now again we've got the top and the bottom edges of our pattern. Now we've got a little bit of empty space left in the middle. Again, we're going to fill it up a little bit with some orange slices and some green. Make sure the spaces are filled evenly. When you're ready, merge everything again. This should be the beginning of our pattern. Now, we're not sure what it looks like when we repeat it, but there's a really handy tool for this. You can go to the Repeating Pattern Tester by Lisa Bardot on the Bardat brush website, which is really useful for this. You just swipe your layer to this website, you can check if your pattern actually connects. You can adjust the scale and have a look, see if you're happy, and see if it actually connects properly. Now I'm just going to duplicate this and scale it down so we can actually have a sample of our pattern here. You can see we've got a beautiful pattern based on our first piece that's perfect as another greeting card or perhaps on another surface. 8. Design III: Now we're ready for our final greeting card number three here. You can do whatever you want, whatever you can think of. I'd really like to make something that can complement the main piece, but that is also flexible that I could change in the future if I needed to. I'm going to duplicate our first file and then delete the layers we don't need like the lettering and our sketch. I'm going to keep that same oval background shape. I'm going to make a quick thumbnail sketch of the third piece. We're going to put a quote on top here, something simple, festive, maybe season's greetings or happy holidays, maybe warmest winter wishes. And then we can use that topic that we talked about with the hot drinks. I'm going to see if that works where we have like maybe three drinks in a row. It's a little bit smaller, but it's based on the mulled wine illustration. And if you want to go crazy with the lettering here, maybe do it in different shape or diagonal, you can totally do that. I'm going to follow exactly the same process as the first piece. You can follow along with this one. Again, if you want to, I'm going to blow up this sketch, then turn on the guide to see if everything is centered. Again, very messy sketch. I'm going to do a clear sketch on top of that before I get started. This process at this point is a lot easier because we've done it once already. This should be pretty smooth. The only thing that's new here is the other drinks. So I'm thinking to just change the mug designs a little bit. The one in the middle is going to be a hot toddy, something in orange. And then the one on the right, maybe a hot chocolate with some marshmallows inside. And I think we've got all the right colors for that. I'm going to use exactly the same colors for our text. Again, the brown, orange, red at the bottom. And just refine those lines again for our mugs. You can open a little reference window with our first design. I'm definitely redrawing this just because I want to make sure that I'm using the same lines as the other two and make sure that it's not too detailed because this mug is a lot smaller. I'm using that felt tip brush to add some details. I'm bringing back as many colors from our color palette as possible in these drinks with the orange and the green and the pink. And finding a balance there. We've got our stamp brushes, our filler elements to fill up some of that space around in the red and white as well. Lastly, I just want to double check the color values with our hue layer. You can see very clearly that the emphasis is on warmest and wishes. That's the most important part of our message, I think, of our quote. And we still have those texture layers and we can drag those to the top. Our texture is added there as well. I think this piece complements our collection really well. I really like the addition of the other drinks. You could even do more with those other drinks. Turn that into another pattern if you wanted to. In the beginning, I said that I really wanted this to stay flexible. Here's an example of what that design looks like if you change the text. I've done a couple of mini collections of festive greeting card designs where I wanted the message to be bilingual. So I could easily add another version to that collection by simply changing the text. Because we kept it simple, that was really easy to do. 9. Mini Break: Stamp Brushes: I got a review a while back on another class of mine on skillshare, asking if I could pay some more attention to making brushes, specifically stamp brushes, and how you can use them in your own work. So I would really like to pay some attention to that in this lesson. If there's anything else that you would like to learn more about, anything about lettering, procreate, working with clients, maybe printing or anything else that you would like me to pay more attention to, please let me know in a review or in the discussions tab. I would love to know what I can help you with. We have created consistency throughout our collection using our color palette, our composition, our lettering style. But we've also used these little repeated filler elements. I really like adding these little filler elements to also show the mood of our collection of a design. There are a really nice way to add a unique spin to your work too. As you've seen in our brushes, you can simply use those as a stamp brush. I want to show you how to make this so that when you start a new collection, you can make these little stamps and use those to create consistency and show your unique style in a collection. To make our stamp brush, we're going to make a new canvas, 2,500 by 2,500 pixels. And we're going to use black. And then a simple brush, maybe the monoline brush is good on a big size. Let's say we want to make that orange slice as a stamp brush. We want to reuse that in multiple pieces. For this, we need to use the entire canvas when it's finished, go to Actions, copy canvas. And then in the brush library, we make a new brush. And then we go to shape, import, paste. Now our shape is inside this brush with two fingers, we tap to turn this negative. Now we still don't really see the shape. We need to go to stroke properties for that and turn that spacing all the way up to maximum. Normally, a brush is made up of a simple shape and then it is connected so that it turns into a line. But what we want with a stamp brush is that those shapes are separate from each other, so that every time we tap, we get that shape. We don't really need a lot of these stability settings, but if you go to the shape tap, you can rotate, you can randomize, you can play around with these settings here a bit. Next up, you can go to dynamics and use jitter, especially the size here. You can change the size every time you tap. You can also have a look at color dynamics, which is really cool if you're using a color and want to just change up that color every single time you tap as well. You can also change your settings according to your apple pencil, the pressure of your pencil, if you find that useful. Then in brush properties, turn on stamp preview so that we're able to actually see our stamp in the brush library menu. Lastly, we'll go to about this brush. We give it a name here, you can also add a photo, add your name, your signature, and most importantly, create new reset point. We want to tap this now. Every time that you make changes to your brush and you want to go back to those original settings, you can come to this tab and go to the last reset point. Now let's have a look at the last design we did. Let's see how our stamp brush turned out. Here you go. You've got your little orange stamp brush. Don't forget, you've got the brush memory tool as well. You can save your size, you can really easily reuse it in other pieces. Stamp brushes are such a nice way to add like a personal spin to your work to just save some time as well. I even use stamp brushes for guides, or to even add my signature to my work, for example. 10. Finishing Touches: Okay, now we've got our three designs, and let's have a look at all three of them next to each other. So here we're kind of double checking to see if all of our designs make sense next to each other and just do a little check. So your collection should kind of look like a family. They are related by color. The theme is very clear, consistent in all three pieces. So lastly, depending on what your end goal is, you can finish this collection up. If you're printing your greeting card collection, it would be really nice to perhaps do a little test print and see how they look. Maybe on the back, you could, for example, add your signature or your Instagram handle, maybe like a little QR code that goes to your social media so that when you sell your cards, that they can look up more of your work. If you're putting your cards, let's say, in a print on demand store, a collection is a really nice way to present your work because you've got not just one card, but three. So you're showing a lot more of your style. You have a lot more to offer. So if people enjoy one card, they might want to buy other ones of yours too. You might want to add your collection to your portfolio. In that case, you maybe want to give a little bit of context, so it's immediately easy to understand that this is a greeting card collection. So you can present your designs in mock-ups. You can use, for example, Canva for this, show the result in a festive greeting card context. Maybe even show your pattern in a different way as well. That then shows also how versatile your collection is. It's a really nice way to present your work. 11. Bonus: Answering Your Questions: Hi, everyone. In case you have any more questions about greeting cards or feeling inspired to create more or maybe even build your portfolio. In this bonus lesson, I'm talking to Cody, who is a talented surface designer, and she's going to answer a bunch of questions about greeting cards. Hi, Cody. Hello. Can you tell me a little bit about your experience as a surface designer? Well, most of my experience started out as like a graphic designer. I worked for over nine years in kind of corporate, just doing design work, some illustration work. Most of my greeting card experience is specifically within the niche of photo cards. So I worked at a national photo lab, and I started out as a graphic designer, illustrator. And then I transitioned to be an art buyer, and I worked with a lot of different artists acquiring art for them for their photo cards and gift products. Yeah, remember you telling me a bit about your experience, and to me, a lot of this was all new that there's so much going on in the world of greeting cards and surface design. Super interesting. So for people who want to get more into this industry, how does it work? What would you advise people? I just think it takes a lot of patience. A lot of persistence. And I think a big thing is also diversifying your income. Different streams, and that may mean it's like in one market, like greeting cards or stationary. You can enlarge that to stationary not just greeting cards. Yeah. Or you can branch out into other markets like home decor, or you can work with interior designers or fabric. So there's a lot of different markets you can work in in surface pattern design. Yeah, I actually completely forgot to ask. Because you would work on collections first, like patterns, illustrations, and then kind of find a way to apply those to different products in the field, which then includes greeting cards, right? Yeah, I'm actually working through this a little bit myself. I found that in approaching greeting card companies, that it's a lot about getting on their list. So once you're on their list, like, you initially have to start pitching to them. And, you know, a lot of times if they like your work, they'll reply back and they might not necessarily want to take anything that you've submitted to them, or if they'll look at the portfolio, they might not take anything either. But they'll put you on their, like, open call list, which is similar to how it was when I did photo cards, I would put an open call out to the artist. And I would say, we're looking for this and then artists would send in their work. And we would say whether or not we want it or not. And it's actually turns out the same way with greeting card companies since I left, I'm working for myself. Trying to pitch your greeting card companies is getting on their list of open calls, and then sending in work that way. And for people who might not know how this kind of works, how do you start with licensing and surface design? Well, it's kind of like renting out your artwork. So a lot of times companies will say, this is how we typically work. We'll give you a percentage for all this, like, every sale that you make, and we'll specify the amount of time that they can use your work. If you're not licensing, you can sell it outright. You always want to make sure you get more money for that because that typically means you're giving away all your rights to the work. Okay. So yeah, there's two ways you can sell it outright or you can license it, and licensing is more of like you're renting it for a certain amount of time. And it could even, you could specify if you want it for certain markets. So a lot of my work that's licensed for cards, but then it's also in wall art. Okay. So then you license, think about that certain industry, right? So you also have sort of like a contract where it goes onto wall art, but it's also on greeting cards or photo cards. Yes. And you want to make sure that you get that in a contract. Whether that's, like a contract that you supply them and you negotiate, or you look at their contract they supply you and always make sure you read it and negotiate and make sure that you got like something that you're comfortable with. Okay. So in general, with greeting cards, if you want to make them professionally, there's kind of three routes, maybe like you're talking about licensing a buyout where they get all the rights or commission, right? Like freelance, if a company might want a certain design, and they want you to design it for them. So those kind of Those kind of three options. Yeah. You can, a company might commission you basically freelance to create something specific for them. And I actually did that a couple of times also as an art buyer. So that is something that is done as well. Okay. And what sort of work have you find that gets licensed? What kind of themes do you work with or have you found that are very popular? Well, I know overall surface pattern design industry, Christmas is huge. You'll often see, at least in my experience, it seems like you're working on it all year long. I know I started in January working on Christmas, and I just had turned in some Christmas designs for photo cards just recently, like this past month. So they start pretty early, but greeting cards, it really depends on the company. Some of them are asking for that, like a year ahead of time. So it really depends. For greeting cards, the next biggest theme is birthday. So those are I think in terms of greeting cards, the big themes, but overall, Christmas. I find it fascinating that you start with Christmas in January. I mean, it kind of makes sense because a long year ahead of things that can get licensed, and you don't want to start with that in November. But it's funny to think about starting Christmas ideas in January, but that's cool. Yeah, I like it a little bit, because especially if you start in January, you don't have to start in January, like some start in spring. But it's kind of fresh off Christmas, so it's a little bit, like, more kind of in your mind a little bit. You're kind of in a mood already. You might have some fresh ideas, and you can put all of that into your work for the next season for the next year. I like that. I've also had a question from someone who wants to know, how do you show off your portfolio online of greeting cards, and also how do you find potential clients? So I have a monthly newsletter that I send out to art buyers and art directors. So it's just usually, a sampling of my work from my portfolio. And I will just basically, I'm always on the lookout for companies that I want to work with from things I see in stores or things that I see online. A big one is also, I'll see other artists. Like, they'll say, Oh, I had work done with this company, and I'll have a little folder on my Instagram that's just potential clients, and I'll save it for later to look into that company and see if my work would fit in there. And then it's like kind of being a little bit of a detective. And finding the contact details for them. I actually did two online shows during the pandemic, so and both of those online shows gave the contact details of everyone who attended. So that was really great in getting kind of, like, a solid list of people I knew were the direct contact. You should always make sure that you get permission from them, though, before adding them to your list. But if you do it that way, you can view it as an opportunity to reach out to them and introduce yourself. And then ask if you can add them to the list or give them a direct link in your e-mail so they can sign up. And then I segment my list, so I have, like I've specified that it's for art directors or art buyers. So that when I send out that monthly e-mail, It directly goes to them. And sometimes at the bottom of the newsletter, I'll put a little kind of, like highlight of stuff that I've licensed other companies. It kind of, like, gives me a little bit of authority like I show I am a licensed artist. This is how my work has been used and like a link so they can kind of check it out as well. And I have noticed some of them will click through on those links to see. So yeah, I also show my work on Instagram. I try to update, like on my website, my work, not very good about updating it, but I try to do it, like quarterly to just to kind of keep it fresh. So yeah, it's just, it's work. You definitely have to be kind of a detective. I tried to set like a little date each month to either research companies or pitch like sending direct e-mails to people as well. Sometimes it'll be just like I'm trying to figure out if this is the e-mail address of the person. So there's a couple of tools that I use to kind of figure out e-mail addresses. Linked is a big one. There's some like Rocket reach where you can type in the names of companies and stuff, and it'll list out people and their e-mail address as potential e-mail addresses that go with the company, and I'll look at them on Linkedin. Is this legal? Can we confirm this? That's amazing. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so lots of lots of different options. What about the monthly newsletter that you sent out? Is that sort of like an update of things that you have to offer that are ready for licensing, like new artwork? Or what does that look? Yeah. If I have new artwork, I'll highlight it. There, So I'll wait until, I think it might be like, when they would be looking for it. But I haven't really really been able to have time to make a lot of new work lately, so a lot of it's like recycling through, but people are so busy that a lot of times I don't think that they see even my initial e-mail. So I don't worry about it too much. If I've showcased it more than once. I just make sure it's spaced enough time, like, at least three months before they've seen it before I'll show it again. I always make sure all the images and they're linked to my website so they can contact me. Yeah, this is just Okay, that's a lot of info. I like it. So next question, when is the best time to publish a greeting card collection? What sort of like does the planning for you look like as a surface designer in the year? For greeting cards, I'm still working that out. My newest thing I'm going to try to do is to work kind of in a batch of, like, definitely starting with the most popular greeting card subjects that I think might work. And then as I've gotten on lists from greeting card companies, having that basically ready to go for when they send out their needs in that e-mail. Okay. That's kind of my strategy right now. Before it was they would send out the e-mail saying that they needed it. I think it's that's why I'm I'm trying to figure out a way to kind of get ahead of that so that I have new work. That's ready to go as soon as they need it. So I've also started keeping a calendar of what companies are looking for when based on what they previously asked for the year before. And so I can kind of anticipate and maybe going forward, pitch a little bit earlier than what they're asking for so that I can kind of get it in there. Yeah. Less stress. Yeah. Next question. What is some feedback an art buyer might give to greeting card designs? What are some things that they might look out for? It really depends on the art buyer. Like, a specific example I actually have is someone, they asked me to change out the lettering I had for a greeting card for a font and then it went through. It was fine. That's really the only thing they wanted. And so I did that, and it was fine. But yeah, a lot of times most of times you're lucky to get any feedback at all that I found specific in trying to pitch and work with clients. I do think though that some of that depends on like, how long you've worked with the client? Cause you really have to build trust and, like, that relationship with them. I actually have a class that talks about all about feedback and drawing feedback from clients. And then we actually on our podcast, Brushing Up, have an episode on it. Yeah. That was really enlightening because you talked about specific greeting card designs and what kind of stuff that they want to switch or like colors, like lettering, that sort of stuff, to be able to let it go through, right, to be able to actually license the work. So basically, an art buyer is someone who works in the company, right? And they're the ones that might look at what kind of work they can license and how they could work with greeting card collections. Well, like, when I worked as an art buyer, I worked with an art director. So and the art director actually had the final say with all things, but I was the one that worked directly with all the artists. And so it was more of like an acquisition process. I was the one that gave all the feedback and stuff to artists. So a lot of times when I say art buyers because I've done that role so Yeah, you know how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. This kind of I mean, feedback is a whole different topic on its own. The kind of stuff that what you told me about before, like what they are looking for is not the kind of stuff that we would think about, but just like, well, this color because it sells well, or this shape, because it works well, or lettering has to be what you said replaced to a font because that's what the company works with, that kind of stuff. Next question, what are some other things that you would keep in mind for designing greeting cards, specific things that people could think about. Hierarchy. I think that's a big one. I think that's sometimes the easiest one to forget about, especially because a lot of times with illustrators, specifically, it seems like there's a lot of elements that they want to put in a piece, and that could be easy to lose track of when in terms of hierarchy. I also think color is really important as well. I remember, actually, when trying to acquire work for the holidays, that we kept seeing a lot of, orange instead of red for Christmas cards. I understand it now, though, now that I'm on the other side of it. Find myself using more of an orangey red, because I think it's also in a way, two parts; you want to make it a little bit different than traditional, like red. And at the same time, for some reason, I think it looks a little bit better when it's a little bit orangy, but you know, we would find ourselves, I know, asking a lot. can you make this a little bit more red, red on the orangy sides? Interesting. Yeah. Specifically, actually for festive greeting cards. Do you think it's better to just stick to traditional colors, or can you change it up a bit? Is orange okay or pink? Can I ask about pink? I think it depends on, actually, well, one, the company and also the region. It seems like in the US, and also the company I worked for, traditional sold better. But I've heard from other people, particularly people who are in the industry that work more in like UK, other parts of the world. Non-traditional holiday colors, they like it better if it's not so traditional. So I think it just really depends. Maybe it's a good idea to do research at this point, right? Because now I'm thinking, what have I seen in the UK, if you go to a greeting card store, I think for festive greeting cards, there is a lot more color. There it is not just traditional colors. So maybe kind of depends on where you are and, you know, what you want to be working on. It's a good idea to have a look at colors. And hierarchy, we talked about that specifically that point in when we talked about lettering, how important hierarchy is because that's especially with greeting cards, it's so important, what do you read first? What do people look at first, right? So that makes a lot of sense. I also think in terms of color, it's good to print them out because lot of times, at least when I did it, like, we printed out everything. And so it made a big difference in how it looked printed. And so it's kind of good to know if like, something like ends up being muddy looking or tone is a big one that you'll catch if you print it out. So a trick is to put a layer of black over my work and then multiply it, and you can kind of see, like, more of like the contrast. It needs to be up to not. But yeah, printing out in general is good to do. Just to kind of get a sense of the color. I think also just seeing mistakes that you've made, anything that doesn't stand out on the screen, once you print I've had this early times, and it's just like, Oh, no. I had no idea this was going on. A whole different world. You talked a bit about printing. So do you ever print your work, or do you just show it off online? Most of it's online. I did I showed in person at Surtex last year, and I had to make and print these huge banners to cover my entire booth. So that was the first time I'd really printed something in a while, and then I had to do business cards and print books, portfolio books, and all this stuff. That was the most I printed at one time in a while. So I do print my work, and I tried to print, you know, just to kind of, you know what we talked about earlier with you know, fix, like, spotting mistakes and checking for color and that type of thing. Online is the biggest one that I probably do right now. But it's really fun when you license your work with companies and you get samples because they will send you samples of everything printed. That's always really fun to see the cards and all that stuff. That's fun. I did not know that. And if they don't do it, you should negotiate it in your contract. Good point. Okay. Negotiate that. I've done this with some print on demand stores, a good idea is either to send yourself like a test pack, or they will do that automatically, for example, with Printful, I think, they do that. If you start to sell posters, then you can get I think a free sample sent to you so that you can see actually what other people are getting and then make changes as well if you need to. Definitely always have a look at that. I love that to get those samples to improve your work as well. I've also found I'm not sure how Zazzle works, but with Printful, I think, Society 6, I think, as well, they have these color samples. So it'll send you I have one here, and maybe I can show it like a big poster, and they basically have all the colors that they print. So you can see what those colors looks like. So if you use that exact shade of blue, this is what we print. So that's really helpful. That's an awesome tool. And very quickly, Surtex. What is Surtex for? It's like this huge trade show where artists, surface pattern designers, illustrators can show their work and a bunch of art directors and buyers will come and they can license your work, get contacts, network. It's just a general way to get connections in the licensing and art buying world. A really nice opportunity to show your work. And also what you talked about with the list of art buyers, like people that can get on your list so you can send out your newsletter to these specific people. That's the way to get context as well, right? Yeah, everyone who stopped by my booth. I had, like them fill out a little questionnaire, basically, like a contact form. And so I was able to ask them, like, exactly, what are you looking for, basically all the information I needed to know about how they make purchasing decisions and their contact. So that was great, and I could follow up with them after the show, get them on my list, and try to keep in contact with them and build a relationship with them. Good point. How do you find inspirations, inspiration for your collections? I don't know why I said inspirations. Inspirations, please. A lot of it's like I walk every day, so that's a big one because I listen to podcasts, Pinterest, my son, he's a huge inspiration, reading. I'm like a huge reader. So that's a big one, too. And yeah, just living life. I like that about going on walks. I found that a lot of creative people have this if you just like shut off or just have a shower, go for a walk, do some exercise, just the most random best ideas can pop up, and that's how you can find inspiration for things. Yeah, really it helps if I'm working out a problem too. A lot of times. It's like, you know, I think most creators are like this. I'm always thinking about a solution to something or an idea or like, something I'm having an issue with or I'm working through. And a lot of times it resolves itself after my walk. Yeah. No, it's actually scientifically proven as well, especially for if you want to come up with new ideas if you new perspectives, then just step away from everything for a bit and they can just come to you. That actually reminds me as well of the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert that talks about this specifically. I'm not wording it very well, but just the idea of how you can come up with creative ideas. That's kind of a bible for creativity, that book. I love that book. Yeah. It's like, creative pump me up. Yeah, exactly. Okay, there's a couple more questions that I've received. I really struggle with coming up with fun or cute sayings, and I worry about any copyright issues on these too. Do you have tips for inspiration? And are there rules to using certain phrases or visuals on your greeting cards? Yeah, you definitely have to be careful about copyright issues with sayings. In the US, you can check the patent and trademark office, and you can actually search so that there's a saying that you're not sure about. You can actually do a search on that website. And it will, like, list if it's trademarked. And then a general rule of thumb is any work published before 1924 is in the public domain. But you'll still want to make sure you do research on licensing because it doesn't necessarily apply worldwide. And then it also could only apply to certain elements of a collection, like for example, with like Disney. Some stuff has come into the public domain in terms of Mickey Mouse, but it's only specific Mickey Mouse stuff, like the steamboat stuff. I heard the same with like Winnie the Pooh. The certain parts of Winnie the Pooh is in the public domain, but the thing with Tiger and his tail like bouncing, that's not. So you can't do anything. So you have to be careful, you do your research even on the stuff that's public domain. And there's a lot of different, like, public domain sites that you can search. And you just have to make sure that you check the licensing information for everything. And some of it will actually say, you can use this, but you have to give me credits. Just make sure you do due diligence. Find that as well with using puns and things. It's always good to kind of double-check to see if it's okay. I think as well, people struggle with, for example, lyrics and songs that they have to double check that as well. That's a dangerous one. But, yeah, always do your research, basically. And let's say you want to start on, like a birthday card. Where would you find inspiration for cute sayings or phrases? I'll like, just do an online search a lot of times for that type of thing. And sometimes it, it comes up through, it feels like brain osmosis, is how I can describe it. I also actually have like a little notebook where I wrote down, names of, potential t-shirt designs. But if I'm kind of, trying to plan something out, a lot of it's just pinterest research or just online research, I'll do a check for it. Yeah. Memes as well. Check if you want to use any references from memes, just double-check if it's okay to use. For inspiration, I like that as well. When random stuff just comes up, to have a list of ideas in a later on, I'll see if anything that I'm working on can apply to what I already have on the list. I just have a random Google Doc full of random ideas. I have pages and pages full of puns. I might never use them, but who knows? They might be relevant one day. And you use the puns in your newsletter, so. That's true. I sometimes wonder in my newsletter, at the very bottom I put a little pun hidden away, and I wonder if anybody reads it. No, I see it every time. I think it's fun. Next question. I wanted to ask you about how we should approach clients that are looking for greeting cards to license. Do we need a website? And how many greeting card collections should go on there? I would definitely say you need a website. That's pretty important, I think now. And if you have an Adobe subscription, you can make a quick one with the Adobe portfolio. So, there are lots of different ways you can go about doing that. And then I would say, once you have the contact information of the art director or buyer, send him an e-mail with an attachment of like three to four pieces, but I've also heard that you can go about doing it by sending a link to an online portfolio that you set up, either a web page or a Zoom book-type flip through document that's online. You can do that. Make sure that if you find in your research in the company, if they have specific guidelines, they want you to follow for contacting them for submitting work that you follow them because I know from being on the other side of it, it is really frustrating and annoying when people don't follow those directions. Yeah, you don't want to start off on the wrong foot there. So a lot of it just seems like the undercurrent theme here is like research. And then keep following up once you got them on your newsletter, following up with a monthly newsletter, or if you have something that you created in mind for them, you can send or if you have new work. You can just pitch them whatever you have that ready. And then I would say for greeting card collections, you can do it a couple of ways. You can do it like as they send a call for certain things that they're looking for. And really unless they have a limit on what they want, you can send as many as you have or as many as you want to send in. Sometimes I will do that. Like, I did that in the past. They're like, we're looking for birthday, so I sent all my birthday that I had wasn't a whole lot at the time. It doesn't have to be a whole lot, though. So as I understand it, right, like, art buyers, art directors, they don't have a lot of time on their hands. And then they get a whole bunch of e-mails or applications coming in. So whatever you send needs to be an easy overview, no matter what it is, whether it's a link to your portfolio website or portfolio overview, something that they could quickly see and then make up their mind, and also to show that you're reliable, right? That you've got everything sorted out, not like a massive portfolio. Which is usually the case. I mean, really, it's better to have a fewer really high quality designs that has your own spin fresh take on things than it is to have a lot of work that's just kind of, you know, not as good. To kind of show that you have a unique style, right, but that you'll kind of know how to select not to curate yourself. I imagined. That is actually a good point. Curating is a big thing, knowing what to send. And you know, that's kind of a balance you have to figure out. The good thing is is a lot of times that because they are inundated so much with work all the time, that that's where the consistency and persistence comes in. You don't want to bother them, but once a month is not unreasonable and keeps you in their mind. They may see work that they didn't notice before building that relationship, because that's really what it's about is. It's just like when you're buying anything from someone, you kind of have to see it a couple of times to kind of think about it to make up your mind. Yeah, same thing. So, I mean, if they don't respond right away, not right now it doesn't mean it's a no necessarily, not at this moment in time, but later on, perhaps. So if you have a website, how many pieces would you show? Like, what would you show in your portfolio? I think I have them by pages, by like category, but I don't think I have more than five. Less is more in this case, like a quick overview. I like what you said about categories, too. Next question. I understand that I shouldn't post them publicly the collections before sending them to art buyers. Is that correct? No, I mean, not necessarily. It just really depends. Some people don't like that, you know, putting their work out because they're afraid that their work is going to be stolen or stuff like that or like an art director. I've heard of people they find their work on Pinterest, they see their work on Instagram, and they'll even see their work, like on a print-on-demand place. And I've never really heard of anything where that hurts you, if anything, that's just how they found you. And if they don't want you like having it on a print on demand, it seems for the most part, from what I've heard, the worst that happens, they'll ask you to take it down. So really, that's from what I've noticed, the wort that can happen. They'll just ask you to either remove it from, you know, one thing. I think it's better to show your work than it is to keep it to yourself. Because I think also when you tend to keep it to yourself, you tend to, also hold yourself back from, like, pitching your work in general. And so if you license your work, does that, is that the moment that you would take your work down or you just keep it in your portfolio? Depends, if you license in only in a certain category, then that doesn't mean that you can't go license it in another category. If the contract allows for it. You just have to make sure you keep track of, you know, what exactly you can like within your contract that you have with a company or manufacturer, what is allowed? And sometimes that means they'll want worldwide exclusive rights for all the categories. But sometimes that means it's only within one small niche category. And that's something that you just negotiate, or you just decide if you're okay with depending on what they want. Okay. I see. A last question, making the work is one thing, but how do you get it across to them? Is there like a specific size or dimensions they usually prefer to receive? I typically set up my sell sheets at like 11 by 17 size document. Like I have an Indesign document, and I just set them up in there. And then I make sure that has my name and my contact information on it on everything. I would have it no larger than 150 DPI, but no smaller than 72 DPI. Okay. But also, you need to make sure that you check the submission guidelines for the company. So I save all of my sell sheets primarily in JPEG, but I've had some that I've pitched you they're like, we want it specifically this way. We want it as like a PDF, and so I've had to adjust depending on that type of thing. And this is specifically how do you call that, a sell sheet? And that's what you would send to pitch, right? That's kind of your portfolio. I'll send like three to four attachments of those JPG sell sheets. But I've also heard of other surface pattern designers who have a portfolio book, and they'll just send a link that way. I tend to do that, like at a second stage, if they're interested. I've had people who, they'll see my most recent art buyer newsletter, and they'll e-mail me and they'll ask me for a link to my entire portfolio, so I'll send a link that way. It just kind of, it's always kind of like depends on the situation. Lots of different options at least. I think that's it. Thank you so much, Cody, for all these insider tips. Yeah, you're welcome. It was really fun to talk. 12. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for following along. I really hope that this process has given you the excitement and the motivation to keep creating collections. And that it has given you the tools to make more collections in the future. By now, you should have your own collection of greeting cards or at least some inspiration to get started on your own ideas. If you have more ideas after, for example, three pieces, I hope you can continue. But either way, try to make some notes and leave those in that same sketch layer so that you can revisit this collection later. And you don't have to start from scratch. I know that this process can take some time, but remember that two or three pieces is enough to make a mini collection. So even if you don't have a finished result at this point and you only have maybe a theme that you picked or some inspiration, some sketches, upload it to the project gallery regardless, because it is a start and your ideas are just as valuable as the final result. Showing your process also helps with getting over the barrier of showing only perfect pieces or finished results. I have found that it really helps with kind of tearing down perfectionism a little bit. It will also help other students to see that it's okay to upload your process instead of only finished pieces. And it could give other people inspiration too. Perhaps you can even look at the project gallery and comment on other people's work and try to support each other. What I would do after this class is have a look at some of your older work and your older ideas and see what you can potentially turn from one piece into multiple pieces. Feel free to upload that to the project gallery as well. I would love to see what kind of collections you come up with. If you want to learn a little bit more about the blending modes and the textures that we talked about, I've got another class where I talk a little bit more in-depth about how to use textures in procreate to develop your style further. And I know that we went over composition and lettering quite quickly as well in my other class, Short and Sweet Lettering, I talk a little bit more about how to combine lettering and illustration in other greeting card designs. To that short and sweet lettering class, I have also recently added a bonus lesson, so you can have a look at this as well. I've also added a few more resources to the discussion staff that you can look at and listen to. If you want to stay up to date with new tutorials, procreate brushes, articles, and more, subscribe to my newsletter. Lastly, please don't forget to leave me a review below. This really helps me to create new classes in the future and for other people to see my class on Skillshare. See you in the next class! :)