Creative Market Basics: Create & Publish a Collection that Sells | Audrey Moon | Skillshare
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Creative Market Basics: Create & Publish a Collection that Sells

teacher avatar Audrey Moon, Watercolorist and Modern Calligrapher

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome!

      1:02

    • 2.

      Why sell on Creative Market

      1:54

    • 3.

      Request to Open a Shop on Creative Market

      2:49

    • 4.

      My 7-Step Workflow

      9:02

    • 5.

      Brainstorm a Collection

      10:49

    • 6.

      Example: Watercolor Crystals - Becoming a Collection

      2:58

    • 7.

      Create Shop Graphics (Screenshots)

      9:12

    • 8.

      Packaging: Organize and Zip Files

      8:16

    • 9.

      Listing: Write "Super" Copy

      7:07

    • 10.

      Listing: Add a Product

      14:57

    • 11.

      Final Thoughts

      0:56

    • 12.

      BONUS: Sketch Crystals

      3:11

    • 13.

      BONUS: Paint Crystals, part 1

      16:53

    • 14.

      BONUS: Paint Crystals, part 2

      11:56

    • 15.

      BONUS: Paint Crystals, part 3

      7:23

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About This Class

Creative Market is one of the best online marketplaces for selling digital products. You can sell almost anything from clip art, fonts, templates, website themes, stock photography, and so much more.

Whether you're a beginner or experienced designer, this class is for you if you:

  • Want to sell digital products
  • Need an overview of Creative Market and how it works
  • Need ideas for how to brainstorm and create a collection that will sell

I'll take you through my 7-step workflow and provide a brainstorming worksheet packet so that you have all the tools you'll need to get started! Go to the Projects & Resources tab to download (available on desktop version only)

In this class, I will be using a brand new collection of watercolor crystals as the example. I've even provided bonus videos where you can learn how to paint these crystals, too! Even if you're not an illustrator, you can still apply my workflow and gain useful tips and ideas.

You will learn:

  • How to request to open a shop
  • My 7-step workflow
  • How to think through creating a collection
  • How to create shop graphics
  • How to package your files
  • How to list your product/collection and write engaging product description (copy)

There are some product creation basics that are not included in this class.

To help you out, I've listed other Skillshare classes to help you create your collection.

Finally, Creative Market is amazing because you can download SIX FREE GOODS EVERY WEEK. Make sure to create an account to take advantage of that! You don't even have to be a shop owner to download them. 

Thank you for taking my class! I can't wait to see your shops and the products you create!

Meet Your Teacher

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Audrey Moon

Watercolorist and Modern Calligrapher

Teacher

I'm so glad you're here! Whether you're new or a long-time student, I hope there's something for you in my classes.

My creative journey started with the bullet journal. Since then, I picked up watercoloring and calligraphy. It's been a bit of a whirlwind, to say the least! I published my first class on loose florals in September 2017, and have been steadily adding new classes.

I love meeting new students and making connections. I hope to see you in one of my classes soon.

Thank you, and let's make the world a more beautiful place!

Website ][ Instagram ][ Faceboo... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Welcome!: Creative Market is one of the best online marketplaces for digital goods, such as website themes, templates, stock photography, clip art, and so much more. In this class, I want to share how I got started on Creative Market and how you can,too. I'm going to share my workflow, brainstorming worksheets, and take you step by step on how to publish your first product. This class is for you, whether you're new to digital products and curious about Creative Market, or a season designer and ready to publish your first product. By the end, you'll have all the best tips and tools to get you started on selling your first collection on Creative Market. Hi. My name is Audrey, and I'm a water-colorist, calligrapher, and a teacher right here on Skillshare. Well, I can't wait to get started. I'll see you in class. 2. Why sell on Creative Market: Before we dive into the how to sell, let's talk about the why. Creative Market is different from other platforms because they specialize in digital products for both the general consumer and designer. If you have a shop on Creative Market, you're also most likely a shopper. I've personally bought fonts, procreate brushes, website templates, and stock photos from Creative Market since I've opened my own shop. One of the first why's is because you're reaching a unique audience. I've discovered so many talented artists, designers and photographers through Creative Market because they were easy to find on this one platform. Where else can you find such a talented, saturated marketplace? Creative Market is also selective in it's shop owners. You have to fill out a short application and be reviewed before you even open a shop. As a customer, this is good news because you know that these shops have been reviewed and that you can trust them. As a seller this is also good news because you can feel confident about being part of a selective community and that you will have already established a basic trust with the customer. Another why is because you're not just selling a finished product, but a tool to get to the finished product. For example, if you're selling clip art, you're helping a stationary create unique greeting cards or eating a pattern designer to create repeating patterns on fabric. In short, you're empowering other designers. Well, I hope these reasons resonate with you. Remember that you're not only making passive income for yourself, but you're empowering and supporting other creative entrepreneurs and reaching a unique audience that is a mix of both the general consumer and designers. 3. Request to Open a Shop on Creative Market: In the previous video, I mentioned that shop owners have to go through a review process. Before you can even start working on your collection, let's get that request to open a shop out of the way. First go to the website creativemarket.com. Then click on the link, "Open a Shop" on the top left. Then the button, "Open a Shop", "Sign up", then answer the brief questionnaire. Links to products or shops where you sell now, links to your design portfolio and why you want to open a shop on Creative Market. If you don't currently have a shop, don't worry, you can list a Facebook business page for free, or maybe you have an Etsy store already. If you don't have any existing shops or don't use Facebook, don't worry. You can just write in that you're not selling any work currently. For the design portfolio, again, it's okay if you don't have your own website, you can create free ones through WordPress, Wix, even Google Sites. But if you already use Adobe products, then Behance is a great place for you to start your portfolio. You can sign in using your Adobe ID and start creating projects that will make up your portfolio. Even non Adobe users can use Behance as well. Start building your portfolio there. Aim to post about 15 works that will be indicative of the type of work that you'd be selling on Creative Market. According to the Creative Market help page, do not use link shorteners or links to attachments for your portfolio, it must be a website page. Definitely consult the help page if you need more information. Finally, for the, why you want to open a shop? I can't answer that for you obviously, but think about what makes you unique as an artist, designer, photographer, or whatever you do. Maybe your target audience is what makes you unique. Maybe you specialize in a vintage style. Share what makes you unique and how your products can enhance the Creative Market platform and help both customers and fellow shop owners. After you fill that out, click on "Request invites" and then wait for a response. I don't remember how long it took me to get my shop approved. But if you don't get in the first time, don't worry, you might just need to beef up your portfolio so add more products or create a more cohesive look and then you can always submit another request. All right, so go ahead and work on that, and good luck. 4. My 7-Step Workflow: In this video, I want to share with you my general workflow when it comes to listing a product. Of course, this workflow will vary depending on what type of designer you are. But hopefully this gives you a general framework to start with. I've also provided a worksheet to help you track how you're doing on each step of my workflow. You can download it in the project section of the class. Now I'm going to use illustrations and clip art as examples in my class because that's what I sell mostly. I'm going to share the seven steps in my workflow and then go more into specifics. First, we have research then sketching, creating and digitizing, packaging, listing, marketing, and maintenance and Customer Service. Number one, research. Now you might skip this step if you already have something ready to go, but if you don't, then it's a good idea to start with research. Let's say that there's a really trendy motif like llamas, slaws, galaxies, etc. If you don't already have illustrations ready to go for these motifs, then you can start to gather ideas. The best way to do that is Pinterest. You can also search on the Creative Market site to see what has already been created so that you're not doing the same exact thing. For example, in this class, I'm going to use watercolor crystals as the main example. Here's a Pinterest board for my inspirations there. To be honest, I'm always in a research mindset because I'm constantly thinking about what the next trend might be, I follow my favorite artists and designers so this stuff for me is ongoing. But if you have a specific vision in mind than this research phase might have a start and end date. Number two, sketching. Now this step of sketching and the next step of creating might go hand in hand. Maybe you're a font designer and you're already sketching all the time. For my illustrations I usually have a sketchbook full of random doodles and drawings but I also have loose watercolor paper with random doodles and drawings as well. Maybe you're a photographer and this step for you may look like snapping photos with your phone, scouting out locations, or practicing different editing techniques. I firmly believe that this step of sketching is super important. Sometimes you don't see all the sketches that go into a painting, but behind every painting, I promise there are dozens of sketches that go into it. Even in this sketching step, you're building muscle memory. As you draw the same subject over and over again, you're honing in on your style and your aesthetic. Don't skip over this step. I probably spend three times the amount of time sketching as I do with researching, because that's the only way I'll be able to create something that is uniquely mine. Number three, creating and digitizing. Now comes the exciting part of actually creating your work. Again, this step is going to look different depending on what kind of products you want to do, but for me it's either painting on paper or digitally creating it. When I do digital work, I usually use the iPad and the procreate app. I'll go more into this in later videos where I show you how I painted the watercolor crystals, but for now, just understand that you're actually going to be creating a lot more than what you will be adding to your final product. If I end up selling about 12-15 illustrations in a single product, I most likely painted twice as many. It's similar to photographers and how they take a lot more photos than they actually need to, and then they go through it, sorting them, editing them, and then picking out just the very best. Just like sketching, this step of creating is also helping you to hone in on your style. Have fun with this process. Now if I painted on paper, the next step is to digitize them. I'm not going to go too much into detail about how to digitize because I actually already have a class on it. Make sure to check that out. Number four, packaging. This is where it gets a little bit complicated, because there are so many different types of digital goods and there are so many different ways to package them. Again, in this class, I'm going to focus on just illustrations, but if you're curious about how to package other types of products, make sure to do your own research on Creative Market and see how other designers and photographers are listing their products. For illustrations, here are some of my best tips. First, make sure that all of your illustrations are at least 300 DPI. This means that whoever is using your illustrations can blow them up to larger sizes without compromising the quality of your graphics. Next, I also offer both JPG and PNG illustrations. I create separate folders for them so that they're easily discoverable and usually people prefer PNGs because of the transparent background. If you don't provide JPGs, then you should definitely provide PNGs. If I'm selling a product that has layers like Adobe files, like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, et cetera then you want to make sure that every layer is labeled and organized. I'm going to say that again. Every layer has to be labeled and organized. Hopefully as a designer, you're already in the habit of labeling your layers but if you're new to it, then start developing that habit now. Remember that beginner designers and customers who don't know design may be purchasing your product so if your layers aren't labeled then they're wasting their time and they're probably going to leave a negative review. Do the due diligence and label your layers. Lastly, you want to package everything and save it as a zip file. Most likely you're going to have multiple files and folders, so zipping it up is the best way. The zip file is actually what you're going to upload onto Creative Market for your listing. Make sure to have everything already labeled with the correct file name, your business name, and add any other helpful documents like a text file or PDF that gives them instructions on how to use your files. For example, for my procreate brushes, I include a PDF that has instructions on how to download and import their brushes. Oh and this is my cat Aslan. In general, just think about how you would want to receive these products and how it could help the consumer. This packaging step also involves creating shop graphics, and I'll go more into this in later videos about how to create those Shop graphics. But for now, just remember that they're very important because they're going to show the customer not only what your product is, but how to use them and give them ideas. Number five, listing. The actual steps of listing a product, I'll go until a later video. But the actual time that it takes me to list a product is probably less than an hour. I usually have generic verbage that I just copy and paste and I really let my shop graphics do the selling for me. Number six, marketing. This step involves being active on the Creative Market platform, in the discussion forums, and also sharing with your followers across your social media channels. Some other ways that you can market your products is by blogging about it and pinning them on Pinterest. Last but not least, maintenance and customer service. Once the product is listed, it's pretty smooth sailing from there. But every once in a while, you should check in and see how your product is doing. Perhaps people have left questions or left a review and so you want to be able to respond to them in a timely manner. You can also update your product. That means that you could fix typos in your description, add a new illustration, and then anyone who has purchased a listing before can download the new update. As we all know, Customer Service is super important. Make sure to answer any questions that people post if they leave a review, take the time to think them. To summarize, here's my workflow again. Like any workflow, things will get easier the more you do it. The first time might seem difficult or time consuming, but be conscious and mindful of how you did it the first time and improve upon it the next time. I've also provided a worksheet to help you track how you're doing on each step of my workflow. Make sure to grab that in the project section of the class. 5. Brainstorm a Collection: There are a few ways to go about creating a collection on Creative Market. First, let's look at some examples and gather some ideas. Some of the best products that sell well on creative market are mega bundles. These include hundreds of products within a single listing essentially saving the customer lots of money. This option is great for the shop owner who already has a lot of products that can be consolidated. Keep this in mind later down the line after you've published a handful of products. But also think about the customer who doesn't want or even need mega bundles. They'd rather get exactly what they want. It's good to have a variety of options in your shop. For your first collection, don't feel pressured to add too much. For example, one of my best seller Watercolor Illustrations is a Calla Lily. The listing is very simple. E-graphics in JPEG and PNG files and I offer a few mark-ups to give ideas. No patterns, no reads, no other arrangements, just straight up graphics. This is my best seller. Later down the line however, I am going to bundle my floral watercolor illustrations into a mega bundle. For now, I only have three watercolor illustrations, but perhaps when I get to five or 10, I can create a larger bundle at a discounted price. Same goes for other types of products. Let's look at stock photography for flatly. This is a great example of when you might find that one photo that's just perfect. Or maybe you do want a bundle because you want a variety to use for your social media, your shop, Instagram, etc. Next, if this is your first time creating a collection, start by looking at what you all ready have. If you work with watercolors like me or if you're an illustrator, you probably have a stash of notebooks or a stack of loose leaf paper with lots of illustrations just lying around. Start there, some of them can be super useful. Keep watching as I show you one of my folders of loose illustrations and how some of them could be turned into collections. This folder that I have has a lot of random floral paintings that I've done over the past maybe year and a half or so. But these are just random sketches or maybe finished paintings that I haven't framed. Sometimes I have random florals like this and I'll just paint leaves on its own. Leaves are always just so fun and easy to paint. Sometimes I'll have a finished painting like this too. I just haven't hung it up. So goes in this folder. Sometimes when I have something like this, I may have had leftover paint and I'm just trying to get rid of that leftover paint so I'm just using it up. So I just paint random things with that too. Washes are always fun to practice with different brushes as well. Anyway, you might have something like this already in your possession. You might have a sketchbook or you might have a bunch of loose papers like me. What I want you to do is start organizing your paintings. If you have something like this, you can put this in the abstract or shape illustrations. That could be one section. If you have something more like florals, you can have this. Or maybe you want to categorize by color or season or a specific flower, or maybe you do food illustrations or people illustrations, you can categorize like that too. Look at your illustrations and just the content of it all, or even the color scheme. There are lots of different ways to categorize them so don't feel like you have to only do flowers. You can definitely do abstract stuff too. Whether they're generic shapes or splatters like this, even these splatters can also be part of a collection too. Start going through your work. Maybe you want to do spring flowers collection and then maybe these daffodils can be part of that collection. Then you can have tulips. I don't know what other. Spring flowers are their highest since. Things like that. Secondly, I wanted to show you what a finished collection does look like. This one I designed for a creative markets for my winter holiday illustration collection. This doesn't belong here, I'm just kidding. First of all, I tend to paint my illustrations fairly large. These bells, this is a nine inch by 12 inch paper. I don't know the exact measurements but these are going to be at least three inches or so, maybe four inches by two inches wide. Because if you think about these designers and other artists or textile makers who might be using these illustrations. If there are too small, even if you scan them at a really high DPI, they might still not be able to get it as large as they want to. You want to paint your illustrations as large as you can as it makes sense. You don't want bell that's this huge because then it's going to be a really, really huge painting. But paint a little bit larger than normal. Even these pine cones, I wish that I had painted these just a little bit larger and they could have been used. I did use this poinsettia though. I think it's fine. The size of it at least this is maybe three by three, maybe four by four. When you do a seasonal type of collection, you want to think about all types of motifs and symbols that would be part of it. Even food illustrations and objects like these bells. This points add us a lot bigger. Adding some more fruit and just food illustrations. If you have an illustration that can be interpreted in a couple of different ways, that's always great to have too because it's great to have options. Here I just have them going in opposite directions and this one's a little bit larger. Then again I have a small and a large version, then here is a much larger version but it's a lot lighter and slightly different color scheme. Same thing with these pines. Instead of just giving this one pine, you can have lots of different options. Thicker pines, thinner pines, different green hues. That just gives some more options and it also increases the value of your collection too. Even these leaves, I don't love all of them. I didn't save every single one of these leaves as part of the collection. I probably only chose three or four. But I painted all of them just in case I didn't like some of them. Paint them a little bit larger and paint just a lot of variety. Finally, I also did all these cherries and hollies as well. These are so much fun. Even these cherries like different arrangements. Some of them are multi-cherry, some of them are double or even singles. Just having these different options gives the designer more freedom and more creativity. Some of these outlined illustrations are always nice too. If you don't want to do a painted outline, you can always do a drawn black thin outline too. These are some pine trees that I was doodling has well, some of these with snow. The more pine trees here. Then here I painted even some more pines. Maybe I wasn't satisfied or something. Then these are just more berries on branches, candles, silver bells. Again, just giving more options. The point is not to make sure that all of these make it into the collection, this is like you're brainstorming process. These are things that you might want to add. You try to do it in a couple of different ways to see if it makes sense to you and if it would make sense for the customer. Then lastly, I also added some lettering options as well because this could be easily used on a card or even on a shirt. I have the letters spaced out. I didn't turn this into a font but you can easily string these letters together. Then I do have one or some of these options where they are connected too. This is 12 pages or so. It seems a lot but if you think about this as your brainstorming process, it really goes by quickly. If you write down the types of illustrations you want to include, then it helps your brainstorming process go a little faster. It takes a lot of research and a lot of preparation in the beginning. But hopefully once you get to the creating stage, it'll go a little bit faster. You'll enjoy it. Then the next stage would be then digitizing these illustrations and then putting them onto your creative markets shop. Go ahead and start brainstorming, filling out those worksheets and thinking about what collection that you want to create. I'll see you in the next video. 6. Example: Watercolor Crystals - Becoming a Collection: I really like how these turned out. I think it looks really great. The next step is to revisit your brainstorming worksheet about how this collection would be used. So put yourself in the shoes of the designer, or the consumer or customer, think about how you would use this. A couple of ideas is what we talked about, you can use these as part of your logo, so you can put it on a business card, or on a magazine cover, or on a postcard, things like that. Actually, you can use any of these as a logo, even something like this. Maybe if you wanted to be part of a floral arrangement and you want to put it on a t-shirt or on a tote bag, then maybe you want to use any one of these again, but then you might need to bolster your collection by adding floral elements. Or you might want to make a pattern. In that case, I think either using these two as part of the pattern, or these two and these two, that's fine, but you're definitely going to need more elements. Whether they're smaller or they're complimentary colored crystals, you will just need a little bit more to make this collection look more complete. Now if this is your first item on creative market, don't feel like you have to be the end all and be all. The great thing about creative market is that you can always add on to your listing. If this is all you have right now to sell, that's okay. Go ahead and list it and still show different options, but then as you continue creating maybe you think that it would be a great addition to this collection then go ahead and update it, and then anyone who has bought it can automatically update their purchase, and then anybody new, because you've updated something, it's going to pop up in the search results again. So that's always great to have. You can definitely create smaller crystals as well. The great thing about being able to edit this digitally is that you can have this entire collection, but then offer it in every single color of the rainbow. Just make a couple of tweaks here and there, and then you can have this in ruby colors, or sapphire colors, or citrine colors. Just think about all of those different possibilities and think about how this could be used. That's why that brainstorming worksheet is going to be super important. Always come back to it in thinking about how you can maximize these illustrations. I'll see you in the next video. 7. Create Shop Graphics (Screenshots): Let's talk about the shop graphics or as Creative Market caused them screenshots. Now when you add a new product, you can also add your screenshots here. Creative Market gives you some guidelines on which size to use. I usually use Photoshop to create my screenshots. So this is the main screen shot that I created. I use all of the graphics of the watercolor crystals. You can see that they're all labeled here on the right. You want your title to be really bold and stand out. When you look at the listings on Creative Market, sometimes the title gets cut off. So you really only see the first 20 or so characters maybe a little bit more than that, but that's really it. If your screenshot doesn't show exactly what your product is, it's going to be really difficult to convince people to click on it. So use that title area to really make it stand out. You can always search for other types of ideas just by browsing Creative Market. You see how bold these titles are. It's really easy to see, especially these that are funds. It's really great to see the details of the funds and how it makes it unique. So think about your aesthetic and how that plays into how you create your screenshots. As for me, from all of my watercolor illustrations, I have a bold title like this. Then right under it I write watercolor illustrations. Then in the top, two-thirds of the screenshot area I use it to display my graphics. Up until now, I've only done floral so it was easy to have them popping out. But with the crystals, I can take up a little bit more space because they can be displayed upside down, sideways, etc and it still makes sense. To use Photoshop and create a new one, you go to File New, or when you open up the program, it'll prompt you to create a new Canvas. I already have a preset that saved. But you can use this right side here to type in the settings. So you would write Creative Market, the width at 1,820 pixels, and the height at 1,214 pixels. The resolution you can leave at 150, which is sufficient for displaying on the web and then you click Create. Now I'm not going to go through the steps of actually creating this, but rather talk more about the principles behind your shop graphic. So again, you really want to highlight your title. Maybe you have a subtitle like I do here, and they really highlight your graphics. Even if you do website templates or resume templates or logos or anything like that, you really want those to stand out. Let's look at fliers or magazines or something, or even abs. Let's look at email marketing campaigns. There are still very good titles here like Lead Magnet Builder. This one's a little bit harder to read. I can't really tell, maybe they should have made this responsive email template a little bit larger. I get that Miranda is the name of this particular style. But I'd like to know what I'm looking at first. This is pretty good 36 e-signatures. I would just bump up the contrast on this title. Maybe make this e-newsletter a little bit larger. It doesn't have to be too fancy or anything. You can keep it simple like I do and just do a bold title, subtitle and then highlight your graphics. That's really all it is. If you have products like this, using mockups might be a great idea. Showing it on a phone, on a desktop or on other mobile devices, so that people know exactly what they're looking for. If you do website themes, it's great to show screenshots of the website in the screenshot too. Another option for your screenshots besides this main horizontal screenshot, you can also do a vertical. Sometimes you'll see an image and it'll say something like click to see more or open to see more, something like that. This is when shop owners might combine additional graphics or illustrations into one long screenshot. In this case, this top half or this area is what they initially see. But if they like what they see and wanted to see more, then they can click it and then this will pop up and they could see a lot more. So notice how I put all of the individual illustrations on this screenshot. Then in the next screenshot, I added all of the arrangements. You can organize your screenshots however you like. I usually like to do the main title first obviously, and then show exactly what they're getting. Then I have a few mockups just to give them ideas. That's usually all that's really required. The only time I've actually used a video is for this listing. I have a ton of graphics here, but here at the end, I added a quick tutorial on how to use these brushes. So you just click "Play." You can link to a YouTube or Vimeo link and then you can just go from there and they can see how to use your product in action. This is great even for website developers or resume. Even if it's a word document template, you can show them exactly how to modify it and personalize it. To create that portrait screenshot, you would still go to File New and you keep the same width, but you just change the height. I usually just multiply the height by two, three, four, five probably more than five is obnoxiously long, so maybe just two or three times as long. I really base that on how many illustrations I have and how many I can realistically fit on one of the screenshot areas. For example, on this one I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, I have 13 illustrations. I could have divided it up onto three screenshots and have each one have like four or five. Or you can squeeze a little bit more onto each one and only double the height. That's really it so for this one, the height is just 1,214 times two, which would be 2,428. Then you click "Create" and then go about the same steps of importing all of your graphics here, and then just rearranging them as you like. After you create your screenshots, you want to save them as JPG files. You can save them anywhere on your desktop or your PC or your Mac, wherever you organize your files. We just want to save them as a JPG and then this is what we will upload onto our product. 8. Packaging: Organize and Zip Files: In this video, I'm going to show you how to package your product. Before I demonstrate how to package this collection of crystals, I want to show you another example. This is an example of my peony watercolor illustration set. As you can see here, I have my scans, my individual paintings and then the Photoshop edited files. This was the zip file that compiled everything and I'll open this in a little bit, but I want to explain some other things first. After I scanned and then digitized in Photoshop, I would save them as both PNGs and JPEGs. When you open either of these folders, each file is carefully labeled and even the reads are labeled and the flower arrangements as well. Since these are PNG files, when you hover over them, you shouldn't see a background and I should say that they are PNG files. If you look at the JPEG file, you do see a white background and then when you hover over it, you see that it also says JPEG file. Now one of the most common questions is how do I know what DPI, these graphics are ads? Well, if you scan them in at a particular DPI, then they should stay that way unless you export at a lower resolution. But if you want to double-check, you can just drag onto Photoshop, go to image, image size and then here in the resolution area, you should see what that DPI is. These PNGs are actually at 600 DPI. These are very large file sizes, as you can see, 11.4 megabytes. All right, so that's how you can double-check your graphics DPI. Now, these are what I exported from these Photoshop files, but these two are what I ultimately added to the final creative market product. But even in these folders, everything is carefully labeled and then when I go to the thumbnail view, right again, everything is carefully labeled. When I open up this zip file, it's going to show me these two folders and then when I open up the folders, it will show me all of these individual files. Now to zip you can control click to select multiple items, right-click and then select add to archive. Here, you want to rename and then select zip and then click Okay. All right, so now that you see how this is done, let's do the same for the crystals. All right. For these crystals, you saw that I omitted these two from the final collection, so I only included this all the way to here. Now at this point, I can reconsider how to name these, right? Maybe I don't want to call them extra crystal number three. Since they are mostly blue I should probably name them as such so this will be blue crystal one, blue crystal two, blue crystal three. Now if I want to put these out of the way, I can just create a new folder and call it extra crystals and then toss these two in there. It's just so that they're out of the way and I have a clean workspace. Same thing with these, I can create a new folder and say crystals scan and I can select those and toss them over there. Now I should have 13 crystals that are going to be part of the final collection. Okay. From here, I also want to save JPEG files, so I'm going to select all of these, drag them into Photoshop and then we'll open 13 different files. Okay, then from here I'm going to do a Save As or shift control S and save it as a JPEG. Here I can create a new folder if you want, so we'll say JPEG, watercolor crystals and I like to label it with my business name as well. Then we'll go ahead and create a folder for the PNG two, even though we won't be saving it to this folder just yet, but we do want to save it to JPEG make sure that JPEG is selected and then save. All right, so go ahead and do the same for all of them. Now from here I want to move all of my PNGs to this folder and I hope this one got left out for the JPEGs. Okay, so these two are going to be the ones that I ultimately zip up, but before I do that, I should have actually checked the resolution first, so let me do that Just real quick on a couple of them so that I know. You should really do them, do the check on all of them, but just click and drag to Photoshop. Go to image, image size and make sure that the resolution here is at least 300 DPI and in this case it's 600, so we're good. Again, double-check that all the labels are correct. Sometimes it bothers me that VCs are not capitalized, but that's just me, you don't have to be as detail-oriented as me, but sometimes it's better to be more detail oriented than not, so let's just quickly change those. When you're already and everything's labeled and again, depending on your product, you might have more than two folders, you might have multiple files within a folder, you might have folders within folders. However, it is just double and triple check that everything is good to go. Then when you're ready, select all the folders that are going to be part of the zip file, right-click, add to archive, change the name here, so I'm going to call it water color crystals, use my business name, select zip, click "Okay." Now this is the file that I'm going to upload to Creative Market. Let's do that in the next video. 9. Listing: Write "Super" Copy: Okay, now that we have our zip file ready to go, it's time to add our new product. Now in the meantime, you do want to be brainstorming titles and the description copy. This is when the brainstorming packet will be handy. If you refer to the brainstorming worksheets, there is a page for writing product description copy. When I say copy, I mean just the entire description itself. I'm not saying that you are copying. I'm just saying that this section is what I call the copy. I'm going to use the acronym, SUPER. S stands for short and sweet. You really want to keep your product description as brief as you can. There are some categories and products that are going to require a longer description because you have to list all of the different features, and so I understand that. If that's the case, then you want to take advantage of the formatting tools. When you add a new product and it's time to write in the product description, there are a couple of different ways to format your copy. If you wanted to place a word in italics or bold, then you want to add these asterisks. If you want to list things, make sure to use a hyphen and a space, and then if you want to add a long horizontal line, then have three dashes. So these are just some easy ways to format your copy, so that it doesn't look cluttered and hard to read. U stands for Unique. Now, each product is going to be unique to you, so you should really emphasize those points. For example, in my peony watercolor illustrations, I emphasize that they are hand painted, they are in a loose style, and then in my fudenosuke procreate brush pack, I talk about how I'm bringing the brush pen to the digital world. Just something that is unique, like there aren't a lot of fudenosuke brushes out there, and this is another popular seller of mine too. P stands for Problem Solving. Remember that your product is a tool, it's not just the end product, although sometimes it might be. In your copy, you want to include how your product is going to help your customer. So if you do social media branding, maybe your audience is virtual assistance, so you can talk about time-saving or being efficient, or not having to be a graphic designer. Maybe you create resume templates and you're catering towards young professionals, so you can highlight how it's going to help them land a job, how it's going to help them look professional. If you're stumped on how to highlight the problem-solving feature, then look at the brainstorming page of your worksheet. On the brainstorming page, there's a question that says, how would these products be used by the customer or designer? So how you answer that question could possibly help you answer the problem-solving feature. All right, E stands for Engaging. Not everybody reads the copy, although everybody really should. But those that do, you really want to be able to capture their attention. Sometimes you can share a brief behind the scenes, story of how this product came to be, especially if it's photography, you can talk about how you're inspired or where you took this photo. Maybe you can ask a thoughtful question to get them to personally relate to the product. You can spark the imagination by painting a picture. For me in my peony illustrations, I have a couple sentences here. The peonies are endless sources of inspiration for me, they smell heavenly, so I'm engaging the senses and the soft petals of all colors make peonies one of the most beautiful flowers. Just with those three short sentences, I'm trying to engage the reader to remember and recall what peonies look like, what they smell like, and how they make you feel. Now this engaging aspect doesn't have to be just a first sentence. It can be scattered throughout the whole copy. So it's just a general tone, you just want to be engaging in general. Lastly, R stands for Ready to Use. Since your product is a tool, you want to emphasize how easy it's going to be to start using it. That can look different in a couple of ways. In my loose florals watercolor brushes pack, in that copy, I have a section called what's included. This helps the customer know exactly what to expect, a brush set file, that has four brushes and six paper textures, and then a PDF on how to use the brushes. Then a section on how to use brushes. Just a couple of quick tips on how to use the Apple pencil to create loose floral strokes. Then I also provided a link on how to install them. This really sets the customer up for success. They don't have to worry about, "How do I use these? How am I going to unzip them? How am I going to install them?" You're giving them all the tools in addition to the product, so that once they purchase and download, they are just ready to go. Then if there are certain requirements, especially for software that are important to note, remember to highlight them right using the formatting, and then any other important notes just really make sure to emphasize those because they might not be professional designers, so you really have to write your copy in a way that any lay person will be able to understand. All right, so that is how you write a super engaging copy. Now at any point, you don't have to include every single aspect of the super copy, but these are just general guidelines to follow, so that you can create a copy that doesn't sound boring or dull, but that sounds exciting and engaging. 10. Listing: Add a Product: Let's get started on adding our product. Now, since we only have one product to add right now, we can select this button, but if you have multiple products, then you can choose this one too. So it's really great if you're uploading, 3, 5, maybe even 10 products at a time, and you can always save your work and just put them as drafts if you're not ready to complete the entire process in one sitting. Again, since we're only doing one product, I'm going to go ahead and select this one, and then you should see a page that looks like this. Up here at the top left, you'll see your progress, and then whether it's in draft or live mode. Right now we can't select live because none of our sections are filled out, but once you start filling them out, these yellow markers are going to turn to green. Now you can spend some time brainstorming different titles and researching on the marketplace and see what other people have used, but I'm going to be consistent with my other products. Since there are watercolor illustrations, I've named them as whatever the subject is: Watercolor Illustrations. So that's how I'm going to name it. Crystals: Watercolor Illustrations. Now there is a cap to how many characters you can add. So in this case, I can only add two more before I run out of space. I'm going to delete those and leave it as this. You'll notice that the yellow pencil sign changed from yellow to green. Let's keep on going down. Here, this is going to be your shop name, and you can choose your category and If you are not sure where it would go, you can always go back to the general Creative Market page and then search. Maybe you're not sure what the difference between objects and illustrations are, or web elements and icons, so if you're not sure, just click on those and see what is under those categories. For my watercolor illustrations, they're going to be Graphics, and then usually there's another subcategory, I'm going to choose Illustrations. You'll also notice that once we selected the categories over here on the right, the prices were automatically calculated for us. Creative Market had recently ruled out the auto pricing feature in August, 2019. Now you can opt-out of the auto pricing feature, and then set your own prices, but you should only do that if you really know your market and if you know what your target audience is willing to pay, and remember to be competitive. I'm not going to go too much into details about how auto price here work, but for now, setting it to auto pricing will probably do well for you. You can click this link if you want to adjust it yourself, but for now, know that the prices are already set for you. Next, let's add our screenshots. So I've added my screenshots and my mock-ups to this folder. I'm going to click and drag, and drop it right there. It will just upload on its own, and then I'm going to click and drag the next one into this little area right here, and then drop. Remember how we divided it into two sections and load out Click to see more. Now when they click it, they can scroll down to see more, but right now we can only see the top half. Then go ahead and add the other mock-ups as well. You got 1, 2, and 3. If you want to rearrange these, you just simply click the thumbnail, and then drag to where you want them to be. Another feature for your screenshots is when you hover over the top right corner of this viewing area, there's the watermark feature. So if you select this, it's going to automatically place a Creative Market watermark all over your screenshots. Now, this is great, especially if you have a lot of illustrations and you want to prevent people from copying and stealing your work. You can even do that on mock-ups too. I don't normally put them on mock-ups just because, they're meant to be seen as mock-ups since I want the product to be able to be clearly seen. We're pretty good there, and now it's time to write our product description. Now since I have a generic verbiage that I use for all of my watercolor illustrations, then I go back to my peony one, and then just copy and paste what I see here, and then amend it to fit my needs. I usually bold the title, and so to add a bold, you're going to add two asterisks before and after, and change this to Crystals, and then go ahead and edit this to fit your needs. So I'm going to go ahead and do that, and then fast forward. After you're satisfied with this, you can always click outside of the text box to see how it would look on the website. As you can see the formatting that we included will automatically be applied. So when you click back in the text box, you'll see those formatting marks again. Then click out, and then they are applied. Now you can edit this copy at any time. So when you add a new product, or when you add to this product, you can change this to 15 or 20 or anything like that, or if you want to add an extra mock-up, go ahead and do that. This mock-up, the sizing is wrong, so I'm actually going to just delete it for now, but just you want at least two mock-ups a lot more if you think that it could be used for a lot more purposes, but for now, just for the sake of this class, we're just going to use these two. So far everything on the left side of this page are good to go. Next, I'm going to go ahead and upload the product. Now you can go ahead and do this part first, especially if your file size is really large, but mine isn't too big. I'm just going to click the "Zip File", drag it over here and then you'll see the status bar. Again, you can do this first if your file size is really large. I'm going to just let that go. The prices have already been set, unless you opt-out of Auto Pricing. Down here is pretty important too. Creative Market offers three types of licenses; Personal, Commercial, and Extended Commercial. You can go ahead and click these links to figure out what they mean. But you are going to offer all three of these licenses, and that's why there are three different prices. The date is defaulted to the current date. Then in terms of compatible with, this is where you can select all the different programs that people could use your graphics with. For example, they can definitely use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and probably others as well. I could probably select all of these but just these are the major ones, but definitely be as comprehensive as possible. Now if you selected a different category, this section is going to look different. Only these options come up for me because I am in the Illustrations Category and then some properties. Now, these files are not layered, so I don't need to collect that. They're not tolerable. I could give dimensions, but each crystal is a completely different dimension, so it would be annoying to have to set that but I can say what DPI they're at and they are at 600. There are not Vectors. So that's the only Property that I need to add. Lastly, we're going to add tags. Now tags are really important because they're going to help with the search results. You don't want to be too repetitive, but you do want to try to hit on every keyword that comprises your product. I'm definitely going to add keywords like watercolor crystals. Now if you do that, you're probably not going to need to also put in watercolor and crystals separately. Just leave that as is. But I could be more descriptive. I could add green crystals and that's different than watercolor crystals. I could also say watercolor illustration and that's different than watercolor crystals is a broader topic or a broader tag. Green crystals or gems are also considered emeralds. I could add emeralds. Just go ahead and add as many tags as you want. But remember not to be too spammy and sometimes there might be pre-populated as well. You could use hand-painted watercolor, hand-picked graphics. I haven't used the word graphics yet, that might be a good one to add. I can add watercolor again and then wait for the populated wants to come out. If they were a bundle, I could select this, but they're not, and they're not floral, I can't use any of these, but that's alright. Clipart is another great word for a graphic. You can choose this one. You can keep going until you feel like you've exhausted every single tag possible. For now, I think this is good enough. I'm just going to double-check and make sure that all of the yellow pencils were now transformed to green. Title's good, got my category, I've got my screenshots, super copy. I've uploaded my product, prices are set, and these features are all added, and I've added my tags. At this point, if you're not ready to publish, you can leave it as a draft, and then select, "Save All Changes". But if you're ready to publish, then you can switch to Live and then Save All Changes and it will be automatically added to your shot. There's no additional review process. But for the purpose of this class, I'm going to leave it as a draft, Save All Changes and then when I close this, I can view this in my drafts folder. But you can also see what it would look like on the websites through right now it's saying that your files currently being processed. This page will update when your file is ready, but it's not Live. It doesn't really matter at this point but this is how you can kind of preview, what your product will look like. You've got that bold title that we're talking about. The graphics are really awesome, and you can scroll through your screenshots. Click to see more, let's click it. You can scroll down and see the details of each crystal and then keep scrolling through. This is where the compatible with a different software comes in. This tells those customer what the file sizes. This is a DPI that you had set and then here is the copy, that super copy. Now again, if you still have questions about the licenses, you can look on this section and just click on this link. It'll show you, what types of parameters there are, for each of these licenses. Now this frequently asked questions area is automatically added to your product. Common questions like, how can I unzip product files? You don't have to worry about having to add them manually to every single product of yours. It will already be here. Creative Market has taken care of you but then if you wanted to add a new frequently asked question yourself, go ahead and do that here, and then click on "POST FAQ". The tags that you use, if you scroll all the way down, this is where you're going to see those. I can't wait to see what products you come up with and to see your Creative Market thrive. Remember to follow along with the checklist and you can find that in the download section so that you are set up for success. 11. Final Thoughts: Congrats on making it to the end of this class. Hopefully by now you have a clearer idea of what your first collection on Creative Market is going to be. This is a great time to upload your project and share your ideas so we can help each other out. You can share your notes on the brainstorming worksheets, or share your shop graphics, or share your published collection on your shop in Creative Market. Remember that you can start a collection with things that you may have already created. Start by going through those old sketchbooks, loose leaf papers and see what you can come up with. Ideally, you want about three to five collections in your shop. Feel free to post questions or comments in the discussions area. Let's help each other out as creative entrepreneurs. Thank you again for taking this class. I can't wait to see what you create. Until next time. Bye. 12. BONUS: Sketch Crystals: Hey everyone. This video is for you if you don't currently have a collection to work with. We're going to sketch and paint some crystals that we are going to then digitize and then add to our collection. Here we go. Let's start by painting some crystals. There are a couple of ways to go about it. You can sketch first or you can paint without a sketch, or you can paint without a sketch and then add inclines later. There are a lot of different ways to do it. I'll just do a couple of different ways and then you guys can do whatever you want to do. Let's sketch a couple up here and then in the middle section I'll do the painting loosely. Then in the last one, I'll paint loosely and then add ink to it. Let's sketch maybe two or three crystals up here. Now when you sketch crystals, you can be as precise as you want to be or you can be as loose as you want to be. I'm going to do just generic shapes that we're familiar with. Yeah, something like this. Again, you can use rulers and stuff if you want, but I'm just going to keep it somewhat looser. Then once you have this generic shape, all you have to do is have lines coming out of it like that, sort of going horizontal and vertically. Now I'm sketching a little bit darker, so you can see these lines, but you might want to sketch a little bit lighter. There's the first one.Let's do another one. Sometimes if I do a crystal where you're looking at one side of it and then you have the other facets, I like to sketch just a generic shape. Again, it can be as precise as you want it to be or not. This is a 1,2,3,4, five-sided shape. Again, you can have lines sort of coming out of it at different angles as well and then sort of connect them. Again, this can be as precise or imprecise as you want it to be. This will be the main focal point, and then these will be the sides or the facets of this crystal. I'm just going to leave those sketches there and then we'll paint them together. Then in the rest of this sketch page, I'm going to paint loosely. Let's grab our paints. 13. BONUS: Paint Crystals, part 1: Let's get started on painting these crystals. First one I'm going to do, I'm using a kneaded eraser to erase some of these pencil lines because later when I digitize it or scan and then digitize it, it's going to be a real big pain in the buds if I tried to erase these digitally. I'm going to try to erase as much as I can, but not so much that I can't see them anymore. Another option is you can draw these on a separate piece of paper and then use a light pad so that you can shine the sketches, through the paper. It's really up to you if you have that capability. But if you don't, sketching on the paper is completely fine, and the reason why I use a kneaded eraser instead of a regular erasers is because the kneaded eraser only picks up the graphite without changing the surface quality of your paper. That's really important when it comes to water colors because you don't want to make the paper less absorbent. I've decided that for my crystal collection, I want to use green. I want to create an emerald collection. You might have lots of different colors. You might have like a warm green like this. But you might also have cooler greens like this one up here and these are just greens that I've mixed from other paintings. Don't worry if you don't already have this. You might also have something more teal or like a bright green like that. You might have a little bit of turquoise as well, or even other bright greens. Just test your greens and see what you have because you'll probably be using a variety of these give or take and you might even have a little bit of turquoise or teal in there as well. But the majority I feel like are probably going to be these three are these four colors. I have a couple other greens in my palette I'm just seeing what else I have. Oh yeah, this is really bright, but I mean, it could work for highlights or something. Okay, so I'm going to start painting for this left Crystal. I'm going to imagine that the light is coming in, maybe this way. If that's the case, we're going to have, this is going to be the brightest area, so it'll be the lightest color and then this whole section will be fairly bright as well with some colors thrown in there and then this area is probably going to be the darkest because it's technically facing down in away from the sun. What I like to do, I'd like to just start with a really light wash. I'm going to just start with the largest portion here, and I'm just using a lot of water in coloring that section in. Again, I'm concentrating my colors on this far left side because that's where more of the color will be and there will be less color up here and it'll just be brighter. Don't worry about trying to be so precise. I think the beauty of crystals is that, even in its imperfections, it looks so beautiful. Don't worry about that. I started with the largest section, but I also have to be careful because I don't want to have too much bleed. I want to be somewhat strategic in the way that I paint. While this area is drying, I'm going to start painting this one and for this one, let's have the sun coming in this way. That way, this section is going to be fairly dark compared to this bright section. I'm going to start with this light section as well. I'm going to use a brighter color. With watercolors, you always want to start from dark to light. I know it seems like I painted nothing right now, but I did, I promise you, let me hold it up so you can see. This one, since I only painted this section, I can actually go ahead and start painting this one. This one is going to be fairly dark, especially in this corner or right here. I'm going to start with that same base color, but I am going to concentrate my colors right there and then drag it out, I'll add some more water as well. It's lighter out here. Again, you don't have to color the whole thing and I'm also going to toss a little bit of black in there, just to give us some more shadow effect. All right, so again, this looks light now, but we're going to add more layers to it so don't worry. Let's go back to the first one and this first section should be fairly dry. I'm going to go ahead and start painting these little sections. Again, this side is going to be the darkest I'm going to go ahead and just paint that. Fairly dark because we know it's going to be dark. I don't want it to be just a flat color. I do want some a little bit of white-space, because it's not like the light isn't shining through crystals have that beautiful effect where light does shine through it so you don't want it to be a flat color. Make sure to leave a little bit of white-space or add some more colors or that it has darker areas like so. All right, I'm going to do the same here. But this time the darker colors are going be concentrated in this corner here. Also be mindful that there might be other tones of greens. This is where you can take some creative liberty and add some different colored greens too. Okay, this one's going to be the lightest one, I'll add a lot of water there. I barely added any color there and then this one. I'm going to let this one dry and I'll come back to this. Part of me wants to come back to this and add some more layers to it, and this time I'm just being again just free really free with it. Leaving a lot of white-space because I want that under that previous layer of the light green to really shine through. I'm going to come to this area and this one is going to be the darkest, right down here. Make sure to add a lot of darker colors down there. I'm also lifting a little bit as I go because sometimes I don't want the color to be too strong, too strong right away. I'm just making some adjustments as I paint. I come back here and finish off the sides. I'm getting a little bit of bleed here, because my paint wasn't completely dry. Again, I'm not worried too much about it, but I don't want too much bleed happening. I'm not going to add too much more water there, and try to lift up what did bleed. If you want to prevent the bleeding, you can also try to leave a really thin sliver of the white paper, so that you can prevent the bleeding from happening and then two wet areas, touching. Continue painting and filling in areas and then layering darker colors, so that you can really see that contrast happening and the shape really taking form. I just have one more small section to fill up here. Then I'm going to continue layering colors over here in this corner down here, as well as over here. This is what I mean by not letting bleeds really get in the way because when you start to lose the position precision of the crystal. So once this layer is completely dry, I will go back here and really define those lines. While I don't mind this bleed happening, right now it looks like the shape is really lopsided, I don't want that happening. I'm just going to wait for it to dry. Over here, I realized that I had extended this corner to far. I had to come back in here and adjust the shape of this and that's fine. These pencil lines I can erase digitally if I have to. I think I've got a good stopping point. So I'm going to pause on these crystals and go on to the ones that are more free hand. 14. BONUS: Paint Crystals, part 2: When I say freehand, I don't mean that they're going to look messy or that they look like blobs. This is what I mean when I say freehand. You still follow some generic shape, but you leave a lot of white space. Even in these two, you are using the concept of the light and the dark, because you don't have crisp lines to give you that illusion of a shadow. Then the ones where we'll be adding inclines to, they're more like this, where these are like blobs of color. But then, the lines help you define where the crystals are. They're definitely not precise like this is totally not precise and there's a missing color down here. That's not to say I can't add color later on, but this gives you more of a free form, a feel. Whereas, this is in the middle. You still see structure and you still see a form, but it's not as rigid. The one thing to note when you do something more freehand is to leave a lot of white space. So even here, leaving white space in between these facets really give you the illusion that it is a multi-dimensional illustration. Make sure to include that. We'll do an illustration like this, like a generic rectangular shape and something like this, where it looks more like a standing crystal, your typicals crystal so to speak. For these loose crystals, I'm actually going to use some salt to add texture to our paintings. I'm going to leave that right there. The first one I'll paint is going to be like a rectangle with pointed edges, and then, I'll add some salt while the paper is somewhat damp. You don't want a puddle of water because you'll need a lot of salt to drink up that water. So you want the paper to be just damp enough so that the salt can soak up the rest of the water. Then you'll leave the salt on the paper until the very end and then we'll brush it all off. Because we're being very loose, I'm going to use a fairly saturated color. Again, I'm going to paint like a rectangular. Okay, that wasn't really a rectangle because I have now five sides: one, two, three, four, five. Even though this side's really small. I'm going to add a lot of water to it. Again, just making it kind of damp, leaving a lot of white space. I'm not really thinking about where are the white spaces. I'm just going with it for now. You can add more color if you want. Let's say that my sun is, I don't know, maybe coming in this way. So that means I need to make, I should have planned this earlier, this section a little bit lighter. I'm just quickly lifting, and then I add a lot more color down here. This is where I'm going to add some of my salt. I add some right there. You can be very free with this too. It doesn't have to be everywhere. You can concentrate it in one area, and then you can even go back in there and add even more color to go around it. That'll create a really unique effect as well. From here, I need to add a couple more facets. So I'm going to have maybe a small one here, a very long one here, maybe I'll make it pointed, who knows, and then I may or may not have another couple of sections out here. But again, just be very loose with it. You don't have to plan so much for it. Remember to leave a white space, very thin white space between these sections. Let's see, I'm going to do like that. Yeah, fill in like that, maybe. This is going to be very dark. I'm going to add a lot more color. I'm still going to leave some white space, and I want it to be completely filled in. You can add a little bit of salt here too if you want, just going to add just a little bit there. The shape didn't really turn out as I thought it was going to, but it's okay. You just go with that and add a little bit more salt over here too. I'm going to leave that to dry and I may or may not add another layer, but let's just do another one. Let's do the kind of like pointed crystal one. It's going to have maybe three triangular shapes up at the top and then three rectangular shapes down here. This time I will plan in advance. Let's say that our sun's coming in from this way. So let's make our first one really bright, so lighter. You can even take away and make it almost white if you want. The next one will be a little bit darker. Remember to leave some white space in between these two sections, and then this will be the darkest. Now, these rectangular shapes are going to have angled bottoms, and you want to curve it or not curve it but angle it upwards. You can add salt to these crystals too if you want, totally up to you. Now, this middle rectangle is going to be more or less flat on the bottom, and the one on the left will also be angled upwards. It'll be darkest all the way down here. Looks like a pencil. I don't know if that was on purpose. That's fine. Then I'm also going to punch in some black and some darker colors just to give it some more dimension. I'm working fairly quickly because I already know the generic shape of my crystal. All I'm doing is just quickly adding some details to make it have more shape to it. I'm not in love with this crystal, and this is also why you end up painting a lot of different types because you're not going to paint it perfectly every single time. I don't know. Let's see how this turns out. Maybe the salt will make it look better. But once I scan it and digitize it, I may end up scrapping it. So don't worry if your paintings don't turn out perfect. Again, this is a perfect example of that. I'm not in love with it, but I don't hate it either. I don't know. There's just something. I think maybe I added too much black. I don't know there is just something. I'm just editing as I go. Just adding some more variety to it. Maybe that's what it needs. Also, these two sections are starting to blend together and so I want to distinguish that as well. Well, I don't want to overwork it. I'm going to leave it the way it is. I'm gonna come back to this crystal and add some more details there too. So I really like how that turned out. It just needs a little bit more color in it. I'm going to add some more. This section is just still very wet, and so I think it's okay to keep on adding some more color. 15. BONUS: Paint Crystals, part 3: I'm going to pause on these as well, and especially because I want to define these sections, but they're really starting to blend. I want able to do it right, so I'm going to let these completely dry because this section is also very wet and for the last couple, this is the one where we're going to just add blotches of color to splashes wherever you feel like it and then we're going to draw ink lines. Now I will give you some direction so that you're not just splattering paint everywhere. So for this one, I think I accidentally smeared it with my hand. So if that happens, don't worry. If it was still wet, you can go in there and quickly pick it up and lift it if you want. But if you can't or maybe it's already dry or maybe it's too dark, don't worry about it because then we can again just digitally erase it. So back to these free form ones, what I want to try to encourage you to do is do something more where you think of like multiple crystals in one section or even something like this where it's just a pile of crystals on top of one another. So try to think of the generic shape or even something like this where you have kind of like vertical strokes and then again, leaving a lot of white-space because this is what's going to help you create a dimension, but also give you clues as to how you can draw your crystals and yeah, and then add some black in there as well to add some shadow effect. But don't think so much about it, just think about the generic shape and then just go for it. Now because we're going to work with larger surface areas, I'm going to use a larger brush. So I'm going to use a size 12, which is fairly large and I'm going to still stay with my green theme, but I'm going to add some teal in turquoise as well. So you want a fairly wet brush because you might be using a lot of, you know, like wet, unwet and adding the darker paints. So for this first one, I'm going to have like two shorter sections, one large section, and then another shorter section and just leaving a lot of white-space giving the indication that there's some shapes going on, but you can't really tell what's going on and that's totally okay. If you don't like the hard edge lines, go ahead and start blurring them if you want. But again, try to leave as much white-space as you can and then lift if you have to because I added a little bit too much paint in some areas. For this one, I'm not going to add salt because I need to draw lines and this salt will probably get in the way of that. So instead I'm allowing these pigments to really speak for themselves and allow them to kind of create visual interest and then at the very end we can add splatter. But what I'm going to do instead, because this is going to be part of a collection. I want this splatters to be its own set of illustrations so that the designer can choose to add splatters or not. All right, so these two are going to take a while to dry. So while that's happening and you can speed up this process, you can use a hairdryer, something else but we have other illustrations. So excuse me while I turn this around and then kind of come back to work on these four. So I'm going to switch back to my smaller brush, I was using a size four and I'm going to revisit these two. I feel like they're at a good point, you can always adjust these digitally as well. So don't feel like it has to look perfect on paper. You can always add just a little bit more shadow here. But I like how they look and so you can always darken these shadows later, you can always brighten the highlights later too. But as much as you can do it right now on paper, obviously, that makes the editing process a little bit easier. So don't be afraid, but if you are hesitant, that's okay too. You don't have to add more details. I think it's looking fine the way it is and I think what I really just want to do is is really just make sure that these two sections are separate. This crystal is kind of coming back to me now. It's not as awful as I thought it was going to be. So let me just turn this back around, so here are our six crystals so far we just need to add ink lines on these two. But once they do that, then we're going to scan this, digitize it, and then make it into a complete collection. Isn't that exciting? All right, so I'll see you in the next video.