Transcripts
1. Intro: Imagine this, you have fun creating a mockup of your artwork on a lazy Sunday, the next weekend, a client purchases your design to use on one of their most popular product lines. A month later, you get a check in the mail for the art you created. What if this were possible, what if you could create mockups of your artwork that can translate into best sellers. Luckily, by joining this class, you'll learn how to create bestselling product mockups in a simple step-by-step way. Hey there, my name is Cat Coquillette and I'm back for my 10th Skillshare class. It's all about how you can turn your existing artwork, patterns, or photographs into professional product mockups, to showcase your work. As a bonus for enrolling in this class, I'm teaming up with Creatsy, to provide you with 10 totally free files for you to download and use throughout all of our lessons. These mockup files come with a price tag of a $155, but Creatsy is giving you 10 completely free files when you enroll in today's class. So here's how it works, you'll use your existing artwork and with a few clicks, revamp it to see how it looks on actual products. You can drop in any type of artwork, whether it's a painting, pen and ink line work, charcoal sketches, or your photography. I'll show you step-by-step how to put your artwork on product mockups for phone cases, tote bags, apparel, framed arts, stationary cards, pillows, wallpaper, ceramic mugs, rolls of fabric and gift bags. It sounds like a lot to cover, but it's actually going to be pretty simple, because we'll be using ready-made layered mockup files. This cuts away a lot of the effort that typically goes into creating your own mockup. A lot of classes out there show you how to build your own mockups out of flat photos, not ready-made mockups like we're using today. There is a lot of rendering and minute details, that go into creating a convincing mock- up out of a flat photo. Like warping the edges, resizing and cropping artwork to specific dimensions, painting and shadows, masking out boundaries, weaving in subtle texture, adding highlights and more. The best part about ready-made mockups like we're using today, everything I just mentioned is already built into the file, we don't need to do it ourselves. Once you drop in your artwork, these actions will be automatically applied. All you need to do is drag and drop your artwork and Photoshop will take care of the rest. Frankly put, it's pretty much magic. I'm good at creating arts, not so good at creating my own mockups. I don't need to be good at that, because there are so many options out there of ready-made mockups. Using these ready-made mockups is a huge time-saver. You can swap designs in and out with ease, so you can see what types of designs are working best for that product type. Plus, you can easily create a large variety of mockups with just a few clicks. No painstaking alterations every time you want to try out a new design. You can also see what the product will look like in real time, all you do is make an adjustment to the design, click Save and it gets applied to the product ASAP. Let me back up real quick. If this is your first time hearing the term mockup, no worries, here's the breakdown. mockups are digital representations of what your design will look like on a physical product, this makes it look like that product already exists. The higher-quality the mockup file, the more convincing this will be. We are going to be using some of the best mockups available in the market today, thanks to my friends at Creatsy. Checkout the fine details when you zoom in, they are not joking around here. So to give you a deeper dive, we'll be using Photoshop to place our designs into product mockup files. It's actually pretty simple, all of these actions, like I mentioned before, are automatically applied to each layered file, so we can just replace blank surfaces with our own designs. You can also modify things like background-color, floor surfaces, wall textures, even small details like the inside of an envelope. Everything feels customized to your designs and your brands. Why are mockups important? I use mockups all the time, in fact, they're pretty crucial to my business, as a service designer and illustrator. I'm the founder of CatCoq, an illustration and design brands. I'm an American, but I travel the world full-time, while running my company. Today, I'm talking to you from my apartment in Chiang Mai, Thailand. In addition to selling my artwork through print on-demand companies, like Society6 and Redbubble, I also license my artwork to companies like Urban Outfitters, Target, Nordstrom, Bed Bath and Beyond, HomeGoods and more. These big brands turn my artwork into products similar to the ones we'll be using today. These are things like pillows, phone cases, wall arts, apparel, fabric, and other home decor items. When a company like Urban Outfitters reaches out to me about licensing my artwork, I'll put together some product mockups, so they can see exactly what my artwork will look like on the products that they sell in their stores. This erases any guesswork about what my artwork will look like on their products, which incentivizes brands to work with me. In addition to showing brands how great my artwork can look like on products, I also like to show my audience. I share a product mockup photos on social media, my websites, in my portfolio, even on my Etsy shop, and in Lookbook, to attract new clients. Essentially, mockups are a great way to showcase your artwork in a very professional light. Plus, it's just fun, as an artist I get a huge kick out of seeing my artwork applied to merchandise. I've been doing this for about five years and it still doesn't get old. So here's how the class is structured today. This is a two for one class. Each lesson is divided into two parts: One, you get to create your own product mockup out of the files I provide and show you how to use; two, I share my strategy for creating top-selling designs in each product category. For example, you might have a design that's not really working well at all on apparel, but it might have a lot of potential for mugs. Today I will be covering a lot of product categories. Throughout the class, I'll be sprinkling in my best secrets to succeed with art licensing. As I've mentioned in a lot of my other classes, I'm a big believer in learning as you're doing. This class will be jam-packed with actionable steps, you'll literally be following me along for every step of the way. If you have a basic understanding of Photoshop, this class will be easier for you, having at least some Photoshop experience will be useful. But again, this is a beginner level course, so it'll be really simple steps to make these product mockups. If you don't have Photoshop, no problem, you can download a free trial with Adobe. I've provided a link to score your free trial, down in the class description below. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare. Click the follow button and you'll be the first to know as soon as I launch a new course or have something new to share with my students. You can also follow me on Instagram @catcoq and every other form of social media with the same handle. Ready to dive in and turn your artwork into gorgeous, trendy mockups, click enroll and let's get started.
2. Supplies: [MUSIC] Welcome to today's class. Before we dive into all of our mockup files, I want to show you exactly where you can go to download the Photoshop mockup files that we'll be using in today's class. First things first, go to catcoq.com/creatsy. I've also linked to this down below in the class description. Here's what it looks like when you get to the page, scroll down until you see the Unlock button, and then type in your email address and once you click "Unlock", you will immediately be redirected to my Dropbox folder that holds all of our high res Photoshop files. Just a heads up, your email address will be shared with my friends at Creatsy. This means that you'll have access to all of their bonus offers, promotions, and anything else they want to share with you directly to your inbox and you can unsubscribe in anytime. Back to Dropbox. These are the high res layered Photoshop files, so they're pretty large. You can either download them all at once by selecting them all and clicking download, or if you're eager to jump right into the first mockup without having to wait for them all to download, just download the first one that we'll be using today and we'll go from there. The first mockup of today's class will be the phone case. Other materials you'll need for today's class, I'll be using Adobe Photoshop. If you don't already have Photoshop, you can just download a free trial. I provide a link to that down below in the class description. The other material that you'll need for today's class is artwork that's already been digitized. That's artwork that maybe you've created digitally or drawn by hand or painted that's now a JPEG, a TIFF, a PDF, just some digital file. If you don't have any artwork digitized, you can snap a picture with your phone of your sketchbook or painting, and we can use that instead. I recommend checking out my previous Skillshare course, digitize your art to sell online, prep your paintings for print on demands. In that class, I show you how I scan in my work, edit it, and get it nice and pretty to sell online. As far as the artwork and designs that I'll be using for today's class, I do both digital illustrations and hand-drawn paintings and drawings. The digital stuff I draw is all in Adobe Illustrator, so it's already digitized, but the vast chunk of my portfolio is all hand created paintings. At this point I'm pretty much a pro at getting my artwork from paper to screen. Here are some examples of the artwork that I'll be using in today's class. I pulled some artwork for my portfolio specifically to use on each product type based off of what designs sell best on each product. We'll get into that specifically at the beginning of every lesson. Quick word on licensed types. I buy the vast majority of my mockups from creative markets. They list the types of licenses very specifically, non-commercial, commercial, commercial extended. I almost always purchase a commercial license. It's usually a few $s more expensive but I do this because I'm creating mock-ups for my business, Cat Coquillette. Commercial license means that I can share these mockups on my social media accounts, which is a business account. These mockups today are provided by Creatsy and they're coming with a commercial license. This means that you can use them for commercial use as long as sales for one product don't exceed 5,000 items. If you want to purchase an extended commercial license for any of these files, I've provided the links for each product if you go to catcoq.com/creatsy and scroll down to the bottom of the webpage. A few more details on ready-made mockups like the ones we'll be using today. Creatsy is my absolute go to for professional mockup files, they put together the highest quality mockups in the marketplace today. Creatsy has thousands of product options and every category you could think of, home decor, tech accessories, apparel, packaging, kitchenware, stationary, and more. They have about 100 varieties of fabric mockups alone, and yes, I have definitely purchase them all. I've even found incredibly obscure mockup files like nail art, stiletto heels, even fidget spinners, and underwear, essentially anything you could ever ask for. When you share your projects on social media, please tag me @catcoq and Creatsy @creatsyofficial, also SkillShare @skillshare. We'd love to see what you guys I'll create today. Now that we've got the supplies covered, let's jump into the first lesson, a simple phone case mockup.
3. Phone Case: In this lesson, we're going to start with the absolute simplest mockup design, which is a phone case. You'll see what I mean by simple once we open up the Photoshop file. This lesson will be sliced into two parts. I'll begin by sharing my tips to create best-selling phone case designs, and then in the second half of this lesson, we'll dive into the Photoshop mockup file itself. First things first, my tips for creating best selling designs on phone cases, specifically. Phone cases are one of my biggest sellers on print on demand sites like, Society6, Redbubble and Casetify. Phone cases are so popular because they give people an opportunity to showcase their own personal style. Just like when you make a conscious decision about what shirt to put on or what shoes to buy. Phone cases have also entered into this realm of self-expression and fashion. A phone case is probably the most visible and consistent form of art that a person will interact with on the daily. Think about it. You probably always have your phone with you and you pull it out multiple times a day to check it. This is a product that a lot of people purchase and perhaps even swap out frequently, which means that there are a lot of opportunities for strong and consistent sales. Let's talk about the designs that sale particularly well on phone cases. All of the products we'll be going through today. There isn't just one design style that needs to be incorporated in order to make it best selling phone case, there are a lot of different paths you can take. However, there are some design trends to be aware of that will elevate your chances of creating a best selling phone case. There are also some design choices that don't really translate well into phone case sales specifically, and I'll cover those today as well. The things that work well, using limited color palettes can be incredibly effective. I typically limit my color palettes throughout all of my designs regardless because having a more selective palette usually feels more sophisticated and refined. When in doubt, always pare down those colors. It's usually better to have too few than too many. Here are some examples of designs with limited palettes that are working really well. In terms of what to create, your subject or motif to put on a phone case design, all over patterns do really well. Basically, think of designs that will cover the entirety of the phone case from edge to edge, no white-space. Patterns or abstract designs will fill the entirety of the product, that phone case, from edge to edge, which really gives it the power to pop. The vast majority of best-selling phone cases will incorporate an element like this, full bleed. Whether it's a gridded geometric design that was created digitally or a hand painted delicate floral, full bleed patterns and graphics generally do very well, especially when you consider the relatively small surface of a phone case. If you don't have any patterns in your portfolio, don't fret, there is a way to fix it. A lot of my patterns actually began as a simple watercolor illustration of one single motif like this butterfly. The original composition is perfect for selling on art prints, apparel, and stickers, but it's pretty limiting if I wanted to use this exact composition on other products like phone cases, yoga mats, or anything with extreme horizontal or vertical dimensions, because it really just doesn't fit the product size that well. My solution, I turned this single butterfly into a repetitive pattern in Photoshop. It's actually pretty quick and easy to do, and now I can use this new pattern to cover the rest of those products that I was previously not able to sell this artwork on because it didn't fit the space. The end result is now this single painting, is much more likely to sell because I've opened up the product offering. If you want to learn how to create quick and simple patterns like this in Photoshop, I recommend checking out my previous skill share course, modern patterns from sketch to screen. In that class, I show you how I take my hand-drawn elements, digitize them with a phone or a scanner, and then turn them into repeat patterns in Photoshop, trust me, it's a snap. Here's a pro tip with patterns. If you want your patterns to feel more modern and contemporary, keep the elements large. For example, I painted this silver $ eucalyptus with watercolor. After I scanned it into my computer, I duplicate it and rearranged it into a pattern. Here's what it looks like when all of the elements are small, and here's how it looks when I do a really tight crop and keep the illustration elements large. Both work just fine, but the pattern with the larger elements absolutely feels more modern than the more traditional pattern with the smaller elements. When it comes to patterns, this is almost always the case. Big elements tightly cropped will usually feel more contemporary and designerly than an intricate and detailed patterns watch. I think we've covered patterns, the point is they do really well, but it's not the only type of design you can use on a phone case, there are a lot of other motifs that are going to translate into best-selling designs as well. For example, graphic illustrations are great, just like a minimal color palette, a simpler illustration will usually sell better than something that's more complicated and detailed. Think about the designs you see on Threadless. These illustrations are created for apparel, but they also translate really well to phone cases. The big trick here is to make sure that the sizing is appropriate and you're not shrinking everything so it gets too small on the device. The dimensions here are crucial to consider. Extreme vertical compositions will work best because that's the shape of the phone case itself. If you do have a lot of whitespace with your design, consider filling it in with a solid color. If you don't want to shrink down, it's also okay to crop your artwork to fit that extreme vertical, as long as you're not erasing out any of the vital parts of the design. Enough shop talk. Now that you know some of my best strategies for creating bestselling phone case designs. Let's dive into the Photoshop file itself and learn how to make our very first product mockup. All right, as soon as I open up the phone case PSD file, this is exactly what it will look like in Photoshop. As you can see, it's pretty simple. It's a whitish gray background. You have a really subtle grid pattern on that phone case. Whenever you see a gridded pattern like this on one of our mock-ups that indicates the space that we will be replacing with our own artwork. To get an idea real quick of how this file is put together, take a look over here on the layers panel. Everything is divided into two primary groups, background and object. When you toggle down on the carrot, you'll be able to see the components of what make up this group. You can do that for the object file and the background file. First things first, what we want to do is replace this gridded pattern with our design for the phone case. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so you guys can see what I'm doing. To replace this gridded pattern with our own design, it's actually pretty simple. The way Creatsy puts these files together is by utilizing smart objects. Essentially, how that will work for us is we'll just be replacing the smart object with our artwork and it will auto fill in, I'll show you what I mean. Over here in our layers palettes, you want to look for the layer that's labeled 'Design.' Now this is the smart object that we will be swapping out. In order to do so, all you need to do is double-click on the smart object. Be careful not to click on the layer mask, it's the smart object that you need to double-click. Once you do, a new document will open up, and this is our sample design. You can see we can turn it on or off, and this is where I'll be dropping in my own artwork. You can simply click and drag, and I'm going to go ahead and expand it so that it fits the full surface area and press "Enter" to set the transformation. Cool. Now that our artwork is placed in there, we can go ahead and close the file. I use 'Command W' to close. Go ahead and press 'Save.' Awesome. As you can see, what we've done is swapped out that placeholder gridded pattern with our own custom artwork. I'll zoom out a bit so that you can see the full scope. It was pretty simple to just click and replace, and a lot of that automation was actually happening behind the scenes. The artwork was rotated at a diagonal to fit that space. It's masked out around the dimensions of the phone case. When you zoom in like this, you can see that it still feels really crisp and all of those details are still there. Overall, this is looking like a pretty solid mockup file, but you can actually make a few more customization's that are built into the file. The biggest one is this background color. You can see here the layer labeled color. Go ahead and double-click it. Now the color picker box will pop up, and all you have to do is click around and see what different colors look like on this background. Right now, it's only picking from this one specific hue down here in the red. You can go ahead and bring that up and explore what different hues look like. Click anywhere in the box to see what it looks like with a brighter saturation. Maybe something that's more desaturated, something I'm really driving with, because this pattern feels a little bit retro. I think it'd be nice to do a background that feels a little bit more 60s and 70s color palettes. Awesome. Go ahead and press "Okay" to set the color. There we have it, this is my final file. I'm going to go ahead and change the file name before I save it, just to make sure that this design is saved in the same working file format. Photoshop is great. Go ahead and press "Save". Now I'm going to save it as a JPEG. Same filename, just a different extension. When you save as a JPEG, you won't be able to edit the file any longer, but because it is flattened, you can upload it to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or through e-mail really easily. All right, so that one was pretty simple. We just made two modifications. One was the background color and the other was the artwork of the phone case itself. Let's go ahead and move on to our next mockup.
4. Tote Bag: In this lesson, we will be covering tote bags. Just like with phone cases, I'll start by sharing a few best-selling tips, and then we'll jump right into our Photoshop file, and learn how to create our product mockup. First things first, my advice for creating designs for tote bags that will help them be best sellers. So tote bags are one of the easiest products to design for, because their dimensions are pretty much perfectly square, and the substrate itself is pretty flat. So our artwork isn't going to be warped around something, like it might with a coffee mug, or wrapping paper. When designs are warped like this, you can only see part of the design at once. Like on a coffee mug you see the front, and back of a mug, which makes it a little bit more complicated to design for. But with tote bags, it's just that one square flat surface, so it'll be pretty simple. The other good thing about designing for tote bags is you generally don't have to worry about making sure you have a transparent background. For the most part. You can usually print full bleed on most tote bags through print on-demand companies like Society 6, or Red Bubble. So my best advice for identifying what types of designs are going to sell well on tote bags, is to do some competitive research. Go to a website like Society 6, and search tote bags. That first page is going to show you the most popular, and best selling designs in that product category. In this case, I chose Society 6, because I simply sell most of my tote bags through this company. So I know their audience will align with mine. Let's take a look at the line-up. Now, it looks like it's just a huge variety of designs, but once you take a deeper look, you can start noticing some patterns and what makes some of these designs on that top-selling product page of Society 6, these are the platforms best-selling designs for tote bags. So we have a lot to learn from them. One thing that jumps out immediately, independently, each of these designs feels very iconic. What I mean by that is each design seems to have a singular, recognizable motif, whether it's an animal, a quote, or a tightly cropped in abstract pattern. The sizing is also pretty similar across the board here, things are at large scale. You don't see an entire lama, you see a zoomed in version of just the face. For the tote bags with quotes, the type is large, and in your face. Speaking of quotes overall, you'll notice that the quotes constitute nearly a fourth of the bestsellers collection. Take notes, because this is a clear indicator that using snarky, or really relatable messaging, maybe a way that you can elevate your designs to be a top-selling product on a website likes Society 6, especially when it comes to tote bags. Clearly there are buyers out there for content just like this. Another tip for finding top-selling designs besides just looking at the first few pages of a platform like Society 6, is to check out high-end fashion retailers like Nordstrom's, or Macy's. You can also take a look at mainstream fashion retailers just like targets. Once you're there, you can use these same methods to identify patterns, just like we did with the first page of Societies 6. All right, now that we know a few pointers for creating designs that will sell well on tote bag specifically, let's learn how to turn our design into a product mock-up. When I open up my Tote Bag mockup file, it looks just like this. So over here on the layers palette, you can see that it's divided into three main groups. Scene shadows, object, and backgrounds. If you want to see what's in that group, the easiest way to get a look is just by turning on, and off the eyeball. So let's see what the scene shadows look like. Cool. It looks like what the scene shadows are doing are providing this spotlight over here on the upper left-hand corner. That just helps the overall composition feel a little bit more realistic like this may have actually been photographed. The object is pretty self explanatory. It's our tote bag, and a little prop over here. It looks like a eucalyptus leaf, and backgrounds exactly what it sounds like. It's that background color. The first thing I want to do is put my own artwork on top of this tote bag. I'm going to toggle down the [inaudible] on my object folder, find the layer that's labeled design. It's right here. Double-click on the Smart Objects. Remember, don't double-click on the layer mask. That's not going to do anything for us. It's the smart object we want. So double-click, and here's our file. We don't really need this. I'm just going to go ahead and delete it, and I'm going to drag in my own artwork. Same as before, I'm just going to go ahead, and using the transformation tool, enlarge it a little bit to fill up that entire space, and press "Enter" to set the transformation. Now I can close this extra file by pressing "Command W" on my keyboard, and Don't forget to save. Cool. You can now see what it looks like when my own custom artwork is applied to this tote bag, I'm going to go ahead, and zoom in so you can see what those details look like. That looks awesome. Obviously a tote bag, that substrate is Canvas. So it's not going to be a perfectly flat, smooth surface, you're going to have some of that fabric texture coming through, and It's integrated really well with my artwork. This really does feel like it was printed on this exact tote bag, and photographed. Another reason why creates C really has the most quality product mockups in the market is for details like this. You can see at this corner is distorted a little bit, which helps it feel more realistic like a tote bag, and check out what they've done. My artwork is distorted right along those same lines as the way the fabric is. It really does feel like it blends in, and it's not something that was just pasted on top in Photoshop. That feels really realistic. Another thing to take note of on the bottom of the bag is that you can see that shadow really deepens a little bit, which helps that product feel more 3D, and that deeper shadow is also applied to her artwork itself. It's all of these details that really help these mockups feel real, and convincing. Let's go through the rest of the file, and see what other things we can customize, and edit to help it feel proprietary to our own artwork. One thing to note over here, the object folder is the color of the handle. That's this guy right here. It's this navy blue as the defaults on the mockup, but we can go ahead, and customize that as well, and same as before, just go ahead, and double-click on that swatch of color, and it'll open up the color picker. Instead of navy blue, I want the handles on mine to be a really dark green to match that same green of the avocado peal. So I could do that manually over here by sliding up, and down on the hue, and picking the right area in the square, but instead I'm just going to do a really easy shortcut. If you move your cursor outside of that box, it turns into an eyedropper. When you click the eyedropper anywhere on your documents, it will auto-fill that color. So that's looking pretty good. That's literally the exact green from this peel area, but I wanted to get a little darker, so I'm going to choose a slightly different area. Perfect. Go ahead, and press "Enter" to set that color. The other thing I want to customize is the color of this backgrounds, since I have a darker handle, this dark, navy blue, it feels a little bit lost. So I want to try something a little bit brighter. Same thing, double-click on the box for the custom color, and I want to do something that feels a little bit more like sky blue. So I'll toggle down to this area, and choose something much brighter. Well, maybe not so vivid. Perfect. Go ahead, and press "Enter" to save that background color. Last but not least, well, I like having the prop of this eucalyptus here, it feels a little bit distracting with my design. So just going to go ahead and hide it. You can see in our objects folder, there's our eucalyptus leaves. We can just go ahead, and turn those both off by clicking the eyeball. You can turn them back on by putting the eyeball back in place. You can even select both of them, and using the transform tool, move them to another part of the composition, but for me, I think I'm just going to go ahead, and hide both of them for now. That was pretty simple. We have just completed our second product mock up. I'm going to do the same thing as before and save it as a PSD file, tote bag avocado, and then save it one more time as a flattened JPEG with the same filename. Cool. That one was pretty easy. Let's move on to a slightly more complex mockup.
5. T-Shirt: Now, it's time to talk apparel. Our Mockup file for this will be a simple T-shirts, but this product category covers a massive scope of products, from tanked tops to leggings, miniskirts, dresses, socks, and more. We won't have time to go through every single product in the apparel category. Instead, we'll be covering one that is probably the most lucrative in terms of high volume sales through print on-demand platforms, graphic tees. If you're already selling your designs online, you've probably noticed that there are a ton of platforms out there that specialize and trendy graphic tees, threadless, t-spring, zazzle, and t-lab, just to name a few. If you have the right art style, you can make a killing on T-shirts alone. Let's talk about what that style looks like. Again, I'm going to be making generalizations here and of course there are always outliers, but in general, here are the types of designs that sell really well on T-shirts specifically. Vector art with solid colors and minimal gradients. I'm specifying vector art here because solid swatches tend to replicate best on fabrics. I do a lot of watercolor illustrations and while they do sell well on other products, apparel is definitely not one of them. When it comes to a apparel, it's really my vector arts that sells the best. When you print on fabric you lose a lot of crispness and detail that you would otherwise get to when you print on a smoother surface like paper or enamel. The crisper your designers, the better it'll look on fabric, and that is where solid colors come into play. That's enough about the medium, let's talk subject matter. On graphic tees, the types of motifs that work the best are fairly simple. If you're wearing a shirt with a quirky graphic, you want it to be a very quick read. There's a reason people don't generally print full comic strips on T-shirts, it gets too small, it's not a quick read, instead, consider printing just one frame, that's the general idea. Threadless is without a doubt, the industry leader in crowd sourced graphic tees, so let's take a look at their match. You'll notice a trend here of minimal iconic art that communicates a specific type of message. Typically humor, quirkiness, or a relatable statements to someone's personal style. Typography is also very common, mostly relatable slogans or phrases. Little quakes and other design trends to implement when you're specifically designing for graphic tees, restricted color palettes, retro and vintage inspired vibes, nostalgic scenes, designs that are evocative of old-school rock bands, and then seasonal trends, especially Halloween, Christmas, and 4th of July if you're selling to an American audience. The main takeaway here, if you're wanting to increase sales on graphic tees, specifically, create designs that feel iconic, use flat solid colors and digital gradients, and feel free to incorporate type, especially if you're wanting to communicate humor. All right, so now that you know the basics, let's jump into our Photoshop Mockup file. All right, so I have opened up our PSD file called T-shirt PSD, and this is what it looks like. It's pretty standard, it is just a flatly of a T-shirt on a plain background. Remember this gridded area within the T-shirts that represents the area that will be replaced out with our own design. If I zoom in on this a little bit, you can see what a great job they did, putting this Mock-up together, these grid lines morph with the fabric of the T-shirts and there's even highlights and shadows in place. Whatever artwork we put on top of this, again, it's not just going to feel like gets copied and pasted right on top of a T-shirt, it'll feel really integrated in with that design. There will even be some fabric texture coming through. First things first, again, we've got two primary folders over here, the backgrounds and the object. To pop our artwork in, we want to toggle down on the caret on the object folder, it looks a little bit crazy right now, but that's just because there's so many customization options within this one Mockup file. When in doubt, I always look for the layer labeled design, but in this case, there's actually four of them because there's different parts of the T-shirt that we can design. There's the sleeves as well as the inside of the T-shirt and finally the front of the T-shirt. For this, it's this front file that I want to be editing with my own artwork. We'll go ahead and double-click the smart object. Remember that's the one on the left and here it is. Same as before, I'm going to go ahead and drag in my own artwork. I'm going to resize it a bit so it gets a little bit smaller and press "Enter" to set the transformation. You'll notice here that the artwork I've dropped in is actually a transparent PNG file. What that means is that the background is removed, there's no white paper background or really any other color for that matter. The reason I work with transparent PNG files for apparel is because it's a really good opportunity to let that fabric show through in the back. Transparent PNG files are actually pretty standard for apparel. It's rare to see a T-shirt with the whole front of the t-shirt is printed. Typically it's just smaller portions with the background already removed. In this case, I want to go ahead and delete the sample design. You can do that simply by clicking it and pressing "Delete" on your keyboard. I'll go ahead and close it, Command W and Save, cool, that our work has been placed in. Right now, the hand that was in that design has completely disappeared because it's a white hand and right now the fabric color of that T-shirt is white. Let's go ahead and change the fabric of color to something darker. To do that, I'm going to go over here on my Layers Panel and toggle down on this folder, which is called Swatch Colors. Now, if you scroll down, there's a lot of preset colors that are available within this one Mockup file. You can turn them on by clicking the eyeball to see what the different colors can look like. This is just a fast way of getting an idea for different colors but you can also go up here to the custom color and do it yourself. Cool, I'm really liking this teal Navy combination so I'm going to go ahead and press "Okay" to save that color. For this particular design, and it really need any custom artwork printed on the sleeves, although with this Mock-up, I could if I wanted to so I'm going to go ahead and turn those off. Perfect, now, let me zoom into the designs. You can really see how realistic it looks like printed on this fabric. Nice. You can see how the design distorts a little bit when it gets into the folds of that fabric. I really like having that effect come through and really enhances the realistic vibes of this design. Even when I zoom in closer, you can see the fabric texture coming through on the design itself. This is a really quality Mockup, all of these details are accounted for. All right, and the last thing I want to do for this design is change that background color, I'm going to go ahead and just consolidate these layers a little bit by clicking the "Caret." Now, I want to toggle down on backgrounds, here we have an opportunity for a custom color, go ahead and pop that on and same as before, double-click the layer thumbnail. I think for this one, because I have rose gold in my design, I want my background color to be a millennial pink. Cool, I like the vibe of this one, feels a little bit more blush tones so I press "Okay." This could be done as is, it's looking pretty good but one thing I want to do is because that design on the T-shirt is fairly simple and minimalistic, I want to add a little bit more possess to the background. I'm going to do that by utilizing some diagonal color blocking. This step is totally optional, but I just want to show you that not only can you utilize the assets within the Mockup design, you can be adding your own as well. What I want to do is add another layer on top of the custom color layer. The way I'll do that is first make sure that custom color is selected. Then go down to the bottom of my layers palette and click this little box right here, which means create a new layer. Awesome, and now, I'm just going to draw a neck color blocking shape. To do that, I'm going to go over here to my Lasso down on my Tools Panel and click and hold your Lasso and select Polygonal Lasso Tool. Polygonal Lasso means that it will draw in straight perfect lines and now it's pretty simple. I'm just going to draw a triangle so click, click, click and click. With my paint bucket tool selected, you can get that over here on the Tools Panel or by pressing "G" on your keyboard. I'm also going to go down here and select my foreground color. You can get that by double-clicking and I want something that feels like it's in that same pink wheelhouse, but a little bit more saturated. Perfect, and now, I'm just going to click into that selected area and the color is filled. Go ahead and deselect by pressing "Command D" on your keyboard. Cool. That was the step to take if you want to customize your own background, especially if you want to do something with two tone or color blocking. Within these Mockup files, you have a lot of flexibility, but don't be afraid to also add your own assets like we just did with this two tone color blocking backgrounds. All right, so I'm loving the way this looks, and I'm going to go ahead and Save. Just like my other files, I'm going to keep T-shirt at the beginning of the file name, but then add in a customization and saving as a PSD file. Now, I'll save again as a flattened JPEG with the same filename. Perfect, our Mockup is officially finished. Let's move on to the next one.
6. Mug: Now we're moving on with our next product mock-up, ceramic coffee mugs. Again, this is another product that you probably interact with pretty frequently. Coffee mugs are probably one of the most collectible items on earth. They're functional and provide a canvas for self-expression, whether it's a punny joke, relatable sentiments, or just a beautiful design that showcases your taste in arts. I'm guessing that pretty much every home out there probably has at least one coffee mug on its shelf. How do we harness the popularity of coffee mugs and get our designs out into the world? Let's go over some tips for creating a best selling coffee mug. First things first, coffee mugs are one of those products that provides a unique opportunity to design a message specifically for the intended use of that product. What am I talking about? It's coffee inspired messaging. It really does do surprisingly well. If you have any designs that mention caffeine addictions or not being a morning person, this is the time to pull those out because they are going to do very well on this product to type. In general, beverage specific messaging will probably sell better than generic quotes when it comes to this product type of coffee mugs. These are sentiments like coffee keeps me going until it's time for wine. But first coffee, don't you wish your coffee was hot like me, you get the idea. Mugs are also absolutely stellar gift items, which means that there is a great opportunity here to tap into the gifting industry and there is a lot of money in the gifting industry. The fact that mugs make a great gifting item means that if you hone in on one specific audience, you're going to have a much stronger appeal. Mom mugs are absolutely a thing. These are mugs that have quotes that are relevant to all the moms out there. Super mom, super wife, super tired, dog mom, today's goal, keep the humans alive. You get the gist. If you want to niche and even harder, think of what that specific audience might be. Is it a mom, a graduate student, a book lover, a graphic design major? The more that your design makes someone say, Oh, that is so me, the stronger it's going to sell. Just like we did our competitive audit earlier on sites like societysix, surrogates, and threadless, you can expand your idea research by checking out and gifting specific brands just like Urban Outfitters. They have an entire section dedicated to mugs alone. Not only will this give you inspiration for what to design, but it's also an automatic key in to current trends. For example, I'm scrolling down and noticing a lot of animals like owls, sloths, hedgehogs, and alpacas. These animals had been on trend for a while and this research is simply confirming that, these guys are absolutely still relatively trending. I'm not saying that you should just copy the exact same illustration of this alpaca at all, but what I am saying is this is probably safe territory, for you do your own interpretation of the same animal. There are unlimited ways to illustrate an alpaca in your own style. If you want quirky quote ideas, checkout, Pinterest. You'll notice here that they're mostly quoted driven, and most of these sentiments skew on the site of humor. That's a great opportunity to get some ideas when you're trying to establish what you'd like your designed to say. Ultimately, consider your audience. If Urban outfitters doesn't align with your customer base, who else might? Think of brands that represent your customer demographic and go check them out. If your design style is edgy, take a look at the mugs selection available through hot topic. If you have a very sleek and stylish aesthetic, checkout West Elm. No matter what your audience looks like, keep in mind the golden rule of coffee mug design. Designs related to what goes in that mug are automatically going to sell better than most. Now they've got a fair bit to consider, let's dive into our product mock-up file. I have opened up mug.psd. That's my mug mock-up file and this is exactly what it looks like. Pretty simple. You can look over here at the layers panel and you'll see that everything is grouped into three primary layers, light, object, and background. The ones that we'll be working with here are going to be object and background. First things first, I'm going to toggle down the caret on my object folder and look for the layer labeled design. Remember, anything that's labeled design means that's going to be the smart object that we can replace with our own artwork. Here it is down here. I'm going to double-click the layer thumbnail, that's the one on the left, to open up the sample design artwork. Here, same as before, I'm just going to drop in my custom artwork that I want to be placed on the mug. Cool. I'm going to expand it a bit so that it fills up the entire space and move it up just a nudge and press Enter to start the transformation and I'll go ahead and close by hitting Command W and saving. Also my artwork has now been applied to the mug. When I zoom in, I'll show you some of the neat things about this mock-up by creatsy. Again, you'll hear me mention this 1000 times during this class but it's because I really like the creatsy mock-ups, they did a really quality job. Check out how the artwork warps around the edges of this mug. It wasn't just pasted and cut on top of this mug, it was literally worked around so that it feels like a three-dimensional shape. There's even some highlights added up top here and then shadows down at the bottom, so it feels really realistic. It's the subtle highlights like this that really sell the design for me. I'm going to zoom back out and now I can make some custom modifications. You'll notice over here that there's some layers that are turned off. It looks like what these layers are doing is adding custom spot colors to specific points within the design. We have the handle, we have the trim or lip of the mug, and we also have the inside enamel within the mug. If you don't want to individually change the colors of each of these parts within the mug, you can also go down here to color and double-click on that layer thumbnail and from here, you can change the color of the ceramic all in one go. I want the ceramic around the mug to be kind of this minty fresh green. Yeah, I'm really liking that one, so I'll go ahead and press okay. One more thing I want to do before I add the background color, is I want the inside of the mug to go back to being that white enamel, so I'm going to turn on that layer, double-click on the layer thumbnail, and bring my color picker right up here to the pure whites and press okay. Awesome. This is looking great. I'm going zoom out real quick an now our last step is to change the background color. I'm going to toggle up the caret on objects to consolidate that folder and toggle down the caret on backgrounds and double-click the layer thumbnail. For my background color, I wanted to feel like a neutral, yellowy orange, something that fits in with these retro vibes of state droopy little hippie. Perfect. That's looking pretty solid. Go ahead and press Okay. Now we have our final mock-up file all ready to go. I'm going to go ahead and save the PSD file first. I'm calling it, mugtrippy.psd, and go ahead and save. Now I want to save it as my flattened JPEG. Going to save again, this time toggle down to JPEG and same thing, press Save. This was a pretty quick and easy mock-up file, but it looks great. Let's go ahead and move on to something that's a little bit more complex.
7. Gift Bag: Moving on to a slightly more niche item, gift bags. A few years ago, it was pretty rare to come across a print on demand company that offered gift bags. However, recently there's been a shift in the market and you're beginning to see more products available through the gifting and space. Wrapping paper is becoming increasingly popular and gift bags are a short seconds, just like mugs, the gifting industry is ripe with opportunities. For me, I've noticed a spike and partners that are interested in licensing my designs specifically for gift bags, so here is exactly what they'd been asking me for. Beautiful patterns that evoked festive sentiments, if I want it to feel celebratory, I'll infuse bright, saturated colors. If I wanted the bag to feel sleek and sophisticated, I'll incorporate metallic accents and minimalism. I prefer to keep my gift bag designs more generic, so you can use the same bag for a birthday party or a baby shower. However, the tighter in that unique yourself, the better opportunity for that bag being picked up for that specific occasion, if you're going to go that route, so keep in mind that you're narrowing your opportunities, by limiting yourself to just one occasion. However, that design will absolutely be more relevant to that holiday and a generic pattern would. It's a fine balance of pros and cons. By going with happy birthday messaging, you'll have a more relevant design for birthday occasions, but you're also pigeon holing yourself into just one occasion where it's appropriate to use that bag. There's not really one right answer here, between going more generic and more niche, it's just a matter of who your marketing towards. But if you are going to stick with an occasion, the top two by a large margin for gift bags are birthday and Christmas or winter holiday. Everything else like father's day, anniversary, wedding or baby shower because that just is far behind these two, birthday and Christmas. Let's jump into the actual mockup file, this one is going to be slightly more complex than what we've been working with so far, but by now you guys are definitely up to the challenge. I have opened up the gift bag file, it's called gift bag.psd and this is what it looks like. This will be our first product mockup where we can fill in two separate products, so if you look at this bag, there's the foreground bag and then we have the background bag. We'll be able to utilize both of those with two separate to designs, and if you take a look over here at the layers panel, it's pretty similar as before. We have three primary groups, light object and background, and we're going to get started by toggling down the carrots on the object folder. The first thing I'm going to look for is any layers labeled design, and this is a bit tricky because I see design labeled four times under this one folder, so a quick tip to know which one is the actual smart objects that will be replacing. You can just toggle on and off the eyeballs, and whenever that gridded pattern disappears that's your layer, so I think it might be this one. Cool, this is the one, it's also labeled sleeve, which is a dead giveaway. I'm going to go ahead and double-click on that smart object. Now, I can go ahead and drag and my artwork, and I'll size it up a bit to fill in that entire space and press enter to set the transformation. I'll close it by hitting Command W and save that file. Beautiful. That looks really good. Now, I'm going to do the exact same thing and put some custom artwork in for the bottom bag, so double-clicking the sleeve thumbnail, adding in my own artwork and resizing it to fit Commands W to close, and press save. Excellent, that was really simple. I like having these two patterns that are different, but they utilize the same shapes, so they go together that way and the color palette is also consistent. One more thing I can do on these bags, let me zoom in so you can see, we have this gridded area and the back, and I'm going to fill that in with a solid color for each bag and I believe that color area is right here. Yes, it is, so I'm going to turn off that smart object and instead double-click on the layer thumbnail of that white swatch to change the color, and I'm just going to use my eyedropper and pick a color straight out of that composition. Beautiful. Now, I'll zoom down a bit and do the same thing for the bottom bag, so turning off the smart object, so it just becomes a flat color, and then clicking nail layer thumbnail to change the color itself. But this one, I think I wanted it to be yellow, nope blue. Perfect. I'll hit "Okay". Beautiful. I'm going to zoom in a bit to the details so you can see how great this mockup is, you can see how it curves around on this bottom corner right here and it actually folds in and that shadow looks really realistic. This is a really great mockup, and I know I say that about every mockup, but trust me, I've worked with a lot of mockups before and these are really, really quality. The last thing I want to do is edit our backgrounds, and for this, I'm going to pick a solid color just by double-clicking the color thumbnail. I'm going to do the same thing, I'm going to use my eyedropper tool to click around on some colors of the composition until I find one that I'm really liking, know that graze too dull. This is supposed to be a party and festive, I love that yellow. I think I'm going to tone it down a little bit. Perfects. I'll press "Okay" to save that color and I'll zoom out a bit so you can get the full effects. Beautiful. I really love how that came together. This one was pretty simple, the shadows look really convincing and are really helping to make this look realistic. I also like seeing some of that dimension on these bags, it's pretty subtle, but it's absolutely there. You see this shadow area where that artwork dips into that shadow, it's all of these small details that make this mockup feel absolutely realistic. I'm going to go ahead and save, and I'm going to name this one pattern after gift bag and save a PSD file, and same as before. I'm going to keep that same file name and choose a JPEG so I can save it as a flattened vital as well. This was our first mockup that utilized to separate designs, and I think overall it came together really well. Let's go ahead and move on to our next products.
8. Framed Art: Chances are you've been waiting for this one, framed wall arts. Wall art typically has the largest royalty margin of any other product, which means you're probably going to make more money selling art prints than any other product category. Plus to be totally honest, it's just pretty cool to see your paintings or illustrations hung up on the wall looking professional. I love seeing my designs on phone cases. The wall art absolutely takes the cake in terms of me feeling like I really made it as a fine artist. I'm going to give you my best selling tips for wall arts, just like I've been doing with every other product category today, but I want to emphasize that wall art is a massively diverse category. It's not quite as simple as designing coffee specific messaging for coffee mugs. But that being said, there are definitely some techniques you can implement to create best selling wall arts. If you wanted the cheat sheet, simply checkout Society6, best selling wall art page. If you're selling your designs on this platform, you literally can't do better than this. They are showing you exactly what the vast majority of their audience is purchasing. As you'll notice, it is insanely diverse. There's a mix of art styles ranging from contemporary to obstructionism, expressionism, surrealism, photorealisim, all of the realisims. There are so many art styles out there because people have a huge range of personal preferences when it comes to art. Art is basically the definition of subjective. It's really hard to say this piece is awful and no one will buy it, because there is always someone out there that, that is going to appeal to. Everyone has different tastes. That's the beauty of creating art. If you have a style that you've established for yourself, wall art is the opportunity to embrace this to the max, though, while I do identify as a commercial artist, I also truly enjoy creating arts that reflects my personality and tastes. If there is ever a time to go in with your fine art side, this is it. Now lets jump into our markup file, for frames artwork. I've opened up my markup file. It's called framed art dots, PSD, and this is exactly what it looks like. There are two primary folders, the frame folder and the background folder. It's pretty straightforward. I'm going to go ahead and toggle down the [inaudible] on frame and see what we're working with here. By now, you're probably finding that it's pretty easy to identify the smart object layer, the one that we double click and replaced with our own artwork. This one is also pretty straightforward. It's literally just called design. When you hover over it, it says smart object thumbnail. Go ahead and double click on that one, and it opens up our file for us. This smart object looks a little bit difference. The reason for that is because this checkered area, which represents transparency in Photoshop, that shows the area where the match will be overtaking the artwork in the actual markup file. Just keep in mind whatever artwork you put in here that should only fill in the space for this gray boxes and not go over into this transparent area, otherwise it will be hidden by the mats. I'm going to go ahead and drag my artwork in. Perfect. It is my fuchsia or good watercolor. I'm going to size it down just a tad and press enter to set the transformation. I'll write my artwork is dropped in and I've resized it to be a good proportion. You'll notice, by artwork, is cutting into this checkered area a little bit on top and on the bottom. I don't really mind too much because no crucial parts of the illustration are getting cut-off. It will really only hit just about up here. Just beneath my signature. No problem. If it turned out to be the wrong size, I can resize it right after this, but I'm going to close this one down, save it, and see how it looks on the markup file. Commands w to close and save. Beautiful, this looks great in that frame. I love seeing these shadows coming through on the edges. Especially when we get down here to the match shadows, they feel really realistic. Some of the modifications you can make for this file or changing the color of the mat itself. If you want to change the color, go ahead and click on the color thumbnail. I'm going to use my eyedropper and pull some colors directly from the composition itself. That's a bit too much, liking them more muted tones, I want to see what happens if I get a lot later. I'm liking this, really light periwinkle blue that I pulled directly from the stem of this flower. They'll press okay to save the color and then open up the backgrounds folder. This is our first markup, where we have some options with the background that aren't just one solid color. You can see over here, they have all these different labelings. Grunge wall, concrete, marble wall texture. Let's turn a few of those on and see what they're looking like. Grunge wall, it looks like, it's pretty much exactly how it's described. A grunge wall, let's see what concrete looks like. I like this one. It also helps to have this more gray background to help that artwork pop a bit more. Let's see marble. That one's very nice as well. Generic wall texture. Very nice and subtle. Down here we have some more options, partial paints and custom color. You can really see what this partial paint color looks like when you have the custom color turned on. I'm really liking this effect of this partial paint area over a flat background color. This is what I'm going to work with. I'm just going to change the colors around a little bit so they feel less extreme. First things first, I'm going to turn on this color layer for partial paints and double-click the color thumbnail. What I want to this painted area to change to is more of a blush pink. I'm going to toggle around on my color picker until I find something that feels bidding. Now instead of having a custom color turned on, I really liked that concrete look. I'm going to turn my concrete back on, but click that layer and drag it just underneath the partial paint layer. That way I've got concrete up top and partial painted down below. I really like that juxtaposition between a flat color and then that concrete texture on top. I'm going to go ahead and call this London. I'm going to close down on my background's folder just to keep it nice and tidy. Go ahead and save it. I'm going to end this filename with orchid and save the Photoshop file. Same as before, now, I will save it as a flattened JPEG. Perfect, I love how this one came together. Let's move on with our next markup.
9. Fabric: Fabric is another product category that is an industry all on its own. Just take a look at Spoonflower. There are artists out there they're pooling a significant chunk of their income just by selling through Spoonflower alone. The way you sell your designs as fabric is to put together a collection. Buyers don't just purchase one pattern and call it a day. They went to see a cohesive line of various designs that can be bundled together. So what type of designs go well together? Let's take a look at the Curated Themes section of Spoonflower. Sure, sticking with a theme like Artdeco or specific color stories as an obvious move when you want to create a collection. But let's take a look at the patterns that curatorial team put together for these themed category shoots. These are the bundles that I'm talking about. They have a similar complimentary color story. They incorporate a blend of patterns, recognizable icons, and abstractions. There's a mixture of large elements and tiny detail elements. Having repeat patterns is absolutely vital for fabric design. But if you don't have any tessellations in your portfolio, no worries, you can definitely fake it for these product mockups and then deal with it after the fact if something gets purchased. But on a side note, if you do want to learn how to create seamless patterns, checkout my Skillshare class, Modern Patterns: From Sketch to screen. With all of this in mind, this Creatsy product mockup will actually have us drop-in three separate designs. This is a great opportunity to select your artwork that can work well together as a pattern collection. So let's get started. I have opened up my mockup file. It's called fabric.psd and this is what it's looking like. The composition itself looks pretty simple and minimal. If you look over here at the Layers panel, it's a little bit extreme. One of the reasons I chose this Creatsy mockup file to work with is so you guys can see what really complex mockup files will look like. If any of you decide to really run with mockups and you start downloading some files on your own, either from Creatsy or from other vendors. Chances are you're going to come across some really crazy Photoshop files from time to time. So let's go ahead and tackle one head on so you can learn how to look at all of this over here on the layers panel and not feel overwhelmed. Because I'm sure you're looking at this right now and scrolling down and thinking, man, but I promise you it's really not that bad. Once you learn how to read these layers a little bit more, it becomes a lot more simplified. Without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this one. What we have an opportunity to do here with this file are choose three distinct patterns to fill in on these fabric rolls. So pattern 1, pattern 2, and pattern 3. I've gone ahead and pulled three patterns together of mine that I think will work really well as a collection. Those are the three files I'll be using for this mockup. Let's go ahead and dive on in. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure I know what these layers are representing. I'm going to do that just by turning on and off eyeballs until I see something change. So let's give it a go. Perfect. That was pretty easy. This one right here, design 3, just underneath the Overlay layers, don't edit. I always find it funny when certain layers are clearly labeled "don't edit," they do not want you messing with those layers. Design 3. Again, I'm turning the eyeball on and off to see which one that actually is. I'm going to go ahead and double-click on the smart object and place in my own artwork. Same as before, I'll be scaling it up to fit that entire dimension and press "Enter" to set. I'll close it with Command W and "Save." Beautiful. Now we just need to do the same thing for this portion of the fabric right here. Same thing, turning on and off my eyeball, that makes sense, that's where it is. So double-click the layer thumbnail and do the exact same thing, drop it on in, "Enter" to set the transformation and Command W to close the file. That was pretty simple. It was just two smart objects and we get this full pattern over here on the fabric. Check out how that fabric texture is applied to the illustration, it feels really realistic. I'm going to go ahead and zoom back out and do the same thing for my two other fabric rolls. I think it might be this one. Let's find out. Yes. Again, all I'm doing is toggling the eyeball on and off on certain thumbnails so I can figure out which one is the actual smart object to be replaced. So go ahead and double-click. Same as before, I'm just dragging in my artwork and resizing it to fit the composition, and commands W to close, and "Save." Beautiful. Now I want to replace this section of the roll, so I'm ogling my eyeball on and off. Cool, I found it. It's called designed 2. Double-clicking the smart object thumbnail and same as before, just dragging in my artwork, resizing it, and pressing "Enter" to set the transformation. Command W to close and don't forget to "Save," beautiful. My last fabric roll, I think it's going to be down here on my layers panel somewhere. Maybe this one, perfect. So double-click the smart object, drag in your own custom artwork and resize to fill in the space, command W to close, "Enter" to save. One more piece. Let me click the eyeball to make sure. Great, that's the one. Double-click the smart object and same old, same old. Beautiful. I have all of my designs implemented onto the fabric rolls. I'm going to zoom in to really show off those details. Very nice. It looks really good and really convincing. Even this detail up here where you can see the stacked layers of fabric, that is a really nice touch. Zooming out, the last thing to modify are the backgrounds. I'm going to zoom in way to the bottom of my layers' pallets, toggle down the caret on backgrounds, and see what our options are here. Looks like the plaster background is already turned on. I'm going to turn that one off and turn on wooden texture instead. I like that, it feels really authentic. Let's see what else there is. It looks like we have another opportunity to do this two tone paints. I think I'm going to go with that. I really like the effect on the framed art print. So I want to do the same thing here. Double-click on the layer thumbnail to change the color. I'm going to use my eyedropper and see if I can eyedrop out part of that mint from these cheetahs. Little too dark, so I'm going to bring it up to lighten it up and maybe make it a little bit more green, beautiful. I'll press okay to save it. I think I want this to have the plaster texture right over it. So all I have to do is turn on the eyeball from the plaster texture. Again, it's really subtle. I'll zoom in so you can see. This is with the texture and this is without. I like it with, it just adds a little bit more texture that I think helps it feel more realistic. One more thing that you could do if you want to do, is scroll all the way up to the top of your layers panel. If you find these plants distracting, you can go ahead and toggle them off and they're no longer there. I'm going to go ahead and keep mine in just because these patterns themselves feel a little bit nature inspired and call it a day. I really like how these turned out and I like how these patterns really showcase what can work well together in a collection. We have something monochromatic, and fine, and detailed. Something a little bit more bold and larger, and a bit more in your face. Then something that is an icon, these cheetahs, and these leaves. Altogether, they're working really well together as a collection or a line of fabrics. Before we move on to the next one, let's go ahead and save our PSD file. I'm calling this one Fabric-Cheetahs as a Photoshop file and press "Save," and then saving again as a flattened JPEG. Perfect. This one was without a doubt our most complicated file so far and we are finished, we got it. Let's go ahead and move on to our next mockup.
10. Stationery Card: Stationary cards are another specialty item that just about everyone purchases at some point throughout the year. Hallmark has built a multi-billion $ industry on this simple concept of capitalizing on the greeting card industry. Before we jump into our mockup, I'm going to pepper in a few pointers on the types of designs that have a strong purchasing power. Without further ado, here we go. While generic stationary cards are always greets, the big power move here is when you hone in on one specific occasion. Holidays like Christmas, birthday, and Valentine's Day are the top three. If you're designing within these three categories, you really can't go wrong. However, I do want to point out that there's also been a rising trend for occasions that have traditionally been a little bit more specific. I'm talking about sentiments that reflect our cultures, social changes, and inclusivity. Now it's becoming more and more common to find cards out there for single moms, blended families, divorced congratulations, and just because, these are all on the rise. If you want to break a part from some of the more traditional like Valentine's Day, consider one of these alternative options as well. In terms of specific design advice, it's best to keep your messaging on the top third of the composition. This is because when greeting cards are sold in store, they're stacked on shelves and the top third is the only part of the card that's visible, though it's important to get your message across and make an impression with these constraints dimensions. Another design logistic, unless you're specifically going for a minimalist style, the vast majority of best sellers have illustrative elements that go full bleed all the way to the edges. In general, more saturated colors do better than a muted pallets, with the exception of sympathy cards. In the case of the latter, pastels are your best friends. Topography is also incredibly importance. It really boost your chances of creating a best seller when you have strong and clear messaging that's easily legible on the front of the card. If you want to go above and beyond, consider creating a line of cards. Three is a great number to start with. Within a collection, look for opportunities to tie things together. This could be similarities like color palettes, artistic medium, are you painting in watercolor or acrylics. You can also tie things together with patterns or the sentiment itself. I'll only be walking you through one card mock-up today, but if you want some extra curricular practice and you feel like going above and beyond, consider creating a full line of cards under one overarching theme like birthday or Mother's Day. When I say full line, I'm talking about three cards, not a million. All right, let's jump on into our mockup file. All right, I have opened up my Photoshop file. It's called stationary card dot PSD and this is what it looks like. If you take a look over here at the Layers palette, you'll see that we have a lot of customization options. We actually have two envelopes here. The one on the left and the one on the right that contains our greeting card. On top of that we have a prop, the scissors. First things first, just for the sake of simplicity, what I went to do is remove the scissors and the second envelope so that this card is really the star of the show in this envelope. To do that, I'm just going to locate the layers with these elements that I want to turn off like this envelope. It's pretty easy to find. It's named envelope and the scissors again, the folder name is called scissors. We can just go ahead and toggle that off. If you want to add them back in later, it's no problem. You can just turn that eyeball back on, but for now, I'm going to turn it off and then I want to grab this envelope and card layer and move it to the center of the composition. To do that, I'm just going to click the layer and then use the transform tool, which is Command T on your keyboard. You can also get there by going to Edit transform scale. I can tell that the transform is an effect because we have this bounding box around the composition, so I'm simply going to click anywhere and drag that card so it looks like it's in about the middle of the composition and press enter to set the transformation. This is a much more minimal composition and I'm really liking the simplicity of it. Now the whole focus will be on this one card that's inside the envelope, which is exactly what I want. Now let's add our custom design into the card. I'm going to toggle down the card next to the envelope plus card folder. It looks a little intense right now. We just need to scroll down and then look for our Smart Object. When in doubt, just toggle those layers on and off until you see, perfect, there it is. I'm going to double-click the Smart Object and dropping my artwork and same as before, I'm just going to scale it up a little bit so that fills the composition and press enter to set the transformation. I'll close the file by hitting Command W and saving. Perfect, that looks really great in there. This is another reason why having your messaging on the top third of the composition is pretty important. Even in this mock-up, the bottom part of the card is covered up. Just keep in mind when you're designing stationary cards or greeting cards of any sorts. Top third is the best placement to have your typography. All right, we have quite a few customization options for this one mockup file. Let's start by changing the color of the envelope. I'm going to zoom in a bit and locate this layer that's called color inside and double-click. Now I'm just going to click around until I find a color that I think is working really well for the inside of this card. I'm really liking this indigo blue, so I'll press OK. Now it's time to edit the color for the outside of the guard, I'm going to double-click the layer thumbnail. For the outside of the card, I want something more of a mint green to contrast against those reds and pinks and the card itself. There's something maybe a little bit brighter, perfect. I'll press OK to save that color. I'm going to go ahead and click the carrots to close the envelope and card folder just to consolidate it. Last but not least, I'm going to work on the background colors. Toggling down the carrot for backgrounds. The first thing to do is double-click the layer thumbnail for that darker gray section up top and for this, I'm going to drop it directly out of the card itself. Maybe something more of an orangey Mellon tone and I want to make it a little bit more saturated. Remember, I wanted to feel festive since this is a birthday card. Perfect, I love that Mellon tones while press OK, and now we'll do the same thing for the color at the bottom. Double-clicking on that layer thumbnail and I'll use my i dropper to i drop out a color from in the composition, like this light pink, make it a little more bright and a little more saturated. Perfect and I'll press okay, great. This mock-up is finished. We did a lot of different customizations here. Not only did we change the product itself, which is the card, but we changed the color of the outside of the envelope, the inside, and then the background color as well, which is that split tone color blocking effect on a diagonal, which always feels really nice and modern and energizes the composition of it. I will save as a PSD and extend the filename to donuts. Make sure it's a Photoshop file and press save and then do the same thing, but just make sure it's saved as a flattened JPEG. Cool, let's go ahead and move on to our next product.
11. Throw Pillow: We're nearing the end of our product mockups, but I've got a couple more for you guys today. In this lesson, we will be exploring throw pillows. Throw pillows are my personal best selling home decor product if you don't count arch prints. They sell so well because they're relatively affordable, they're functional, and they're a really simple way to spruce up a space to feel more homey. Here are my best tips for creating top-selling designs for throw pillows. Throw pillows are primarily ornamental, so the designs here are more about creating appealing patterns and artwork than conveying strong messaging. For color palettes, I typically take a look at the pillow selection through anthropologie. Anthro typically updates their home decor section every season, so what you see on their website is relevant to what's on trend right now. Their pillows are typically a mix of fancy embroidery, which I understand is limiting if you're selling printed designs, but not a total waste. You can still get inspiration here from patterns, motifs, and color ways on all of their more tactical pieces. Even if it's not something that you will specifically be able to create, like having fancy embroidery embellishments on the throw pillow. Anthropologie also has a range of graphic pillows, which are more immediately relevant to the types of products that will be selling through print on demand sites and through buyers. But overall, the three primary types of design inspiration that I'm looking for are interesting color ways and color palettes, playful pattern ideas and motifs that are relevant right now in this moments, like animal prints, tribal patterns, and in some instances, typography with quotes. Because I primarily sale throw pillows on Society6, they're another great resource for me to see exactly what types of artworks sales best on pillows to this audience. It's usually refined abstractions, patterns, and simple color palettes. Neutrals tend to do a little bit better than more vibrant color ways, but there are always exceptions here. The occasional bold infusion of color can work really well from time to time. Ultimately, a great place to start is to consider what you yourself might want in your own home and then work from there. Let's move on to our product mockup, which I absolutely love. A favorite details here are the imperfect creases and then the slight depletion of the pillow itself. It feels really comfy and it stands apart from the other mockups that you'll see all over the Internet, which are more sleek and polished. This one feels much more lived in and natural. Let's dive in. All right, here we go. I have opened up the Photoshop file. It's called throw pillow.dotpsd, and this is what it's looking like. Pretty simple. We have our main product, which is the pillow right in the center, and we even have a little bit of a setting built-in. There's a floor, some paneling and a wall behind it that has some unique painting effects. If we take a look over here at our layers panel, you'll see that it's divided into a few different groups. We have the scene shadows which we really won't be touching. Overlay layers which is specifically called out as "do not edit", so we will not be touching that one. Then we have our product, which is the design pillow. Last but not least, we have our setting, which is the wall, the paneling and the floors. This create T file is a little bit different from the rest, and that's why I chose it. With all of our other files, all we had to do was simply click the "thumbnail" to edit our smart object but this one is actually a little bit special. It's a 3D Smart Object, which means if you double-click this thumbnail, this is what you're going to be seeing. We don't really want to mess with the dimension and warping anything around right now, so I'm just going to click anywhere else on my layers panel to get out of that setting. Instead, the way that we'll be placing our own artwork in is by clicking this area down here. It's not a layer thumbnail this time instead it's a line of text starting with \users\. You can still toggle on and off the eyeball to confirm that this is the area that will be replacing. In every other thumbnail, we double-clicked on the icon itself but on this one, we're going to double-click that text starting with users, and this is what it takes us to. Again, very different from the other files we've been working with, but it's still a good one to explore in case you go off and decide to download more mockups on your own and you encounter this in the future. I'll show you how to still work with the same file and place your artwork in. What you see over here with all of these really complicated lines is called the wireframe. It's what's providing the fabric mesh so that our artwork gets distorted on top of that pillow. Normally, this thing happens behind the scenes and we don't even see it, but in this file, it's right here in front of us. The end result will be the exact same, but we're just going to have to work around these parameters. Same as before. I'm just going to "click and drag" my artwork directly into this file, and I'm going to resize it down to fit just one of these pillow faces and press "Enter" to set the transformation. When I popped that artwork in, it went on top of the layers panel, so I'm just going to click it and drag it down into that front folder. To fill in the back area, I'm going to make a copy of this layer and to do so, I'll click my layer so it's highlighted. Then use the key command, "command J" to make a duplicate of that layer. Another way to make a duplicate is simply to click that layer, drag it down to the bottom under copy and release. Either way you have a duplicate layer, so I'm going to click that layer, drag it down into the second folder which is called back and release it. Now, I'll use transform "command T" to simply drag it on over and set the transformation by pressing "Enter." I know everything looks a little crazy because we're seeing our artwork on top of that meshed grid, but that's all going to disappear when we close our file and it automatically switches into our actual mockup file. Let's go ahead and close by hitting "command W" and saving. All of that crazy good work is gone. I mean, it's still there but it's just not visible. Instead, it did exactly what it needed to do, which was add areas that crease inwards like this and they warp around the creases in the pillow itself. Now that we have our design in place, let's take a look at some of the options we can change around with our setting. I will toggle down on the carrots, and let's take a look at some of our options. Same as before, I'm going to view these by turning the eyeball on and off. First, let's turn off baseboard and see what it looks like. Cool, so that's pretty minimal. That baseboard is literally just that partition between the wall and the floor. It looks like we can turn on some design options for the wall, like this stucco texture. We have additional wall textures here. Again, it's pretty subtle. I'll zoom in so you can see. This is with the texture and this is without, we can change the color of the wall and the floor itself. Two things I want to point out on this setting, there are actually more options that are visible just in these layers. If you look at the thumbnail for design wall and design floor, you'll notice this little box in the bottom right-hand corner of the thumbnail that indicates that these layers are actually Smart Objects. When you double-click them like this, it'll open up a brand new file and you'll be able to choose your own custom floor. There's wood one, wood two, marble, and then the default gridded pattern. I really like marble, so I'm going to keep this one turned on and turn the eyeballs off for the others and saving that file. Now the floor has switched from that wood to the marble. Cool. The only other thing I want to do is change the color of the wall itself. I'll start by just double-clicking on that layer thumbnail, the one that's in color right now that looks a little bit navy, and I want to choose something bright turquoise, cool. I like that. The green contrast, the pinks in the design really nicely, they're both complimentary colors, so I'll press "Okay." Last but not least, I want to change the paint color right here at the bottom, so I will do the same thing. Double-click on that white swatch, which opens up my color picker, and I'm just going to use my eyedropper, click at anywhere in that green, and then opt for something a little bit lighter. Perfect. That is my final file. I'll go ahead and save as a "Photoshop file first" and I name my file name with Jaguar because that's the type of print, save as a Photoshop file and now do the same thing, but save as a flattened JPEG. Cool. I know the Smart Object for that one looked pretty complicated, but I think it came together pretty well, and overall it was a fairly simple mockup file to use. Let's move on to our very last product mockup of today's class, wallpaper.
12. Wallpaper: All right, it is time for our last official mark-up for today's class. I say official because there is still the bonus lesson mock-up, but for the time being, this will be our last freebie mock-up, provided by my friends at Create Z. The product is, wallpaper. This one is one of my absolute favorite mock-up files for today's class for two reasons. One, it shows off the product, wallpaper in such a great light. Wallpaper can be tricky to demonstrate on a mark-up because it's so easily overshadowed, but definitely not in this case. Reason number two, this one is more customizable than any other mark-up that we've worked with today. Not only can you change the floor surface, like many of our other mark-ups, but you can tweak the absolute tiniest details, from the Chrome hue of the small key to the paint color of the desk itself. It's so customizable and fun to work with. First things first, my best-selling tips for wallpaper. Wallpaper is one of those products where just like fabric, if you're selling it on a real life product, it must be a seamless repeating pattern. What I mean by that is that the pattern must tile seamlessly, just like a tessellation. It needs to be able to be stacked and repeated an infinite number of times in order to work on this product. Just like with the fabric mark-up, you don't necessarily need that repeating pattern right now to make this mark-up work. My illustration that I'm using, for example, this Japanese wave. It's not actually a repeat pattern, but it's detailed enough that it will work for this scale of mock-up. If a partner company were to see this mock-up of mine and requested on wallpaper, I would have to spend some time tweaking the design a bit to turn it into a repeating pattern. Until I absolutely need to do that, because it does take some time, I usually skip that stuff and wait until a partner requests that specific artwork as a repeating pattern. So in the meantime, I can fake it. If you want to learn how to make a repeating pattern in Photoshop, definitely check out my previous Skillshare class because I cover it in full detail. Anyway, back to wallpaper. My absolute favorite inspiration for wallpaper is Hygge and West. Not only are they one of the leaders in this industry, but they have an extremely curated collection of only the most on-trend patterns, color palettes, and textures out there. If you see it on Hygge and West, you know it's a massively popular design. Wallpaper tends to fall into two primary categories: Subtle and sophisticated, or a statement wall or all over room wallpaper. It's much more common to see a tighter pattern versus something that's larger and more overwhelming. Color pellets tend to sell best when they're monochrome or a very limited color palette of maybe just two Hygges. As far as motifs go, patterns really do quite well. As do nature-inspired designs like clouds, branches, or animals. Diving in more specifically, lately, we've been seeing a rise in geometric fine lined patterns. Think 1920s, Great Gatsby Art Deco Style. Atome patterns also do quite well, especially in monotone and when they're packed with critters and foliage. Lastly, exotic animals are everywhere right now on wallpaper, especially tigers, lions, lemurs, basically anything you'd see on an African safari. All right, with those tips aside, let's jump into our actual mark-up file. All right, I've opened up my file. It's called, wallpaper.psd, and this is what it looks like. This is probably the most refined mark-up that we'll be working with today. There's a lot of individual elements that we can edit around or adjust. We also have this really beautiful shadow coming in with this natural light that looks like it's coming through a window because you can see the panes. Overall, this is a great mark-up to really showcase our artwork. First things first, let's take a look over here at the Layers panel. It looks a little bit complicated. Not everything is as nicely organized into groups as some of our other mark-ups, but that's cool because by now I think that we've probably gotten the handle of it. Again, if you're ever really not sure what something is on the layer, just do that trick where you turn the eyeball off and on. All right, so the first thing I want to do is pop in my actual product, which is wallpaper. It will be taking over this entire gridded area here in the background. I want to go ahead and locate that on my Layers panel. Here it is. It's pretty easy to find. It's the only smart object in the group. You can tell it's a smart object because of this little icon on the bottom right-hand corner of the thumbnail. It's even called Design Wall. So I'm going to go ahead and double-click the thumbnail, which opens up the Sample Design. Now I can pop in my artwork, and I'll resize it to fit. Press Enter and Commands W to close, and don't forget to save. Beautiful. I think that looks really lovely. Again, that shadow is really enhancing this quite a bit. It's adding a lot more dimension here, so it feels like a realistic scene. Now I'm going to make a couple more adjustments just to make this mark-up file feel a little bit more proprietary to my artwork that I'm using. The first thing I'm going to do is change the color of the desk. I'm going to start here because this is the largest object in this mock-up besides the wallpaper. I want to choose a color that feels complimentary or like it aligns with that wallpaper. I'm going to locate that layer, it's called, Color Furniture. I'm going to double-click on the layer thumbnail. I think I want to go for really light Robin's egg blue, something that's also pastel like that background, but doesn't overpower it. Maybe a little bit more desaturated. Perfect. Next I want to change the Chrome color of this lamp itself. So I'm going to zoom into the lamp, locate it over here on the Layers panel. It's called, Color Limb. Double-click the layer thumbnail. I want this to feel like a rose gold metallic finish. So I'm going to go over here on my color picker. Nope, that's too dark. Yeah, that's feeling really nice. I'll press Okay to set. Let's take a look at what other things we can change over here. Let's see, we have the color of the vase itself. It's over here called, Color Vase. Right now it's a pretty bright white ceramic and I feel like it's competing a bit with these fine lines in the background on the wallpaper. I'm going to change the value to be a little bit darker. So I'll double-click on the layer thumbnail and I'm simply going to pick something that's also desaturated, but a little bit darker. Perfect. I'll press Okay. We also have these other colors that we can change. I'm going to hide the layer and then put it back on. So I can see that this color is for the candlestick. Same thing with the candlestick. The width of that candlestick is about the same width as that wallpaper so it's a little bit confusing and distracting. I'm going to change the candlestick to be a different color. I think it would be nice if it were the same blue of this dresser. That way there's not too many things going on and it feels like everything fits together. I will double-click the layer thumbnail, then use the color picker to get my eye dropper out here. Click anywhere on that blue. Not quite dark enough. I'm manually going to bring it on up. Perfect. I'll press Okay to set. There's a few other things on the shelf that we can change the color of and feel free to do that on your own. I think for now it feels pretty set. Now I'm going to go down here and change the color of the key. I want it to be the same color as the lamp. Another way to make it be the exact same color besides using the Color Picker and Eye Dropper tool is to double-click on the lamp color, copy the hex code, and Command C to copy. Press cancel, we don't really need that. Open up that key color by double-clicking the layer thumbnail and then pasting that hex code down here. Even though it's the exact same hue, it seems pretty dark here because of the built-in shadows, so I'm just going to drag it up a little bit on the color picker to get a tiny bit later. Perfect, and press Okay. All right, so this is the state of our mark-up wallpaper file. You can also do some other things like change the color of the floor down here or change the color of the baseboard. I like that fresh clean look of white on white. So I'm going to leave that be. I'm only going to make one more adjustments, that's to lessen the intensity of the shadow. To do that, I'm going to click the shadow layer. Right now the opacity is at 100. I'm going to toggle that down to about 70. The shadow is still there. It's still pretty obvious, but it brightens up the room a little bit, which I think works best for that pastel hue of my wallpaper. So we are good to go. I'm going to go ahead and save first as a PSD. I'm going to call this one, Wallpaper Wave. Make sure it's a Photoshop file and press Save. I'm going to save again as a JPEG, just that I have that fun file. Press Okay. We're good to go. Next up, let's talk about the project for this class.
13. Your Project: [MUSIC] For your class project, I would love to see your favorite mockups that you put together in today's class. Feel free to share why it's your favorite and why you chose the design you did to put on that specific product. If you want to go a step further, I encourage you to create a series, one motif three products. The reason why I'm calling out this type of series specifically, is because this is one of my strategies for convincing a buyer to license my artwork. It shows your potential buyers that the same artwork is very versatile, and can accommodate for a much wider variety of products than just one alone. This makes your design much more appealing. It shows your buyer that they can make the most out of this design because it's applicable to a multi-faceted product range. Here's my example. I used my original painting for wall art. That was the easiest part since I didn't change anything. For the t-shirt, I removed the white paper background so it can be printed transparently on the t-shirts and for the pillow, I duplicated my design to creating modern pattern to fill in the product space. In addition to sharing your work in the class projects section, I encourage you to share on social media as well. Feel free to tag me, @catcoq, creatsy and Skillshare, pro tip, this will get you maximum exposure. I have one more bonus mockup for this class today. But in the meantime, I just want to say thank you guys so much. I really appreciate you taking my class today. Do you have any questions or comments? Please feel free to post them down below in the class discussion thread. You can follow me on Instagram and everything else @catcoq. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button up top. This means that you'll get an email notification as soon as I launch my next class. Plus I'll occasionally send messages directly to my followers with announcements like giving away a free Skillshare membership or announcing free goodies that I have available on my website. You can get access to all of this by following me on Skillshare, by clicking the follow button up top. Moving on to the last mockup of today's class, a full interior design scene.
14. Bonus Lesson: Welcome to the bonus lesson of this class, a fully fleshed out interior design scene. This is an optional mockup and isn't included with the free mockups that Creatsy provided for today's class. If you want to follow along with this last lesson, you can purchase it at creative markets. I provided a direct link to purchase, which you can find at catcoq.com/creatsy. Back to our mockup. I love putting together fully fleshed-out scenes like this because it's a great opportunity to show what a collection similar works will look like together in a real space. Plus, we've got a variety of products to showcase. The mockup also looks authentic and real, pillows on the couch are more relatable than pillows on a standard white background. The latter is good for showcasing a single design, but this is best for showing that design and others in a true world application, like a living room. It also shows a deeper dive into my portfolio and shows how versatile my collection of artwork can be. I have multiple pieces of artwork on multiple products in a setting that is applicable to my audience and appealing to my buyers. Now let's jump into the actual file. I have opened up my mockup file, it's called interior scene.psd and this is what it looks like. As you can see, there are a lot of different elements here. Everything that's in this checkered pattern indicates that this is an opportunity to plop in our designs. We've got this bench, we have this rug, another blanket, a collection of pillows and even some wall paneling over here by the window. Obviously there is a lot going on. If you take a look over here at the layers panel, it's pretty busy but don't get overwhelmed. It looks a little insane right now, but things are still grouped together in a way that actually does make a lot of sense. When I approach mockups like this, things that are a big scene, there's a lot of elements, there's a lot of opportunities for new designs, it can be a little bit overwhelming at first, trying to decide which of your patterns or which of your illustrations or paintings to be using in place of some of these products. But the way I approach it is I look for similarities in designs. Maybe there's a similar color palette or maybe it's using the same medium, maybe everything that I'm using will all be acrylic or all be watercolor, or I look for things that go together in a theme. Maybe it's a seaside or ocean aesthetic, maybe it's something that feels more jungly. Then once I've narrowed down the general theme or color palette or medium, whatever is going to tie all of these things together, then it becomes a lot easier to move forward. For this one, there's actually eight individual elements that can be swapped out with their own artwork. But that doesn't mean that you need to pick eight individual pieces of artwork. I'll be doubling up on some of these as well, which I'll show you. Let's go ahead and just dive right in. The way that I get started with these big compositions like this is I always start with the biggest object in that room, and in this case it's the rug. The reason I start with the largest object is it makes it easier for me to match other elements to that large object and then build around from that. There's a few different carpet options. You can turn your eyeball on an off to take a look. There's a circular rug, there's one with rounded corners. But I'm just going to be using the standard rectangle carpet. Go ahead and toggle down on that cut and then click the Smart Object, that's the layer labeled Design. Double-click, and now I'll drop my artwork in. Expand it to fill that composition, press "Enter" to set, then Cmd W to close. Don't forget to save, cool. Now I've got a nice zebra skin rug right in the middle of this room. Next I'm going to choose the second most prominent piece, and I think it's going to be this square throw pillow right here. It's facing the camera pretty much head on, so I think whatever design I plop in there will have a lot of prominence. Let's go over here to the layers panel and locate that layer. First, I'm going to close down my carpet rectangle holder, and it looks like it's in this group called chair plus pillows. I'm going to toggle down the cuts and do my little trick where I turn the eyeball on and off until I locate that specific design. Got it. It's down here at the bottom. It's right underneath that dark gray color swatch layer. Again, turn the eyeball on and off, make sure that that's our layer and then double-click the Smart Object, drag in my artwork, set the transformation, Cmd W to close. Don't forget to save, lovely. I'm actually going to use that exact same pattern over here on the bench. Remember, it's okay to repeat designs in the same composition. In fact, it really does help the scene hold together cohesively. I'm going to close that group, locate the group called chair plus blankets, toggle down the cuts, and do my eyeball trick until I find what I'm looking for. Perfect. It's this layer right here, right underneath the gray color swatch. I'll double-click, drag that same artwork in, resize, press "Enter" to set, Cmd W to close, press "Save", and here it is. As you can see, this is only one face of the bench, so I'm just going to do the exact same thing for the other two layers to fill in the other faces of the bench. Double-click, and the last side of that bench, it's barely visible, but it still matters so let's go ahead and swap in that same artwork. Those are the two instances where I want to be using that neapolitan ice cream pelleted x artwork, and I'll be using unique artwork for the other pieces. But real quick, right here we have this blanket laying over the chair. That's this gray tone over here in the Layers palette. I'm going to go ahead and double-click that color thumbnail, and then using my eyedropper tool, I'm going to pull directly from the pink of this x, perfect. I'll press "Okay", and now I've color matched the blanket exactly to the design of that chair, just so that it feels a little bit more cohesive and like it belongs together. I'm done with this folder and click the cut to close it down. Now I want to change this blanket right here on the ground with a new piece of artwork. I'm going to locate it over here. There it is. It's the folder called blankets, toggle down the cuts and I'm going to double-click that first layer thumbnail and add in some new artwork. Press "Enter" to set the transformation and Cmd W to close, save. Cool, that's a nice blanket. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so we can take a closer look at it. As you can see, our design layer was applied right here at this first layer and then the second two are called auto. That means that these segments just automatically get applied. It's for the folds in this blanket. In fact, this is one layer right here. You can see it off and on, and the second one is this inner area right down here where it folds inwards. I'll show it to you, off and on. This area is actually two blankets, but because this composition is already pretty complicated, I'm just going to apply that same artwork to the lower blankets, so you can locate it over here on the Layers panel. It's right underneath this color swatch, and I'll double-click, drop in that same artwork, expand it, press "Enter" to set the transformation, Cmd W to close and press "Save". Nice. Again, you can see that the inner folds were also automatically applied and these are these auto layers. I'm done with the blanket. I can toggle that cut inwards and zoom back out. I think I'll use the same golden bamboo artwork over here on this wall section as well. I'm going to try and locate that layer. It looks like it's down here. It's called design wall. I know that this is the correct layer because it has this Smart Object indicator in the bottom right corner of that thumbnail, and you can double-check by turning the eyeball off and on. Double-click the Smart Object, drag it in that same artwork, sizing it to fit, set in the transformation and Cmd W to close. I really like that look over there, this accent wall with that same bamboo pattern. I think I'll apply that bamboo pattern one more time, right here on this middle pillow. This chunk right here is the last area that we need to edit for this, and it's called chair plus pillows. If you locate that folder, you can toggle down the cut and now we're just going to be doing some digging around. That same trick with turning the eyeballs on and off until we find this middle pillow. It's right above this layer right here, that's the gray color swatch. Go ahead and double-click the Smart Object. I'll drag in my artwork, resize to fit, press "Enter" to set the transformation and close. Now I need to do the same thing and apply the artwork to the bottom part of this pillow as well as the side. Here's the layer right here, it's the one directly above the layer that we just adjusted. Go ahead and double-click. I'll drag in my artwork. I'm going to go ahead and flip it 180 so that the bottom edges of that bamboo match the bottom edges in the pillow above it, and press "Enter" to set, Cmd W to close and save. Nice, that looks great. It looks like this side was completed by this auto layer right here, which is great. It's one less step for us. Let me zoom out so we can take a look at the entirety of the composition. It's looking really nice. There's a lot going on. Instead of putting a design right here in place of this checkered pillow, here let me zoom in, I think I just want to use a solid color instead. I've located the thumbnails for this pillow and I'm just going to click and turn them all off. It's the three layers that are directly above this layer that's this cream color swatch. What this does, is it removes the need to drop in a Smart Object of my design. Instead, I can double-click that layer thumbnail, that creamy palette, and use my own color instead. I want something desaturated, it's a darkish gray. I'll press "Okay" to set and zoom back out. This is just a reminder that you don't have to use your own designs at every single opportunity for you to insert your designs. You can always just have solid color swatches instead, especially if it's starting to look too busy. Our very last opportunity to drop in some designs is this top pillow right here. Let me zoom on in. I'm pretty sure it's going to be up here at the tip top of the Layers panel, let's see. Cool, this is it. Double-click the layer thumbnail, drop in your artwork and scale to fit, Enter to set the transformation and it's closing with Cmd W. I'll do the same thing with the underside of that pillow, so it's actually going to be the top layer right here, just underneath our chair and pillows folder. Double-click, drop in your artwork, resize, press "Enter" to set, Cmd W to close and save. Awesome, that's looking really fantastic. I'm going to go ahead and click the cut to close down that folder. We have all of our elements placed in. There's only one more thing I'm going to do, and that's to change the floor color. This dark wood isn't really driving with my illustration and design style here, so I'd like to look for something a little bit more modern. Down here it says design floor, down to the bottom of our Layers panel. You can again click the eyeball off and on to make sure it's that. Again, we see this little icon on the bottom right-hand corner of that thumbnail, that indicates that it's a Smart Object. Let's go ahead and double-click it to look at our floor options. It looks like we've got about four choices here. This original dark wood, some bleached wood that's quite a bit lighter, some parquet floors, I really like that, it feels modern with my art style and a really minimalistic, bleached beach wood look. I think I'm going to go for the parquet floors, so I'll have that layer turned on and I'll close this with Cmd W and save. Beautiful, I'm really liking how this all came together. There's a few additional things that you can change as well. Again, you can turn the plants off and on. You can also turn off this little table here with a reading book. I think I'm going to keep mine off, it feels a little bit simpler, and I'll go ahead and save. Then I'll call this one interior scene pink black, save it as a Photoshop file and now I'll save it as a flattened JPEG, press "Save" and we're good to go. Nice job you guys, we have mastered the most complicated mockup file of today's class. All right guys, thank you so much for taking my class today. I hope you've learned everything you needed to in order to get your artwork simulated on product mockups. Thanks to Creatsy for providing our free mockup bundle. You're already off to a great start with putting together a physical product portfolio. Please feel free to tag me at catcoq, on social media when you share your work. You can also tag creatsyofficial and Skillshare. I'll be sharing some of my favorites in my Instagram stories and on my social media posts. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button up top. Thank you again, and I will see you for my next class.
Cat Coquillette, Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
