Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, my name is Derek
Mitchell and in this course, I'm going to let you
look over my shoulder as I work on a real
client project. I'm going to be
creating a boat ramp, which is basically a design on a giant piece of vinyl that gets printed out and
put on the side of a boat, and with these skills, you're going to be able
to do the same thing to create a design for
cars, for trucks, for ATVs, for jet skis, for any kind of a vehicle that you want to put a
vinyl wrap design on. Now, this course, not only
am I going to show you my exact process for
creating real files that will actually
be printed but I'm also going to show you how
to create mock-ups as well. Perhaps you're following
along and you have a brand that you've been working with and you want to show
this off in your portfolio, I'm going to show
you exactly how to create a mockup so you
don't actually have to print the vinyl
and have it put on a real vehicle,
but you could. What you're going
to do is you follow along with everything that
I do for this project. I give you all the lesson
files if you want to do that. Or for the class project, you're going to be creating
your own vehicle wrap, whether it's for your own
car or a friend's vehicle, we're going to take
a picture of it, cut it out and then
apply the graphic to the vehicle and post
it in the projects. It's going to be a ton of fun. I'm really excited about this project and I hope
you decide to join me. Again, my name is
Derek Mitchell, I have over 20
years of experience working as a graphic designer and I have over a 150,000 students at the time
of this recording. I'd love for you to become one
of those students as well. So if you're ready to dive in, let's go ahead and jump into
the course and get started.
2. Gathering Assets: In this video, we're going to
take a look at how I gather ideas and begin to wrap
my mind around a project. So we're going to
build a boat wrap. It's a graphic
that's going to be printed on vinyl and
then applied to a boat. The boat we're going
to be working on is actually for a friend of mine. It's new to him,
it's a drift boat. This is a picture of it. What we're going to do is design the graphics for the
sides of the boat. We might even get crazy
and design something for the trucks so it all matches and we're going to
have a lot of fun. So again, as far as where I get my ideas and how I
start a project like this. This is what I do
first and foremost, I went through and I
took a bunch of photos of the vehicle that we're
going to be applying this to. Then also we got
measurements as well. Once we set up the project
we'll have these measurements to go through to get us close. Then from here I
want to go through and look at what's possible, get an idea of what I like and what things might be
fun to try on this. First, I love to
jump into Pinterest for something like
this specifically, if it's graphic design-related, like logos or websites
or things like that, I love to go to behance.net
for those inspirations. You can search up here for
all things like logos, photos, web design, brochures, anything you can imagine. In fact, let's just
see boat graphic. Let's see if they have any
boat graphics in here. It doesn't look like
there's very many in here. Which again, is
why I jumped right into Pinterest because it's something a little
more specific. I went through and I
searched for vehicle wraps and truck wraps and boat wraps and different things
like this. That's cool, man. Command, click holding
down command and clicking on a link will
open it in a new tab, which is basically
what I've done for all of these tabs that
are open right here. What I would typically do
is if I want to save this, I'd make a new board. So we go ahead and
create a new board. We're just going to call
this boat wrap ideas. Simple enough. We'll
click "Create". Now we have a new board. So I can go ahead
and close this. I'll go through all of
these. Let's go back. Because all these pages
were already open. Oh, there it is. Sometimes you have to refresh the page
as I was going to say, but because it's
already right there, I'm going to click "Save",
Command W to close this, Control W on our PC. Let's go ahead and save this to boat wrap ideas, we close it. I'll just go through and
do this for every one of these pins that I have opened
that's inspiring to me. That way later, when
I come back to this, I can see them all in one place. That's my process. It's pretty straightforward,
nothing too crazy. So here's a few different ideas. Just notice there's
lots of possibilities as we dive into this project in different ways we can take this. I'm going to go ahead
and just jump ahead and show you one other link here that I found that
was really inspiring. I actually found
this through one of these Pinterest links and
its WakeGraphics.com. I don't have any affiliation
with them whatsoever. But as I was looking
through some of their different
boat wraps and vehicle wraps and different
ideas when you scroll down, I wanted to show you
this real quick. So here is a couple
of their guys applying the wrap to a truck, which is actually
very similar to the truck that we're going
to be doing this too, just so you see how this works. What they'll do is
they'll print out big sheets of these graphics. Then using a heat gun and some different
tools they'll actually apply this like a giant sticker to the truck is basically
how this is going to work. By using the heat gun, they're able to mold it
to the different shapes and contours of the vehicle. This is how it starts. Once you're done, it turns
into something more like this, which is super cool. So another way
that'll grab ideas the first is through Pinterest,
like I just showed you. The other is if I find
something inspiring like this, I can take a screenshot
on some websites, you can right-click
and save the image. This one, the right-click is disabled because the
way the site was built. I use a shortcut "Command
Shift" and the number four to get my crosshairs here and just drag around this
and then let go. You'll notice it takes a picture and save it to my desktop. On a PC it's going to be a little bit of a
different approach. But basically all
we're doing is taking a screenshot or screen grab whatever you
want to call it, so "Command Shift" four
as my shortcut on a Mac. Click and drag, let go the
mouse and it takes a picture and then it saves it as a PNG on my desktop so I can keep
that photo for later. What I'm going to do right
now is just go through. There's a couple photos in
here that are inspiring to me. They show the process as well as give me some ideas
for things we could try. Let's do just a couple more. I love this style. This is not at all what
he wants for his boat, but it's still inspires me and I think it's
fun to look at it, at least for you
guys to see what's possible and see what you
can do with this medium. So I'm going ahead and
close this website. I've got a few different ideas, some photos that we've taken. I've got a few different
pins on Pinterest. Let's go ahead. I'm going to skip through this real quick. I'm just going to save
all these to my boards, and then I'll fast-forward
the video real quick. So now that I've got the
Pinterest pins saved on my board for the
boat design ideas. Now what I'm looking at
are some more inspiration, things that he's sent me. So he wants this to look
like an 80' s vibe to it. Like sunset, things like that. So he sent me a picture of
these O'Neill boat shorts. We've got some of these
stripes and these colors. We've got all these
colors to work with. We have the stripe pattern to work with as far as
an idea that he likes. He's put new seats in the boat. He sent me a photo of these so if we wanted to match
this a little bit better, maybe we can work in this blue and gray and
charcoal look to it to match, which will help it tie
it in with a boat. Then also, I went
through and opened up some more pins to see
some different light, bright neon sunset
ideas as well. I'm going to actually
save all these. Let's see. These are
more for us to just see the style we're looking for. I might say this is my board, but I also will just keep
these off to the side here, so I would like
to refer back to. Then when I saw this 50
retro, vintage sunset, whatever this is,
this PNG clip art, it reminded me about
Envato Elements, which is something that
I use all of the time. I love Envato
elements and I highly recommend you guys to get
a subscription to it. I'm actually an affiliate, but I don't have an
affiliate link here. I just believe in it, so I'm not making any money off of this to
refer them to you like this. I just want you guys
to be able to have all the resources you need to be successful as a designer. With that in mind what
I did here is I went to Envato Elements and I typed
in 80' s sunset graphic. Then you can search
for all items specifically right
now I'm looking under Graphic templates. I could change over to graphics in general. Let's
search for that. You might get some
different results here. I'm going to go
ahead and go back. I think there's more here for what I'm looking
for like this. But there's video
items and fonts and photos and just all stuff. I'm going to just delete this and just see what the
80' s gives us in general. As I scroll down, obviously
some of the style, like this font and this
treatment stands out to me, the colors stand out to me. We've got lots of cool
things we could work with. We might end up
downloading some of these and pulling out
some of the pieces. But this is the
direction we're headed. Now that I have a
really good idea of where we're going and
what we're going to do. In the next video,
we're going to go ahead and start preparing our artwork to design
our boat wrap.
3. File Management and File Setup: In this video, we're going to do a little bit
of housekeeping. We're going to do
some file management and then we're going
to set up our file, so we can start
designing our project. Right now I've got this vehicle wraps folder on my desktop and this happens to be where I'm saving the recordings
for this course, as well as the design files
for what I'm actually making. Let's jump into this
design files folder and because I'm going to be
referencing this folder a lot, I'm just going to click
and drag on this folder, and just throw it over into my favorites tab on the side, that way, as I'm
going through things, I can quickly and easily see this and I've used
the columns view. I can see folders that we're going to
refer to quite a bit. We have the ideas this is
that photo that was sent over with the inspiration
for the color and the style, and then we also have
all of these screenshots that we took for
some other ideas. I'm going to throw this in
the ideas folder as well, and then I do have all of those photos from
Pinterest that I could go through and save those the same way take
screenshots of them, and save them into
this ideas folder, and I probably will do that, so that way you
guys have access to them in case the
web links change. On that note, the portfolio, I'll show
you this real quick, I've got the link to where I grabbed all of these screenshots if you guys want to
check those out online. Anyway, so that'll be provided
in this folder as well. I go through when I'm starting a project and I
throw all my ideas into an ideas folder and if
I have any photos or assets, I throw those in there as well. Here's all the
photos of the truck if you guys want to use these. Later on in the class, we're
going to be using these. We're going to cut out these photos and apply the wrap too. It's going to be super cool,
but this is my process. This is how you
get everything all set up and ready to go. Now, because we've got
our files all set, it's time to actually create the file itself,
the design file. For this project I
could use Photoshop, and in some cases I
have used Photoshop, but because this is
going to be huge, it's going to be
like 18 feet long, we're going to use Illustrator. The reason why we're
using Illustrator, is because Illustrator is
a vector-based program. It lets you design
gigantic graphics that are really small in file size
and they're scalable. I'm going to go ahead
and start in here. We're going to start by
creating a new file, and right off the bat, it's already set up for print. If you don't see this,
notice across the top, we do have some different tabs, and as a side note, what's really cool
if you click on these tabs obviously we're
doing a print document, but if you scroll down, there's some pre-built templates that you guys can play with. Sometimes it's easy to overlook these when you're
just trying to look at how to start a new file in
Illustrator or in Photoshop, but check out all
these different tabs. There's some really cool files that might be fun to explore, especially if you're new and
you're trying to learn and reverse engineer how somebody
else built their work. This is a great place to start. Because this is a print project, I'm going to start
here under print, and let's go ahead
and change this from points to inches, and in fact, I could probably
change this to feet. That's a new option here that we didn't use
to have in the past. I've got this option for feet. I'm going to go open up
these photos that I got, and we're going to go
find this image that had all of the boat dimensions. It's 16 feet from here
to here, but the boat, this part is curved out, so it's actually 18 feet
to wrap around that. We're going to set up
our file 18 feet wide, put 18 in here. Now, if you're using a version that's older and you don't
have feet as an option, you can just get out
your calculator. We go calculator
and we were to go 18 feet times 12 inches that'd be 216 inches if you wanted to
do this in inches. Anyway, that's how I'd work. That's how I drop in
the measurements there, let's go back to our
preview and it's about 18 inches
tall in the back, but it's 32 inches on the front. What's cool about this, we could actually change
this to feet and inches. Again, if you don't
have this version, if you're working
with an older version that doesn't have this, usually the whole
thing in inches and convert it that way as well. But because we have
this as an option, super cool, we're just
going to do it this way. Let's look at that
again, I forgot the measurement, 32 inches tall. Let's go back here, and we're going to make this 32, which is actually 2 feet, 8 inches, there we go. Then the color mode is CMYK because we're
doing this for print. We want our raster effects
to be 300 pixels per inch. A raster effect would be if we're going to
add like drop shadows or other non-vector
effects to this. We want it to be high
resolution for print, and then we'll go ahead
and click "Create". We have our file now
and you'll notice this looks nothing like this shape. What's going to end up
happening is we're going to give some wiggle room for where this
actually gets cut out. If I wanted to, I
could probably plot this and get it to be
closer to do an outline, but what we're going to do
instead is we're going to design this in a way
that's pretty forgiving. If we look at these board shorts that we're one of
the ideas sent over, we can make the whole thing
one of these patterns, and then it doesn't really matter where that
falls on the boat, it's going to give us
a lot of wiggle room for when this actually
gets applied. Then we can design either
a logo or something separately that then once they get this laid
out perfectly, they can put the logo on top and make it fit exactly where
they want it to go. That's pretty much how we're
going to get started here. What we're going to do now
before we get any further, let's go ahead and
save our file. Go File, Save As, we'll save it on our
computer for this one, however, I do recommend saving
it to the Creative Cloud, and the reason why is because if you just look at
these check-boxes here, with the Creative Cloud,
you can do cool things like sync it across
all your devices, you can auto save every change, you can see version history, you can even invite
other people to edit, which again, I recommend
working that way, because of some things I know that I'm going to be
doing in the future, I'm actually going to
be same as straight to my computer for now, and also I typically
use Dropbox. Right now I'm saving directly on my desktop for the
sake of this course. Actually just make a
new folder in here, and we'll just call
it Design Files. Let's call this Boat-Wrap-1. I'll leave it as dash 1 so that way as you guys are
following along, you have the different
versions with me here. But typically I would save
this in my Dropbox folder, so then I have version
history that way, and then I have shareable
links for other things I do when I'm working with a team outside of the Creative Cloud. I'll go ahead and click "Save", and I'll go ahead
and click "Okay", and now I have a file that's ready for us to start designing. In the next video, now we've got our file
setup and we've got some file management happening, we're going to go ahead and
start throwing some things in here and starting to see what we can come up
with for our design.
4. Cutout a Vehicle in Photoshop: In this lesson, I'm going
to show you how to take a photo like this, and I want to cut this truck
out of the scene and then create areas where I can put graphics into it and
make it look real. This is an unnecessary
step if you're working with a printer
who's going to be doing a vehicle wrap for you. You should be able to just
send them your design file and then they can apply it or maybe even do
a mockup for you. However, if you're
working for a client or maybe you are the person who's going
to be doing the rap, it's fun to show them exactly what it would
look like on the vehicle. In this lesson, we're
going to take a look at exactly how to do that. To begin, you can pick
whichever photo you want. If you want to follow along, I happen to be using this
one, it's IMG_7009.JPG. I chose this one
because I might go over the top and design
something for the truck as well. But it's also a
good profile photo of just the boat
and the trailer. If you want a closer shot, we've got 7004, which is just pretty much the
boat from the side. I could choose any one of these photos to do
what I'm about to do. Like I said, I'm going to start with this one
though because I want the full truck and
trailer in the shot. Let's go ahead and open
this up in Photoshop. There's lots of ways to do it. I like to just click
and drag right over the Photoshop icon
to open it up. If that doesn't work for you, you can also open it
up from Photoshop, going to File, and then Open, and then finding that photo. Right now I'm just
going to work directly inside of this photo. Let's go ahead and save it. I haven't done anything yet, so by hitting "Command
S", nothing happens. What I'll do is hit
"Command Shift S", which is my shortcut for Save As and now I can rename this. I'm going to come back up
here to my design files. Let's call it Cutout right now. I'm going to leave
the image name in it. Sometimes I do that if I ever want to refer to
the original image. I can do a quick
spotlight search with the shortcut is command
space on a Mac, and I can type in IMG_7009 and then I can find
that image really quickly if I want
to go back to it. I'm just going to do that
right now and click. Let's see format,
we want this to be a Photoshop file so we
have editable layers. I'll go ahead and click "Save". Right now, if you've never
used Photoshop before, I'm going to show
you just the steps for this exact piece, and I'm going to go
a little bit fast, but you can definitely follow
along with what I'm doing. If you want to learn
more, I do have some other Photoshop and
graphic design courses as well where I go
into more detail. But my hope with this lesson is just to show you
exactly what you need to do to be able to follow along and
make this cut out. With that said, right now
I've got my background layer. A really cool feature
in the new versions of Photoshop is we've got
some quick actions here. To get to these, we're
in the Properties tab. If you don't see that, let me do a couple of things first. I'm going to come up here,
and I'm going to reset my workspace and make sure I'm on the
Essentials workspace. That way, you and
I are hopefully looking at the same thing. From there, I've got
this Properties tab. If you don't see that, you can come up here to Window and then come all the
way down to Properties. You're going to see
all these properties. Now, this is dependent on what layer you're on or
what tools you're using, these properties will change. With that, I've got some
quick actions here, but I don't see the
one that I want. What I'm going to do with
this layer selected, I'm going to
duplicate this layer. There's a few ways to do it. My favorite is to hit
"Command" and letter J to jump cut a copy right
up to the new layer. I'm going to delete that, show you another way to do that. Hold down the option
key, click and drag, which isn't going to work
because you already have to have another
layer before you can start clicking
option and dragging. Let's shift click both
of those, delete it. Guys, I know I'm
flying through this. If I'm going too fast, don't forget it's a video. You can pause it, you
can play it back at half speed, rewind it. You can even play it back
really fast if you're an intermediate to advanced user and you want to skip ahead. I'm just, again,
trying to show you, if you're looking
over my shoulder, exactly how I work. Let's try this
again. The other way we could do this is click and drag right over the new
layer icon and duplicate it. I guess what I'm trying to
show you here is there's 100 ways to do the same thing, just in case one of these
doesn't happen to work for you, depending on if you're
on a Mac or on a PC, or what version you're using. Again, my favorite is
just hitting "Command J" to duplicate layers when
I need to make a copy. With this background
copy selected, I now have these quick
actions available, under the Properties tab, to remove background
or select the subject. What I'm going to
do is click "Select Subject" and just see how
good of a job it does. You can see it doesn't
get all of the boat. It gets more of the building and I can tell right away this isn't going to work very well
for me for this version. However, depending on
the photo you have, you might be able
to click "Select Subject" or remove background and immediately everything
else is cut away. Now, that's not the case for me, so we're going to have to do
this a little more advanced. Let's go ahead and turn our
background layer back on, clicking on this eyeball. I'm going to come
to this mask layer. I'm just going to
hit "Command Z" a couple of times to
undo all of that. I'm going to turn off
this background layer, and I'm going to use a pen tool right on top of this
background layer. Now, the reason why I use
the pen tool is because you can can make really
precise selections, you can click and drag to make curves and arcs and
all cool shapes, and then when it's all said and done and you've
closed your path, you can right-click, and you can make a selection. With this selection,
now I can make cutouts, and I can make masks. If I have this layer
selected and down here I can click on this
little mask icon, what this does is it adds a mask to this shape
or to this layer. So anything that's
black is being hidden, anything that's white
is showing through. Then what I could do is I
could get my brush tool, and if I'm painting
with black right now, which is my foreground color, it's going to erase away. If I hit the letter X and
I swap this so that way white is the
foreground or I click this little double arrow to swap which brings it in front. Now, if I'm painting with white, it's going to bring
back that image, and I'm just painting
on this mask layer. This is going to
come in really handy as we refine our selection, but I just want you
to see where we're headed and how this behaves. What I'm going to
do is click and drag this mask right into the trash, We'll click "Delete". We don't want to apply this yet. I'm going to start
over. Now what I'm going to do is
I'm going to zoom in. I'm a huge fan of
keyboard shortcuts, if you haven't figured
that out already. By holding the space bar key, it turns into the hand tool so I can move my canvas around. Or I just hit the letter H, or I could click
here, my tools on the side, and grab
the hand tool. I want to zoom in, so I can
hit the letter Z or I can click on the zoom tool and then click and
drag to zoom in. Then I can hit the
letter H again to move my canvas around, but all of this is
too many clicking. I don't like getting
stuck on the hand tool. What I like to do is
use the move tool, which is the letter V, or actually rather, it's the move tool in Photoshop, it's the selection
tool in Illustrator. I like to use the
move tool and have it set here, letter V, and now with nothing, I'm not touching anything on
the mouse of the keyboard. If I hit the spacebar, it's my shortcut to
get the hand tool. As soon as I let go, it
bounces right back to that, move tool, spacebar, then command and it
becomes my zoom tool. Then click and drag or spacebar, command and then option
becomes a zoom out tool. I'm constantly moving things
around like this with my hand or the zoom tool to get things exactly
where I want it to go. Now that we've gone over that, I'm going to hit
the letter P to get my pen tool and we're going
to start cutting this out. Now, you can start
anywhere you want, It doesn't really matter. Just start somewhere
where it's easy to see where the beginning
and the ending are. For whatever reason, I'm going to come right here and
we're going to start here. I'm going to hit
the Caps Lock key, it's going to change it from the pen cursor to
the precise cursor. I can turn the Caps
Lock on or off depending on what you guys
want, what you prefer. I'm going to click,
and then click, and then drag before I let
go to get a nice arch, I don't know, a
nice, bendy line. This is going to be something
that you might have to do a lot of practice. You can also choose
what to include. Now, I know this is the
antenna on the truck, but I could cut it off
by just going like this and nobody would
even know it's missing. Or if you want to be really
over the top about it, you could come in here
and include that as well. I'm going to step back
hitting "Command Z". Let's make sure we're getting
some nice curves here. You'll also notice
I'm cutting in a little bit because
see where this line is? It's a darker outline. Instead of following it
directly exactly there, I'm cutting in by a pixel just so it's a
nice, clean selection. This is something that I've had many years of practice trying to get really
precise with the pen tool. If it's a little
difficult at first, don't be discouraged, it's a difficult tool to master. The other thing you can do is, once you get to a corner, if you want to bend this corner, I can hit the option key which changes it from the pen tool to the anchor point convert
tool right here, the convert point tool. I could come in here
and click this, and then I'd have
that tool to just bend this where I want it to go. But, again, I like using
shortcuts because it's faster. That's how I work.
I'm going to use this hold down option
to convert this point. Now what's going to
happen is our line is bending towards here, and then as soon as I
click anywhere else, the line is going to go
towards this anchor point, towards that handle, see? But then it bends to
wherever I click. That's one way that you
can really control this. Now, the other thing is, because this tree is almost the same color
as the truck bed, Photoshop would
never be able to get a really good selection
here, which is, again, why I like to use the pen tool instead of some of the
other selection tools that we could use that might
make this faster or easier. I like to make this
very exact and precise. Sometimes you'll notice this is part of the truck right here, but I'm just making
it a straight line again because nobody's going to know once
this is cut out, whether it's missing
something or not. Also, I'm even having a hard time identifying which
pieces of this to keep. Something to keep in
mind, when you're cutting things out, you don't have to
follow it exactly, you can paint the
picture that you want them to see and make
it as clean as you want. I'm going to go
ahead and cut out this piece up there because
it doesn't really make sense. Now, this goes way
past what I want to, going to the option
key and I'm going to bend this line back, and I'm still selected here
so I can just keep going, and it's going to be a
really tedious process. I want you to see
exactly how it works. I am going to speed things up
a little bit and then we'll come back here once
I'm further along. Here's something where
you could choose to be really over the top and spend hours doing this
or not, totally up to you. But little things
like this cable, the brake line
that's coming back. I could make my
selection come down here and keep this in-store, and then if I want to
add to the selection, what I would do is
command-click off of here, so now this line is
de-selected, this path. If you ever want to
see your paths again, over here by the layers tab, if you go over a couple of
you see this paths tab. You can see the work path that we're currently working on. If you don't see it
here, go under Window, go down to paths and
you'll see this path. Now, up here in the options
bar across the top, this will change depending on what tool you have selected. Right now, because I have
the pen tool selected, I have some different
options here. Right now, if I
click down on this, it's going to exclude
overlapping shapes, which is exactly what we want. We want to be able to draw multiple paths on
the same path layer, and then when I make a selection
at the end of all this, I want them to cut out,
so that's good enough. I'm going to command click
over back on this path. I brought this little circle
with a line through it on the pen tool so that
I click on it and now my pen has a little slash mark
and I can click and drag and continue
on this path. Again, I know it's going
to take a lot of practice, and I really want you to see my workflow and my process and how I think
through this stuff, and also show you
what's possible, but also keep in
mind, like I said, I've been doing this
for a really long time, and hopefully you pick
it up really quick. For me it took me a while
to get good at this. But it's really worth it
because when you are done, you will have pixel perfect
selections for things. This is going to get
really technical in here. If I wanted to, I could finish my main outline first and then come back or I
can command click off, and then come back
in here and add in all these little
cutouts and shapes. Again, this is so far over the top overkill, but
I really like it. It's nerdy stuff to do, but what's going to happen
is once we cut this out, it's going to look really
cool because all of these little extra details
will still be in this photo. You'll see what I mean
here in a little bit, and if you're curious, you can just cut ahead to a
few other videos and just see the end result but again,
this is my workflow. Now, I've got this path all go in here still on
the same work path, sometimes what I'll do
is I'll double-click in here and I'll call it cut out just so that way it saves the path when I save
this file and close it. Speaking of, I'm going
to go ahead and save this right now
command S to save it, click "Okay" and it's going
to save this PSD file, and that way if anything crashes or anything happens
to my selection, it's still going to
be in this file. I could even close this, open it back up and then
come to my path Window, click on this path
and it's going to be right there
waiting for me. With that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and keep clicking, keep drawing paths, you can see I've
got a long ways to go and it's a really
tedious process, but again, when you're
working with a photo that might be difficult for
Photoshop to see the edges, this is the best way to do it. I just finished cutting out the entire outline and
now I'm going to step in and just make sure all of these little shapes inside
get cut out as well. Down here, I completely skipped the chains and these cables because it was just
going to be way too much work and it was
going to take forever. Let's go ahead and start
working on the inside. I'm going to click on
this cutout layer command click over here to de-select
all these anchor points, and now with the pen tool,
I'm going to continue cutting out these interior
pieces as well. Now, I'm done with all of the painstaking detail
on the inside here. Photoshop would never be able
to see this actual shape, and even though there was
a car in the background, I went through and precisely
traced out all these pieces even the cable with the little Caribbean are on the end here that
hooks up this loop. This is way the
heck over the top, but I love this stuff
and I love making my selections as
perfect as possible. Now, I've got this
cutout path here, I'm going to go ahead and
save my Photoshop file again. Now, here's where the magic happens from all
of this hard work. What we're going to
do now is I've got the pen tool selected , there's a couple of
things we could do. I can either right-click
right inside here and go click on "Make Selection", which will then make
a selection out of everything, and now in this box, we can feather the edges and
what that means is just to soften them a little
bit instead of it being a really hard crisp edge. I'm going to leave this at zero. Sometimes I might bump it
up to pay on the image size from a couple of pixels
to maybe 10 or 15 pixels, it just depends on what
you're trying to do and we're going to
make a new selection. If I already had a
selection, you can select, add to selection or subtract
from the selection or intersect to have those two selections
intersect with each other. I'm just going click "Okay", and now this entire thing
is going to turn into a selection
rather it should have. Let's try that
again, click "Okay". It is not working. There we go. I think that's
just a little Photoshop bug, but we got it to work. This
is what you should see. I call this the marching ants or the marquee selection here. I'm going to hit "Command D" to de-select this or come
up here to select, down to de-select, just so I can show you
another way to do this. We don't see the paths again. In the path tool, click on your path layer,
it'll come back. You can right-click
"Make Selection", or I like to hold down the command key or
the control key on a PC and then click
on the thumbnail of this cutout and it'll do
the exact same thing, so those are two
ways to work here. Now, as I see these selections, one thing I notice
is we might be okay actually these wheels,
yeah, I think we're okay. I didn't cut out the spokes, but I don't think we need
to because they're so deep, you don't actually
see through them, but I did see through them
on this backside here, so you can see my selections. I went through and cut out absolutely everything that
wasn't part of the image. Now, what we can do is
actually really cool. I'm going to come back
to my layers panel. We're on this background copy, and down here on this little square with
a circle in the middle, that's our add
layer mask button. If I click on this, it's going to mask this image. If we accidentally
selected the wrong thing, we can click on this black
and white mask layer and using the brush tool, which is the letter B, and up here in the Options bar, we can control what our sizes, we can control how hard the
edges of the brush are, lots of cool things we can do. I could come in here if I missed the selection, right now, white is my foreground on
the mask and if I start to draw or paint, it'll come back. Command Z, if I go hit X to swap my
foreground and background, I'll click on this little
double arrow icon here, it'll swap and now with black, I can paint on this
and erase away, but by painting with
black on this mask layer. Those are two ways to work, but that's so cool
because now I can also hold down the
shift key and click on the mask to temporarily disable it and see
where my image is that. What's cool about
this is now we have this perfectly
selected truck and we're making great progress
here to have a template, a way to mock up
our vehicle wrap. I'm going to go ahead
and stop this video and make sure I hit
"Save" real quick. In the next video, I'm going
to show you how to make some realistic
shadows and then also we're going to create
our panels so that way we can bring in our
artwork from Illustrator.
5. Create a Realistic Shadow: In this video, I'm gong
to show you how to create realistic shadows for a vehicle. Again, this doesn't
have much to do with the whole
vehicle wrap design, this is more of the
mock-up portion of this, but it's something that I do that I have a lot of fun with. I really enjoy it and so I just wanted to show you
my process as well. If you're following along,
go ahead and open up this shadow start file and I'm going to
go ahead and save this again as the shadow end, because that way, I don't
accidentally save over my work. You can open up the shadow start file and you'll see this. What we're going to do
is create the shadow. If I hold shift and
click on this mask, we can hide this mask
and see the image below and then see where our
shadow is for this image. What I'm going to do is go ahead and make a new layer and I like to hold down
Command and then click on the New Layer icon. What that does is it makes the new layer below
the layer I'm on. If I were just to
click the New Layer, it would put it above. Not a big deal, I can
drag it down below, but again, just showing
you my workflow, I'd hold down Command,
click on that, and now I've got a new
layer right below here. Now I'm going to get
my pen tool again, lots of ways to work, but this
is how I want to do this. I'm going to click
and drag, and it doesn't have to be precise, it just has to be close. I'm just making a
shape that's about the same shape as this shadow. It doesn't have to
be perfect yet, because of a couple of tips
or a couple of tricks, I guess I'm going to show you
how to make this realistic. We're just trying to get it in the general ballpark of
what this shape is here. You don't have to
be this precise, you could literally just draw a rectangle and that
might be good enough, but because I do have the shadow as an
example to work with, I stayed pretty close
to that outline. Now I have this path and
I'm on this empty layer. I could right-click and make a selection like we've talked about or I can come over here to Paths and we have a new path. Let's just call this one shadow. I'm going to command click
on that shadow path. Now I have a selection. I'll come back to my layers, I'm going to fill
this with black. If I hit the letter
D on my keyboard, it's going to change my fill and foreground
and background colors to the default black and white. I've got a selection
among this blank layer. Now I can come up here to Edit, down to Fill, and I can choose to fill it with
the foreground color, which is going to
be the black here. I'll click "Okay" and now
that filled it with black. Now we can't see it. Let me turn off this
layer above it. There we go. There's our shadow. Command D to de-select and
I'm going to do this again, let's step back a couple, undo we've got a selection. So Edit, Fill is
one way to fill it, but I like to just hit Command
Delete or Option Delete, depending on which color using. Option Delete for me on a Mac is going to fill
with the foreground color. It's just a shortcut,
just a faster way to work instead of going
up into the menu. Now, let's de-select this. Command D to de-select or
come up here, de-select. We have this shape that's
going to be our shadow. Now, if we turn
this layer back on, turn off the mask, now we have this
realistic looking shadow and we see the checkerboard here that shows that all
this is transparent. Let's make another layer
behind the shadow first, let's rename it to shadow. Just click in there
and rename it. This is selected, so hold
down Command and click on the new layer icon down here
to get another new layer. We'll just call this background
and I'm just going to fill this with a light gray. There we go. We see
this taking shape. Now, let's click back
on our shadow layer and I want to make this
a little more realistic. What we're going to
do is come up here to "Filter" and then come
down here to "Blur". I'm going to go to the
"Gaussian Blur" and right now, it's a one-point three pixels, which is probably good
enough and on an extreme, you can see if we go
all the way to the end, it really blurs this out. We want it to be soft, but because of the harsh light, it's still a fairly hard
shadow. We'll click "Okay". Now the next thing
we need to do is light and the shadow
up just a little bit. The two things we're
going to do is change the blend mode up here from normal
down to multiply, which is going to
help it interact with the layers below it and then we're going to scrub down our opacity
just a little bit, maybe like 85-90 percent and just whatever you
think looks good. Now if we do more things
with the background layer, this shadow is going to come over to anything else
we use this with. Don't forget to save, and now we have a
beautiful looking shadow that really makes us look like it's sitting on the
ground somewhere. The last thing I'm
gonna do is Command click the layer above it, just below the title so both of these are layers are selected. I'm going to right-click,
scroll down. I'm going to link the layers. Now you see we have these chain link icon and if I wanted to, I could shift click these
to de-select that link or right-click and come down to unlink layers if you
ever want to undo it. But now, no matter
where I click, the shadow and the truck
will stay together. That's how you make a shadow. The next video, what we're
going to do is create our mask so that as we design
our art in Illustrator, I can drop it back into here and we'll see how this
is going to take shape.
6. Linked and Embedded Files: Now that we finally
have our truck and boat cut-out and a
cool looking drop shadow, a realistic shadow, now
we can start bringing in the actual artwork to
mark this whole thing up. What we're going to do is jump back over into Illustrator and remember that Boat-wrap-1
file we started. We're going to go ahead
and jump in here. I'm just going to
rename this or hit "Command" "Shift"
"S" to save as, I'll save this one
on my computer. We're going to call
this Boat-wrap-2. We'll go ahead and hit
"Return" and click "Okay". Right now this is
just an empty canvas. There's nothing on here. There's no artwork, no
shapes, no fonts, nothing. For right now, all I want to do is drop a
simple shape in here. I'm going to hit the letter
M to get my rectangle tool, or you can see it over
here on the side. Actually before I get
too far down the road, let me just also make sure we're looking at the same thing. Up here on the very top
right of Illustrator, I'm going to click
on the Workspaces. I'm using Essentials
Classic and I'm going to reset Essentials Classic just to make sure it looks
just like yours. I'm going to hit the little green plus
button so that it's large so that you're not seeing Photoshop behind it and
confused with that as well. Now we're looking at just
the illustrator interface. I'm going to come over
here to the Library's tab. Now, Libraries are a
way for you to sink assets across multiple
applications. If I click "Back" you can see
I have a ton of Libraries. These are client files, these are project files,
these are all kinds of stuff. The one that I just had opened was mysterious energy coalition. Now these are colors and graphics that I made
for another course. It's my logo design course, and we take a random
word generator and we come up with a brand
and then make a logo. The random words that I got were mysterious
energy coalition. That's why we came up with this. These are some colors that I
made during that project and I happen to really like
these two options. I think they might be cool
for this boat projects. I might be using these, I might not, I don't know,
we'll see what happens. But what I'm going to do
right now is I'm going to create a new rectangle
again letter M. You and I are looking
at the same thing, same workspace and I'm
just going to click and drag on my canvas to
make a rectangle. Currently by default,
this rectangle is just white with a black
stroke around it. Very basic. You can't even tell because
it's sitting on top of a white canvas. Now I'm going to do is
just click on any of these colors here to change
my foreground color. I'm going to click on the Stroke and then down here there's
this little slash. I'm going to click on
that to make no stroke, so there'll be none here. I'm going to go
ahead and save this. Then I'm going to jump
back over into Photoshop and I'm going to come to
File and then down to place. Now there's two different
place options here. Typically what I would
do is I would place a linked file and
what's cool about that is it links to
the original file. If I drop this in there, this Illustrator file and I
place it, we'll click "Okay". Now this is referring
back to that graphic. Over here, we can see this little chain link little icon which tells me
this is a placed element. If I save this, I'm going to save this as Mockup_end so I don't overwrite my other work for you guys so you
can follow along. If I jump back into Illustrator and let's
grab this shape. I'm going to copy
it, Command C and then Command F to paste it, right in front of the other one. I'm just going to change this
color a little bit maybe. It's because I'm editing the
stroke in that stroke off. Let's swap it. That way, this is our
foreground color. Now let's try and
change the color. Then I'm just going to
grab this handle maybe. I hit letter "E" to
scale this across. It's going to put a halfway. I'm going to save
it, jump back into Photoshop and it immediately
updates that artwork. Really cool and it'll
help you as you do mark-ups to be able
to do the work one time and then be able to
create multiple versions. That's one way to work. I'm going to go ahead
and delete this though. The reason why is
because I don't want this to mess up
when you guys pull this in and maybe
links break and stuff. What I'm going to do
now, I'm just going to save this again. Let's jump over to Photoshop. This time let's go to File
down to Place Embedded. An embedded image,
just like it sounds, it's actually embedded into
this document if I place it. Now, let's scale this
down a little bit. Let me move it up
here, hit "Return". Now you'll notice our icon
is a little bit different. In fact, let me just
do the other ones so you can see
them side-by-side. This one will be placed linked. Same one, place, click "Okay" and you can see this bottom one
or this one we just did, this is the linked version. I can type linked and
this one is the embedded. Notice the icon difference. The linked one has a chain link, the embedded one
looks like a piece of paper and this is
actually a smart object. What's cool about
this is even though this is embedded,
if I wanted to, I could double-click that
smart object and it's going to open this up in a way that
I can make changes to it. Now, if I make a little
bit of a change to it, maybe change the color to
something else and I save it. Notice the title is still
called Boat- wrap-21. It added a one to it and
it's got the little asterix, meaning it hasn't
been saved yet. If I save this in Illustrator, this has been saved. But if we come back to
the original Boot-wrap-2, it still looks like this guy. If we jump back into Photoshop, you can see the one
that updated was this smart object that we double-clicked into
from Photoshop and the linked one
one changed yet. Now if I change this
one a little bit, maybe we scale it this way, change the color or
something else, and save it. Jump back into Photoshop. Now that version is
the one that updated. You can still edit the artwork when you bring it in this way. The linked version is
really cool if you want to link the file so then in the future,
all you have to do, you wouldn't even have
to open up Photoshop, you can jump right into this
file and make changes and it'll update in
your design file. I'm going to go ahead
and close this guy. I'm going to go ahead and
close this one as well, jump back into
Photoshop and you can see they're updated dynamically. Now, what we're going to do, I'm going to go ahead and delete the linked one because
again it refers to the actual file and if you were to send this file off and not
include the linked image, it would break, it wouldn't
know how to find that file. That's why I like to embed
my artwork when I'm working. Now that we've brought this in, what I want to do, we already have this as a smart object. Let me take a big step back for those of you
who are brand new. Command T or Control T in Photoshop is how you get
the free transform tool. The free transform tool
is how you move and scale and skew
layers in Photoshop. Where that's at if
you go to Edit, down to Free Transform, this is what we use to
resize things in Photoshop. Not super user intuitive if this is your first
time in Photoshop, but hopefully for those
of you who are more intermediate to advanced,
obviously not a big deal. This is one of the
most used shortcuts you're going to use. I'm just going to scale this
into place, get it close. Then what I'm going to do,
I'm going to hit "Return". Over here, I'm going
to Right-click. Then come down and I'm going to convert it to a smart object. It's like Inception, it's
a dream within a dream. If I Double-click on this layer, now I'm in another
Photoshop layer. If I Double-click in here, I come back to the
vector side of this. It's nested inside of
it basically twice and the reason why I
did that is two-fold. I'm going to put this up here and I'm going to Right-click. I'm going to make a new
Smart Object via Copy. If I drag this down, I double-click in here. Let's add a font or something. I'll hit the letter "T"
to get my text tool. I will just drag this
in here. We save it. I'll jump back into Photoshop, you'll notice because it's a copy or it's a
new smart object, it updated itself, but it didn't update
the original instance. Now if I just drag
a copy this way, hold down "Option"
"Shift," and drag. Now if I change
this smart object, let's say we changed the color, save it, close it. These two are linked
together now because I just made an exact copy instead of going Right-clicking and saying New Smart Object via Copy. It's going to make a copy, but it's going to be a new instance. It's a little bit confusing. I hope that makes sense, but here's why we
want to do this. I'm going to put this up here. I'm just going to
drag a copy down. I'm going to turn this
layer off so I have an extra one up here to
always come back to. I'm trying to turn
that layer off. Now, when I come down here, I can start skewing
this into place. I'm going to hit "Command" "T". Now because it's a
nested smart object, I have this option up
here in the Options bar. If I click on this,
I can start morphing this graphic and you can see pretty quickly why
we want to do that. Because we want to
get this graphic to match the shape of our boat. I'm not going to
make it perfect. It's just a general idea. If I needed to, I
could drag the opacity down to be able to see
this a little bit better. Because of how we're
going to design this, we want our design
to be flexible. That way, there's
some wiggle room, some margin for error when
they're printing this out. There we go. Now hit
"Return" and then I'll apply that transformation and I'll
drag my opacity backup. Now if I Double-click in here and I come back again and add some texts and I save it, we jump back over here.
Two things happen. This isn't quite
the right angle, it looks coming into play
this little bit further. But if I turn this other
smart object back on, they both got updated. The reason why I
kept this copy up here is in case for
this exact reason. Let's say you're scaling
things and you screw it up, you can turn that
off or delete it, drag a copy down and try
again. I'll turn this back on. Then as I want to design
more the elements here, I can come in here and make
changes to this design. But what I'm going to do
with this smart object, I'm going to jump back
into Illustrator and I'm going to design
everything in here. The reason why is because
then when this is all done, I'll just send this one
file to the printer. That's the actual size, and this is what
they'll print from. But then for the Mockup, they'll be able to see in here what we're thinking and how
it's going to play out. I hope that made sense.
In the next video, we're going to continue
to actually jump in and create this design now.
7. How to Make the Art Mockup Look Real: In this video,
we're going to push this a little bit further. I know I said we were
about to start designing, but I want to make sure that
this graphic looks real, that the shadows look right
and that simple things like this tire are actually sitting
in front of the graphics, it looks like it's
really on this boat. What we're going to do is
first we need to mask this. Right now, the graphic goes
past the edges a little bit. If I make this a
little transparent, you can see that it's much larger than the
boat and that's okay. This is just a rough mock up. What we're going to do
though, is we're going to take this mask from down below, hold on Option and
then click and drag up above and it immediately
applies the mask to this. Now, that gets us closer, but the graphic's too big
so it still goes past, then it goes onto the boat
trailer and it doesn't sit on here quite perfectly yet. Let's go ahead and fix that, let's go ahead and
jump into here and let's turn off this layer. The best way to
work, to be honest, I'm not quite sure, let's
take a look at this, I'm just turning it
on and off to see how far past this goes. Let's just focus
on this top lip. I'm going to do the same
thing that I did in the past, I'm going to grab my pen tool and you could use other selection
tools if you wanted to. We've got the Quick Selection
Tool or the magic wand and you might have good
success to pay on what you're working with to
just click and drag, let's make sure we're on
the right layer here. Now, because this is a mask, it's still going to
see everything else in this photo behind it as
if it wasn't even there. If I turned off this mask by holding on Shift and clicking on this thumbnail and then
I try and draw here. Photoshop, depending
on the photo, might do pretty well,
but in this case, it's grabbing way more
than I need it to. If I try to select
just down below, it does a better job. I can just click and drag
and get pretty close, but I like to make things
as perfect as possible. If you're working
on a quick project, maybe you don't need
to do it that way, but I'm going to
go ahead and use my pen tool so I can tell it exactly where
I want it to go. What we're going
to do, we're just going add to this mask. If I turn this back on, the quick and fast of what we're doing here is I'm
just going to make a shape. Go to my path command, click on it, come
back to my layers, and on this layer,
I'm going to fill this new selection with black, with my foreground color. What that's going to
do is it's going to cut away and hit
option "Delete" real quick and you can see it cuts away at that excess layer
by drawing on this mask. I'm going to do that
all the way across. Let's go ahead and undo that to make sure it's exactly
where I want it. Let's turn off this layer, I'm going to start up
here at the top and we're just going
to get it close, click and drag, click and drag. The longer your handles are the smoother this curve
is going to be. I like to just go to where
both of these anchor points, this one where the arrow is in the opposite side
that's cloning it. I like to go to where both of those are touching the edge. Now, I've got these
little two things here. I'm not quite sure
what they are, I can probably just Photoshop right over the top
of them or cut right over the top or I could
include them in the graphic. But for now, we're just
going to go right over the top Command if
you get it wrong, you can just step back. What we're doing here is just
tracing out this top line. I've got some more
shapes that cut in. Honestly, I'm not
sure if this is a handle or part of the shadow, we could cut this
into the graphic, which would help make it look
a little more realistic, we'll go ahead, and
do that real quick. Command, click off
of here and then do the interior so it cuts out. I'm having a hard
time grabbing it just where I want it to be. This is an example of me being way too picky
about things. Things that nobody's
going to notice, but I can't turn it off, this is just how I work. I have a hard time, just
halfway doing things so, if you're charging by the hour, that can be difficult
for your client. Once you get really
fast with it though, if you're charging per project, as you get faster, you'll make more money, which
is always great. Here is a decision
we have to make, do we want to include this two strap in the graphic or should
we Photoshop it out? We could Photoshop it out, I think for right now, I might just keep going
over the top of it here, I think we're just going to
go over the top and then we'll clean it up here later. I don't need to trace
the whole boat, I just needed this top
edge to be perfect. We're going to come over
here and we're just going to close this circle here. Go to paths, we're going
to command click on this, come back to layers and then we're going
to click on this mask. Let's turn it back on
and we're going to fill this selection with black, so just the interior of this
is going to fill with black, which is going to cut
everything else out. Hit option "Delete"
to quickly fill with black and you can see this tow strap or that's tie down is now hidden behind it. I don't really need
to do too much Photoshopping, I'm
going to go ahead, and duplicate this layer below, so command J to jump
cut a new layer. I'll turn off the one below it, I'm going to click on the photo layer and then
I'm going to come in here and I could start
cloning this out. Let's just make a quick
selection with the lasso tool, so the letter L. I'm just going to make a little
selection right here, I'm going to hit "Control, Shift, Delete", which is my shortcut for
fill or come up here sorry, let's see, yeah, edit, fill, you just do "Shift
F5", either one works. Instead of foreground color,
we're going to choose Content Aware and click "Ok". It's going to look
around to the left and the right and sometimes
it does a better job than others of seeing what's around it and cutting it
out and filling it in. If that doesn't work, you can also hit the letter "J" and come down to
the patch tool and you can draw and then move over to where
you want to sample from. That way, it does a better
job of filling in those gaps, now that looks terrible. The other thing we could do is hit the letter "J" to
come back over here and we're looking for the
spot healing brush tool. You can come in here
and you can click on spots and it's
going to just heal those nicks and dings and straighten things
up here for us. Sometimes it works really great, sometimes you have to try a
couple of different times. Let's see, we can also come back to that patch
healing tool and force it. Now, this isn't a
super great job, I'm going pretty
fast just to show you the tools we can use. We could also use
the Stamp Tool, we got the Clone Stamp, and
we have the Pattern Stamp. We'll use the Clone Stamp Tool. The way this works, you Option click somewhere off to the side and then it's going to
use that as a point of reference to draw. You can see the circle
is where it's painting or drawing and the little cross is what it's sampling
from to get that so, I can Option click
over here and then come back over here
and draw across. Same thing down here if I
wanted to add an option, click over here and then paint in to make it blend
a little better. You could obviously spend
a very very long time doing this to get it to be exactly how you want it to look. When I first started
recording this course, I didn't intend to show you
guys this much in Photoshop, but I realized that this is a lot of the fun in mockups and vehicle wrap design
is like getting to see what it's going to look
like before it's even done. I really enjoy it and
I hope this gives you some ideas and other
ways you can use these tools and
it's a lot of fun. Again, moving on, moving
quickly, this isn't perfect. It's definitely
far from flawless, but you can see I'm just Option clicking and just
sampling to make these edges as close to
perfect as I can get them or at least good enough that at a distance you don't even
notice that that was there. I'm going to clean this up, right down here where
that little loop is. If I need to, I can make
the brush a little smaller. I'm using the
keyboard shortcuts, the left and the right
bracket keys right next to the letter P or up here, well, it's the clone stamp tool. I can come up here
to this option bar and I can change the size
of the brush here as well. Now that I've got this
pretty much done, I could spend more
time making it perfect, but it's good enough. It's way good enough
for what we're doing. I'm going to back
out, we'll save it, we'll turn our graphic back
on and it's looking better. Now we need to refine
the bottom edge. I'll turn this back off. All I'm worried about is cutting off or masking around the
wheel well and the trailer. Let's go ahead and jump in here. Go back to our paths. We're
going to do another new path. I'd like to start
just off so that way by the time it gets to here, it's a nice faded line to make it as close to
perfect as possible. Now I'm just going to trace. I can actually jump down here. Then we just want
to punch in right here and then punch in up
around the wheel well, where the fender, whatever
you want to call it. Down to here. Then
we'll punch down here. Then we just going to come
all the way out and around. I don't think we've
got the front yet, so let's do the
front real quick. We're going to jump
in. Let's see, we're going to come
down into here. Now I can right-click, make a selection, click "Okay", zoom out. Let's go back to our layers. Let's come back to this mask. Make sure you're on
the artwork mask. We want to fill this with
black on the mask layer. What we going to do
is going to cut out all of these pieces
of the trailer. It's going to cut out. It's going to fill the selection with black on the mask and cut out these pieces
of the trailer. Let's go ahead and make sure our foreground is black
and we'll click "Okay", I'm going to edit down to fill. We can choose black right from here if we wanted to
or foreground color, which is currently the front
color, which is black. We deselect at
command D. Now we can see it looks pretty darn good. I think we're in
pretty good shape. It's starting to look real
like it's really on there. Let's see, the next couple
of things we want to do is we want to add
some shadows to this. Let's turn this
back off and we see the lighting where it's
really bright white here, and so that's dark in the back. Let's add a shadow to this. To do that, I'm going to
get my pen tool again. I'm just going to loosely follow this curve down here
all the way around. It doesn't have to be
perfect and you'll see why here in a second. Right-click, make
selection, click "Okay". We're going to make a new
layer above our artwork. We'll call it shadow. Hit the "Letter D" to make
sure our foreground is black and our background is white on our color samples here. Hit "Option" to
fill it with black. There you go, there's your
shadow. That looks amazing. Just kidding. What we're going to do is between the shadow layer
and our artwork layer, we're going to hold
down the Option key and we're going to
go right between these two thumbnails
and see how the icon changes to a little down
arrow with a square. Then I'm going to hold
down the Option key or the Alt key on PC and click. Now what it's going to do,
it's going to use this layer below as a mask for
this layer above. Now what we need to do is
change our shadow from normal to multiply
in the blend mode. Let's drag the
opacity way down to, I don't know, 38 percent. Then let's maybe even
blur this a little bit. On the shadow layer,
let's come up to filter down to blur, down to Gaussian blur. You can see it softens up
this line a little bit. We could soften it
further if you wanted to. That looks good to me. That looks pretty great. Now
let's add another layer. Let's drag it down
here below this one, and let's call it wheel shadow. I'm going to, hit the "Letter B" to
get my brush tool. I'm just going to use, this is a 50 pixel super soft brush, all the way down to zero. I've got black selected and I'm just going to paint
along this wheel well, and a little bit
along the bottom. A little bit up here as well. Actually I'm going
to make this brush bigger by hitting the
right bracket key. I'm going to barely
kiss into that a little bit. I said it. Just to add a little bit of a shadow
along the bottom. We're going to change this
blend mode from normal down to multiply and then we're going to scrub the opacity down
a little bit as well. Now that looks real cool, that looks very real to me. We're going to grab
these two shadow layers, we're going to turn
them off and turn off the artwork layer just
to zoom in and see, okay, we could add a little
bit of a shadow here. Let's see if we
missed anything else. I think this is going
to be good enough. Let's go ahead and turn
these layers back on. On this wheel shadow layer,
I'm going to come up here, make my brush much smaller and just paint in there as well. Cool. That's looking real good. I'm really happy with
how this is turning out. It makes it look very realistic. Now I'm overdoing
it just because it's so much fun to
paint in Photoshop. That looks cool. That's
starting to look like a real graphic on this boat. I'm going to go ahead
and save this mock-up and now, yes, we can finally dive in
and start designing the actual artwork
for this boat ramp. If you wanted to, I'm not
going to do right now, but we could push this
even further and do the exact same
steps on the truck. Now in the next lesson,
I'm going to go ahead and start designing this 80's retro looking
vehicle rap for the boat.
8. Design the Vector Graphics: Let's jump over into Finder
and into Design Files. I see Boat rap 2, which is where we left off
in the Illustrator file. I'm going to go ahead
and hit Command D. To duplicate that, I'm going to hit the Return key, hit the right arrow key, delete this, call it number 3, and then hit Return again. That's how I do things. If you guys haven't
figured out by now, I use shortcuts for literally absolutely
everything because it makes me so much faster with
everything that I do. It also helps me stay focused
on the creativity part of it without getting sucked into the actual computer
and what it's doing. I encourage you guys
as you continue, just to learn as much as
you can to dive in and memorize those
shortcuts because it'll make you such a better
designer in the long run. Now that I've got
this file duplicated, I'm going to hit Command
O to open that up. Now I've got this clone
where we can actually start designing our artwork. To be honest, I have no
idea what I'm going to do. I really liked how
simple, look at this. It's just such a simple graphic. This is me screwing around. When it gets applied
to the boat, it actually looks really cool. This is nothing like what he wants this to look like though. Let's go ahead and just see what we can do with
this to make it cooler. I'm going to start by
grabbing our inspiration. Let's go to our Ideas folder. I'm going to click on this photo he texted me from his iPhone. I just drop it in here and I'll put it right on my
Canvas just as inspiration. One thing I want
to point out, when I brought this
image in like this, notice it's got this blue X. What that means is this asset is actually
still linked to this photo. If you were to open this file and you
didn't have this photo, you would see a big gray box
and the link will be broken. What I'm going to do for
you, one of two things. You can either provide all of the assets when you share
something with somebody. You go to File and come
down to Package which will copy and package
everything when you share files or if you'd just wanted to be inside
this one Illustrator file, just come up here and click
"Embed" in the Options bar when you have it selected
or go to Window. Come all the way down to links. Right in here, we can
click on this drop-down, we go to Embed Images. Now it changes from a chain
link that goes away and we can see this image is just
embedded into this file. Just some I want to
share with you as we go through to pay attention
to as you bring in, maybe graphics for Inspiration. Let's go ahead. Let's just guys, I don't even know what
I'm going to do here. Let's analyze this a little bit further. What else I want to do? I'm going to bring in
that picture of the, let's see, where did he put
that? I think it's in here. The picture of his seat so
I can match the colors. I'm going to click up here on
"Embed" so that photo stays embedded with this
file. I'll save it. Okay, now, let's go ahead and click on
this blue rectangle. I'm going to hit the letter
I for eyedropper tool. I'm just going to sample
directly from this seat. Then let's draw, let's see, we've got three big shapes here. Let me just copy this Command C, command F to paste
it right in place, letter E to get my
free transform tool. I can just skew this
from here to here. Gets a letter I for
my eyedropper tool, I'm going to come
in here and sample the yellowish orange. Copy it. Command F. Let's make this, let's see, we'll go yellow, we'll go to orange. Sample from here. I want it to be more
orange than that. Let's see, actually,
oh, interesting. It's just an optical illusion. This yellow is the same
all the way through, but as the stripes
get wider with red, it makes it look
orange at a distance. Interesting. Well, good to know. The other thing I
could do, It's not quite exactly what I want. I could force it by just coming into the
color samples here, getting it closer to a color that I think I want it to be. I'll try that. Then last, this one will be red. Let's see. This is me just
trying to figure out my flow and what I
want to do for this. I encourage you if you want to play this back and
slow speed or rewind it. To try and figure out
exactly how I'm working, I encourage you to do that. I hit the letter E there
and then I clicked right. I had all three of
these selected. The letter E. Then I can skew
them all at the same time. Let's see which side of
the boat is going to go. I don't know. We'll
figure it out. We might have to flip it. All that to say, this is a real life project that I'm going to
share with somebody. I'm trying to let you
look over my shoulder. Because it's creative,
I'm having a hard time talking and being creative
at the same time, so I apologize in advance
for that, but again, don't forget you can rewind
fast forward play it faster, play it slower, whatever it takes to help you guys
get this figured out. I'm just trying to figure
out what I think might look cool and give him the
look he's going for. Let's see, let's scale my stroke up a little
bit on this guy. Quite a bit actually. Let's not add a stroke.
I hit the backslash, which is my shortcut to
turn that stroke off. Command Shift G. Bump
these over a little bit. Let's go to our Align
window, down to Align. We are going to distribute
spacing so it's equal. Now I'm going to jump
ahead just a little bit. I'll save these. I'll jump over into Photoshop.
We'll come over here. I'm going to double-click on this smart object.
I'll go to File. Turn to Place Embedded. Grab this boat wrap, place it, click "OK". You'll notice it just brought
over the actual art board, not this stuff that I have
hanging off the Canvas here. Let's shoot back
over into Photoshop. Maybe bring this
text up in front of it just because I like
what it does for it. I'll save it. Close it. Now it updates
that boat as well. Looking good. I
don't love this yet, but I like the idea and I'm
glad that we've got this mock-up so we can quickly see
if we like the direction. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to compose my
thoughts here a little bit. Then in the next video,
we're going to continue to push this design further.
9. Building Shapes: Part of the inspiration
he wants me to include is like this '80s
sunset graphics. As we look through this, there's a lot of repeating elements that become popular
with this style. The first is we've got the sun as basically just a circle. Then we have these
lines through, they start thick and
then go thinner and thinner creating a
gradient almost. We see a lot of
oranges and yellows, some pinks, some purples, some violet stuff
going on there. Then we also have
like on this guy, we've got the sun dipping down behind a mountain
range landscape. I'm seeing a lot of that as
the trend and then of course, you've got these gridded like 3D grid-looking
things in front of it too. This is super stereotypical. But we could try this, we could try working in some of these different elements
and see what happens. What I'm going to
do is I'm going to open up this graphic here. I've got it already open. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to copy the image, jump back into Illustrator
and paste this in there. That's inspiration and
we're going to learn, I'm going to show
how to make the sun graphic just like this
here in a second. I'll jump back over
here, and let's just look at any of
these other ideas, see if any of these
give us inspiration. I like how this is cropped
with these triangles. We'll copy that, we
paste it in here. Then let's go back and just see if there's anything else in
here that might be inspiring. I like the color of
it, so we'll copy it. Copy image, throw it in here. This is a low-res copy. It's okay though, I
don't really care. I just want it to be in there as inspiration and
something to try and keep in front of me
while I'm designing this. Everything else looks
pretty much the same to me, maybe palm trees or whatever. But let's learn how to make
this shape from scratch. To begin, what we're going
to do is hit the letter L. To get my Ellipse Tool. You can see it over
here on the side. It's real simple, click and
drag to draw your shape. If I hold down the
shift key while I draw, it's going to make
it a perfect circle. I'm going to go ahead
and change this to a regular white shape just so we can start
from the very beginning. Now I need to make
these rectangles that cut into this a little bit. What we're going to do,
match letter M to get my rectangle tool
makes no sense. I don't know why
they don't call it R, but that's alright. Anyway, we're going
to click and draw a simple line shape here. Now we're going to do with
this rectangle also hold down the option key and
then click and drag, and then hold down
shift, so that way instead of it being able
to move left and right, it stays perfectly in line
with the shape below it. To do this, make sure you've got your selection tool selected
up here before you start. Then what we're going to
do is with it selected, we're just going to make
this rectangle skinnier. We're going to select
both of these by clicking off and then dragging
around both of them. Then over here in our toolbar, you should see this Blend tool. Now if you don't see it, you can come down here and click on these little three dots and you can see there are a ton of tools that you can add to your toolbar
in Illustrator. Also keep in mind that I'm using the Essentials
Classic workspace. For me, this tool
shows up right here. I'm going to click on the Blend tool and what
the Blend tool does, it lets you morph shapes and colors between
two or more objects, which is super cool.
I'll click on that. I'm going to click
on these guys. Click once and then
click to the other. Now, something weird happened. It's blending from
left to right. Let's do that again. We'll try and click
in-between. There we go. Now what I'm going to
do is I'm going to hit the return key without
touching anything else. I still have the
Blend tool selected. You can see we've got the two shapes highlighted
in this line in-between. I hit the return key, and right now what it's doing, the spacing is set
up for smooth color. You can also change the
orientation as well, which isn't going to do
anything for us right now. I'm going to change
this from smooth color to specified steps. Let's make it 10 steps and
just see how this looks. I will click "Okay," and
it's not quite enough. But what I can do is grab this
top layer and move it up. You can see that it gives me an equal spacing
between each one of these. Now to get that selection,
I hit the letter A to get my direct
selection tool. That lets me grab
specific anchor points. I'm going to click off
to the side all the way around and highlight
this top shape. Then I'm just going to drag
it up holding the shift key. Now, depending on the
size of your cutouts, you might need to play
with the sizing a little bit to get it how
you want it to look. We'll get it close. Maybe
scales up a little bit. Then I'm going to Shift
click both of these layers. Then click one more
time on the circle and you see it gives a
thicker blue line. That's telling me when I go
to use my align shortcuts up here and they show up because I've got the
selection tool selected. Everything is going to align to whatever key object I have. By clicking one of these, that because my key object, and now I can align it to
the bottom and centered. Now what I want to do is click
on these blended shapes, and technically
Illustrator just sees them as these two shapes and it's applying this effect
between them. They're not actual shapes. They can't select these guys in-between, it's just an effect. What we want to do is
with this selected, we're going to go
up here to object, go down to expand, go ahead and leave object
and fill selected and click. "Okay." Now each one of these
becomes a separate shape. You could, if you
wanted to go in and individually modify each shape. But what we're going to do
is select all of these, Shift-click our circle again, then we're going
to go to Window, we're going to come
down to Pathfinder, I want to click up here
under shape modes, we want to minus the front. Now it cuts out those front
shapes out of the sun. So now we've got this effect. It looks pretty cool. That's how I did it. Now what
we want to do is we want to apply a gradient to match
what we've got going on here. We see we go from a yellow
or orange down to a pink. Same thing over here. Honestly, I'm not sure which
color I want to go with, but we're going to explore
this a little bit further. I'm going to select the sun. Then over on the
right-hand side we see this little gradient toolbox.
I'm going to click on that. Then if you don't
see that again under Window down to gradient, I'm just going to click
right on this tile and it will probably be a
different color for you. This is leftover from another
project I was working on, but by applying this
gradient to each shape, now I can hit the
letter G to get my gradient tool and I could modify each shapes
gradient individually. Or I can click off
to the side and apply to all the shapes at the same time, which
is pretty cool. That gets me pretty
close to the design. Now because I was playing around these two gradients in
the middle are different. But it's really easy
if I want to fix this, we're going to come back
to the gradient tool. I'm going to click on
this linear gradient. This time what I want
to do is the top part. We're going to change this color to this yellowish-orange color. Then I'm going to hold down
the option key and click on this to add another color stop
and with this color stops, select it, I'll grab my
Eyedropper tool and I'm going to try to click in-between
here and get that pink color. Then we're going to click
on the last color stop. Grab my Eyedropper tool. I didn't get this darker,
richer, pink color, add the letter G to
get my gradient tool and then we're going to
click and drag down. Maybe start just a
little bit inside. Now, that looks pretty close to the sunset that
we're looking at here. Hopefully, that makes sense to you and you are able
to follow along. Keep in mind, this is just me trying to replicate a style, but you guys can deviate and do whatever
you want if you're following along and
you're trying to create a graphic for this boat wrap, feel free to go nuts
with it and have fun. In the next video, we're
going to push this effect a little bit further and
continued to refine our design.
10. Design Continued: As I look at all of these
pieces coming together, I can tell right away, I'm going to need
to create a couple of different versions for this. I'm going to have a
hard time blending this style and this
style together. It's not impossible, but I think what's going to
end up happening here is I'm going to create two or
three different versions. I call them comps or
comprehensive looks. You can call them different
rounds of revisions or different mark ups or
whatever you want. But the point is,
I'm going to give the client a few
different ideas, and then they can
choose what they like. Sometimes they might
even do what we call frankensteining
and say, "Hey, I like this version and I like this version and I want you
to mash them together." [LAUGHTER] That happens
sometimes with logo design and not always the best because then you get a haphazard result. But if you do your job right, by giving them a
couple of choices, it'll help involve your client with part of the design process while also helping you
arrive at the best solution. That's what we're going
to do as I look at this. I want to break this up into two different designs. Here's
what we're going to do. I'm going to hit
"Command Shift S", save it on my computer. I'm going to call
this Boat-Wrap, let's call it V1, which might be confusing. Let's see. Here's the deal. As
I'm recording this, I realized that by giving you the lesson files
for Boat-Wrap 1, 2, and 3 to help you follow along, typically when I would
name this for my clients, I'd name it something
like Boat-Wrap_V1 or R1. R1 meaning Round 1,
the first round, or V1 meaning the first version. Whatever makes sense in
your brain, you guys. It doesn't really matter. It's just again, trying to lift the
curtain so you guys can see behind the scenes on how I do this and how
I think about it. Hopefully, this helps
you and hopefully, it gives you an even
better idea than this. But the point is I don't want to confuse you for the course. What we're going
to do is we've got these boot wrap files
for the exercise files. But in this case, I'm trying to design different
versions for the client. This will be Boat-Wrap_V1. We'll click "Save", and
we'll click "Okay". What I'm hoping to
do here is create multiple versions
for the client. Now, you can create
multiple files or you can create multiple artboards
inside of Illustrator. Because this file is gigantic, remember it's like
how many feet? It was like 18
feet or something. It's huge, so I don't have a lot of extra room on
my canvas to work. Typically what I would
do I hit "Shift O", which is my art
board tool shortcut, and then hold down Option
and drag down a copy. I've got two
identical artboards. I'd work inside the same file for everything's have
multiple versions right inside of here, which is handy to pick and pull pieces from
different places. I probably can move this
way and stay like this, but I'm going to undo that. I'm just going to make
this my Version 1 comp and then I'm going to
hit "Command Shift S". I'm going to save
this on my computer. I will call it V2. The reason why I'm doing this is trying to keep
things clean and also because this file is so big and replacing it
inside of Photoshop. I'm going to go ahead and let these files be two
different things. Let's go back into our Finder. Let's go back to
our design files. We have Version 1 and Version 2. Version 2 is already open, so let's go ahead
and open Version 1. Now I've got these
two different files that are currently identical, but we can start
working through. What I'm going to
do is I'm going to delete these three rectangles. I'm going to delete these shorts and I'm going to let Version 1 be this tropical
sunset looking thing. We'll hit "Save", so
that starts there. Then Version 2, we're
going to do the opposite. We're going to delete all
of the sunset stuff and let this be the direction we
started to begin with. From here, what I can
do is continue to flesh out these designs and come
up with multiple options. I feel that for me when I take the pressure off
of having to have one really great design, it makes it easier
to have one suck and one look terrible
and that be okay. It doesn't matter because
maybe this one will be better and it lets me work
through things faster. With that in mind, I'm going to flesh out this design further, and then we'll call it good. I've got these three stripes. If we look at this
and analyze this, we've got these thin
stripes that get thicker and then
change color up here. This is the same
blend mode style that we have from
that sunset thing. I'm going to replicate that. I'm going to grab
some shapes here. Just going to fill
it with this red. I'm going t hold-down Option, click and drag and then
let go and then hit "Command D" a bunch of times
to step and repeat that. That's one way to work.
Works pretty good. Then a bunch of shapes, these all look about the
same size and then they get to about twice as thick. What we're going to
do is right here, I'm going to drag a copy, scale this to be the exact same size Command X to cut it, delete this guy Command F
to paste it right in front. We'll do the same thing,
we'll click and drag, and then step and repeat
a bunch of times. This is working manually. We could have done the
blend mode like we learned in the last video
where you draw one shape, go to the end, and then do a specified number
of steps in between. But this is going to
work just fine for me. I'll highlight all
of these Command G to group them. I'll
bring them up here. We're going to skew
these to match this angle of the shapes below. I'm using the letter E, which is the free transform tool and I'm just going to
eyeball it, get it close. [NOISE] That angle looks
really close to me. Now what we can do is, I don't know, keep
pushing this further. Let's just see what
happens, see what we get. [NOISE] Now I've just made
some random shapes. I'm going to grab this
background and hit "Command 2," which will lock it down
as it seems going to object down here to lock, or we can unlock it. But all I want to do is make sure that if I
accidentally click on it, let's go ahead and
lock the selection. Now I can grab everything
else except for that background layer and
I'm going to flip this. I'm going to hit the letter
"O" to get my Reflect tool. Then I can click and
drag and it's going to reflect this design. Now the reason why I want to
reflect it is because as I look at it now on the
side of the boat, I think we're going
to want it to be this direction instead. We'll do that. Grab these, drag it up to
the front, and let's see. I first had this
over here just to make this shape thicker. Honestly, this is all
subjective design preference. I'm letting you guys look
over my shoulder just to see that sometimes it comes easily and sometimes you have to really
work at it to get it to look like you want
it to and that's okay. It's part of the process. Let's go ahead and save this. Let's jump over into our mark up here and I'm going to
double-click in here. We're going to go ahead
and delete this text , delete these layers. I'm going to go to File, place Embedded and we're on Version
1 or Version 2 right now. We happen to be on Version 2. That's all right. I'm going
to jump over into here. We're going to place
it, click "Okay", save it, and that actually
look pretty cool. What I'm going to
do now is I'm going to keep designing this and then I'll show you what I end up with here
in the next video.
11. Design Alternate Looks: Here's where I ended up
after the last video. I decided just to stop here
because it follows pretty closely what we're seeing
here in these board shorts and this end matches
the seat cover, so I feel good about
this as a look. It's really basic,
but it's something, it's a version to consider. what we're going to do now is I'm going to jump
back over to version 1 and we're going to push this a little bit further and see what we can come up with. Then what I'm going
to do is actually pause all the recording for a minute and I'm
going to take a break because I've been at
this for quite awhile. Typically when I create
something for a client, I'll spend about an
hour to two hours tops, and then I'll take a break. I'll go do something else, whether it's do the
dishes or clean the house or clean my office
or go play ping pong. We've got a ping-pong
table here in the office, or I'll just do
something else to get my mind off of the project. That way in the back end, my mind can still be
thinking about it, but not have it
right in front of me and that's where some of my most creative ideas come from. Let's go ahead and get
this version 1 pushed a little bit further and
just see what happens. Then we're going to step
back and take a break. I'm going to go ahead and
sample the color from the seat, selecting the rectangle,
getting my eye dropper tool, and just selecting
that real quick. Then let's go and grab the sun that we
started playing with. I'm going to drag a copy down. I'm going to rotate it, scale it up, and we'll
see what happens here. I don't know, this might
not be the right approach, but we're going to
see what happens. The cool thing is once
we get a design going, we'll be able to mock
it up really quickly to see if we like how it
actually looks on the boat. Now I want to do is
I'm going to grab this rectangle
shape and copy it, and hit "Command F" to
paste it in front and then "Command Shift" in
the right bracket to bring it all the
way to the front. If I undo that, I can
come down to object, go down to a range, and bring to front. Shift Command and
right bracket key, that's where I got
that shortcut. We'll bring that all
the way to the front. Shift-click our
circle, right click, and then come down and
make clipping mask. Now that shape doesn't go past my canvas so I see clearly
what it's doing here. Now let's go ahead and add
some mountains to this. I'm going to do is, let's grab the pen tool
or maybe the pencil tool. With the pencil tool I can
draw a rough shape like this. With the pencil tool selected,
I'm going to hit "Return'. Now you can see I've got
some Tool options here. I can make it really accurate, so it'd be more jagged as I draw or I can have it
smooth things out. I want to put it right
right the middle and you see how that looks. Let's go ahead and
we'll keep it selected. What else can we do here?
Also looks pretty good to me. I'm going to go ahead
and click "Okay". Then we're going to change
this from a fill to a stroke. For now, I'm going to
make this white just so it's really easy to
see what's going on here. Let's do a mountain-range
looking graphic here. We're just going to roughly
cut or draw these shapes out. Let's see how we look here.
Let's close this Shift X, which is going to swap
my fill and stroke. Right here, that's the
shortcut for that. Now we have a fill and
it looks pretty good. It's not great though. I don't like some
of these shapes. Let's try this again. Let's
do a little more jagged. I'm going to delete that, get my pencil tool hit 'Return". This time I want to
be really accurate. Let's see if we make
this more jagged. Now let's draw again. That looks better. Let's click on the Fill, double-click. Let's actually make this dark, will make it black. It's more like a silhouette.
Now going do the same thing. We're going to grab
this rectangle Command C to copy,
paste it in front, shift-click this layer
and you could also, instead of right-clicking
and making a clipping mask, just hit "Command 7" which is the shortcut
for that as well. That's starting to
look pretty cool. I'm going to leave that there. What else can we
do to this thing? We've got some, I think the son
probably needs to be more centered and not so big. But what I'm going to do instead is make this more like
a decorative element. I'm going to make it huge. It goes all the way
off the canvas. There we go. Hit "Return". Actually, that's Photoshop
I'm thinking of now and that adds some
cool elements to it. Let's go ahead and let's
see what can I do to this? Bring this sun down and
make sure you bring a copy. Scale it down. We'll bring it up
towards the front. Bringing those mountains
back in front. This pink needs to change. Let's double-click in here. Let's grab this shape
and let's change this color. That's better. We're headed in a direction. I don't know if it's
the right direction, but we're definitely seeing
some progress, which is cool. I don't know whether
I want this to be big or if I want the whole
thing to fit on the side. Now keep in mind, this is going to be about
two feet tall, where this is on this
part of the boat. It's going to look pretty
large and it's going to be, obviously pretty
visible. Let's try that. What I'm going to do now
is go ahead and stop this video and maybe go
play some ping pong. Maybe go, I don't know,
go figure something out. I'm going to let my brain
think on this for a minute. I think we've made
great progress. We're going to pause this
video and then the next one, we'll come back and push
it a little bit further.
12. Project Update From Real Client Feedback: In this video, I'm going to review where we're
at with the design. Since the last video, I was able to connect
with my friend and take a look at the design
and get some feedback. This is the final design. This is the name of the
boat, Fishful Thinking. Then we have a fish
pattern going on here, and then the original
stripes that we pulled out from our inspiration
from the board shorts. In this video, what I
want you do is walk you through how we got
here and just some considerations to fill in the gap between
what you saw last in the last video and
where we're at now. What happened was, this pattern was actually discovered by an artist that he found that
he really likes. His name is Derek DeYoung. We found this company, so it's DeYoung Vinyl Wraps. They've licensed his artwork, so they've made vinyl wraps that you
can put on like this, like a mailbox, or a car, or pretty much
anything you want. We found this specific pattern
and he really liked it. What we ended up doing was
contacting this company, SCS Wraps because they've got a license agreement
with the artist. We said, hey, would
it be possible to use this pattern but to do
our own spin with it? What we did here
where we added the stripes and things like that. We emailed them, had
to wait for a day as they got back to
us and approved it. Now here's the problem though. This image that we're using, this JPEG that's just
embedded into the design, is a low-res screenshot that
I took from the website. This is not going to
print well at all. What we're going to do in the next couple of
videos is we're going to package this artwork up so the printers can use it. What we'll do is give them
all of the editable files. They'll be able to go in and then they'll drop in the
artwork that they already have the high-res imagery and then they'll produce
the boat wrap from there. What we're going to do
now moving forward is, I'm going to show
you how I package these files and interface
with the printers in a way that will help them get
all of the pieces they need to make this real. Let's go ahead and
dive in, and we're going to do that
in the next video.
13. How to Quickly Send Comps to Clients: In this video, I'm
just going to show you how once I have a design done, how I sent it to my client, or in this case my friend, and then how we pass it on to
the printer to be produced and how that in-between process before we send
them the final artwork. Just to make sure
that we're all on the same page and it all works out good. Here's what
I've got going on. Here is an iMessage window on the right with him and he just dropped in a couple
of photos of things. This was earlier on some some he had and give me some feedback. Then I apparently use
Siri to text because I have a couple of cops that
I've been working on them. I meant to say comps,
like comprehensive looks. Then I said he's cool though. What I meant to say was,
these are cool though. I don't know what
Siri was thinking. Anyway, you can see
it's very informal, just passing the
ideas back and forth. Then as I scroll down, you can see that I dropped these screenshots right
into the Chat window. Let me show you how I do that. What I would do here is I have this graphic here
that we wanted to show the look of how the wrap is before
it's on the vehicle. I hit ''Command", "Shift'', and then "Number 4" and I
just take a quick screenshot. Now before I let go the
mouse with the space bar, I can move this window around exactly where
I want it to be. Then before I let
go of the mouse, I'll hold down the
Control key and it takes a picture and copies
to my clipboard. I'd come over here into
the Messages window. I'd click, hit "Command V" and it pastes
it right in there. Then I'd hit "Return"
and it will send it. I'm not going to
set it now because it's going to
confuse them because he doesn't know that I'm
working on this right now. I'm going to jump back over
into this other view as well. You can see that I've
updated the mark up to reflect the new artworks. You can see how this actually
looks on the vehicle. It's same thing, Command
Shift 4, click and drag. Now you might be
wondering, well, why don't you just export it? Well, I could do that. I could come up here
and go to File, down to Export, Export As or I could quickly export as a PNG.
All of these work. Now if I did it this way, it would export
the entire square, this extra dead space
we have above it. That's fine. Could
totally do it. Will come back down
to Export, Export As. Then I could choose
whether I want to send it as a PNG or JPEG. I can control the quality
to get the size just right. This is 447 kilobytes,
so it's not that big. I could email this or send
it in a texts, no problem. Click ''Export'' and then
save it wherever you want. But for me, I just like
I work as fast as I can. Command Shift 4, space
bar, click and drag, hold down "Control",
jump over into my messages and then hit
''Command V'' to paste it. That's how I send my comps. Very informal. This works well for when
you're working with people you've either built
a relationship with or have done
other projects with. If you're working with
a professional client, you might want to
go with obviously the extra step and
name the file, comp 1 or version 1 or
whatever and then email it. But for me, because of a lot of the projects I work
on with our team, we're using Slack, we're using Microsoft Teams or
we're using messages just to quickly bounce
ideas back and forth. So that's how I
do it. From there he copied those and he sent an email to the printer to request permission
to use the artwork. That's my quick process for quickly sharing
ideas with my clients. Now the next thing
we're going to do in the next video is show you because we have approval
now on this process, I need to package
these art files and send them to the printer. We're going to do that
in the next video.
14. Export Final Press-Ready Files: In this video, we are
going to actually package the final files and I'll
walk you through my process. We should be good
to go after this. First things first, we've
got our mock-up here. I'm going to go ahead
and save a copy of this Command Shift
S and I'm going to call this wrap final. Actually, I'm going to
leave the mock-up in there. Let's go ahead and
we're going to make a new file in here. I'm going to call it finals. Save this. Click, "Okay". Everything in here is
looking pretty good. We've got our smart object or shadows,
everything like this. I'm going to go
ahead and peel off this layers window just so I can make it larger and see
everything at the same time. I'm going to go ahead
and delete this layer. I'm just going to clean
things up a little bit. Let's go ahead and crop this. I'll put this back over
here for now, I suppose. Let's go and crop this with
letter C to get my crop tool. I'm going to go to original
ratio, clear all of that. I'm just trying to make this
fit a little bit better. That's good enough.
I'll hit "Return". We just cropped it down, Command S to save it and
that is our final mock-up. Then I'm going to
go and export this. I showed you in the
last video how I quickly send comps to clients. But I'm going to go ahead
and click "Export". We're going to export
a quick JPEG of this just so it's right
here in our folder. That way, if somebody
does not Photoshop, they can still see
what the design is. I'm going to make
this high-quality. We'll click "Export". Then we're going to stick this right here in our finals folder. Click "Save". We're done there. Now, what we need to do
is actually go through in our illustrator file and
we need to finish this up. I've got the font here. This is called
Adhesive Nr period. I had to look this
up. Apparently, it's an abbreviation for near. Anyway, this Adhesive Nr
Seven regular font that I found on Adobe on
Typekit website. In theory, I don't need to
worry about them being able to pull this font because they should have access
to license a font. But here's a couple of
things we're going to do. This is the final. What I'm going to do
is hit "Command Shift S" and we're going to
save this on my computer. We're going to our
finals folder. I'm going to call this
boat wrap, final. Click, "Save", and click "Okay". Now, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to come in here and hit "Command Shift O", the same as coming up here to type and then create outlines. What that does is it
breaks apart the font and turns it into a shape
which is really cool. We didn't really get into
this in this course. But you can actually
now manipulate all of these anchor points and create
some pretty custom stuff. That's how I make my
logos when I start with a font and then create
custom shapes from that. Really cool shortcut but
what we want to do with that now is we're going to hit
"Command Shift S" again. We're going to save
to my computer. Here we go final and we're
going to call it outlined. It's safe, or outlines. Either way it
works, but that way we have the option to go back to the editable version
if we had to update spelling or
change the title. But then we also
have this version where if they don't
have that font, they're still going
to be able to open this and see the artwork.
I'll go ahead and close that. Let's jump back here
again to our finals. Let's open up the one
that still has the font. Now from here, something we need to pay
attention to is something I already did offline. When I first pasted in or
dropped in this graphic, it had a blue line between here, it looks like an X that
goes from corner to corner same stroke
is this blue here. What that tells you is it's an embedded image and in fact, it still looks like
it's embedded. If I look up here
in the Options bar, I see brown flank_orange.jpeg and I can click the
unembed button. If I click on that, it's
going to try and re-link to the original full
image that I had here. I could do that, but
then if they open this file up and I don't
send all the linked assets, this will break and they won't
be able to see that image. I embedded these images already. But another thing
you can do that's a newer and a couple of
versions ago in Illustrator, is you can use the package feature to have it automatically package
everything you need. We're going to do that next.
Let's come up here to file. This time we're going to
come down to Package. Click on this. We better save it first. Don't
click to save. Now it's going to let me
package these assets. Let me go ahead and select
where it's going to be saved. Let's go into our finals folder. We'll put it in here
and we'll choose that one and folder name
boat wrap final folder. Great. What it's going to do is it's going
to copy the link. Like this image here that was
linked into this document, it's going to collect links
in a separate folder. It's going to re-link
the document. When I send it, everything
comes together. It's going to copy all the fonts and it's going to
create a report. Let's go and click
the "Package button". It already did it.
Let's go ahead and show the package and here's
the folder it made. Here's the illustrator file. Had I linked these graphics, it would have made a new
folder in here with the links and link them directly
within the project. But because I embedded them, it just shows this
illustrator file. Then we have this
report text files. If I double-click
to open this up, you're going to see it shows the document with the name
of it, the color mode. All of the details
here, color profile, whether it's in the ruler units right now used feet
fit in inches. The dimensions like all of the details that the
printer is going to need. Now, one thing
that's interesting, if I scroll down, there's
no missing fonts, but it does use a protected
font that it didn't package because this font
is an Adobe font, it didn't bother packaging it because you can just sync
it with the Typekit. In fact, let's take a
look at that real quick. If I jump over here into
Typekit, fonts.adobe.com, and I searched for that font Adhesive Nr Seven
and I click on that, you can see that I have
is font activated. If I scroll down, you
can see it in use. The printers will be able
to do the same thing with their Typekit account. They'll just sync
the font and if they don't have it, then I'll
be able to update it. That's why it didn't package
in this final folder. In theory, all I need to do is I could click on this folder. I could right-click. I'm going to come down to
compress the boat wrap folder. Now I've got this zipped file that's only six megabytes and that's a reminder why we're using Illustrator and Photoshop
for something like this. Because if we designed a
Photoshop graphic that big, it would be multiple gigs and your computer
would probably crash. Now, there are ways around it, that's beyond the
scope of this class. But basically, you can call
your printer and talk about what DPI they need, how many dots per inch. Typically with print, it's 300, but with large-scale graphics, you can make it like 72. Because you're viewing it
from a further distance back, the file is smaller. Again beyond the
scope of this class, just something to be aware of. Now, what we're going
to do is you may have noticed I made
these other files, the outlined in
the non outlined. What I could do is drag and drop this outlined
into this folder. Let's go ahead and delete this compressed one and
we'll do it again. Then that way when
they open this, they have options
to the outlined into the non outlined version. You know what? They're
going to be able and their production team
to do this themselves. But I was thinking about
pulling out the text as a separate file
and sending them just these graphics so
that way they could place this wherever it
made the most sense. But as I think about it now, I think this has everything
they need to be successful. They'll be able to
jump in here and drop in that updated
graphics like this. It's the bottom layer and then I've just
got a mask above it, this little angular shape that's cropping it.
That's it, guys. That's everything
I needed to do to make this printable for them. Jumping back over here
into my finder window, we added that outlined version. I'm going to right-click again and we're going
to compress this. Now, all I have to do is
one of a couple of things. If this was a large file, I could throw this into
my Dropbox and then share a link or this is
only on this case, it jumped up a little
bit to 13 megs, but I can still
email this so I can just attach it to an
email, no problem. I'm going to go
ahead and do that. I'm going to send
it to the printers and then they're going to update the graphic and then send our comp back to
us for approval. That's pretty much it, guys.
15. Export Final Press-Ready Files Part 2: One more thing I want
to show you that I forgot to include in
the last video is, I went ahead and added three more resources
for the printer. The first as I went
ahead and grab the exact image that I had
copied from the website, I added a text file, so I made a new text document. You can use Notepad or TextEdit depending on if you're
on a Mac or PC. I just called that
DeYoung Source. DeYoung is the artist, his
name is Derek DeYoung, where I found this graphic, here's the exact link
of where we got it, just to make sure we're
all on the same page. Again, make sure we have the
right licensing in place, that's again, why I don't
have the high res version. This company we're going to be using, super cool company. Let's jump over to their
website here, SCS wraps. They've got some really
really cool stuff. You can see that, let's see, that's the wrong
window, amazing wraps. But we went through and they are the only people that are
licensed to reuse his artwork. I don't have the
actual high res file. That's why we're
working this way, which is not a
usual way to work. But because we're using
somebody else's artwork, I want to make sure that we're giving credit where
credit is due and doing everything that
we need to be licensed. That's why I included
this source text. Then the last thing I
included is this image here that I got from
my friend who took exact measurements of his
boat just to make sure that it's all
exactly cut to size. The other cool thing
is this company actually makes boat ramps. This is the exact style
of boat that he has. They're going to
use their template, they've already used with somebody's artworks
and they're going to overlay the designs that
I did in the Illustrator. I hope that makes
sense, but that's the final piece
to get this thing over the finish line here. Because I added those folders, I have to recompress
this file again, just so that's all included, so we'll compress it. Then now I can actually email them this
final zipped folder.
16. Class Project Overview: For our class project, here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick a vehicle, it could be your vehicle, it could be a friend's vehicle, you can even find a photo
of something that's online, could be your dream
car, whatever you want. Find a vehicle,
get a photo of it, and then we're going to cut
it out in Photoshop and then design a graphic to go on
to design a vehicle wrap. What I want you to do is
once you get that cut out, you get the artwork designed, post it in the project
section of this course. I can't wait to see what
you guys come up with.
17. Next Steps: Thank you so much for
taking this course. I hope you enjoyed it, I hope that you learned a
lot of valuable information. More importantly, I hope
that you followed along and created your
own vehicle mockup, your own vinyl wrap decal, and posted it in the
project section. If you have not done that yet, please do, I can't wait to see what do you
guys come up with. Then if you've already
done all that, you're through the
course, again, thank you so much for your
time and for joining me. For next steps, there's a
few things you could do. I have a ton of more
courses here on Skillshare and I also have a bunch of free tutorials
you can find online, either at
Youtube.com/DougMitchell, or my website at
DougMitchell.com, tons of freebies and great
resources, and again, tons of other courses
if you're looking to further your career
as a graphic designer. Again, thanks so much
for joining me and I hope you have an awesome day.
Derrick Mitchell, Designer | Teacher | Artist | Innovator
