Designing a Retro Postcard in Affinity Designer on iPad

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to this course on creating a retro postcard using a famous designer on the iPad. My name is Ben Nielsen and I'm a media design educator and I'm excited to go through this course with you. Retro postcard design is one of my favorite kinds of design because I love the way that it looks and I love the way that it makes me nostalgic for the places that I've been. I really love to look at these retro postcards and I love to make them. I'm going to be going over everything that you need to know in this course, including how to separate document, how to find source material or the adding your layers and your textures and colors and your texts. We'll go over all of that with you so you don't need any prior experience to be able to take this course. But I do have a lot of courses on ethene designer here on skill share. So if you want to go even further and learn even more about being a designer, be sure to check those out as well after you finish this course. So let's go ahead, let's dive in and start learning how to create a retro postcard and you feed designer on the iPad. 2. Project: The project for this course is for you to create a retro postcard using thin designer on your iPad. I do hope that everyone who takes this course will take the time to complete the project because you will learn a lot more by doing than you will just by watching. You'll get a much better feel for the way that you can use this program to design if you are actually doing it as we're going along at the end of each video, I will give you an assignment. And if you complete that assignment by the end of the course, you will have your project completed. There's a few things that you'll want to make sure you do in your project and we'll go over all of these in the course. The first one is you want to make sure that you do your project in a standard postcard size. I'll be using four by six and I'll show you how to set that up and you fiend designer, then you'll want to make sure that you use your source material to create some base vector layers that will create the base design for your postcard. Then you'll want to make sure that you add in shadows and highlights to give your postcard depth. And you'll go ahead and you'll add in some text to make sure that you get a message across in your postcard. And then you'll go head and at the very end, you will add some texture to your postcard to really give it that vintage feel. Once you've done that, you'll export your postcard as JPEG and upload it to the project section for this course, please make sure that you do take the time to upload it because I love to see the work that you do. And we all learn better when we can see each other's work and learn from each other. So I hope you're ready to get started. In the next video, we're going to talk about finding source material for your postcard. 3. Choosing a Source Photo: Okay, we're now going to start looking for source material for our retro postcard. And the easiest way to make retro postcard is to actually start with a photograph that looks similar to the type of thing that you want to create in Eretria postcard. And that will allow you to really get your base layers from that photograph when you are designing it. So especially since we're designing a postcard that would come from a real place, we want to have a picture of that place. And you can have several pictures draw inspiration from, but you really want one picture that's going to serve as your source material when you go to make the postcard that you're actually going to kind of pull from in order to create the layers that you're going to use. So I'm right here and I'm looking at pictures from a recent trip to Arizona. And I know that the place that I want to do came at the end of our trip. It's actually a place just over the Utah border. It's of these mushroom Hutus here. I know that I wanna do a picture of that for my postcard. When you're doing this to avoid any copyright issues, it's best to use your own image, one that you took of the place that you were at, that you wanna do the postcard. Of course, if you're just doing this for fun, you can use any image that you want. But I think if you're just doing for fun, it's more meaningful on a personal level as well, to do it with a photo of something that you took in a place that you actually were because then that helps you to remember it. So let's go ahead and let's look at these images and see why we might choose one. Now I know right off the bat that I am going to do my postcard in a horizontal orientation to a picture like this isn't going to work because that is a vertical one. So I'm looking at my Mac right now, we're going to produce this on the iPad, but my images happened to be on the Mac and then we will transfer it over. This one's looking pretty good. This one is in a horizontal orientation here. And if you don't know on a Mac, you can just hit spacebar to preview the picture when you're looking at in the finder, really do want to get this mushroom who do in here because that is the iconic part. And you really want to consider that when you are creating these postcards, What is the iconic thing that you need to get? And since these are called the toadstools Hutus, I really want to get one that is representative of that toad stool feeling. And even the vertical ones I'm just looking at for inspiration just so I kinda know what was going on at the time. I really like these, like crossing lines here and if that would work super well and the postcard, but I want to keep that in mind, that kind of idea for those clouds. Just go and look at different ones. Even one like this where there might be like people in it is fine. You might want a person in it depending on what you are doing, but you could easily just not put that person in when you're doing it because you're just using this as a reference for your layers. Learning that you really wanna think about is how good are the blocks of color here. So this one, blocks of color are very good. And this is especially important when you are first starting out doing this. It makes it a lot easier if you don't have to have too many layers. And so you can see here we've got blue, we've got this orange red, and we've got this whitish and then maybe kinda this brownish grass in front if we were interested in it or the wider even the sand. So we don't have so much going on here that it would be difficult to deal with. Now all makes sense in the next video, when we go ahead and we look at the anatomy of one of these documents, will look at a finished one, and it will make sense what we're trying to do here. But paying attention to whether or not you have nice blocks of color that you can use when you make this. And so I think this is really the one that we're going to be going with here. And that's especially critical because we're working in a very limited color palette when we're doing a retro postcard, we normally want colors to be somewhere between 35 total colors, including black and white. If we're going to use those for our shadows and our highlights. And we'll talk more about color way later on in the course. But you just want to keep that in mind when you're selecting your source image. So I'm pretty sure this is the one I'll be going with. It. It has those good solid blocks of color that I can use and it's in the landscape orientation that I want. So I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm going AirDrop this over to my iPad. You can get the picture to your iPad however you want. I'm just going to AirDrop it. But of course you could transfer it via email or USB drive if you have a way of hooking USB up to your iPad, especially if you're using a USB-C iPad, that's pretty easy. I'll just go ahead and drop it over to my iPad. And then in the next video we'll get started looking at the anatomy of a retro postcard. 4. Anatomy of a Retro Postcard: Alright, in this video we're going to be looking at the anatomy of a postcard that I've already made. And this will give you a better idea visually what we're going to be doing in this course. So you can see I'm starting here and if you look over my Layers panel, I'm on this art board called grayscale. And this is where we really start from. We start without using any color. We start working just in the greyscale. And the first thing that we start with is our reference photo. So you can see I have a photo on the bottom and that is locked. So it's locked so that I can't make any adjustments to it, move it around accidentally, anything like that. I bring it in, I size it to the art board that I'm doing in this case, this is a four by six art board. And then we go ahead and we laid down our base layers. So this next one is base layers. Let me just turn that on for you so you can see it. Resize this a little bit and open this up. So you can see down here we have these base layers of the major blocks of color within our image. So let's go ahead and term-based layers off again. And you can see how I've translated that image into the base layers of this postcard. Okay, after we've added in our base layers, which are the big chunks of color basically. Then we can go ahead and we will add in shadows. So you can see I've added in the shadows there. These are the darker parts of the image. And if I scroll down here, you can see that there are lots of little shadows. And that's where you really start to add in details. The next thing that you do to adding details is to add in highlights. And you can see I've added in those highlights. There aren't as many highlights as there are shadows and this particular image, but there's still a bunch of little details to add in. Right then after we've added in highlights, we go ahead and we add in text and we'll talk more about all of these as we go through and actually make our postcard of the Hadoop, which we selected the image for in the last video. But just get this idea. So you're going to put in some text and you can see the text likes to go over spots that are kind of solid blocks of color without too much going on in the wavelike shadows, highlights or different blocks interacting, that just gives a text a better place to stand out. So once we've done the whole thing in grayscale, then we go ahead and we start adding in color. And as we add in color, we make different choices about our color palette. So you can see I've got an image here that gives the color palette to start working from. And I'll show you how to do all that and to make a color palette. And then we iterate and we just keep trying different things, different colors in different spots to see how they're interacting. When we start over here, we started with just four gray colors. And we're gonna try and end with just four colors total. You can see there's a bunch of different iterations and that's a really important part of the Japanese. You just keep iterating. And you can see down here we get to what's called the final colors. So we got to the final color. I decided that that was going to be the way that the color was going to work out best. And at that point, I added in this rectangle layer, and that's just to give it a little bit of reframe, I decided it needed that not every postcard needs a frame, but in this case I thought it needed it. But you can see we still have exactly the same layers that we started with, except we've deleted that base image layer to. So we don't make this file too big by copying that big bitmap image over and over and over again. So we still have the base layers, the shadows, the highlights, the text, and all of that. And then let's get to our final one. There's a couple different ways to add texture. We'll go into all of that. But here you can see this one is my final one and it's called brush texture because they chose to add it with brushes, will go over both how to add texture with bitmaps and with brushes. And in this case, you can see that we add the texture via masks and whichever method we use will always add it via mask. So you can see I go into my base layers and I start turning off my Masks. You see that texture kinda disappear. Zoom in here. So you can see there goes that texture. Try it on the trees here. There you go. So that's extra, so that texture is really adding some depth and some age to this postcard so that it looks more vintage than if it were just flat. Like if we go back to our final colors over here, it's very flat because it's very vectorized, right? And so in order to give it that age of that vintage field, we start adding in texture and we'll go over all that throughout this course. But I just wanna make sure you have a basic idea of how this course was going to go and what things we were going to be putting in here in the next video, we'll go ahead and we will make the document for our postcard. 5. Document Setup: Okay, so now that we know what we're doing, we need to go ahead and go ahead and set up a new document for us to create the postcard. And you should do this along with me so that you can get started making your postcard. Hopefully you've selected the place that you want, do a postcard of and selected an image that you can use as reference. We're in a faint designer and we're in the New Document window, Congress going ahead and we're gonna choose new document. In this case, we want to change this to print. And then we're gonna go ahead and change our units to inches. Were in tap where it says width. And on the width we're going put six, height, we're going to put four. So this is going to be a four by six postcard. You can see it switched the orientation to be landscape there. And then we're gonna go ahead and tap on create airport that will allow us to more easily create duplicates of this and be able to do those iterations that you saw in the example one. And then we'll go ahead and we will click. Okay. And here we are. We can zoom out by pinching on the screen. Sierra Hall are born. There we go. Now one thing to know about Affinity Designer on iPad, and the iPad doesn't keep apps in memory as long as something like a desktop computer does. And so if you leave here and then come back, the app might reload. And in that case, a might not have saved your document to the best way to make sure that your document will stay up to date is just to hit the back arrow in the top left corner of the screen that will pop you back into the document selection window. And that's going to make sure that all the changes are actually saved by trying to make sure that I tap out of there every so often so that I know that my changes are saved because I have gone out before to another app, may be to get reference photo or something like that. Come back in here and had the app restart and then lost the work that I've done in the meantime. Okay, that's it for setting up the document, pretty simple there. In the next video, we're gonna go ahead and talk about policing, are referencing. 6. Placing the Reference Photo: Alright, let's go ahead and place our image here. We place our image by going up to the top left and choosing the document menu. Then going down in choosing place image, we then have the option to import from cloud or import from photos. Now, you can import from the cloud if you've got like your Dropbox account or your Google drive hooked up to your iPad. But you also need to choose import from cloud if you're going hook a hard drive up here I've had because that's the only way to gain access to your files. We're gonna choose import from photos because we just AirDrop this into our photos app. But a lot of times you might have your photos on a hard drive, so you might need to use the import from cloud. Okay, let's go to import from photos. I'll choose recents, and then I'll just choose this most recent photo, which is the one of the toads to Hutus. Then it's going to load that up for us. And we can click and drag or we can just click to place a full resolution. In this case, you can see if we place it at full resolution, it's way too big. We'd have to zoom way out, you see here. So let's undo that and we will replace it again. When you know the size that you want it to be. It's a lot easier if you just click and drag out. So I'm going to start in the top left corner of my artwork. I'm just going drag out. This one happens to match perfectly to have my four by six immature. And then the next thing that we need to do is go to our Layers panel, make sure that were selected on the image of the photo. Then we'll hit the three.me to go into our option and choose the lock icon. If we go out to our layers, we can see that that layer is locked. That would just stop us from accidently messing with this layer when we're laying down our base factors. And that's all we have to do with this photo. In the next video, we'll start talking about laying down those base factors. 7. Drawing the Base Vectors: So the next step in the process, and really the first thing that we are going to be doing using designer is to create the base vectors that we will use as the main shapes for our postcard. Retro postcards like this tend to consist of mainly large sections of color that represent the place that they're trying to portray. And so we're going to look here at this end. There's really three major blocks here. It's really the blue of the sky, the reddish orange of the rock, and then the white of the other rock and the sand. We might need to do it in a couple different pieces, but we'll see as we go. So let's go ahead here and we're going to use the pen tool, which is just found midway down the left-hand side. The Pen tool, it can seem a little intimidating at first. It's fairly easy once you kind of figure out what's going on with it for laying down the blue of the sky, it's going to be really easy because we're just going to be doing lines. And we just wanna tap in the corner of the left and then we will tap in the corner of the right and will come all the way down. We won't go past where the blue disappears and make sure that the blue always shows up behind the other layers to tap on the line, go all the way across, tap on the line, and then come back up and tap on our original point to close the shape. Then we'll go to the colour panel in the top right, which is that little circle. And we're just going to go to our swatches in the bottom, and we're using Grace here. So we're going to use four colors of gray as we are creating this, we're going to use black, seventy-five percent black and 50% black and white. And so for the sky right now, I'm just gonna go ahead and choose 50% black. And we're going to come back and change that all later than in the layers panel. I can go ahead and I can click the check mark to turn that off so that I don't see that anymore. And the next thing that we're gonna wanna do is go ahead and lay down our next layer, which is going to be a little bit more complex. It's going to be this orange rock here. So let's start over here on the left edge. What you wanna do is if you have a curve when you tap and hold down your point, you just want drag out to match the curve that you're going for. So it's fairly simple to do, but you just need a little bit of precision. Then the next thing that you want to do, I'm going to zoom in here so that you can see this better is tap on that point and that will get rid of the other curve handle. And that will allow you to better control the next curve. So when I'm doing this, I almost always tap on that point to get rid of the outgoing curve handle. And we're just going to work our way around trying to match the curve as closely as possible. It doesn't need to be exact. This is not meant to be a photorealistic replica. So you can see how I'm just making the curve tapping the point. Making the curve tapping the point. And it's alone, monotonous. But it's not hard to do. And depending on what place you've chosen, you may have more or less curves depending on how Angular the place that you've chosen as. And of course, you can choose what level of detail you want to go into with the curves. It's really up to you how detailed you want your postcard to be. The thing that you want to make sure you're doing is just conveying that sense of the place that you're trying to create. So that if somebody who'd been there looked at it, they would say, oh, yes, this is that place where I have been. And if you aren't very practiced with the pen tool, this can take a little bit of work, but don't worry, just take a little time to practice. You can even leave this document and just go practice with the pen to a little bit. Basically just need to remember that you can tap to lay down points, tab and drag to make a curve, tap on a curve point to take away one of the handles. You can zoom in to get more precision. And that's basically all there is to it. It can just be confusing at first because it's not like drawing with a pen or pencil. In the real world. You can always tap with two fingers on the screen to undo if you happen to make mistake. This can especially happen if you accidentally, like Get off of your line or something, or you lay down a point where you don't want one to be. No problem. You can just undo it. And two fingers on the screen will allow you to pan around. Then when you get to a spot where you know that another vector layer is going to cover it. You can go ahead and you can just click across to your end point and you can just finish it off there. Because here we know that this next white layer is basically going to cover it. We might need to add in another orange layer off to the right will see. But we can just go click on our end point and just do a straight across like that. I'm going to go ahead and select seventy-five percent black for this color right now. And then I can go and turn back on my curve. I can see where I've gotten so far. Click on this and turn off my stroke. So I'll just tap the stroke and then swipe, and then swipe up on it in the colored panel. Okay, so we've got that. I'm gonna go ahead and speed up the next part just so you don't have to watch me do that over and over again in real-time. At this point, we have our base layers done. So we go back here and turn off these layers. We can see that we basically got the whole image covered for the big chunks of color, right? And that's what we're trying to achieve here. But when we turn this back on, we see that we made a couple little mistakes where there's some parts that are not covered. So we just need to go fix that. So it we didn't give quite enough. We sky there. And then we'll just take our node tool that we can fix these rocks will just kinda pull our handle out until we have covered in. Okay, so there we go. That's looking pretty good for our base layers. That's going to be the structure of our postcard. And what we wanna do now is go ahead and group those together so we can easily turn them on and off while we're working on the highlights and the shadows. So to select multiple objects, you tap on one and then with two fingers you tap on the last one in the line that you want to select. So I'll use two fingers to tap on the sky and you see those all get selected. Then you can just pinch together with two fingers on the Layers panel. And that'll make a group. We can name that group by going up two or three.me, tablinum where it says group. And we'll call this base vectors. Now we can easily just turn that entire group on and off just by tapping the checkmark. That's it for creating the base vectors. In the next video, we'll start talking about creating the shadows. 8. Shadows: Alright, in this video we are going ahead and we're going to start adding in the shadows. Shadows give depth and dimension to your postcard. So you want to go through the image and you want to find the places that are darker. And then in the next video in the highlights will find the places that are lighter using these shadows and highlights will allow our image to carry a lot more meaning and a lot more information, even though they're fairly simple to create. These are just like creating the base vectors, but on a much smaller scale, when you're looking for shadows, you're looking for the dark parts of the image. And these are often found maybe in windows that aren't reflecting sunlight. Cracks of rocks in overhangs from either rocks or trees or buildings, or wear a tree or a building shadow is actually crossing the image. So we just want to look around for these dark parts. So I'll grab my pen tool again and I can see right away that I've got some dark parts at the base of these rocks. So I want to zoom way in so that I can easily create these. And these do not have to be perfect because obviously shadows would change from time to time. But using the shadows from an actual picture helps to make the shadows look authentic. So let's go ahead and we do these just like the base vectors. We're just going to draw them out. And we just look for the shadows wherever we can find them. And then normally I'll just make the shadows black. And if you happen to still be clicked on your base vectors group, then this curve might have ended up in the base vectors, but as long as you're clicked on the art board instead, then this curve will end up on a new layer. If we went into the base vectors, you can always just drag it out of that group. Let's tap our fill and turn that to black. And we can just go along making these. Now you don't need to do every single thing that's dark just enough to where you feel like you're getting enough dimension for the type of image that you want to create. And then we've got some shadows done. You can just come back in, turn on those base vectors. Could you move to one tap off so that you can see, and you can see how that's going. So you can see that without that shadow on, there's not as much dimension and we do put the shadow on, there's more. So let's go ahead and we'll just keep making these shadows. I might want to do something completely with the top of this rock, which is kind of a different color in the mushroom part. And I might want to do that later, but for sure I'm going to add in this shadow right now. And especially with the shadow like this where it's actually overlapping the edge of another object like this red rock. We want to make it black and then we want to turn on those base vectors to see what it's looking like. There. It looks awkward, then we might need to adjust those points along the edge. This one actually looks pretty good, but we can come in here, select it, whoops, don't move it. And then using the node tool, we can select individual points and move them to try and line them up better with the object below it. And it doesn't need to be perfect. You just want to make sure it doesn't look weird. Okay? It's turned those base vectors off again and we'll just keep going with creating these shadows. So what I'm looking for here is just, am I missing any really important details of the rock or the building, or the waterfall or whatever feature that you are working with here. So I'll just turn that off and turn it back on just to see if there's any major features that our shadow features that I'm missing. I think there is right here. Need to be able to show that there's kind of an edge here. How many shadows you add N is up to you. It can get a little monotonous. So you really only want to add in as many as you need, but you can't really tell if you need a mentor after you've put them in. So it's okay if you put some in and then decide not to use them later, or if you decide later that you need to come back and add some more, that's perfectly fine to remember that design is an iterative process. So not only is it fine to make changes as you go along, but you definitely should. And sometimes you'll find that a shadow release gonna belong in the base layers and you're going to need to move it there. So like this one really should be behind the front part of the rock. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drag it down so I can see what it looks like they're tray into that group. And then I'll drag it behind that layer and I'll tap off so I can see it. And yeah, that looks better. So once in a while you'll need to put one in there just for the layering effect and that's OK. And it just won't be as easy to change the color of that later because it won't be able to be part of the shadow group. And I think that is going to do it for the shadows on this one again, I might come back in and add some later if I feel that it's needed for right now, we're going to call it good on the shadow. So we just want to make our shadow Group tab on the top one. Then with two fingers will tap on the bottom layer, the shadows and impinge them together. Tab on the three dots, tap on the name group. And then will this name shadows more, right? And in the next video we'll come back and we'll do that. 9. Highlights: Now it's time for us to add in the highlights to this image. And it's important to kind of think through this and what the highlights are. In some images, you'll have things Clinton off of glass or metal and those will be really clear highlights in this case, we're really just telling with rock. And so we don't have as much. That would be a highlight words, just Clinton off. Most of what we've got is actually this white kind of sand and this white kind of rock that we've already created as a base layer. And so we'll have so many like maybe true highlights, but we're looking for the lightest parts of the image. And I definitely see like this banding in the rock right here as being maybe a highlight feature that we can add in just to give that more of that feel and depth and dimension. So it's sometimes it's a highlight, Sometimes it's just a lighter part of the image that we're going to add in here and highlights, especially true highlights there actually like a Glynn tour, gleam are often much smaller than the shadows that we've just been making. Ok, so let's go ahead and let's make sure we are tapped on an airport. So we're making this here. We can go ahead and we can turn off our shadows for right now. And we're just going to look for the white parts that we can put in. And I definitely see a little highlight up here on top of this rock. And of course we can turn our shadows interface back on. And you see how that's looking at this again is an overlapping edge. So we wanna go in and clean that up a little. One of the things that we're looking for as we do this, any place that there might be an edge that we'd like to be able to see is a good place where we can put in a highlight as well. So you can see here, there's this kind of this flat part of the rock and I'd like to see what that looks like as a highlight, even though it's not really a highlight here, it's actually even maybe a little bit in shadow. But just like to see if we can get that edge to kind of display there. And it may not work. Sometimes it doesn't. But I just want to see if it does. I'm going to turn it off for now. We can always turn it back on later if we decide we want to go ahead and we'll add in a little bit more of this banding here. Since we can't do this particular one very precisely. I'm just following the general line of it, but I'm not paying too much attention to how close I am to the actual band in the rock. Okay, so this one does not have a lot of highlight work, but I think that is probably pretty close to good for us here, right? You want to try adding in a little bit of a cloud here. And this might be something that's better than what the brush. And we'll just go and try it and see. And this will have to be something that we put behind rock layer to make it work. So again, we'll go in here and we'll come and we'll drop this into the base vectors. Turn the base vectors on. And we're going to move it behind our rock. And we just want to see what that would look like to, okay, we'll have to see what it looks like. Maybe when we add in some color, check E Once again, if there's another highlight that we want to add, I don't think there is right now. I think we're good. I think the area I'm concerned about right now is this area down here where there doesn't seem to be a lot going on. There's not, I love dimensional detail to it, but that is likely where at least part of my text will end up. So it's actually good to have kind of a blink area in the top or the bottom or both. So that when you're adding in your text, you have someplace where your texts can be easily read and is not conflicting with the other elements on your page. So I think that's okay. I'm not sure worried about that. So that's adding in highlights. And then in the next video we're actually going to go ahead and add in that text. So that will help us to see how that's gonna work out. 10. Adding Text: Alright, now it's time for us to actually go ahead and add our text. And we're going to add in a couple of different boxes of text here, similar to what we saw in the example file. But you want to get the text tool from down at the bottom of your toolbar. There are two texts tools here. There's the art Text Tool and the text frame tool. It's much easier on these postcards to work with the art text tool than the text frame tool it takes frame tool sets the boundaries that your text will be in. The art text tool that's your texts me more free flowing and you can adjust the size of it much easier to. We're going to go with the art text tool. Now we've got kind of two areas where we probably could add in some text. We can add some texts along the top and we can add in some on the bottom. So I think I'm going to try and put my greeting up here. I'm going to put readings from toadstools, Hutus, and then down here I'm going to put, where's that? So let's go ahead and we'll drag that out. And quite frankly, working with text is really probably the worst part about working in a funny designer. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to turn on my Bluetooth keyboard just so it's a little bit easier. But even with a keyboard, it's just not as great as working on the desktop version. The text is just a little bit difficult to deal with and to be able to adjust all the proportions and the sizing and things. It's just a little bit harder. But let's go ahead and we'll put this in. Greetings from, and we want to change up the font, and that's something we can iterate on. But let's go ahead and let's just try something so I'll tap on my Tech students off on the right-hand side. And here's my fonts. And I'm gonna look for something a little bit. And writing E, Which I think what I ended up using in the last one was this, say Voilette. So, Oh, it sounds like you see sometimes it's really just tricky dealing with it. So I'm just going to select my text. I just held down Command Shift and arrow key on my keyboard, but I could select it with my pencil or my finger as well. And let's go ahead and let try changing it again. Okay. So there's greetings from if I'm putting the greetings from my life to have a little bit of a handwritten feel. So I had a couple others that I was trying out. Here's noteworthy. Here's Bradley hand. And I'm sure I'm loving any of those. Are that many selections. You can do some things to add fonts in on your iPad, but it's a little bit trickier than doing it on a computer. So like I said, text is one of the drawbacks. But you can normally find something that will work. Okay, I'm just going to stay with the subway let for now. A guy might change it later because I'm not loving it here. Since this is happening on the right side, I'm actually going to go ahead and tap on my right alignment just so that everything kinda stays aligned with the right. And we'll go ahead and we'll grab our Artistic Text tool and we'll make another box. It's going to go to civil app, but I know that I want this one to be greasy spoon. Tap here. Search for greasy spoon. Now, you might not have greasy spoon by a did come with the purchase of affinity publisher when, if any publisher first came out. So if you also have publisher, you might have greasy spoon or affinity does offer it from their website directly. And we'll go ahead and type in the name of this. And we're gonna do a right alignment on this as well. So this is the toads tool you use. We'll go ahead and we'll adjust that up. Grab our Move tool so we can put a imposition. Just go and try and drag us down into the bottom and just see how that looks like that better. Ok, then I'll just copy this by holding down two fingers on the screen and dragging it. That's the copy command going to center this one right there. And this is where I'm going to put in where these are. Okay. So this is Peoria Uta. But all of these and I'll just move them up a little whittling down one finger keeps it in alignment. And Stan are sold on the font. But I think we will go ahead and move on at this point. So that's how you add in your text, how you write it out and do it. Of course, you can do anything you need to do to the text within the text panel. So there's lots of different options that you have as far as your typography goes. You positioning that you can get things to look just the way that you want them to. But I think we're good with what we have for right now. And in the next video we're going to talk about choosing colors for art postcard. 11. Selecting Colors: Now it's time to go ahead and find some colors that we want to use for our postcard. And even though I don't use Adobe programs very often, I do like this website that Adobe has its color dot adobe.com. They actually bought this website when it was called cooler, and they basically have kept it mostly the same. They've made some improvements and adjustments here and there, but it's still great way to find a color scheme. You can choose from different options. You can drag these bubbles around the color wheel and you can also change the different color harmonies that you want is great way to get colors that can really work well together. But what I like best is actually this Explore tab, because there's a lot of people who've already put together palettes, and this is a great way to find ones that might work for you. So I'll normally just go here to the Explorer and I'll search for something that goes along with what I'm doing. So in this case, I might search like, who do you see if anybody has made any color palette for a hoodoo? And there's a few coming, looks like quite a few From Bryce Canyon and some other things. So there may be something there. I also often like to search, maybe like vintage or retro to kinda get colors. There might be more in line with that. Try vintage rock. See what we get. Make it stuff more from the music scene here, and try different things just as you look for the color, it can take a bit to get to the right color. We kind of know what we're looking for. We probably need something in the blue side for the sky. And we're going to need a beige color and a reddish orange color. At least those are what MTG we probably need. Although you can go a lot of different routes with something like this. And what we always want to be mindful of is we're really only going to work between 35 colours, including white and black if we choose to use white and black as our shadow and highlight colors, which we can use other colors for that I'm interested in this one here which has oranges and blues and kind of a beige might work out. Well, let's go ahead and we'll screenshot that there's a couple of ways to screenshot on your iPad if you just drag from the corner with your pencil, that's what I like to do that we'll screenshot. If you have a Home button on your iPad, you can press the Home button and the power button at the same time, and that will make a screenshot. If you don't have a home button, you can press the power button, the volume button at the same time, and that will create a screenshot. But I'd like to do with the pencil. There we go. And then I'll just crop down to the palate because all we need is the color. Then n choose safety photos so that we can bring that in. And I think I'm going to pick up another one here, which I think might be useful, should be this one from arches. And just do the same thing screenshot that done safety photos. And that's probably good for now. There might be others that are worth bringing in here, but we'll go with those for now and we'll see what we get. We can always come back and get another one later. So then we just need to go ahead and jump into a Feeney designers so we can bring these colors in. So we'll go ahead and place it. Go to our place image in our document menu, Import from photos. Grab our photo. And we'll drag it out. And it's the weirdest thing right now, for some reason if e1 designer is not bringing in the Crop Photo, and I don't know why we don't need all of this other stuff around here. So we can just do a vector crop on that though. And I don't know why it doesn't bring those in because they appear as the correct like snapshot in the photos app. But when you bring them in here for some reason they revert back. That's fine. Let's go ahead and we'll add in some of these colors. So we'll go to our coach panel swatches. And we're going to go ahead and on our little 3-bar menu at the top right, and we're going to choose add document palette. And then from here, the easiest way to do this is take the eyedropper tool and the right-hand side, track across and pick up the color that you want. I want the second orange from the right here. Then I can tap on the eye dropper color to put that in my fill ups and don't want to be selected on anything. Tab on the eyedropper to put in the film and then end up 3-bar menu, Choose, Add Current filled to palette. Then when go get my beige color, but that in my hill and add current fill the pallet and then I'll go get my blue color. I think I will use the dark blue here, tap it again and add current filter palette. Now I have this pallet going on and let's go ahead and bring in our other picture. You go ahead and add in new colors here. And you can switch here from seeing the buyers with the RGB just by tapping this icon next to the name. And then you can just see the colors there. When Cuba with the bars for now k. In the next video, we'll actually start adding the color. 12. Adding Color and Iterating: Okay, so now it is time for us to go ahead and add color into this artwork. And so the first thing that we want to do is actually make a copy of this artwork so that we can add color to it, but still maintain this grayscale base. So let's go ahead and we'll zoom out so that we can do this easily. Then go to your Layers panel, closed down your art board one, and just tap on it so that that entire airport is selected. Then you hold down two fingers on the screen and then drag away. Once you've dragged out, as long as you're still holding it, you can let go with one of your fingers and use the other finger. I will keep it in alignment. So if you have one finger on it will just keep it in alignment. So now we have to our board ones, so we want to rename this one. And we do that just the way we did with layers. We go to three.me, change this and we'll just call this one color one. The next thing that we wanna do is go into our layers for this one and go all the way down. And we're actually going to take this bottom layer, this image photo. And we're going to lead it because we don't want to be duplicating over and over and over again that entire JPEG image, because that's going to really make our file get bigger and bigger, especially as we go in, in the next phase and we start adding texture. The more of those bitmap images we have, the larger file is going to be in, the harder it's going before the iPad to be able to process that. So we don't need at this point, it's still there in art board one if we need to get back to it, but we only need to be here with all of our different color variations. So let's go ahead and jumping here and will start changing these colors. We'll start with our base colors. Let's go to our base vectors down to the bottom. Let's just start with the sky. Jump to our colors, go to our swatches, and go to our unnamed. We could name that if we wanted to, but we'll just keep it like that for now. And let's go ahead and let's try our Hop colors first. So let's go with this dark blue for the sky. Go ahead and grab our rocks and we'll give them the orange colored. Then we'll tap on our mean sandy part and we'll give that a BH color and we can zoom out, see how that looks. So we're currently at five colors here because we have the black and the white as well going on. I think I'm going to go to this bat curve and I'm going to add that to be than the base. Think I like that better than the white. And then one of the nice things about having a Shadows group like this is you can just tap on the shadows group and you can change all of that colors one. So we're going to change it to the blue and see how that looks. That gets us down to four colors, except that we still have black in the words o and we have that one shadow that needs to be changed in the base layers because of its position to change that. So now we're down to just four colors, three colors plus white really. And that's pretty good. So let's go ahead and let's change our text and you can try different things with the text. I think I'm going to try it in orange for that. And then I'm going to try the blue on my smaller text. And remember the way to select two things is tub on one of them. And then if they're in line, you can tap with two fingers or you can just swipe across them to select things that are not in a line. Alright, let's change that to the blue. That looks pretty nice. But it looks more nighttime e. So I want to make another copy and go ahead and try the other color. So I'm going to copy this art board because it already doesn't have the image attached to it. And there's another way that we can go about this as well. We don't have to use the color panel. If we wrap this color. Bring it over. We can actually use the eyedropper tool to do this as well. And that can save us some jumping around. Just kinda depends on what you like. But I wanted to show you both ways of doing it. But let's go ahead and we will grab our sky first. And we'll grab our eye dropper tool. We're just going to come over and drop that in there. Let's grab Iraq's silver eyedropper tool though. Let's try the dirt. Let's try that. Read. Maybe a little bit too bright, maybe too much saturation there will see page and we'll try the orange. Then let's go grab our text. And lastly, let's deal with our shadows. When try making the shadows orange. Just seeing what that looks like. Three or four colors here. And I think I'm gonna actually try making the shadows. Skip back to eyedropper tool. Try making the shadows BY this dark red. The other one. Change this text to be that truck rate as well. Okay. Then I can zoom out and I can look at both of them. And we're just going keep assessing the color as we go and deciding what we want to do and actually liking this beige color better than the orange, I might try adding that. And so let's go ahead and duplicate this guy again. And this is how you iterate InDesign. You just keep duplicating, making new copies and then seeing what you find. So I think I'm going to try adding in the page color here. You do want to rename these so that you can keep track of what's going on and you know which one to export at the end. So right now I'm just using numbers, but you could add something in more descriptive if you had names for your color palettes or something like that. Okay, so let's go ahead. We'll grab our orange here and we'll just switch over to the base eyedropper tool. We'll just pick that up. And since we are keeping the White for the highlights and might actually turn that to white. So that there's a little bit more dimension to that one. Not loving these two shadows down here. So I think I might go ahead and just get rid of them or turn them off for now because they don't think they're really adding anything to it. That's helpful. As you add in color, you might wanna make adjustments to things as you go along. So let's see what we're at here. We are at 12345, we're at five colors. Five is about as far as I would want to go here, counting white. One probably wanna go any farther than five was go ahead. We aren't using black. We could use black for the shadows and we might try that again. But right now I just want to make another duplicate. I'm going try replacing some of the text here. Rename that. I think I actually want to kind of balance it like this. And then maybe try more in the center so it's not encroaching so much on the rocks there. But it's still pretty much encroaching on the rocks. Don't wanna be too close to the edge. And if I have a new idea, I'm happy to just make another airport and try it out. That's really the best way to do it is just make another airport trout your new idea, see what's happening. So I want to try it this way with these kind of all centered up in here. Okay, and at this point, I think I want to jump back and look at my photo. So I'll tap on that and then I'll go into my Layer menu. And I will choose so low. And that makes it so I can only see that. I can turn that on and off. And that just helps me to visually see, do I feel like I'm capturing the essence of what I'm wanting to. And I feel like for the most part, yeah, I feel like I've pretty much caught what I want you in this picture. I'm still not quite sold on the placement of the text, and I might just get rid of the greetings from altogether. Now I think we need that, but I would like to try adding in a border now that we have some color here, let's go ahead and duplicate this one more time. And we'll just add a border which is just going to be a rectangle. Rectangle. Drag this out. We want to go into our color, get rid of our swatches and we'll click on our stroke. Will choose our dark red and go into our Stroke panel and click advanced so we can actually adjust our stroke, remembering our weight up. And we wanna make sure that it's set to be aligned to the insight that we have nothing going out of the board. Alright, I'm liking that quite a bit. So now that we've got our color and our text, we've kind of settled on where we want things to be. We're going to go ahead and in the next video we're going to start adding in some texture to give a kind of that world. 13. Raster Image Texture: Okay, so now that we have our color and stuff basically set up, we want to go ahead and duplicate this again and we're going to start adding texture to kinda rough it up it really give it that retro feel. So let's go back into our layers. We'll rename this one more time. We'll call this color with frame. Will duplicate that. And we'll call this one texture. We'll, we'll call it Raster texture. So basically there are two ways that you can go about doing this. Texture can get really complicated brewing, keep it fairly simple in this course, there's two ways you can basically do this. You can texture from a raster image that's black and white. Or you can go ahead and do it with brushes will go over both of them. But this time we're going to add a raster texture. So I've AirDrop to texture over to my iPad and you kinda get Texture lots of different places. There are some free ones on the internet, there are some paid ones on the internet is happens to be a free one from retro supply company. I'll put the link to get this in the resources for this course. I don't have any affiliation with retro supply company, but they think they make good stuff and this is a good texture for this course. So we're going to be using this grease splatter texture. And let's go ahead. We will tap off of our board and then we're just going to place the image here and you just need your texture image saved somewhere on your iPad. And we'll say place image, import from photos. And we'll grab this texture. And then we wanna place it off the art board so that we have it because we will probably need to use it several times. So there we go, we've got that and then we're just going to duplicate that and bring it down onto the art board TO two fingers to duplicate and drag. And then there's a couple of things you can do here. You can either resize this really big to make it fit the whole thing. You can resize it just to that square and then drag it out. Or you can go ahead and you can duplicate it as well. For me. I'm just going to drag it out for now and see what that looks like. So then we go to our Layers panel and selecting on this layer. And we're gonna go to this Layer menu which looks like a square with layers underneath it. Tap that and we can just say rasterized to mask. And what a mask does. It basically shows or hides part of an image based on whether that mask is black or white. So in this case it's taken everything that is white on that mask and it's showing that to us and everything that's black. It's hiding from us and it's showing you what's behind it. So you can see here that all of these places where there's these grease splatter is where it's taking them away and that gives it a much more like rough feel. Ok, let me just go ahead and show you that so that you can kind of visualize it. Let's go solo this layer. It will go into the three.me and click solo. And you can see where it's white, it's showing through and where it's black, it's hiding it. And it's just showing what's underneath, which in this case it's just the blank canvas of the art board. Okay, now, that's okay. But we might actually want different things to be showing here, right? So we might want to seed the blue beneath the red and the red beneath the beige. So we might want to see more interaction than what we're getting here. So in that case, we need to mask individual portions of this and this is where it can start to become a very large file because you're going copy this mass like five or six times to get this to work, right? Let's leave that one there for now. We'll go ahead and we'll duplicate this one more time. We'll rename this. Oops. And we'll just call this raster texture each layer, because we're going to apply this texture to each layer separately. So first we'll just take this mask and we'll open up our base layers. And instead of having this mask, the entire art board will start out by just having it mask just the sky. So we're going to take it down, drag it, and we're going to drag it until we see that a blue square appear over the sky. And that's what we want to mask. And now it's only masking that part of it. So let's go ahead and we will grab again this texture and we're going to duplicate it over this airport. And then I'm going to size this one up to size around the center hold two fingers on the screen and it will resize and proportion. I just want to get it all the way to the edge there. And then I'm going to turn this into a mask. So clicking that Layer menu and choose rasterized to mask. And then drag that down and drop it onto my rocks. Okay, So you can see what's happening there. Now. The blue is what's coming through instead of the white of the background because there would be blue back there. Okay, so we can just do that again and then we'll just grab that image again. This is why we wanted to set it off to the side so that we would have it many times. Let's duplicate it over. Expand it out like that. Rasterized to mask again, check that all the way down and drop it on our sand k. And we've got basically what we need there, but now we want to do it to a whole group so that we can do it to the shadows. Let's go ahead and duplicate this again. You can see how this can make your file quite large after just a short period of time. Let's do another way. We distort it a little bit. Restaurants to mask. And we'll just go ahead and drop that right on our shadows. There may be a little hard to see. We can zoom in here and you can see where the red is peeking through on those shadows. Alright, now we need to do it again on our highlights. Now this can all get to be a bit much. Perhaps you're thinking maybe there's too much going on there and we'd like to get rid of some. Well, that's where painting on the mask comes in. So we can actually paint black or white to bring in more or less of what's underneath the mask. So let's go ahead and let's try this on our Schuyler. It's gone to our mask. Then we need to go into our pixel persona, which is in the top menu bar, and it looks like a bunch of dots. So tap on that and go into our pixel persona. And we need to paint in white and black. So we're on our brush tool and an AR colour panel. If we paint white, that's going to reveal. And if we paint black, that's going to conceal. So we want to reveal more. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna paint white. And we can just go ahead and we can paint away some of that. She's going to be too much. So we'll do a little bit on the rocks here, so we need to be on our mask and then painted some of that. And you can change up this effect depending on which kind of brush you use. We'll see that more in the next video where we're talking more about brushes, but you might just want to not have quite as much. So you might get rid of a little bit here and there, depending on what your purposes. And that's basically how you'd go about adding texture using a raster image like that. And the image does need to be black and white. Of course, you can make it black and white using an adjustment layer here as well if you need to, but that's the basics of it. You can go to different levels on this just like you can with other parts of this, like adding in highlights and shadows. You can add in a lot of texture like we did here. You can add in just a little bit of texture. You can add in a very, in your face texture or a very subtle texture just depends on what you are going for. 14. Brush Texture : Okay, so we've added a texture using raster image and our next step is going to be to add a texture using brushes. So first off, let's go ahead and we'll duplicate our color with frame layer again. I'm just going to bring that down here so that we can work with it. And let's rename that. And we'll just call it brush texture. Zoom in here, just like with the raster texture, we're going to be using masks. But in this case we're going to be painting those on ourselves or are they doing using a pre-made texture? So we need to go into the pixel persona so we can get our brushes. And then we need to go into the brush studio so that we can select what brush we're going to use. There are a number of brushes that Affinity Designer comes with, and there are also a lot of brushes that you can get online and you can even use Photoshop brushes here. If you have some of those, it can import them, but there's several that we can get started with here. We're gonna go ahead and we're going to look into this one that says textures. We're going to use brush patterns 03. Then we need to go ahead and we need to make a mask. So let's go here and we'll go to our vectors. And of course we could mask the entire airport like we did with that first one, but I want to add more subtle textures in that. So let's go ahead and we'll start with our sky, just like we did before. And we'll go to our menu and we will choose mask layer. So that will make a blink mask on top of our layer that we can then go in and paint on. And of course we want to paint with black because we're going to be obscuring stuff too which use black. And then we can go ahead and we can paint. And as we paint, you will see that texture appear. And of course this is over the art board, so it's going to all show up white. Now you might be like, Well, that is too much again, correct? That's too much again. So this is where it's good to have black on your stroke and white on your fill because you can then just easily swap two white by tapping the fill and then go back and paint over it again. And that will lessen the effect. Because you're painting with the same brush that you started with. They basically are looking the same, but you're getting less texture there. And depending on what Brush you're using, you may wanna do more or less of this. Different brushes have different density of texture that there'll be applying. But we can just do that with kind of each of these. So let's go ahead and make a mask on this one. Mask, the layer will switch back to painting with black, will just go over the whole thing and we'll come back. And we'll choose white. And we'll come back over it. And we can of course do this with as many of these as we want. I'll go ahead and speed this up while I work on these different layers. Okay, so there you have it at a very different feeling than the other texture. So of course you can get tons of different feelings. Doing different textures with different brushes are different bitmap textures. There's so much that could go into really applying texture to your document. So you do want to take the time to figure it out, but of course you don't want to spend an enormous amount of time make decisions because you could go on with this forever, figuring out how you want to add texture, either do it with bitmap image or brush or you can combine them. You can imply one to some layers and went to another. You can also come in with different brushes like I showed you in the bitmap one end brush over that to try and erase some of it. Of course, if you used a texture brush on that, it would seem a little bit more real than if you just use your round brush the way I did in the example. That's how you're going to go about getting your texture. And then in the next video we're going to talk about exporting this image for your class project. 15. Exporting the Postcard: Okay, so at this point you should have your postcard kind of the way that you want it. You should have created your base vectors, and then you should have added in shadows and highlights and text. Then you should have come along and adding color, and then finally adding in some texture and it now and when you have your colors and your texture the way that you want it, it's time to export it for your class project. So this is what you will submit to the class project. So let's go ahead and look at how we would export this. We're going to come up to our document menu and we're going to choose Export. And there's a lot of different options here. The one that you're looking for as a JPEG, you could of course do this also as maybe a PNG or a PDF depending on where you're going to put it. But for the purposes of the class project, you really want JPEG and then you want to come here to where it says area and hold document and make sure that you select the one that you want. In this case, we want brush texture because that's the one that we've kind of settled on here. And there's some other things that you can adjust here, but we really don't need to for the purposes of this, you can just go ahead. You can name your file. You especially want to do that if you're going to be putting this into your harddrive for this, we'll just go ahead and name it. Toad stool. Who do? And you can see how big it's going to be. This is going to be 2.65 megabytes. And if you didn't want it to be that large, you could go ahead and lower the quality and that will change it, will keep it at that quality for now. And then we can click OK. Next it's going to ask us where do we want to save it? I don't have an external hard drive hooked up right now, so I'm just going to save it onto my iPad into a famed designer so that I know where I'm going to be looking for it. And we'll go ahead and click Save. And it's gonna go ahead and save that. We can then jump over into our files up. We go, that's our finished postcard. Of course, you could always do more on it or do less, just depends on what you like. And that's it. You've completed your retro postcard now and in the next video, we're just going to take a moment, go ahead and wrap up the course. 16. Wrap Up: I hope that you've enjoyed this course on creating retro postcards using feed designer on the iPad. I had a lot of fun making this course, and I hope that you've had a lot of fun watching it. I do hope that you will take the time now to export your project and upload it to the project section for this course so that I can see what you've been able to accomplish and see all the great places that you've made retro postcards for if you want to continue learning about Finn designer, remember I have many courses on this as well as if we follow any funny publisher here on skill share. So go ahead and check those out. If you want to keep learning more about design, you can also follow my bend designs YouTube channel where you can get weekly videos for me about design subjects. Or you can follow me on Instagram at Ben designs media, where you'll get weekly lessons on design principles. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments in the discussion section And feel free to leave a review of this course as well. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next course.