Transcripts
1. 1. Introduction: Hey, you guys and welcome to class. This is the first day of our Skillshare course, communicating with color, pattern, and texture. I just want to thank you all for signing up. There's been quite a few of you, a lot more than I thought there would be. So if I talk faster, if I don't know what to do with my hands here it's because I've never try one of these things before and there's just so many of you guys, so I don't want to let you guys down. But thank you all for joining and help me promote this course throughout this past month. It's been a lot of fun getting this syllabus all together and hearing your questions about wanting to get this, how the workflow will go for this course and your input on what you'd like to see and what you'd like to get out of this course. Hopefully, I have done a good enough job to make you to actually add to your knowledge and I know you all have your own unique processes that you follow or unique creative processes that you follow and I just hope to add to that. I don't want to say that this is the right or wrong way, but I am flattered that you are interested in how I think and how I create my illustration. So I'm extremely happy to be able to show these to you and show my process and yeah, so let's go ahead and break that down in a course overview. Here we are. Unit 1 is where we're at. This is the concept development stage and this is where we set up our illustrations where we're going to start getting out all the ideas out of our heads and throwing them onto paper. It's great to be analog right now. I don't have to worry about getting on the computer and just start sketching away. The next video will be about how and why I sketch. I promise it won't be boring. I'll show some examples of my terrible sketching skills. But how to turn it into something beautiful. So it's a great story and there's some cool tips and stuff that will definitely be helpful to all of us. I know there's a huge range of experience levels in this class. I know there are some of you that are super novice and some of you that have been around the block a lot longer and a lot more times than I have. So all these things I've catered everything to fit, to have information that will help all ranges and all experience levels. So that's what Unit 1 will be, is we're just going to develop our ideas, define the word loud or quiet, whichever one you choose and really learn how to take a concept and bring it all the way into a finished illustration. Hopefully, something that will be exciting and deeper than what we've been creating before. So Unit 2, that's the meat of the entire class. It's awesome. It's going to be layout and composition, which of course, we will go over a little bit of that as you're sketching. You'll be laying out and hopefully thinking about your composition as you sketch. But Unit 2 will actually house these specific things. So it'll house a video about learning how to establish a color palette. I know a lot of you had questions about color and they're saying like wanted to know how I made color choices or how to build these palettes. A lot of times we get stuck especially when we go to the computer for some reason it's really easy to. We don't have texture or anything, it's real flat. So just makes it even worse and we can't get these colors right and so we have flat objects and the color is flat colors. So we're going to fix that over our color theory. I know if any of you are saying right now, "Color theory, I've been designing, I've been illustrating for so long. I know this stuff backwards and forwards." Well, I have some new tips for you and also I'm pretty sure you haven't taken a design and color class since your first year of college. At least that's how it was for me, so bear with me. There's some really cool ideas and how I'm just unique to myself and how I create these colors. I love colors and I think in colors and I compose everything with these colors in mind. So you'll see that I really start pushing the colors early on, right after sketching actually. So that'll be an awesome section. Also, we'll go over a little bit of the principles of design, just two in particular, unity and variety and repetition. Then, we'll also talk about how I set up my digital workspace and I'll show you that. So great things to come. Unit 3 is finishing touches. That will be a bunch of a series of tutorials that I will create and these are the ones that they're all unique to this Skillshare course. So you won't find that in YouTube, you won't find these in any, well, maybe somebody else has done it before, I haven't found them. This is just me working, but feel special because these are for you. Even the videos that you don't hear my voice, they are actually professors of mine and I've asked to custom make these to share to you. So really great stuff on how to finish our illustrations and take them from those flat compositions into something very much alive, and add more depth and dynamism to these pieces. Yeah, I think that's what we all want. So we'll definitely go over some tips and tricks in unifying the color palette. Once we've even created the color palette, we're going to find ways to unify it even better in the finishing rounds, and also some little tips to make in your vector, still a little bit more tangible and more real and less harsh and digital. So we'll do some things like that and then we'll do some more Photoshop textures and scanning and getting our hands dirty. So lots of fun stuff to come, I'm really excited. Through in this little slide just to show you why I broke up the class into these three units. It's because I see the illustration process like building a house, kind of corny, but it helps me remember the process in which I need to follow. So Unit 1 will be like our foundation, Unit 2, the framework of the house, Unit 3, putting on all the details, the siding, the roof, all that fun stuff. Keeping it in that order will definitely help you out with your illustrations. So project overview is all pretty simple. I don't know if it made sense or not in the Skillshare. What was it? Class description, but choose to visually represent either the word quiet or loud. This is clearly up to you. I wanted to leave it up to your interpretation because this course is all about having fun and experimenting and learning. I took these two words that are very open-ended and are quite open to your own interpretation. So define the words in your own mind and then think of a way to represent that visually in an illustration. Illustration needs to be 8 by 10 either landscape or portrait, up to you, and just have fun with it. There's a lot you can do. I didn't want to hinder your creativity too much and so go ahead and start thinking of your ideas now. That's what this is all about. Just a few more things to think about before you jump into your sketching, which will be the next video, and figure out why you're creating this illustration. A lot of times I know this one is it's because it's a course and it's to have fun, but figure out whatever that concept is that you're coming up with. Try to put up some parameters and say, well, this is what I want to accomplish with this illustration, not just start this illustration and just see where it leads you. Try to set some goals for yourself and know what do you want to accomplish. I know a few of you have already sent me an email or a OneNote trying to tell me what they wanted out of this design course and a lot of you, or some of you were talking about how you wanted it to not feel so square, or you wanted it to feel layered, or whatnot. All are great things, so keep that in mind when you're creating this. Things like when you're working on a project for a client, you need to keep track of why you're creating this illustration. It's easy to get carried away with textures and colors and start getting really experimental and then you start getting into this fine art piece that is only good for you and you can only interpret. So if this is for a client or something, reign it back and continually look back at why you're creating what the concept is. Also, there's a great Jack White video. It's an interview with Jack white about his own creative process and how limitations breed creativity. I agree 100 percent with everything he says in that video and I actually apply that into my own design process. So you have a world of opportunities to design anything you want. When you have unlimited resources to do whatever you want, sometimes that's harder to make up your mind and actually commit to something and start working so then you never start and you procrastinate and you're on a crazy deadline and work all night. So don't get caught in that. Try to restrict what you want to do. Narrow your focus and decide on what you want to do. Maybe it's a certain color palette you want to work within, maybe it's a certain format you want to do, maybe you really want to apply this type of texture. So cater your illustrations to that, your concepts to that. So remember, just define those words, whichever one you want, quiet or loud, and use that in an illustration. A little thing to help you, this is a Brad Woodard special tip that I don't know too many other people that actually do this, but I write down a word list, and these are all things that you do before you sketch. As I write down a word list that'll help me out defining whatever the word is or whatever my concept is, just a lot of supporting words. It's just a way to be able to get my thoughts out. Seeing those words make it a lot easier for me because they're harder to misinterpret. For example, another great resource is by using things like mood boards. Basically, if you don't know what a mood board is, it's basically a Pinterest board. Yes, I'm a guy and yes, I use Pinterest, and so do many other designers and illustrators that are guys, so don't judge. It's awesome because you can be able to keep a catalog of all your inspiring images that you find and so that's the idea. Collect all those images, bring those in, just reference references on color or your texture or the composition, whatever you feel. Maybe it's a certain time period. Whatever you're thinking as your concept, find appropriate inspirational images and build off that. So taking those images and pairing them with the words, having both of those on either side of your work while you're sketching could really help you stay grounded and focused on your concept. Like I said earlier, when you have that word there, it's a lot harder then because when you get into your pictures or your mood board, a lot of times you'll get a little swayed and start going crazy because I found this new texture that I liked on this one image and now I'm going to start trying to do that and adding that into my illustration. But now my illustration is going really far away from the concept that I had originally had, or the definition of that word so it doesn't actually visualize that at all anymore. You can look at one of those images and you like it for its texture but the subject matter has nothing to do with what you're doing. So rely on that word list that you create for yourself to help you out and to keep you grounded on the path you wanted. That's a little tip. Hopefully, that helps you. Also, one last thing I just remembered would be a quick little activity. Not a quick one. You can do this whenever. You can do this now or you can do this later. But just a great exercise nonetheless is to find great work, something that inspires you, an illustration that inspires you and take it apart, and then take it into your computer and make a replica of it. I don't condone stealing or anything like that or actually using that, but you can take it and really analyze all the pieces. When you recreate something, you have to look at it really closely, and as you start taking out elements of this illustration you'll start noticing, oh, when I take out that, the whole composition feels a little unbalanced or whatnot, and so you put it back and you take out another piece, like, oh, there it goes again, that doesn't work. I can't even rearrange these when you're trying to recreate it, or else it just feels off and then you start realizing that everything was placed there for a reason. Understanding those reasons is really key, so that will help you in your own illustrations, in your own compositions especially. I'll stop talking. This is exciting. I will answer any questions that you have, so feel free to ask them. I will see you in the sketching portion, which is next. Hopefully, you'll click on it right after this. Thanks. Bye.
2. 2. Get Sketching : Hey, guys. Welcome back to class, this is the second portion of our first unit and we'll be going over sketching. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes and wondering how we're going to do a whole segment on just sketching, but bear with me, I have some actually valid tips and things from my own practice of sketching that will hopefully help you and aid in your own process of creating this illustration and prepare you for the next step which is making a digital. We definitely want to set up this foundation right, so the way to do that is to get out all of the ideas that we can, and the fastest way to do that would be through sketching, with pen and paper or a pencil and paper. I want to go ahead and take you through my own sketchbook and I was debating whether I should or shouldn't, if I should use some beautiful examples online from other artists whose art or whose sketches didn't look like a kindergartner drew them. Mine are pretty bad, but not bad in a conceptual way, just bad in the actual rendering of them. But that's okay, so if you're not an artist, this is good news for you, or if you feel you're not a great drawer, don't worry about it. These sketches are just to get your own ideas out in there for you, If you need to take some time and clean them up and prepare them for a client, you can do that obviously. But right now, we're just going into rapid prototyping and getting out all the ideas we can. If they look ugly, whatever, as long as you can decipher what's on that page, and you'll see some examples of that coming up here in a second. Well, let's get started. Let me go ahead open this up. Well, I wanted to start off with this little specimen here and I was wondering if any of you knew what language this just might be. Well, you may already know, some of you may know, but it's actually English, it is English and it's just a shorthand that they used to, before computers they had to make quick notes that will be for secretarial work or journalists would try to get down ideas quickly, this is what it looked like. If yours looks something like this where no one else can decipher but you, that's perfectly fine. I had to throw that in there because it makes me feel better about my own stuff. Here's an example of my sketchbook, I just want to go briefly, go through these and scan through. As you'll notice on the left-hand side, like I said in the last video, I do make a word list and some better than others, but there usually is words on the left explaining what I need to be doing on the right-hand side during my sketches, and I usually have my computer right above this and open to the mood board that I've created of all the imagery as inspiration. There you go, these ones are actually a little bit better, these were icons that I was creating and somehow they ended up looking decent not amazing, but decent. But then here's an example, I want to explain to you how each of these sketches have helped me. In this one, I just try to come up with many different little type ideas and I had to write the word fully out there to see how those letters would correlate or why not, so you play around with ideas like that. Sometimes you're making a bunch of different elements, it all depends on your illustration, but on this one, you can see I got really lazy. You can see that word list is pretty haggard there. I'm not sure if you can read it. But these illustrations were really, really quick, rough and dirty, just enough to let me know what I needed to draw in the basic shape. Once you go into digital, you can clean those up, but it's really nice to have them at a point where you can take these, scan them in, and then create your vector art over top of them, because a lot of times I won't be able to, specially on this one, taking all those elements and being able to arrange them how I want them around. This one one around word. Just because I do so much moving around that it wouldn't be practical to keep redrawing everything. When you're at that point, just waiting to get on the computer, just shuffle things around, just get the basic shapes and ideas out. Here's another just example, this is a little bit better of just going through and taking all the different elements, maybe just the different, this is a seal, so how those letters play around with each other. How would they interact? Maybe what was the feeling that I wanted to go for? What's the border or the edges of this seal, and how would that shape be? Then maybe in some as I play around with form, when I'm trying to do some characters and it looks like I'm just drawing the exact same thing, but each time I'm trying to find out, how extreme I can go to exaggerate that part of the body this cat was supposed to be, rearing back, and later on it becomes a really angry cat. You'll see that at some other point. Layout, so just some quick ideas on what it is. Now, here's some before and after, I had to put this one in here because I really like the outcome on the right, but the sketch was just awful. This huge fat Frankenstein thumb, There's these fingers, I'm not even sure how they hyper extended to go that way, you have some going on here in her back and I'm not sure, but I think that's a face, just awful stuff. But because I was experimenting, I had actually a couple other pages with things just like this, I thought I'd spare you, showing you all of them. But what I want to prove with this is, it's definitely important just to get your ideas out there. They don't have to be beautiful really, just get your layout, and your ideas, and some of the basic shapes and you're good to go. Like this one, this one just ended up being right on as I was sketching it, maybe take it and I just wanted to show this one because there's the sketching velum there that I had, the tracing paper to make that a little bit [inaudible] that in a little bit better, and clean up the edges so that I could bring it onto the computer, scan it in and put the vector art over top of it. Definitely scanning your sketches. This one, this is the last one, and I just wanted to show you because I was, again, really happy with the outcome in the lab, but it made it so much easier to do that because on the left you can see that I really dealt with the composition. I had a whole another page of just the elements, maybe just the little umbrellas that were on the beach, and those sailboats, and those trees, and whatnot. I had these elements and then on this page, I just threw them together in somewhat of a composition and how I wanted to balance some of the elements in there. As you can see, it's pretty close to what the end result was, so that saved me a lot of time once I got onto the computer. Another method, if any of you've done web design, I'm sure you're familiar with the wireframing method of gray boxing. Basically, where you just take for each section of your website, you just go ahead and make a gray box there and block out that area for that content, so that way you know where things are, what the size hierarchy is, and things in relation to other things, so just helps you out. Think of this when you're doing your sketches, especially if you have a lot of elements, start placing them where you want them, that'll save you a lot of time down the road. I think that's all I have for that, but just before I let you go, just a couple of thoughts. I guess a quick tip. I like to write some times where I like to sketch sometimes with just a pen and not use a pencil, and the reason why that is is because when I write with a pen, It's definitely more permanent and so I have to keep those ideas out there. When I have ideas that are just super generic or I just, I don't know, even if I did a bad job drawing it out and I felt like it didn't represent what I'm doing at all, I would just erase it or if I started on the computer even, I would just hit Command+Z, and that was really easy. Then I had no archive of all the past work that I did because I deleted it all, I erased it all, and those ideas were still stuck in my head and I kept going back to those. So a way to do that is try writing with a pen or sketching with a pen, and getting your ideas out and getting them out of your head onto the paper, so that you can see them, you've done it. You could tell your brain, I've already got them out of my head, they are there, now I can work on the next idea and not get stuck. That's definitely one of the bigger ideas I'd like to share with you, and hopefully that helps aid you in your sketching. Also if you're going to be doing patterns, I wanted to just say that, this is not a time to get into your textures and your colors. We'll do that right away in the next unit. But right now, we're just coming up with concepts and different elements and forms of those elements that we're going to be including in our illustration. Don't worry about any of those other things like your colors and your textures. If you are making your own patterns, obviously, go ahead and sketch those out and come up with how you want to show those. I think that's it, I'll let you go. Again, you don't have to be an artist, a crazy good drawer to be able to sketch well, but I hope these ideas help you, and I'm looking forward to seeing all of your first round sketches. Thanks. Bye.
3. 3. Power of Color : All right, we made it. We're now in the second unit here of the course and we made it through the sketching and concepting stage, and hopefully, that went over well, and the tips that I shared their helped. Now we're going to get out of the black and white stage and get into the color, the fun part, and a part that I know that a lot of you have been waiting for and see. We're going to start getting this stuff, our sketches and our ideas now solidified and hopefully we're doing that through the getting feedback in the forum there, and I'll do my best to reach out and try to give individual feedback as best I can with such a large class. But yes, now we're into the digital, creating a digital version of our work and getting into the colors. Let me explain to you just how I see color, because color can be scary to approach just because there's so many options and variables involved in choosing colors and next video will actually be specifically. Actually watch the next video, right after this one, because I will be doing a walk-through in Illustrator of how I set up my workspace, but also how I create color palettes and little tips and tricks I do in Illustrator to settle on a color palette that I feel is appropriate to my illustration and concept. The power of color, the reason why I think that we all get hung up on creating color palettes and what makes it so difficult is because of the different of the variables like color is very emotional. I grew up in Seattle, it was gray, dark. It was easy to be depressed when you walked outside, but as soon as it was sunny and bright, it was definitely a mood changer there and you were happier and yeah, your spirits we're higher. Emotionally, color does play a big part. It's also descriptive, if you were to think of something. We're dealing in a world of illustration and sometimes the forms are a little bit more abstract. Being very descriptive as in, for example, you are trying to show the difference between a black bear and a polar bear, you wouldn't know that difference if we didn't use the right colors. Unless you made that shape, or in contexts or whatever, but definitely, color can help describe things and they can also point to a time in history, which I'll talk about in just a bit. They definitely are descriptive and they're relative to wherever they're sitting, whatever they're next to, wherever these illustrations or wherever these colors live, they're very relative to their surroundings, lighting, all types of things. That makes it tricky, and then obviously it's functional. It's definitely when you get into composing your work, you're going to be thinking about your color and the color will play a big part in the balance, in the composition that you create. Just because things like darker values being heavier, and lighter values being lighter on the page, visually lighter and visually heavier, can really make a difference on your page and for your concept. All the list of reasons of why color can be so tricky. It's not just you, it truly is tricky to pick a color palette. We're going to fix that in the next video but here, I just want to take you back to the Color 101. Our color basics and understanding this. I'll run you through this real fast, and I'll show you some examples of my own work. We have the color wheel. If you're not familiar, this is the primary colors. These are the secondary colors. The complimentary colors, and what's interesting about this is that you have, I noticed that when I was working, these are complete opposites and they can be super vibrant next to each other, but almost too vibrant and a little bit too in your face, the color combination of your complimentary colors. Doing things like using the near opposite instead of the direct opposite of it in the color wheel, can make your combinations be a little bit more subtle and that can be a nice touch and nice to add to your colors. You have your tertiary colors, which is obviously the combination between your blue and your green makes your teal color here, and then you get your lime green coming from yellow and green, and so forth. You got analogous colors, which are my favorite, because they're right next to each other and you can do a lot with them. They're all similar in hue, but they range in value as well. They can get darker there and you can do a lot of things with them like I did with this snippet. I did this web banners for snippet, and I was able to achieve a lot of depth and dimension in my work, solely from using these different hues of the same colors and these analogous yellow colors, as a quick way to add some depth and when I saw it can definitely be used. Just color has lot of sway in your work. Just to go back to basic terms, just so we're all on the same page. Maybe you haven't seen this in a while, so your hues, your colors, your intensity there, is the brightness or the dullness of the color. You can see here, but it definitely gets into your shades and your tints where your shades, or when you're adding black to your color, tints your adding white, and this is where you're just losing the actual color, that orange color is fading out, and you're losing the purity of that color. Then you have your value, which is like your brightness and your luminous and lightness, or however you want to say that in your work. You tell if it's a brighter or darker, so you'd say brighter or darker I think that's the easiest way to say it. Yeah. Playing around with those is very important because things like this, I took an illustration and you can actually see the real illustration on my website with their true colors because these are just for the presentation and they're not fantastic, but they do work for this. If you're looking at these close values equal soft, soft edges. If you look right here in the cow, you'll see that you lose these spots here just because the value is so close together, but it can become nice if you separate them. It's nice, it adds a little bit of variation, subtle variation, that really stands out in a piece I think. Taking the same illustration, you get contrasting values equals sharp edges, which maybe you're looking for them, maybe you really need to define that part here, you want to see those spots, but maybe back here for example, it's a little bit too strong, and it's not super important that those palettes be in such high contrast, they feel a little bit disparate from each other where like here I just felt like one solid thing. How are we going to do it? Just know close values equals soft, and those contrasting values equal sharp, which is an important thing to know and it's a good way to tell is to squint at your work. As you're working through it, just go ahead and squint at your work. You can see on the left there, the vibrant colors and colors have different values. When you have those like different lighter or darker values, you can see those shapes a lot more than when you scan over to the right, you lose things, things get a little muddy. That could be a good indicator to you, that you may want to change up some of the color values so that you can get a little bit more of a balanced composition. Relativity going back to this, I felt when I first made this pattern art, it was super bright and colorful, which kind of is. But you see this background and here on my website it's a little bit darker, and you can tell that the colors start to get really dull. This tan color starts to get really dull as soon as you put even a tiny light gray in the background. Here's another one on my slider there, on my break the woods homepage. You can see it, but then it's right next to this one, and this one is so bright. I thought that first one is really bright and vibrant until I saw this on next to it, so it's definitely next to. See where you art is going to live and make sure it's not next to something that's going to dull it out or what not, but see it in context. Just look at it in context and colors change when they're next to other colors, and a good example of that is here. You can see these three different colored boxes, but they have the exact same colored box in the middle, but your eyes do funky things when you pair up certain values or certain hues together. Here you get a nice contrast, but it seems because of that light, vibrant, yellowish green, it made this tan box dark. It doesn't look like this one, this one looks a lot lighter just because these two are so close. Looking at colors next to other colors can really help you. That helps you with building your palette. Finally, I just wanted to say that the history part that I mentioned earlier, it's just knowing your history. I've put a link to the book, the Pantone book, that goes throughout all the different decades and explains all the different cultural, and art movements of that time, and the Pantone color palettes that went with that movement. You can see here with this history that I've put up here, you can see like the Russian Constructivists Movement goes with these colors. If you start using these colors, make sure you're not making these super geometric shapes unless you want it to start looking like this. Unless you're looking for a movement perfect, use these colors. Like the art devour and then you have your 50s kitchen, and you use your pastel colors and start giving them the same hues and all of these. Just know your history, you just know it could be a benefit to you to know it and for two reasons. For one, that you know to avoid certain things if you don't want it to look like that, it's not going to further your concept. But if it is going to further your concept and you want it to look ratio or like this certain time period, know your history, and match your color palette to something like that. That can help you decide really quickly what colors you're going to use. But yeah, hopefully this helped. Don't want to ramble too long, I know the last ones are long, but I split this up deliberately to help you out. The next one is, I'm going to get into working in the digital space and showing you around Illustrator, all of the things that I can do with color and making a color palettes and all that fun stuff. Stay tuned. Thanks. Bye.
4. 4. Illustrator 101 [OPTIONAL beginners only]: Hey, guys, welcome to Illustrator. I made this quick little optional video for all of you who are brand new to Illustrator, or maybe even dabbled in it a little bit but just don't feel super comfortable yet. This'll be a great review on the very basic tools and functions that are available in Illustrator that can help you achieve what you are looking to achieve with your illustration by turning it vector. This is the Illustrator portion. Right now I have a sketch, let's just say, I had for another project. I'm going to just show you how I can make part of this vectorized. As I do, as I go through that process, I will go ahead and show you all the tools and hopefully some little hot keys on the way to save you a lot of time in taking your sketch to a digital place. Now we're here looking at this sketch and I want to draw right on this. I'm going to drag this because I won't keep this for long. I just want this as a reference. So I'm going to blow this up a bit and I'm going to draw this guy right here. What I'm going to do is I want to just go in a different layer. Anything I mention, any of the words, look them up in Help if you can't find them in the same place that I'm finding them because my tool kit maybe set up a little bit differently than yours. If you go over here into your layers, you'll see you're on layer one right now. You're going to add another layer, but right now, make sure you're still clicked on layer 1. Click on this guy, so layer 1 and then we want to make sure this is knocked back a little bit in opacity, just enough that we can see it, but not enough that we don't want it to distract too much from the shapes we're going to be building on top of it. Just like tracing so it'll be a lot easier but not quite so cheating because it's all yours. All right, so then now we can go back into your layers and let's lock layer 1 so we can't do anything to that. Now we're going to layer 2, click that back. I'll zoom in, Command plus sign is to zoom, Command minus is to zoom out. I want to pick the ship. So let's say, I'll make that circle first. I'm going to draw on top of it so let me just make sure I have a good color here. Now up here you can change it right over here, or you can change it right over here. But this is the fill color and this is your line color, your stroke. So let me just go over here. I'm going to get rid of my stroke color. Whenever I click on this, it's just none so I take out that stroke. I want to fill, let's just say blue and put that back. Now I'm going to go over into my panel over here, my two locks, and I'm going to click and hold. That will open up all the other options that are available to you within that shape. All the ones of these tiny little black arrows in the corner, that means if you click and hold on them, there's going to be more options. So I want to look to the circle on each with the Ellipse tool. Then I'm going to click. So I'm going to click and I'm going to hold down option "Shift" and that will scale it from the middle. From where you clicked, it will scale it right outwards. Reason why is that is cool because if you don't, if you just click and drag, it will scale all over the place. You can hold shift to keep it as a circle while you drag and I haven't let go yet. You can create your shape, but it's hard because, let's say, I want to put it right there. I want to draw this circle, so I have to draw in the corner and then it's just harder. So it's a lot easier if I just clicked right in the middle of this shape, make it a lot quicker and you hold Alt or option, that's what that button is, or shift while you're holding, clicking when you haven't let go yet. Then you drag and let go of all three, and there you go. So that's a quick little tip. So I have that shape. Now it doesn't really matter what the color is, I'm just trying to get the vector shapes in so I'm going to click off of here. You have your black arrows. That's first just your general selection and that all of these little points on here are all called anchor points. It'll select all of them at one time if you use the black arrow, which is generally what you want to use. If you want to zoom in and zoom out on your screen, obviously I said you can do Command plus or minus, but if you want to just also drag your art around so you can go to a point where you need it, hold your space bar and then click and drag. It gives you a lot of control and you can go through and see your art. So if I want to click, drag, and want to look over here. It saves you just a ton of time. So that's another little quick tip. So I'm going to zoom in, it's Command plus, and then I want to go over here into my palette and I want to get a pen tool. I'm going to click. I'm going to start making points, anchor points. So I will click at another anchor point here, then click, then click, and now I'm noticing now it's on fill. So I'll go back to my selection arrow. Click off of the thing. It's just not selected. So now if I go back and reselect it and I'm going to notice it's on the wrong one. So I just want to swap these, actually I'm going to go down here in the bottom left. You can click on this little button and it will swap or you can hit Shift x, save you a lot of time. But now I'll go back to my pen tool, then I'll click back on that point and you'll see it'll have a line there, a little slash. That means you're ready to continue on that line. If you're going to do a plus anywhere, you see that plus sign, that'll add a point that you can move on your line to click around your line. The way that you can attack just one point is by going to your white arrow and you can click on it. You could see it's the only one highlighted and now you can move it so you can drag and really get some custom shapes in there. So I'm going to go back to my pen tool. Cool, let me just try to continue, go through, keep going through. Now I have a shape here, and you can notice it's going to be symmetrical here. So I can just click straight down, not worry about it, click right over here. Just close the path, and you've got a little end of circle, it means you're closing your path, and then I can hit Shift X, or I can go over here and do this again. Now I have this vector shape but since it's going to be the same on both sides, I could just erase one of those sides just straight down in the middle, so if I hold on this I'll go to Eraser Tool, then I'll zoom in [inaudible] Then you can change the size of your brush on your eraser by using the bracket buttons on your keyboard. The one on the left, make it smaller; the ones on the right, make it bigger. Let's play around with that. Then if I hold shift and then I click and drag down, it erases in a straight line. That's what I do quite a bit. I'll go right over there, click shift, so now I have this. I want to make this shape, I want to repeat this shape. So I will copy that, you can command C, and then command V, which would be this, command C, command V, it's off to the side, but I want it in the same spot, so not to mess with that. I do command C, command F. That pastes the new one right in place. If I were to drag this, you have a new, right on top of it. That's perfect. That's exactly what I want. So if I hold shift, it won't go anywhere when I drag it, it'll stay in line with it. Let me see if I can drag it, and then if I right-click on my new image, I can go to Transform, then I can go to Reflect. Then I can do vertical, which will mean I'd slip it, this way. Horizontal it'll go that way. We can preview how that will look, and it looks perfect. Then I can hit just "Okay". Then I have the other shape. Now I hold shift and click, bring it over, and match it up. Nice. Now it's all symmetrical, great. If I highlight both of these, and I have a really cool function over here in your Pathfinder tools, they unite, you play around with these, they do all sorts of things with two paths when you put two vector shapes over each other. But this one will unite those shapes, then you won't get this into one big, happy shape. So click that, there you go. Now they're united, and we have this little, obviously is not straight at the bottom. But if you get rid of that anchor point, it'll obviously go straight. Let's see there. We can go back to our pen tool. If you hover over it, it'll give me an option. It'll save that, you'll see a little negative sign. That means it's going to get rid of that anchor point. Click on it. Oh, there's multiples, oh no. Click, click. Click big, I got all of them, and now it's straight. There's a few little helpful tips for you. Now, adding a curve on a line. If I was going to click and say, let's do this, click, click, click, click, [inaudible] to create this. But I want to make sure this is switched to the line. I can hit this one right here, this direct select, which is just clicking on one of these anchor points, I can drag those. They're going to add like a curve or something. You have your Beziers hand, is what you want to pull out. That goes if you want to click and hold on the Pen tool. At the very bottom you have a convert anchor point, and that brings out your Beziers hand, which you'll see in just a second. So click on it, then drag in one of your directions. Now, you'll see it will go, it'll coincide with each other and make your life easier, and let go. Now, you have that nice curve. But if you clicked on just one of those with this direct selection tool, you can go through, and you can go ahead and see here, you can change the shapes quite a bit. That's another really helpful one. You can play around with that. Play around with all these different ones in here in the Pathfinder. You can look up tutorials online on how to use this a little bit better and there's all sorts of options you can do. But hopefully, some of these little things just help. You can go ahead and, like I said, you can go over here and change your colors. I'll go more into how to set up color [inaudible] or whatnot, or actually, you've probably have already seen that. So don't you worry about it. It's one of the videos in this unit. So you can change your colors. Over here, you can see, you can copy that. So let's choose one. Then let's say over here I can change the opacity, I showed you that. Over here, I can see all of the things that I have applied to this. You can go up and you have effects just like we do in Photoshop. The same with Stylize something. I have Drop shadows, whatever. You can really get into a lot of options here with these vector shapes. Your eraser tool still just cuts your path, then you have two different shapes, which is neat. Yes, I won't keep rambling. I think this is enough to at least get you started. If you click and hold, you have your options here. You have your lines, just start playing around with it. If you have any questions, you can e-mail me directly. This isn't an intro to Adobe Illustrator class, so I won't go too deep into this, but just hopefully this helped even a little bit. You are working on a canvas. This canvas here is your art board, is what it's called, right here. So any art that is hanging off the side, whenever you save your file, it's not going to get rid of it, but you just won't see it when you save it as a JPG, PDF, whatever, it'll be gone. This is your working space and you can go into documents setup over here. You can edit that art board you can either resize it, or up here, you can do specific sizing, you can change to portrait, landscape, you can click on this and adds another one. So lots of little opportunities there, but now you're in this mode, so you can click back out of it by going back to your selection tool. There you go. Hopefully, those helped. Let me know how it goes for you, and I'm anxious to see what you come up with. Thank you. Bye.
5. 5. Going Digital - Part 1: Hey guys, and welcome back to class. Hopefully, you just came out of the color theory portion and now you are all masters of color, and understand the theories and complexities of it and you no longer need my help. If that's the case, go ahead and turn off this video now and you're done. But if you're still having some reservations about your knowledge and application of color, then this is a perfect video for you. I hope that I can add on to your color knowledge and help you build out some beautiful palettes that will help your concepts, and reinforce those concepts that you've created in your sketches. We'll go over some compositional things later. Main thing is taking these ideas that you put on the paper and scanned in, and taking those into Illustrator here. This is how I work in Illustrator, and then for final touches, I put it into Photoshop. I'm going to take you through that journey, by taking these scanned images and bringing them into this digital world and making some vector graphics. Making this composition digital is pretty straightforward, and everybody has a different way to do it. I won't spend too much time showing you how to do that. But this is my workspace, as you can see, my workbench, my digital workbench, and I like to keep everything at my disposal right around my canvas here, my workspace. You can see, starting from the left here is my scanned image of my sketch. I use a reference. I have my textures, I have my colors. We'll go over how to put those colors. Here is swatches and you probably know that, but I'll just really quickly show you the benefits of doing that and using some of these other tools here for color. Then I built out some elements that have come from this, and I have these as reference images over here that helped me create these things right here. This is what happens once I recreate my work here. That's what I got. In order to get that, what I did was I just took this image and I went to transparency, opacity and just knocked it down a bit just enough so I could still see it. But it's barely there, and I go ahead and close that. I can either take this and open up the Layers panel and make it on a new layer, or I can hit "Command-2", and that will just lock this element, not the entire layer which has all of these, which is convenient. Command-2 is a nifty little trick. "Command-Option-2", is how you unlock it, and it'll unlock anything else that you've locked on the board, but this is it. So "Command-2", lock just that element or you create a different layer, and it's nice because I can build these elements right on top of my sketch, so I can keep that composition out. That's the benefit of fleshing out your sketches early in that sketching phase when you scan them in so that it saves you a lot of time here digitally. You can do that. Once I went over and built out all my different pieces here, and then I assembled them like a big puzzle into my composition, and I can now play around. The best part about being digital is you can go ahead and just take those shapes and move around and find out the perfect combination and balance that you can be looking for. I will come back to this later. Now we know how I set up my digital workspace and brought in my sketch. Now I want to talk about color palettes. This is just a poster I did for a client, and I again, have my color palette sitting right up here. But first things first, when creating a color palette, go ahead and just base it off of one color. Build the rest of the palette off of one color, main color that you choose. Have something that you start with. In this case, it was nice because the client said they wanted this blue teal color, and so I went ahead and just built a palette around it. According to our color theory class that we just had previous to this, you can see how I have a nice range of values here. These are similar in value, but I have these two other options, so I have like this tan color to help out, and also this really high contrast, this darker value to add contrast to the palette so I can balance out my piece. It's nice to have all those supporting elements in my palette. Let's jump into this. You have your palette, I keep mine here so I can see them or you can put them in here in your swatches panel, and that's easy enough to do if you haven't done it real quick. All you have to do is take it, highlight the colors that you choose, and then go into your swatches, and then just say you want to add another color group and you say, test. This is all fine, and just say, "Okay". Now you've created a swatch panel and a little folder just for this artwork on your illustration here. You can go through and say, I want to change this color, now I already have this set so I can just click and just change that to the correct color. I won't waste time on that. Have you ever used a color guide tool? Now, if you haven't, it's quite amazing, and I think it's a little jewel that people often overlook. It has a bunch of different options here, right now it's set on. So when I clicked on it, it's set on shades and tints. Let me just open up. Let's just say I'm going to me pick a color first and let's just go off of that. Let me pick a blue, then go into here. Now it's showing me all sorts of shades and tints and I can go in here and customize what I want to see. If I want to see warm and cool versions of that color, which is really neat. I can go through and I can see this range of values and seeing its complimentary color on the other side. You can set and play with that right up here in the top corner, you've got vivid or muted. It just takes out the saturation. It's just nice, once you have that one color. Maybe I should be using that color just so we don't confuse ourselves. But it's nice, I started choosing my color palettes. I have my one single color and I go into Color Guide. Now I can start seeing some of the colors that go with it. I guess I was seeing what it looks like if it was more muted and I might be able to take out multiples of these and use them in one composition and one palette. But if I click on, let me show you again, I'll click on this button right here, the Editor or Apply colors. Now I'm working with this color, and I like to look at it right here. This is what we should be familiar. We just went over in color theory, your complementary colors, your complementary two's, and so it's showing you all the different color combinations that it has there in the color wheel to help you out, to give you a quick guide. Colors that match in value. It shows your analogous colors right up here, just a little jewel that many people don't know and it can aid you in deciding what your color palette is because they have some nice colors. If you're going to go for a complementary palette, that already has some ideas for you. If I want to look at these colors, I can go through, and this is how I want to see this color. I like to use this one right here just because it's a lot easier for me to comprehend. Just simple colors and I can go through, and I can see they're all affected, some of those colors stay, what's in this enqueue and whatnot. Lots of color. You can see some really neat colors. You can actually see how mine turned out due to playing around with these tools. You can see all the color bars that are already just forming for you. So a really handy tool and it does a lot of the legwork for you. I would definitely say, check this out and explore further, and you can also take those once you create in this palette or one that you have up here, and you can just make it into a new, this little folder option, it makes it into new color swatch. You can say "Okay", and now you go into your swatches, and now you have a new color palette. That's a big help, I think. At least it's been a big help to me.
6. 6. Going Digital - Part 2 : This is a really cool tool, I don't know how many of you use it, which is the Blend tool. It's really cool because it gives you a quick look at some color ranges, I guess. You can actually specify the steps that you want to see in between. So let's say, I want to see all the color progression between this teal to this yellow, but I want to see it in steps. I don't want to see just a big gradient, which I can also do, but maybe I don't want to see this gradient, I want to see in specific steps. I want three steps in between here. Three colors actually, so one, two, three, I want to see it like that, but I want to see it progress. I'll take this out. I can go over here, here's your Blend tool, double-click on it and choose Specified Steps. I could choose, I want three steps in between so I click three. I click "OK", now, my tool is now the blend tool so I click on the one I want to start with and the one I want to end with. There you have it. Now, it's taken this and it's showing the range of color that can go as it converts from this color to this color. Sometimes some color palettes can come and you can actually come out of that. If I highlight this, I want to hit Object, Expand, and now, I have these as individual pieces and I can ungroup those, and I can move them around. That's a quick way to look at some colors too. You can also see them with a Blend tool. If double-click on that, you can not do Specified Steps, but you can do Smooth Color, and click "OK" and click on the first one, click on the second one, and you can see a really neat transition there, which is your gradient from that color. But the cool part is, if you do object expand. Now, those are a bunch of circles layer on top of each other. You can actually take out a few command Shift G, which ungroups these elements. Now, you can go ahead and take out individual colors, so which is a neat option to, if not for anything, but just to play around with, I guess. But sometimes I can help you to determine some colors that you want to choose, so you keep pulling those out or the one if we wanted to. Let's continue. You have the Blend tool, you have up here, you had your color guide to use as building your palette. As you're doing that, there's also some other resources that I have listed and that are online that you can use and actually, they are built into Illustrator and Photoshop, which is Kuler, K-U-L-E-R. You can build things online or import pallets from online that other people have created and use them here in your artwork. Some people find that not to be super helpful. So these other ideas that I just shared with you and the idea of selecting one color, then going up to here and playing around with it and finding complementary colors, analogous colors is a lot more helpful. So find your jumping point color and go from there. Just one thing I think would be really helpful for you. Now, once you've created your artwork and you have this complex set of elements, if you want to change your color palette overall, let's say, I want to change this teal, but I don't want it to be teal, I want it to be this light blue color, I don't have to click through each of these. I'm just go ahead and click on you want, go ahead and go to Select, go to Same, and then go to your Fill Colors. You want to find the same teal color going to that. Now, all of the one with that same color are highlighted, everything is. You can go ahead and change that, and it will change it everywhere. That will save you hours and hours and hours of clicking, and shift and clicking, and trying to highlight all of those different ones, and finding all the instances of that color. This is a quick way to change your color palettes. I can quickly click on that, Select, Same, Fill Color. Maybe I want to make this more of like purples and reds and pinks. I can do that very quickly just using that tool. That's another tip that I use and it will save you bunches of time. But creating a color palette is a lot about just going with your gut too, knowing what you want to say, what you want people to feel when they see your work and If that fits with your concept, then go with your gut on those color palettes and use these tools to help you get there. Don't be afraid to use a lot of color. Use colors that you normally would not pair together. These are pretty elementary, pairing of colors, but sometimes you can get a little bit crazy and it's experimental, and they work because there's contrast, and there's in the values, and even if they're similar hues or whatnot. There's lots of options. Have fun with it. Incorporate this into your set, your illustration here that you're creating. Let me go back here, and I want to talk a little bit just on composition. Now, I love using this as an example because it was basically a test study, if you will, for me on composition. It was basically a lesson for myself as I went through this. So I want to just break it down and show you why I did what I did, and how that I feel ended up being and into a balanced interesting composition. Right now, you're seeing, early on, I just put all the elements together that I had created. I started putting it back together like a puzzle, like I said. Putting it there, it's not bad. This blue is a little overbearing. It's a big shape, it's a big mass that takes up a lot of revenue, but also because it does that, it draws my eye to it but it's not a lot of detail too, it's not necessarily the one thing that I want people to look at. It gets a little boring, you have the three trees, and not a whole lot of visual interest. It gets a little uninteresting down here just because of the detail, but that's what you'll want to look at anyways. I had to somehow make this feel a little more balanced overall. They would scan through. My idea was, I wanted people to look from the top to the bottom. Here I go. The next layer that I added was this texture right here and I used that white to lighten it. I tinted it basically with a pattern. That's definitely a good way to go and easy way to break up that space. Then I went ahead and added these little tiny waves, little white caps here, and spread them out through out so that I could break up this space a little bit more into the background and set it down so I don't have to just see this big space. Then the next step is I started to fill in some gaps, I added in these birds because they felt like before, it was a little unbalanced maybe because I had the rest of this thing filled, so it felt weird having this gap here and I was lacking some black. I just had black all over here. That's a big thing too with your color. Spread your color around. I did, I guess I'll quickly go back here and you can see the color palette that I had originally. There we go. You can see how I divvied out this teal and I didn't want it to be all in one spot because color definitely, some of these yellows could attract a lot of attention maybe. But I don't want just these, I want you to look at all the elements so I can spread out that color and make sure that it isn't feeling too heavy in places. That's what I tried to do here, I tried to deviate that out. Then over here I added some extra little details to break it up a little bit further and to bring in because it felt like there's a lot more white down here than there was up here so I brought those in. Then the final really subtle, I'll go back and do it again. You'll see on the trees, the corvette, these beach umbrellas that now I've added another texture in there and lightened those up because of that texture. That's a nice way to lighten things up. You can use the exact same color. You don't even have to change the value, you just have to add a texture and leave the background white and these are just lines on top of the white background. It knocks it back a little bit so that you can see this whole thing starts taking shape. Originally it looked like this, and slowly it morphed into this and that was the final rendering that I had. I feel it is balanced quite a bit. Just some things you remember, colors carry a visual weight depending on their value and also if you're going to go ahead and you have all these different elements here, a good way to break that up, like I said, is using some of your design elements, which are your color and your pattern. That will help you establish a hierarchy over your whole piece and where you want people's eyes to go. Hierarchy as in bringing some things forward, some things back into focus and attract the eye. Let me show you here, I guess repetition is another one. I'll go over some design principles, on top of this would be these umbrellas here. They were initially just all the same color, so I decided to break it up and I started to add different color to make it a little more interesting then I added some of them with textures. This is what you call unity and variety. The variety as in you have the same type of object, but you add a variety of colors and shapes and textures within here that can really make this thing come alive and jump out. Those were typically just little triangles, but now they have a little bit more life to them and they can hold their own eye feel. That's definitely a good principle to go by is repetition in general. Because repetition, it can just one, unify your work by using the same color as I go through right here and distribute that to add balance to your work, but it unifies it because now I have it over here, the shape is over here and here, and maybe I stuck with a few others like this master here. So I did this once, this organic feel among these other very geometric feels. But this organic feel, if I only did it once, it will feel weird or if I only had it here and then in this major shape and then all of this was super geometric. I added this little landmass right here that was also organic. That is using repetition and that unifies your piece. Think of that. Little things too that can make your composition interesting is letting your eye have a break, but also give it a little treat when somebody looks at this and there are things like lost and found shapes. You can see here I'll zoom in on this house. I actually had this as a red color and it was just way too harsh so I went ahead and took it out and just left it and when I took out that shape, it actually left no shape and it felt better because my eyes connected these lines automatically just because of the relationship it has to these other houses and what you've seen here. It automatically completes that and you don't even need to put a shape there. So a little touches like that and things like these little white caps help when somebody wants to come up closer to your work and see it. There's a few more surprises to look a lot more, a lot deeper than it looks like from a distance. Well, I hope this was of some value to you. We went over the composition, we went over how to create color palettes, and we went over how to take your sketches and put them into a digital format. The next unit will be on applying these types of things, the texture and ways to bring in your own textures as well and scan those in and there will be lots of tutorials. It will just probably be a bunch of video tutorials, shorter ones that you can go through and stroll at your own leisure. Thank you. I hope this helps and I'll see you in the next class.
7. Optional: Previously Recorded Q&A Video: Hey, guys. Now, this is our live sessions. Sorry for all of you who are in a different part of the world or a different time zone in general and couldn't see this live. Luckily for you, [inaudible] this as a recording now, and you can see that in YouTube, which there should actually be a link there in the syllabus. This is a lot more nerve-racking having to do this live. So I apologize if I stutter or whatnot. I also apologize if I sent to you, I didn't specifically send you, but if Skillshare sent you about seven or so e-mails regarding this Google Hangout session I guess within a half an hour. I'm restarting because my browser was freezing. I apologize in advance for that, for the spam e-mails that may have come your way. But let's go ahead and answer some questions. I want to thank you guys for sending over so many questions and then upvoting this so I could determine which ones I was going to go over with you guys. One more issue that we're having with Google Hangouts is it's not allowing me to screen share. Luckily, a lot of the questions that you've asked, I've already made tutorials for. I just haven't shared them yet because I'm going to put those up right after this hangout. So don't worry about that. I'll make sure to keep this brief and just touch out regarding some of these questions that you have. If anything I need to use visuals for, I'll make sure and send those your way in the resources part of your syllabus for the unit 3. So the first question here. Actually, this one is specifically what I just did the other night in a few tutorials, which is adding texture. Is it more effective in Illustrator or Photoshop? Depends on what you're using it for. It can definitely be more effective in Illustrator just because, like for me sometimes if you want to use it in Illustrator, I don't feel like you have as much control to the ways that I approach it, so I would say I like Photoshop because you can control it a little bit more. But in Illustrator, it's nice because you're still working with vector shapes. So that's the benefit to that. But then you'll see I have a video for that specifically, and then how to make those all feel more natural and not feel so computerized. So I hope that helps. Another question here was please overview a few trends and the styles which are popular in modern digital illustration. There's a lot of styles going on, but one that I've noticed, well, I guess there's two. There's the one that looks very Web 2.0, very bubbly, but there are also very vector flat objects. Then the other side is people are trying to make everything look very hand done and either painterly or they're trying to make it just look like it was handcrafted or hand-cut out or if it was just printed or screen printed. People love that, and I think that's just a result of everybody being tired of seeing, now that we have all these digital, these ways to create things digitally, initially when it was up and coming I think we overused it and now we're starting to realize that we want them incorporate some real craft into our work, and a lot of times making it look a little bit more real like we've actually handcrafted these things and not just created them on a computer is a nice look. [inaudible] discussing how to add texture in Illustrator so don't worry about that. That is in the video. Art align work, edges, and shapes also going to be in the video? Here's a good one. Rachel Neighbors had asked this one. If you're watching, here you go. You had said you'd had a problem where you leave the canvas very blank or you always feel like there needs to be more of a filler or a background or something like that. I definitely do have this problem. It's just a matter of when do you stop working with your illustration, or how do you plan to fit it within your space that you're given? I think those are all important questions to ask, and I'll make sure to add some resources that you guys can look at in regards to this. But a lot of times when it comes to these, you just have to think about what are you trying to do. Sometimes if you have some big bold shapes and you're wondering if it looks a little bit too flat or too big and then you're just trying to add a little bit of interest, a way to do that without filling up the whole background with something is to just make whatever shapes you have in there a little bit more exciting and/or the composition of those shapes used to be exciting the shape of your illustration. If you have a bunch of different elements that are coming together, have them make some shape together and not just be your disparate elements all over the page. Try to group them and try to have them be a shape in and of themselves. That can help you frame your work, and you'll not have to worry about the wide space all around that. But patterns and textures can be a really good way of being what you call a filler or whatnot just because it can, depending on the colors you choose, if you choose ones that are similar in value, and if you hit like a red and a pink together, they're pretty similar together. If you can choose one that makes the values similar, it's a really subtle pattern that you can put on something and it's not too distracting, but at the same time if you were to look at it you'd feel like there's more detail going on, and when you do look closer it's a nice surprise. So that's how I combat a filler. If I need some to fill in some space, or I just put a light pattern in the background. That's another way to do it, or blocks of texture. A good example of that would be look at Charley Harper, his illustrations, or Alvin Lustig. They have some really good examples of that. Really, it's the mid-century modern illustrators who really do the job at that. So those are good research, and I'll make sure those are in there in the syllabus. So what types of projects would you recommend to a beginner designer looking to add work to their portfolio and what types of work people are generally looking for. People are looking for everything. Now, I know for me people are looking for specific things because of what they see in my portfolio. I'm not convinced that there's one thing that's one type of illustration that is the right way to go in terms of getting the most work. I know one that's very popular illustration, and I know he's a designer here as well. He knows app design and web type work. I know that's very flurry now, but for me it's not my favorite type of work. So what I've put in my portfolio is very planned. I do have a lot of web work, but you don't know about it because I don't put it out there in my portfolio because I generally don't want those types of jobs. So I'll take them because, obviously, sometimes you just need to pay the bills. But in general, fill your portfolio up with work that you want, the clients that you want to attract. Put the work that would excite them, and do that. I think that has a lot to do with style. Now, I know a few of you asked about having a specific style as well in your artwork. My answer to that is you'll always have your own style come through anything that you do. Anything you make is yours. Anything you make will have your style in it. Even if I try to do just other artist's style, I try to mimic the way they do their clouds or whatnot in there illustrations, it'll still be a cloud by Brad Woodard because it's how I created. It's how my mind works and how I visualize things. So don't get too hung up on a style because whatever you do will be yours. But I think what's important to do is to realize if you do have something special going on or something that people really are attracted to, or something that you're attracted to, emphasize that and really play off of that. Those are perfect things to work on and put those into your portfolio, and hopefully, you'll get tons of work for that because people want to come to people for specific things. It's better to be really good at one thing than be okay at a ton of things. This is the philosophy I have to go by just because I know initially right out of school I tried to do everything, and I tried to include everything in my portfolio. But the problem with that was, you're always critiqued and judged by your weakest piece within your portfolio, so remember that as well. If you have all these so-so pieces that you're not too happy with but you're putting it in there because you want to show a wide range of styles, or a wide range of types of work that you can do, that may be more detrimental to your process than anything. Continue experimenting by all means. I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying what you put in your portfolio should definitely be work that you're trying to get.. Hopefully that answers your question. That's been on my mind quite a bit, and every time I go back to my website, I definitely go through and clean house, and take out a lot of the old work, and it takes time to build up to that I understand. When you get out of college, maybe you're saying, "Well, maybe I only have like five pieces inside. I don't want to just throw everything out the window." You don't have to. Initially, I would say build yourself up. But when you start having enough pieces, start replacing those, the work that you do have in there that isn't really the type of work you want to do, or is not the best display of the type of quality you can do now. Take those out and replace those with better stuff. Because the only way you're going to get better is through mileage, and as you continue to create and work on your so called style, that'll start evolving too. One more thing on that, I think is watch out for trendy fads in your style. Maybe you do something a certain way, and you're noticing that everybody's doing it that way, and that's just the style and it's getting you a lot of business maybe, or at least attention right away. But be careful that you don't get stuck and pigeonholed in that style. Because as you're going forward, you don't want to just stop and not progress, and have everybody asking you for that style, and never having to change a thing and basically make a formula for your work. Continue learning, continue growing and expanding that style that you have, and make sure it's something that's timeless and good ideas and good creative solutions based off craft. Good ideas and understanding history and the historical context of the work that you do. Move on. I think I've gone on a long enough rant about that. As you were asking about some of my references, some books that I had, I put a lot more in there. Basically my Amazon wish list is in there and other books that I have. I know you've noticed that people like the Alvin Lustig book and that one is amazing. He has great examples of textures and patterns, and the use of color composition. Everything in there is just really good work, and it's a good study for your composition in making sure that the things balance out. He would be a good person to look at. There's a few other, I put in Alexander Gerard, a book about him and Charley Harper. Mary Blair actually, from Disney. She has amazing illustrations and use of color and texture. Look at her up if you don't already know who she is. That was an amazing era for illustration during the '50s, '60s, mid-century era, so take a look at those as a reference. That's where most of my influences come from. It's a hybrid of design thinking in with illustration so that's why I like it. I'm messing with layers and illustrator. I'm not the best person to ask about layers and illustrator. I taught you that crazy key command tool, which is to lock your layers. Well, not lock your layers, lock the elements within a layer, and that I use maybe too often, I use it as a crutch. I'll just lock a bunch of layers in my back, I want make my background color I'll lock it, and I'll build everything on top of it. It's all within the same layer a lot of the times. But if it's going to be really, really complex, just to make sure you name your layers and work off that. I know it feels like it's a little more time consuming, but when you have to make edits and go back, you're really going to want to see those layers because then you can just turn off a few layers, and maybe just go to the texture layer, go to the character layers, and maybe you have a line work that was over top of that that you save or whatnot. But yes, I don't have any better way than just to name them and keep track of them, and do them if you really are doing something big and robust. Let's see hear little bit more about making money. This is a good one. "Please talk about turning this into yo bread and butter." I like that. Eventually, we have to make money off of all of our work if we want to make this our career, so that's a good question. I've done it a little bit differently, I don't think there's any magic formula for getting work, but it definitely comes from being persistent and up to date. What I've done since actually before I got out of college, I went ahead and started a blog, started my website, and I started posting work. My work wasn't great and maybe my writing skills weren't all that great when I first started blogging. But the things that I did, I actually reached out to a ton of different illustrators that I admired, a lot of different designers that I had admired, and that were professional designers and illustrators. At first, I didn't think they would ever respond back to me. But I found out quickly that the design community is very open and willing to help out other designers and illustrators, so keep that in mind. Reach out to people that you admire. I mean, there's a good chance that they will get back to you. Maybe it'll take a few weeks after they find it in their spam folder or whatever, their inbox has been crowded. But generally, they've gotten back to me. When they do, they're more than happy to give you advice. That's a good way to learn from someone like a professional, is to just go and email them. Another way that I was able to get their attention was, I would post their work on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook. When I posted it, I also attributed that post to them or whatever. I tagged them in that post, so that they would see it. Also I asked them if I could do interviews with them, like email interviews. Mostly for me, so that I could pick their brain. But also, I told them I'd put it in my blog and all my viewers, I don't remember how many I had at that time, maybe six, could go ahead and learn from you as well, so they're more than happy. The cool thing about that is that when they're happy and excited to share that information with you, I was able to get information from them. I was able to put it on my blog, so I had some really interesting content on my blog that would actually get people to want to come to my blog. But the best part is those professionals started tweeting. When you put up the blog, you tell them, I put up the blog, your interview is there. If you don't mind sharing it to your friends. You're not going to have to tell them that because they will share it because they've been featured on the blog. Now you have high level people, people with lots of followers, influential people in the social media world tweeting and liking, and sharing your information or sharing your blog, and so your name's getting out there. All of this is what I'm saying. This is all turning into bread and butter here in a second. There's a lot of building up to this. Getting your name out there is key, getting in contact, getting in those communities is key because now a lot of those people who I thought were these untouchable designers, and illustrators that I would never be able to even aspire to be, now I'm good friends with a few of them. I've actually gone and met them, been to their studio, and we even share work. If I'm too busy with this client and I get another job come in, I'm able to share work with them and likewise, they'll share work back with me, and refer clients over to me. Being close with the design community has its benefits. It does not only makes you better, but it also can get you work. With that being said, if you went to college for design or illustration, stay close with your college buddies, your classmates. Not even just in your classes, but more specifically in your classes because having them be really good friends with you is a good thing because if you're looking for a job, or if you're looking for extra work on the side like I said, it's the same thing that I was saying earlier. We get extra work. Once you start getting work, you get a lot of work. When that work comes in, the best thing, instead of just turning it down, it's a lot easier for me and I like that better if I can go ahead and share that with another friend of mine who I trust is talented, and a lot of those people are my friends from college that I've seen, and I know their work ethic and everything like that. Never underestimate the power of your connections and your friendships. Those can get you work as well. I talked about blogging, getting high profile designers, illustrators, sharing your information, sharing your blog, and that's beneficial too because you're trying to build up your name. When you're building up your name online, it takes a lot of time, and it takes good content. You can't just put up a bunch of content, and expect it to be this crummy content, but you're just putting a lot of it. That doesn't work. Also if you're trying to get commenting on people's blogs, make it meaningful. Give feedback, ask questions on your blog and try to get a response, and start opening up some discussions. Think of ways where you can promote yourself. I don't want you to be like shameless promoting yourself per say, but definitely get out there. Whenever you make a new project, go out there and share it. Find sites like Dribbble. Dribbble is a great one. I get a few projects every month off of Dribbble alone just because I use the pro status there so they can go ahead and click on there. A better success story is my full-time job that I have right now here in Boston came from my Dribbble work. It was on there. They went through my Dribbble profile and saw my work and contacted me and offered me a job here in Boston. So that was the biggest eye-opener to me. Also the biggest success story that I think I could share is, people will start coming to you if you can get your name out there and you put out good work. I can't emphasize the good work part enough. Make sure that it's quality. The only way you can do that is by continually creating, and learning from your mistakes, and learning from others, and researching, and getting buddy, buddy with people who are better than you. That's always the best scenario. So anything else? I'm trying to think of how else I make money. That's pretty much how I make a living off of this, is from just the attention that I've been able to get online. This is another one, you can send your work into blogs. Blogs that you follow for illustration or design or what not. Go ahead and go to them, send them e-mails, send them work. A lot of times they want just the file ready, maybe even see what the size of the work that they display in their blog, like the width of their blog is and how large the images are, and save an image for that ready for web so they don't even have to resize it. Send it to them and say, "Hey, I thought this would be a great thing to put on your site. I think it goes along way with the other types of work you're putting in there." You can just send it over to them. It's worth a shot, just shooting out there. I've had a few times where my work has been featured on blogs because of that, and because they've been featured on blogs, all that traffic gets sent back my way and it gets my name out there even further. So that's how I do it. I can't really share too many other examples because that is the only way that I really get to make money off of this, is just from getting my name out there. So start now. If you don't have a website, start a website. I highly recommend a blog just to help you learn. People will start seeing it and they'll start getting into the community and know what's going on. Hopefully that helps. That was a long answer for that, but I hope that helped in regards to your money question. Do I sketch on a Wacom tablet or an iPad? No. Well, a Wacom tablet, yes. I do use the pen there for the Wacom tablet. I only use it though when I'm in Photoshop for some reason. I don't use it all that often. I have become a pro with pointing and clicking with my mouse. All those unique shapes actually happen because I used the smooth tool. I haven't done a video on this and I don't think I'll have time to do that, but I'll tell you where it is. So when you go into Illustrator, go to your pencil tool, click on it and hold, and there should be a striped white pencil looking thing. That's just your smooth tool. So if you have a shape and it looks too angular, so you're going ahead and clicking around and trying to make this specific shape and it has all those points so that's jagged, the way that I make them look a little bit more organic is taking that smooth tool and you click and you just rake over those points, the different anchor points, and just rake over that shape and you'll see it'll start smoothing. It'll add more anchor points unfortunately, but it will smooth out those edges and it will start adding these more organic shapes for you. So that's my cheater way of doing it a lot of the times and that's how I get around it. So it ends up being a happy accidents with me when I get a really cool shape and I just stop right there and I use that. But yeah, for the Wacom pen, I use that for Photoshop because I like to control my textures or line work. But usually I just scan that in any ways. Enough about that. I'm sure many of you are using a Wacom tablet and that's awesome. I wish I used them more. I should probably try to use it some more. Deciding on colors? I have that in the videos. But typically, one more thing about colors is just go with your gut. A lot of the times it's how I have to go. Use all the things that I explained and shared with you in the second unit, going over color. Those are huge helps. They have been huge helps here me. But just remember things like value. Yeah, maybe the colors are awesome, but the values are too similar and it just looks great if you put the palette together, but when you put it into your illustration you're like, no, it looks a little dry or little bit muted or muddy. It's because your colors are too much of the same value and there's no contrast. Understand that colors have, how do you say to it, they have a visual weight to them. So darker values with colors makes it heavier and more pronounced. So be careful of where you put those and make sure that those are balanced well on your page. But as for just deciding on colors, I like to try different colors. You'll see that I use a lot of the same colors. I like the oranges and the pinks and the reds, all those together. I love that harmony. Just because it's really fun to make illustrations out of that because it's a subtle thing that you can have on there. I'm not sure how else to explain that but go with your gut and use those rules. That's where I'm at. Just make sure it works for your illustration. Owen you asked do I think of the color wheel on my mind? I don't think of the color wheel exactly, but I do reference a lot of work from the past. For example, from Mary Blair. For example, I like to look back and see how she makes colors work and transfer that to yours. Like I said, go ahead and break one of those down, get that artwork and bring it into Photoshop or Illustrator, one of the successful illustrations, then go ahead and eye drop all the colors out of that, and that way you can really see what colors you're using and how that works with their composition. Another question is what do you do when you're stuck? When you're stuck, I do those word webs a lot. But when I'm stuck on an illustration, I like to stand. I like to leave it. If you can and you have the time, I'd leave it for a day. Sometimes I just have to stand up and just step way from the computer. I think best in the shower. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who does that. But anything, take a walk, get your mind and your eyes away from the computer and staring at the same piece. A lot of times the more you stare at something, the more it just looks wrong. So leave it alone. Let someone else look at it. I use my wife all the time for that. I have to show her my work and just say, "What's off about this?" I'm like, "This cat's leg looks just messed up." I say, "It doesn't look right. I don't know why. I need it to look like it's crouching," and she's like, "Oh, well maybe because a cat's like does this or that shoulder is you not doing what it should be. It should be going down a little bit more." Usually getting a fresh set of eyes on it can be a big help. But also just letting your eyes as well, just give them a break and come back. A lot of times you'll see it. Sometimes I'll print my work off, put it on the wall, and just look at it for a day as I'm going through and doing anything else, I'll go back every once in a while, look at it and make a note on it and then continue on. But yeah, that's a big way of getting unstuck. Then if that all doesn't work or another way to do it would just be to continue to look at some references and see how other people have done them, see how they've made it successful. Well, I think I'll answer one more question because I'm already at a half an hour mark, so I don't want to keep you hanging on here. Let's see. Oh, Jay asked a quick question about do I work mainly in CMYK or RGB? RGB for web and CMYK for print. That's traditionally how that goes. All right. So if I didn't answer any of your questions in this, you specifically have a question that you want answered or I didn't get down to yours in the list here, that's okay because I'm going to try to go in and try to answer those as best I can on the discussion board. But also, if any of you know the answers or have answers for those things, go ahead and fill those in and help your classmates out. I'm going to try my best to get around to everyone and I apologize for not being able to give feedback directly to everyone. This class has been awesome because there's so many people and I've noticed that you've all made groups and I've been trying to give everyone feedback. So thank you very much for doing that. It's making my life easier and letting me focus more on making these tutorials and lectures and stuff like that to really get to you the information that you guys are looking for. But I hope all of this helps. Right after this actually, I'm going to post all of the content for the textures and the patterns and the finishing touches here on your illustrations. Then I'm going to try my very best because I have a week to go through and see if I can give the direct feedback on a lot of your work. But thank you and have a good night.
8. 7. Natural Vector Shapes: Many of you I know, have been asking me how I get my vectorized images to look less vectory and computerized. Everyone's looking to get rid of that. These perfect edges here on our shapes and making them feel a little bit more imperfect or more either printed, or hand done. There's definitely a way to do that here in Illustrator and keep it as a vectorized image. Also, here on these lines they tend to be when you use the pen tool, they look very computerized because there's no variation in the line width. These lines are something that we'd also want to change. But using this turkey as our test subject, I will go ahead and show you both of these things. So let's start with the lines, we'll "Zoom In" here, now this is something that you "Highlight" your section here, you could go into here where they come with character of your line. You can change, what it looks like here, the nature of that line. Sometimes this works and a lot of times it doesn't because you don't really have too much control over how it changes that line. I like to keep it uniform, but actually use over here my toolbar. Click on the "Width tool". What this does, is I can go ahead and click anywhere on this line. A lot of time to try to do on these "Anchor Points" if I can. But I can go ahead and change the width manually, so I can go larger. If I click and "Drag", go in, I can make that smaller or if I click on it and go out, I can make it thicker. But I just want to get very subtle variation in this line. I don't want to have it be too extreme. So maybe down here, make this a little bit smaller. So you can really see the difference, oops, and I have this thicker line right here, and then it gets thinner as we go around that bone. Let's do the same thing over here. We'll go ahead and go back to the "Width tool". We can enlarge that side a little bit, because we just want to make it feel a little bit more natural. Like a stroke depending on the pressure that you put on a pin and the thicker that line comes out. We've now made these lines feel a little more organic. But sometimes you get these things like the elbow, these little joints right right that come off a little bit too pointy and jagged. A good way to do that is click on your "Line" here and go to your "Stroke". Then you have the "Corner". That's these things right here. Then your "Cap", that's this at the end here which also we can work with. Let's just hear for the corner now, let's go ahead and round that off. Click on this one in the middle, and it takes off that edge, when you're far enough away when you "Zoom Out" here, you're really not going to see that rounded edges, just going to look a lot more natural. But maybe these are dead giveaways that it's computerized line. So let's go ahead and change the "Caps" on those. Let's change those to rounded as well. Maybe they still feel a little bit too uniform. Go back to your "Width tool". Now, let's go click on this one and I can make those a little bit narrower. So when I "Zoom Out", yeah, it feels a lot more natural now. I can do the same thing and go ahead, and do that with the plate and make it all feel a bit more cohesive. But we'll just stop there for the sake of this tutorial. I think we have it. Now we have that done. Let's go ahead and make a copy of this, because what we're going to do next is something that we can't go back from. So let's go ahead and I'll just "Copy" this off to the side so that I have another workable file here, that that I can use. What I'm going to do is I'm going to "Highlight" everything and I'm going to "Object" "Expand Appearance". I click it once and it expands all those. But sometimes in these lines it doesn't expand all of them. You have to go back "Object" and then just hit "Expand" this time because "Expand Appearance" is no longer available. Just hit "Expand". It'll say, "Do you want to fill "End " or "Stroke". Then you say, yes, "Okay"." Now everything in here is expanded, meaning they're not lines anymore with anchor points. Now it's converted those into shapes, that you can fill with blocks of color not deal with lines. Now we have that, you're going to continue having that highlighted and we're going to go into "Effect". Then we're going to go down into "Distort and Transform", go over and into "Roughen". Now I'm going to show you, and it's going to look, I'll warn you when I first click "Okay", and use the "Roughen" tool it's going to look pretty bad. But that's okay because we'll fix that. But let's go to "Preview". It looks really jacked up right now and we're going to fix that a little bit. I always like to keep it on "Smooth" and then I have to keep it on "Absolute". Then what I do is, so this is the level of detail, level of complexity within these shapes here, what it's going to do the line. So you can see it's really messing with it. I don't want to have like super high detail because I want this to be subtle. Just a little bit here. Then the size is how high, how extreme these are going to be. Maybe this size is, no. We don't want to do too much, because this is going to get too crazy. This is the part that you have to finesse for each different illustration. Mess with the size and the detail. You'll figure out after a while of using, what works best for what size of an image. But since this is such a small little image actually on this big Canvas, this should be okay. So click "Okay" and we're done. Look at this. It's just a beautiful organic shape. For real, it looks terrible. But what we're going to do now, is "Highlight" everything. Let's do command "G" that groups this, all of these together. Now I click off that, it's all together. I'm going to "Zoom Out", because what I'm going to do now, is hit "Command Shift". I mean "Option Shift", and go ahead and "Drag" this and "Enlarge" this. Now I can see that this is looking a lot better than it was, a lot better. I want to enlarge just a little bit more to make it a little more subtle. Then once I've enlarged to the size that I want, I'll go "Object", "Expand" once again. What that does is that it expands all those points that you had created, all the jagged marks. Now it's expanded and now those all have their own points, so they're all editable "Anchor Points". Now we'll go ahead and shrink this back down. So you're holding "Shift Option" and shrinking it back down to the original size, right about there. "Zoom In" and see what we've done. All right. It's a little bit shaky here. Well, let's say if it's going to be this big, now you get this, even you can compare the two together and see that it's a lot more. See these edges here, now they're round off in some spots. It's not this smooth shape here any longer. Now you have this little subtle, jagged edge, especially here on these lines. Definitely it gives it a feel of being a lot more natural and hand on. Even this pattern here, these circles are no longer all uniform. They all their their own custom shapes. There're variations of those circles within there. This is the "Roughen" tool and this is what it can do. Now like I said, it's really finicky so you have to play around with it quite a bit. But the key takeaway for this whole thing, is that once you've expanded it and you've made, and you've set it to whatever setting you want for the Roughen, it won't look perfect right away. But go ahead and enlarge the image quite a bit, expand it once again, and then shrink it back down to the size that you want. It'll look much, much better than what you originally clicked on when you clicked "Roughen". Here you go. I hope this helps you and that's the end of this tutorial.
9. 8. Making Patterns in Illustrator: This tutorial is all about making patterns in Illustrator. Custom patterns that you create that are completely vectorized. We're going to make it so that they're on swatch and therefore automatically tiled. That will save you a ton of time rather than just creating them and copying all of your shapes over and over again and then using those, you're going to actually create it as a swatch. The importance of patterns already we talked about just being able to add some extra visual interest to your image, but also being able to use it as a tool for establishing a hierarchy in your composition, being able to de-emphasize some of your elements on your page, and/or emphasize them depending on how you use these textures. They're super important. I want to go over them and show you how to do this. Now I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS5, but if any of you are in CS6, I know that there's a tool that does this all for you. But the reason why I'm showing this to you still is, one, because I only have CS5, but too, I want to show you how a pattern is built so that you already have that knowledge and I think that's important in understanding how it works. First things first, as you want to create a square, you always create a pattern within a square so it can be tiled. Let's go ahead and just make this 300 pixels by 300 pixels. Let's just make this background, I'll also take that background right there. Now, let's move this over here so I can see my colors, I want to use. The idea is, let's say I have a shape over here, anything that's outside of this square, if anything comes on the outside, it has to duplicated on the other side and it has to wrap around. That's just the nature of a pattern and it has to be able to be seamless. We'll go ahead and take this, wrap that around the other side if it's hanging off. That goes for any other elements in here. We'll start with actually locking this background layer because we don't need it right this second. Let's do command 2, and that just locks one element within any layer and then command option 2 will unlock that. Let's lock it. Command 2 and let's start building our patterns. If you're ever afraid that or if what's been keeping you from making patterns in Illustrator is math related things, don't worry about it. Illustrator is on math for you and I'll show you how that works. Let's just say we're trying to build this pattern, I'm going to take this shape and this circle and just put it right around the corner. It's not even, so we'll just put it right over here. I want it to reflect on all these four corners, but I can't just haphazardly just bring it over because it needs to be exact. What I do is command C, and then you hit "Command F", and after you've copied it and now you've pasted it in place. It went right on top of that because we're going to use that and move it over here. When you go on your x-axis, which is this one, horizontal, you can actually go up and click right after the numbers, you can add a plus sign and then a 300. We're already working in pixels, so we already know that it will look over 300 pixels. Then you click off to the side and it's already moved it over there. Easy as that, so I can go ahead in command C, on both of these command C then command F, and now I can bring those on the y-axis right here, the vertical one, click plus 300 because I know the size of this square and it's going to move it perfectly over there. Awesome. Now we have the shape over here, let's make a diamond shape in here. So diamond shapes, for some reason, you can't just go ahead and take a square and make it into a diamond. If anybody has a workaround around this, please let me know. But for now, this is what I have do. I just take another shape, just any shape, bring it inside of here, and then I take both of them and I unite them. I go to my Pathfinder tools and then unite them. Then now I'm able to scale that into a diamond shape. I'm not sure why it does that, but it might be fixed again in the newer version if you're fortunate enough to have that. But this is what I have to deal with for now. Let's go ahead and use a different color. Let's say I want this right here and I'm going to put another one right here. I'm going to have these mostly [inaudible] smaller, I'll try to center them, but I'm going to have them offset a little bit just to show what we can do. Actually, let's just do this. I'm playing around too much let me just cut to the chase here. Now you can do any other shapes that you want to put on here. Just your normal square, now I have put it over here again, it has to be on the other side, so command C, command F, go to the x-axis plus 300. Let's move it over there, maybe we have. Well, this is going to further demonstration. Let me just erase these things. I want to unlock command option 2, unlock this square, keep it where it's at, but take away the color. You don't need to color this way. You want to save this pattern as something transparent, unless you want that color there, fine. I don't because it usually looks like a little edge there. Just take that all out and then go to your swatches panel, highlight everything, take everything, just drag it straight into the swatches, and then you can delete all this. Very cool, because now I can go ahead and take this. I'll make a circle and click on this, I've that color there. Now I have my pattern, now I have a repeating, seamless pattern that I've just created as a swatch and I can click on just like I would any other color to fill any shape that I create. It'll save you a ton of time and it's scalable. You may wonder how, because when I go like this, I can change it, but maybe I want to keep the shape the same size. I don't want to have to move my whole shape to make the inside pattern grow or shrink. We don't want it small, but I want these, the patterns. I want this big, the shape big when I want to pattern inside small. We can actually change that by going into your object, transform, scale. Now, it automatically changes, its clicked on your objects. You don't want the object to scale, you just want the pattern in just scale. Click off of that, and yes, I had this already set at 50, but if it is at 100 and you can see what we have normally, but you can shrink that and this is a 10. It's that actually is a lot cooler when it's a lot smaller. That's the way to change the scale of the actual pattern in your shapes. You don't want to move your shapes around. Then you can just click "Okay". It doesn't actually change it for the pattern itself in the swatches, because when you click on it, it will go back to that normal size. The scaling just happens individually for your different needs. Another cool thing is, I don't have to stick with these colors. If I want to change those colors, you can actually click on that swatch that you had over here. Click it, drag it, pull it out here, and there you go. Now you have that, your original artwork. Click off of there, ungroup everything, command Shift G because it's all grouped, and then you can click on these individual elements. I want to change all four these to not red, but I want to make them like a yellow color. Actually click on one of them, select "Same", Fill Color, and I want them to be yellow. Then when I'm done with that, just take it, color it all, drag it over here and now I have a yellow version. I can erase this, erase this, I'll spread the triangle, and I'm going to use it with the yellow version. I have the derivative versions now. You can change the color, you can change the scale, and it's now swatch, just a super easy way to make patterns in Illustrator. Let me show you one more thing while I'm in here, because I think this would be super important for you to know as well. Maybe I want to take this pattern, but I want to apply it evenly, distribute it evenly amongst a bunch of different shapes. Let's say I have this shape here, I'm going to go ahead and change this back to yellow. Then let's say I have a polygon over here, and then a circle over here. None of these are connected in any way, but I want the pattern to go specifically. I want it to lay, even though I don't want to have to individually do all of these. Maybe the best way to show you this is with a different type of pattern, maybe the lines. I want all the lines to line up completely. If I was to draw a line right here, I want it to continue in right through here. I don't want to have, if I did this line pattern here and then I applied it separately to this shape, you'd have lines over here and have them match up, but I want them all to match up. To show you what I mean, you actually have a lot more options that are preset within Illustrator. If I go into my swatches, I can go directly in the top corner, and click on that, and I can open up a swatch library. Now there are some better ones and other, but you can go down to your patterns and go to your basic graphics, and you have dots, lines, and textures. Just if you didn't know that, that gives you your halftime look, fill the dots and then you have the lines. I'm going to use the lines for this and show you exactly what I mean. I want to use this. There you go. I want those lines to be there. But if I did these lines, and I offset this, and I click that, if I move this shape, I can move this, and now you can see this line wouldn't continue into this circle. I want them to line up perfectly, but I don't want to move my whole shape. In order for these to line up, what I can do is take these, I'll highlight all of these, I'll go to object, and I'll convert them into a Compound Path. That means they're not going to be united in the shapes, but anything I applied to it will happen across all three. For example, I'll make, so now this compound path, if I click on it, and I click this texture, now these are perfectly lined up with my pattern and my shapes. If I wanted to individually even just move this, you'll notice that the texture will always line up perfectly with those shapes no matter where I drag them. That's a cool little thing if you want that texture to lineup specifically with lines, to look like you applied that texture over the entire piece of art not just individual elements. Hopefully that makes sense. I'm anxious to see all of the wonderful patterns you create. Hopefully they were more beautiful than the ones that I created today for this example, but I hope that helps. Thanks.
10. 9. Custom Texture Brushes and Patterns: So for this tutorial, we're going to be going over the Define Pattern tool. There's a few good uses for this, and I use it all the time. I'm grateful that I learned it in my one and only digital illustration course that I took back in college from Scott Francine. I'm going to mention his name just because you may have noticed that he is in our class and hopefully just spectating and not critiquing my teaching abilities here. But he was one one that passed on this knowledge to me about using the Define Pattern tool and many other things that I've shared with you today and throughout this course. Hopefully, now I have this opportunity to convey clearly how this tool works, and thanks to him. Let's go ahead and start. The great part about the Define Pattern tool is that you can bring in your own custom textures and or ones that you find online and make them into seamless patterns or brushes for more precision, which I like to do a lot of the time. So let's go ahead and double-click here, make this a layer. We'll go to image mode, make sure it's grayscale. Then once it's grayscale, go to Adjustments and your levels. I'd like to add a little bit of contrast there just so I can see a little bit more of that grit. I like to see that gritty grainy look there because it shows up nice in the illustrations. Click "OK" and here's the tool. It's Edit, Define Pattern. Let's just call it test1 and hit "OK". Then we'll go into New Document so I can show you how this turned out. Let's go to Effects, Pattern Overlay. Please don't use these bubbles. I'm not even sure why they're there. But maybe just to show you that there are patterns, probably no one ever should at least use them. Let's go ahead and see what we've created. So this is what we've made. You can see the issue that we're having here is there's this boundary or the borders of our texture that we've scanned in are very visible when we start tiling it and you can see where it gets dark and this light over here. So we want to somehow blend these together at least a little bit so that it's easier to work with as a brush in a pattern later on in our art. Now that we've seen that, let's go back to our texture and do something called offset. Let's go to Filter, down to Other, and to Offset. I've already had these sliders all moved around, but when they are at zero you don't see any wrapping. But if you click "Wrap Around", what you'll see is the bottom of this texture here. The top of this texture is coming up on the bottom and wrapping back around, and when I move the horizontal sliders you can start seeing these edges, the right and the left start wrapping around. So this is the same continuous texture, but this is what we want to see. So keep sliding this around until you see this crosshair here and this is what we want to eliminate. So if you go to your spot healing brush tool. It's called the spot brush because we would actually want to only use it in this short spots just to get a better result. But I want to go through here and start blurring these lines here. We don't want them to be so cut and dry here. So if we can go through and just clean up these lines as the first thing we need to do, and I'll leave this here so you can see. So actually if we go to Filter, once you feel like you've finished this view, if you go up to Filter, you'll see that the offset is now at the top there, and that'll just repeat the function. So click it and you'll be able to see that it's offseted once again and move things around. Then now you can see that there's some lines that I need to get rid of again. Now this won't be perfect, but it'll be good enough for what we're going to be doing. So let's hit "Offset" once again. Let's see if there's any lines. Just try to get rid of any of those edges. Then once you feel comfortable with that, once you feel comfortable with what you've done here and eliminated those edges, go back and redefine this as a pattern. We'll call this test2. Then we'll go back and I'll show you what we did. I'll show you what we did first actually. So this is what we did initially. Those harsh lines and then this is what we just did. You can see it's a lot less harsh. It took off those edges there and you can see there's still some dark areas. If I spent more time in here, I could go through and lighten and darken certain areas to make this completely seamless. But for this tutorial, this will do, and I'll let you go further into detail if you choose. Let's go ahead and see how this actually turns out. So I'm going to go ahead and make a circle here. I'll just go ahead and fill it with this blue color. I'll go into my colors. Go to your brush. So you could take that pattern that we just created and do what I did and go to your effects and do pattern overlay and it would overlay this pattern in here. As you can see, let's see. I'll just show you. You could overlay this and I can actually hit Command Shift I, and it will select all the areas around that as I still kept that selection. You can delete that and you'll see that it has just this texture available now. I'm going to change this background to white. I'll show you what I've done. Let's go ahead and create another color here. So now that I have a different color behind it, I'll show you what we can do. So you can actually just not back the opacity and you can multiply this onto whatever surface that you're on and you can have that texture be there. But what I like to do more than this, I sped through that because that's not really how I work. More so how I work is this. Let me delete these. I'll just show you with this image that I've already created. Let's go to the brush and now we can see our texture that we've made. We defined it as a pattern and now we can see down our swatches here for our brush textures. So when you click on the brushes things, the Brush tool, you can go and click on "Texture". Make sure these other ones are taken off unless you're using dealing specifically with the Wacom tablet. But you can go through here, set it to the texture that we have in our newest texture. This should be good. So what will happen is if you import your vectorized images, you placed them into Photoshop, since they are vector shapes, you're going to have to, I just click B for my brush and then I click on the image and then it will ask you this smart object must be rasterized, do want to do that? That means it's going to make it so now that it's pixels. So make sure that it's large enough for whatever you're going to be using it for because now you're going to be adding this texture to this new size and it's not going to be completely infinitely scalable because it's not going to be vector anymore. So make sure this image is large enough for you to print. So click "OK". So now I can see this bear here and I want to add that texture. So the cool thing that we've just made since now we have this texture, we can actually make that in whatever color we want even if it's just black. I'm going to go ahead and just highlight just this part of the bear with the magic wand tool and then I'm going to go back to my brush, which is B and you can play around with subtract, dark, and invert. You can see what the best result is. But as you can see as I go down here, I can just darken in specific areas of that bear and maybe I want to close and make it a little bit more subtle so I can go to the edges there and you can change the size of the brush. Not the size of the brush, this is the scale of the texture. So if I go real small, you'll be able to see that it's repeating. You don't want to do that. Make sure that it's set a little bit higher so you don't see that repeating edge there. Even though we were able to blur it quite a bit, it's still noticeable enough that you want to get rid of it. Sometimes I like to do is I'd like to take the color and just do a darker version of the same. I will have that brown and make it darker version and then I go ahead and do that brown, I guess butt right there on that bear. So if it doesn't look the way you want it, if those edges are too smooth, you can actually go up here, Mode and go to Dissolve. This is one that I like to do, especially if I keep this small enough. If you zoom in, you're going to see that these are pixelated. But far away, you'll never know. It looks like it's just [inaudible] on there, almost like a little bit of a blow brush or whatnot all sprayed on there. So that's a way that I use that for my shadowing and to make it feel a little bit more dimensional. Let's use this color and let's darken it just a little bit and maybe you can use a yellow. Actually if I'm going to do this, I'm going to have to change this color back. I'll make it little bit darker than what I already have. So I've highlighted around this clock. I'll just go around this edge here and automatically it adds a little depth to it without making it just a drop shadow and looking super computerized. You can make it feel nice and then fresh and hand done. So you can go ahead and play with those all day long and you can change this to your wand tool if you want to select a certain area. You can go back in the contiguous. You can click on it once again and we'll go through all the areas. If you unclick that, when I select it will only select that one area, not everywhere where it's that color. So that might help you in your texturing process of your illustration. So that's how you bring in a vectorized image in there and use the Define Pattern tool as creating brushes for yourself. So hopefully, that helps and that's the end of this tutorial. Thanks.
11. 10. Bitmap Textures : Illustrator fans, this one is for you. I carefully chose this tutorial in keeping all the Illustrator fans in mind because I'm definitely in that camp. I like to keep as much as I can in Illustrator just because I like to work with vectors. But the problem is when I try to bring in my scanned textures, the file sizes are too large and they make my whole working experience there in Illustrator a lot slower, my file sizes are huge, and it's really hard to go in and custom change my textures or the color of those textures that I bring in. This is for you guys, and it's going to show you how to take that file size and shrink it dramatically by converting these into bitmapped images and then saving them as TIFFs. Here's a scanned in image and let's go ahead and make sure, yes, it is a layer. Go to your image mode, let's grayscale this. We'll deal with colors in Illustrator. Then we want to go ahead back to image. Once it's gray scaled, I'm going on to threshold adjustments, threshold. This takes out all the grays, so you're just black and white. Go ahead and play with this until you feel like your texture is at the point where you want it to be. I think this is, that's fine. You can clean up the edges with the pencil tool here. Make sure it's just on the white and you can clean up any of those edges. There's little straggling, little dots. They're all around this side, so I can clean that up, whatever. I have this here. Let's go ahead now that we have this. Go to your image, your mode, and let's put this bitmap, flatten the layers, yes. I usually put it 300 pixels per square inch, but you can go ahead and change that depending on the size of your artwork. Click "Okay". Now we have this bitmaps, but we're going to save it as a TIFF. So let's go to Save As, rolled paint. That's great. Desktop, yep. I'm going to save it. It usually saves as a Photoshop, just go down to TIFF, and then click "Save", "Okay". Now you see, so what we had before was a six megabyte texture. Now let's see what our new sizes go to. Right-click, go get info. Now it's only 385 kilobytes, much more reasonable, much easier to work with in Illustrator. Here I want to open up and I have a vectorized image of a piano. Very Picasso as piano at that. These colors are obnoxious and I actually made them that way, because I wanted to show you something. I didn't want to have to spend a whole new tutorial on this. But if you're having trouble with unifying a color palette once you've put it into your artwork and those colors just you don't feel are jiving too much and you want it to be there like a warmer palette and feel more unified or even like a cooler palette, go ahead and just put a box around this whole thing. You can change it to your cooler or your more warm color. Let's just say I want to use this color right here. I used the orange, yellowy-orange. I'll go to my transparency and go down all the way to color. Now let's apply that over all of those different colors. So it's equally distributing this new hue throughout all the other hues that I have in my palette, which is I don't know if it's a great trick to follow, but it is definitely want to help me get an idea of what my color palette could be and start unifying it just a bit more. Maybe that yellow is just still not working for me, I could work with that. But now, this will just help you see the possibilities and maybe that's too strong. You can start seeing that these colors are looking a little bit more unified than they normally would be. That's a little trick that I use sometimes to unify my color palette. We'll work with these noxious colors, that's fine. Let's go ahead and take these. Let's go to File, Place. Now on our desktop we have the road paint TIFF. Let's go ahead and push "Okay". Here it is. This tiny little file, you can actually use copy, copy and use these all throughout your image and it will definitely still be a smaller file size than what you would have been if you would have dragged in that full scanned image right out of Photoshop. What you can do is I usually use clipping masks. If I want this shape right here to have this grungy edge on it, I can go ahead and click on it, Command C and then once I hit Command C, I bring this over just so you can see the edge here, and then I'll do Command F, which is paste in place. But in Command Z, it would just paste it somewhere else. But I want to hit Command F, so it's there right in the exact same spot. Then I'll highlight all three things. You can see that there's multiples of this now. There's one at the very bottom. You're sandwiching this texture in between. I want to capture all three, just those three, and then I'll right-click and make clipping mask. Now that texture is sandwiched in between there. If I double-click on this, I can move just the texture around by itself and I can shrink that texture and I think at the edges that I want, I can rotate my texture to see maybe it's a little bit too much a flat edge. Maybe that's a little better and I can enlarge that. Click off to the side here. There you go. Now I can effectively add those scanned in textures into Illustrator, which is a great tool. Another thing though before I let you go is if you double-click on there, you can actually change the color of this texture all you want. Let me get this color here. Now it's the same color. A little bit darker. My little trick that I like to do, just so it's subtle. There you go. You can change the color just as easy as you would any other vector shape, but you can change your texture color, which is awesome and incredibly helpful. Hopefully, this tutorial was incredibly helpful and I will let you go. This is it. Thanks.
12. Optional: Final Session Q&A: Well, this is our farewell Q&A session. I've been following all of your newest posts there in the projects and I've been super impressed by the work that you guys have all been producing here with these illustrations. It's been so much fun being able to see the progression from the beginning of these, just concept sketches and even word lists, and then seeing those visualized and manifested in the way that you guys have through the digital format and adding the patterns and textures. It's been neat to see how you've interpreted my course, especially those tutorials, and it's been neat seeing different ways to use those and execute those tools. That's been neat and that's been a great learning tool for me. I'm not sure, I know they've been making lots and lots of different changes throughout the whole class on the interface. I'm sorry if some of these things you are getting lost. They are changing for the better, which has been really nice. A lot of little things to help me out find your work and see your projects. So that's been great. But bear with the Skillshare folks. They've been doing a lot to get it to the point where it's at, and it just so happened that we're in that transient time when they're trying to get those things back up. I noticed that there are only a few questions here that we're asked for this Q&A session, which is perfectly fine because I feel like you guys have done such great work and many of you have emailed me directly and asked for help and that's been fine too. Hopefully, I've been answering your questions. Let's go ahead and I'll go through some of these questions that have been asked of me here and then we'll move forward from there. First of all, Linda went ahead and asked a few questions and really good questions. The first one was, "Do you think you'd be willing to teach another class?" The answer to that is yes. I'd already been planning a few other courses that have been developing in my mind over the past little while and I'll keep you all posted on those. This one has gone way better than I ever thought it would. Not just because there's many of you, but it's been really neat to see how much growth has happened and it's just been a really good experience for me, if anything. I definitely want to teach this class again as well. That'll be hopefully here in the near future I'll be teaching this course again. If any of your friends try to take it and didn't have the time, this would be perfect time to mention it to them. But also, I was thinking as well, this one Linda asked if we could do a database course, and that is something that I had been thinking about. So I will keep you posted there. I had also been thinking about other options like just iconography in general narrowing that down from not just database, but the actual iconography because that sets can be used for anything like editorial illustration work. A lot of times they ask for that app design, website design, and all of those logos and logos sets or icon sets can definitely be a really robust class and I'll really need to be able to distill those images. So that's another one. Also my wife and I were thinking about tag team teaching one. She's a writer and Illustrator editor. She was thinking about teaming up with me and teaching a course on how we may brave the woods. The name get out there and my work get out there and the whole process behind that and developing the social media presence and whatnot. Lots of fun stuff coming up. Yes, there will definitely be more classes coming up and any suggestions that you may have, please shoot them my way either in the discussion board or you can email to me directly if you so happen to like this class. Another question, "I've noticed that almost everyone here has made a figurative piece. We came up with this concept of the class, did you expect this many figurative pieces or were you thinking more abstract?" Personally, I kept my mind open, so I didn't care what was represented. For me, I probably would have gone abstract if you're going to ask me personally what I would've done. Only because I feel like that's my only opportunity to do abstract work because I don't get that. I don't get commission to do abstract work very often. If ever, that would be my chance to experiment in there. But I've been delightfully surprised and seeing how you could take those textures and patterns and incorporate them in such a literal and figurative piece. It's been really neat to see all that. Nothing is figurative pieces and it turned out great. "What have you gained from teaching this course It's what I've been saying. It's just been neat to see all the different styles that you guys bring into the table. It's cool to see the range too, because a lot of you are super talented at illustrating and sketching and the whole hand done aspect of it. It's super motivating to me to get better at my sketches, getting better at my live figures and whatnot. You guys have really shown me quite a bit. Then those of you who are new, it's really neat to see those who are brand new using these tools and how they use them. There's things that I wouldn't have typically thought over colors or color combos or just how to represent an illustration in general. It's been cool to see all these different interpretations. For me, it's just been learning from you guys and it always helps when I speak out loud. For me to understand things is, if I can go ahead and explain it to somebody else, every time I explain it, I come up with something new. I learned something from what I'm saying, or if I start talking and I can't figure out what I need to say, then it's usually a sign that I need to study up some more. So it's been a really good outlet for me to share what I've learned throughout my own mistakes and through schooling, which I feel I learned quite a bit, but I just haven't been able to. It just seems to becoming second nature now once you've used it so often, all these principles and elements of design, so it's fun to teach them and rehash on them. Great questions, Linda, and hopefully, other people have the same kind of question. Christine also had that question about classes. Just a little plug for Oliver. He's been sending me lots of notes to remind everyone that he's set up a Facebook group. You can go through the notes there, and the Q&A's, and the discussion boards. Here's put the link there. Just for those who wanted to reconnect after the Skillshare course, I know some of you feel you'd like to stay in touch or to continue working on your pieces and getting feedback from each other, so that was a way to do that. I think a few other people tried to set up Facebook groups as well. Pay attention for those. Oliver's has his setup there on the discussion board. He has it ready and up for you guys. Oliver had a bunch of questions that are good ones to ask, specifically about pricing your work and about the timing of how things work, and in regards to your experience, how does timing and pricing work? I hope I don't skip over any of this stuff. In terms of pricing, there is no real set formula for finding out how much you should be charging your clients. Now, sometimes there's industry like standard type things that aren't general prices for things like editorial magazine, or editorial articles, or editorial illustration, those tend to be pretty set. But for most things, it's just depending on not only your experience, but how much time you have or the size of their company. These are all things that take into account when you're pricing for work. I know Oliver was talking about not having a whole lot of experience in design, and many of you may feel like you're in that same boat or illustration. What I've done for pricing was, I've incrementally added onto my price and charged a bit more as my experience has kicked in and I feel like I'm growing, so that's something to take into account. Make sure that you're not just keeping your old prices because that's what's worked back then, but you can continue to add onto these things and continue to grow your prices with the experience that you have and added knowledge that you have because I won't price the same for a small business Mom and Pop's, I may charge them a lot lower to be able to work something out with them. But I might be a little bit more liberal in my quote when I am quoting for a large corporation or company. Things to take into account. It's not just your experience and it's not just your time. But if you are looking to give like a base price for a quote, I like to first think about how much my time's worth. I never charge hourly, I charge per project. But the hourly I think is for me to just get a base for what the price would be, so I can guess, this is at least how many hours it will take and if I put a price to every hour, this is what I have as a base. But then I take into effect, like I said, who's the company? What's the timeline? Is it a rushed piece? Do I have a lot of other clients, and this is going to be rushed? Then it's going to be more expensive and whatnot. You just have to think about your time and what it's worth, and I think that's a good way to start. What else did he ask in there? Sorry, I don't want to skip over any of these questions. If you don't want to reveal some spent time, [inaudible] I guess I did cover that. The timing is all. Like for the speed of different projects, I've found I'm consistent in how long it takes me for different projects; Like that poster, it took me a few evenings to knock out that poster, just because a lot of times I like to leave it and then come back to it. That's all up to you. I won't specify specifically what you should be for time. You'll find that out as you go. Really quickly, I'll just jump over this, he was saying that in a color picker, in one of the videos, I suggested that you take some famous piece of art or someone else's art that you really like, their color palette, and you bring it in and you go through color picker and pull out all of those different colors and see how that was made up, how it was made. I wasn't encouraging you to steal color palettes and just use that, but I was encouraging you to experiment. Right now, we're experimenting, this isn't client work. It's not a bad idea just to go and take some of those pieces that you respect or admire and go through and take them apart and see what all the elements are. In the color palette, take apart and see what all those different colors are in that palette, and you'll be able to really see how that was made and why it's effective and try it out on your palate. Usually, it'll change most of the time: like nine times out of 10, you won't even come away with the same color palette, even if you've brought it straight from that one, because it doesn't fit what you're trying to do. You're going to feel like, "Oh, well, I needed an extra light color because I have this element here. I need to bring in a little bit more contrast over here." I wouldn't worry too much about that. I'm not saying steal, I'm just saying learn from it. Also, the other question was, when are you satisfied with your work? Because he says he feels like a lot of times, right after he's done the piece, once it comes up like a year later or, for me, even like months later, I feel like I don't like that work that I created a few months back or a year back. The big way for me to combat that is to go through my work quite frequently on my website, my portfolio, and see what work still, what I still like, and what's still appropriate. A lot of times, I'll put in work. I mentioned this last time. There's a lot of work in there that I feel was strong at the time, but I've grown. Or the type of work that I want is not the type of work that I have included in there, but I simply included it because I didn't have a lot of things in my portfolio, so I take those out. I feel like, now, I'm at a point where I'm getting happy with the style that I've started to fall into, and I'm really understanding what I like and what I'm looking for. I'm much happier with the stuff that I'm doing now. I'm sure in a year, I will go through the same process and kick out all the stuff that you see in there now and start with all the new projects that I have. That's just the process of moving it forward, and that's not a bad thing. A smaller portfolio is better than a big portfolio. A smaller portfolio with stronger work is way better than a cluttered portfolio of subpar work, so just remember that. I think those are all the questions that you asked. I don't want to drag this on too much longer for you, if there's no other questions. But I do want to just thank you one more time. I felt like if any of you haven't had a chance to get direct feedback from me, that you've reached out to me or asked me specifically on the discussion board or reached out to me via e-mail, I've tried my very best. I think everybody that's reached out to me, I've been able to connect with and give feedback. I'm almost positive I did, but if I haven't, and you are that one person that feels neglected, please feel free to e-mail me. I didn't want to bring that up in the middle of the class because there's just too many things going on with me trying to create these courses and whatnot. But now, if you're looking back on the class and you feel like you didn't get any feedback, if you're one of those people, and you feel like you need either some extra guidance to just finish up your piece and you're not quite finished there, go ahead and you can e-mail me directly and I'll try to get to that as soon as I can and give you feedback. Because I feel like if you pay for this class, you should, at least once, get some direct feedback from the teacher. I'm sorry, again. The class was so big. There's pros and cons to that. The pro is that you have so many other people's work to be inspired by. You guys have done a great job of commenting on each other's work, which has been extremely helpful for me, but also rewarding for me to see the feedback. It's actually good feedback, and you guys have grown and your pieces have been better for it. Thank you for creating that community that this class should have. It's made it real fun and fun to observe, too. If you need feedback, it didn't feel like you didn't get it in this class, don't feel bad, reach out to me specifically. Since at the very end of the syllabus, the last thing on there is to wrap up the class, and it'll ask you to give a teacher endorsement or feedback or both. I welcome both. If there's any feedback that you have for the class, positive or negative, please let me know. I'd like to make this class even better for the second time I teach this, and your opinions really matter, and your experiences matter. Please feel free to let me know if there's anything that you need changed in this class. I know you guys have given me so many kind words throughout this whole class. If you don't mind just putting those on as an endorsement, as well, and just putting those up there as a testimonial so that other people coming to the class and interested in the class will be able to be swayed to join the class and enjoy it as much as you have. I thank you all for submitting, and all your hard work you've put into this project. It's been so much fun. I will definitely teach this course again and try to teach other courses like it, and I'll keep you posted. You can find on my website, bravethewoods.com, near the bottom of the page, on the homepage, you can see that you can subscribe to newsletters. I don't send out newsletters. I haven't even sent one out yet, but I only send them out for events, like if I'm teaching a course where there's going to be something new in the shop, which you've noticed, the shop is under construction right now. So you most likely won't get anything right away for that. I won't bombard you with e-mails and spam mails. If you do subscribe, it would be good because then you can have a heads up on the course. Also, on my homepage there, there is a Facebook fan page for Brave the Woods that you can go to. One last plug, there's the blog. I know many of you have been looking at the blog, and I've sent you over there for one of the resources. There's another good place to be inspired. All the stuff that I'm inspired by, I'll post in the blog, and any thoughts that I have. That might be a way to continually get inspired. Thank you so much for participating. If you have any more questions, just put them in the discussion board. I wish you the best of luck. Thank you.
Brad Woodard, Illustrator + Graphic Designer
