Digital Illustration Techniques: Creating a Paper Pop-Up Style

1. Let's go!: In this course, I'm going to be teaching you an illustration style that's got me massive clients, has scored a few features and awards here and there, maybe a little bit of Instagram notoriety, which is never a bad thing, and most importantly is a look that I think has a ton of wow factor and will never get old. My name is Michael Fugoso, I go buy foods trader on Instagram and social, and I'm one of those illustrators that might be more of a graphic designer, but I'm an illustrator. Somewhere in my creative journey, I started posting illustrations of different styles on Instagram. Those Instagram posts caught a little bit of wind and from there big things started happening for me. I got to do illustrative work for some of the largest tech and space companies you can think of. I worked with and was featured by Adobe on many occasions. I even got invited to speak at large conventions and conferences on illustration. The one illustrative sell that probably gave me all that was the digital paper pop-up style. You know what homies? This is a style that I'll be teaching you in this course. It's a look that has that immediate wow factor, I mean, things are literally popping out at you. It is 100% digital, so you don't need to cut a ton of paper or use a lot of craft materials. We will be going through the entire process, from the sketch to rendering your sketch in Adobe Illustrator, to finally texturing and lighting in Photoshop. It's crazy, my followers have been asking me to teach this style for years, so I am super pumped to finally put this out there and see what you all do with it. 2. The Project Overview: All right everybody, tutorial view, let's go. If you check out my diagram here, this is exactly what we're going to be working on in this course. If you look at the first three boxes up top, that's actually the entire process. Step 1, make a sketch, and as you can see, I'm not the greatest drawer out there. It's probably the extent of my drawing ability. Number 2, you render that sketch in Illustrator using simple shape building tools. In step 3, you bring those shapes into Photoshop. Apply texture, lighting and bring everything out with all that depth. We're going to be spending most of our time on steps 1, 2, and 3, just because I think it's a lot more beginner friendly. With a much more simple composition, it's easier to see some of the tricks that I do. For example, painting in these highlights here in this donut shape because the shape is so big, you can actually see the highlights being painted in there fairly easily. That's what we're going to spend most of our time on. We are going to go over 4, 5, and 6 in much more speedier intermediate fashion. Again, it's the same exact process. Start off with a sketch, render in Illustrator and texturize in Photoshop. Steps 4, 5, and 6 is really just there to show you something that's a little bit more representative of where you can take this style. Just a heads up, the last three steps here, numbers 4, 5, and 6, they take a really, really long time. That's why we're going to breeze through those. Just break those down so you can get an overview on how to execute something at a larger scale like that. I hope that gives you a clear idea of where this course is going to go. The tools that you're going to need. You'll need a computer that's capable of today's graphic design standards. I was able to work this style fairly easily with a MacBook Pro from early 2013. It had 16 gigs of RAM in it and it ran this style, no problem. If you have something equivalent to that then you should be pretty good. You will need Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or programs that are equivalent to those. If you use something different, you might have to do a little problem-solving on where those tools are and things like that. Lastly, you'll need a piece of paper and pencil for the initial sketch. You could use a drawing tablet as well. I personally use an iPad since it's easy to draw on that thing and export it over to Illustrator. That's that, I hope you all enjoy this course. Let's now dive into the sketch and rendering your composition in Adobe Illustrator. 3. Sketching and Rendering in Illustrator: What's up everybody? Welcome to the next part of this course. We are going to open up Illustrator here. I already have Illustrator opened here. Check it out. We're going to start this file, and then we're going to briefly go over the sketch which you already saw in the last video probably. When you open up Illustrator, you push ''Command N" or you can click on this button, "Create New". These are the settings I have. I have eight by eight inches. I just felt like that's a great size for something like a high-resolution postcard or something to post on Instagram. You know what I mean? It's a great size for both. We can ignore the Bleed part. Set your color mode to RGB. That's super important. You know what I mean? Typically when you work digitally, everything should be in RGB. Remember that when you're in this color mode you have a wider range of colors to work with. I think I said that right. Raster Effects, 300 ppi. Perfect. Let's go ahead and hit "Create". My face might be blocking this button, but just know that the Create button is right behind my face. That'll save me some time editing. Now we are in our file, a nice square, eight by eight size. You know what? Since we are responsible human beings, let's go ahead and start a save file for this because it's important to save your stuff constantly, so Save As. I made a folder specifically for this tutorial called Skillshare Tutorial Files. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's call this, I don't know, Illustrator-render, just because I'm not feeling creative right now. Hit "Save". Cool. Take the defaults there. Bam. Now we can really get started here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get my sketch because I've already made it, and you've all already seen it. If I pick it up from my desktop here, Skillshare Tutorial Files, simple sketch. That's the one I want. I'm just going to drag it on here and boom. It's in my Illustrator file. I have it set to Layer 1. Make sure your Layers panel is super visible because you're going to be using it a ton. I can size this sketch up here to the full width and height of my canvas, and that's what I'm going to do. Bam. Boom. Nice. From here I'm going to turn the opacity down because I feel like the lines are a bit too harsh. I just need to be able to see my sketch. My sketch serves as a guideline for me to illustrate on top of it, so I'm going to turn this down a bit, and I'm going to lock that bad boy right there. Let's talk about the sketch a little bit. I made my sketch on an iPad. You can easily do it with a piece of paper and pencil. Notice how there are so many imperfections here. I never make my sketches super perfect. I'm not that type of person that makes all my sketches really pristine. To me, I don't like to spend a ton of time there. I like to make my sketches to a point where I understand this is exactly how I'm going to build this out in Illustrator. That's why I was saying you don't really have to know how to draw all that well to be an awesome illustrator/designer just because you can build a lot of these things with shapes and shape-building tools, which I'll show you a little bit of here. That's the bit about the sketch. I hope that's easily understandable for everybody. I forgot to mention if you noticed earlier, I had my sketch as a JPEG. If you're using a piece of paper and pencil, all you have to do is try to flatten your phone on top of your illustration as much as you can, take a photo, and boom, it's a JPEG. AirDrop it over to your computer and it's the same exact thing. Now that's really it with a sketch. Let's go make this in Illustrator. I haven't locked my layer because I don't want to mess with it. I want to be drawing on top of this thing. I have this called Layer 1. Let's get used to naming our layers because especially with a style like this, we're going to be having layers, and layers, and layers of stuff, so it's good to get used to naming these things. I'm going to call this the sketch because that's what it is. It is what it is. Let's create a layer on top of that. Cool. Let's call this the background. Nice. Check out my little colors here. I'm going to move my fill color here to black, and I'm going to turn off my stroke color. You will see why in just a second. If I take my shape tool here and choose rectangle, I'm going to start from this corner. I'm going to hold "Shift" that constraints my proportions, and you can see I can drag out a perfectly proportioned square. I typically make everything black, and then I just control everything with opacity first. I do it this way because I don't want to think about the color yet even though I know I've made this prior to this demonstration, so I know what color it's going to be, but just to let you know, I turn everything black, I turn the opacity down just so I can see my sketch underneath it and that's how I build my illustrations. It's different for everybody I think, but this is the way I got used to it, and it's the quickest way for me. Cool. That's my background. I'm going to go ahead and lock that because I don't need that anymore. I did turn the opacity down, as you can see, to 31 percent there. Let's create another layer on top of that, and let's call this, I don't know, inner square, icon square because it looks like a iPhone icon? Icon square. You know what? I actually have a quick way to do this. If I unlock my background square, I'm going to select that "Command C" to copy, and then now I'm going to lock my background square. Go to my icon square layer which I made on top of it, command Shift V. What that does is it pastes the shape that I copied, but it pastes it right on top of the shape below it. It looks like I didn't do anything, but it's just another shape on top of the shape below it. I hope that makes sense. It will make even more sense now because I'm going to size it down. If I hold Shift and Option, it constrains my sizing and it sizes it down from the center. Now I have a square that's perfectly framed on top of the square above it. Cool. You see these nodes here, that's a perfect way to round these edges out. Look how easy that is. You see what I mean? There are so many tools like this in Illustrator that you don't really have to know how to draw super well to execute something super cool. We are not going to go over a lot of Illustrator tools here. That's not the kind of course it is. There are plenty of courses in Skillshare that I think do that really well. If you want me to do it, I could make a course like that. The beginner tools of Illustrator, or maybe my top 10 tools of Illustrator, the only 10 tools you need to know. I can make a course like that. Just let me know somewhere. Let me know on Instagram, let me know in Skillshare, I'm sure there's a DM system there. This is my first Skillshare course. I'm sure there's a way you can DM me through Skillshare. But just get a hold of me. Let me know if you want me to make a course like that, and I totally will. Now I have my iPhone icon square here. I want to run it out a bit more, just a little bit. Yes. We can lock that. Look, we only have two more shapes to go and we're done with this. If I make a layer on top of there, I'm going to call this the circle. Sic, I like that. If I go to the Shape Tool, select the Ellipse Tool here. I'm going to try to go in the center of this circle. I know it's not perfect. I'm going to hold Option to size it from the center, and then I'm going to hold Shift to constrain it. That's a perfect circle. I like that. Let's turn the opacity down so I can see below it, I can see my sketch. Look, we are already almost there. I can take this circle command C, just like we did before to copy it. Let's lock that because we're done with that. Create a layer on top of that and call this doughnut. Command Shift V. Boom. I pasted the circle on top of that circle just like I did with the square and the square before. I'm going to move this over to match my sketch there. Like I said, the sketch is just a guideline to how I'm going to build this in Illustrator. That's close to perfect. Check this out, homies. Command C again, command Shift V again to paste that circle on top of that circle. If I size this down from the center so it's perfectly framed on top of the circle below it. Look at that. You see where I'm going? It's pretty much that doughnut shape. You're going to get this palette here called the Pathfinder tool. There's a lot of ways to do this, but the Pathfinder tool is an extremely important window in Illustrator. If you're new to Illustrator, you're going to be using the Pathfinder tool a lot. If I select that shape and I select a circle on top of it, there's this icon here called Minus Front, that's going to subtract the front circle from the circle below it. Check this out. Boom. We got a doughnut. Check it out, we separated it into layers, we got doughnut. This is very important that you organize your layers like this. Circle, the icon square, and we got the background. Now, what we got to do is choose the color. Like I said, I did already choose a color because I've made this previously. I don't really have an extensive process on how I choose color. I've just made so many illustrations that I know what colors most of the time I want to use. But if I don't and I want a really quick way to do it, there's this cool website called adobe.color. I'll probably do a little B-roll thing so you can see what that website looks like. You can literally just search the theme that you want. I do a lot of space stuff, I search space and I get all kinds of space-looking color schemes that pop up. But I'm going to go ahead and get the color scheme that I chose just so it's uniform with all the other files here that I have prepared for you all, and we'll get to that. We are back, and I chose my color scheme a while ago. But these are the colors I'm using. I'm using a four-color scheme. I want to tell you all right now that I usually never go over five colors. It's a skill to use minimal color like that. I think when you do, it brings more intention to your work and more purpose. Things end up looking really stylized and super cool. I encourage you all to work with minimal color schemes. When I mean four colors, I mean four, 1,2,3,4. There's no tints of this. There's no, other than that, lighter blue. But you know what I mean? There's no tints of that blue and then tints of this. There's no gradients or anything, it's just four colors. Practice it. I put it on a layer here. I'm not really going to use this layer when I move this over to Photoshop. But just so I can be organized, this is called color scheme. I'm going to unlock all these other ones except the sketch because I don't really need to mess with the sketch. You see I have my color scheme up here. I made a layer for it. Let's color this thing. I'm going to select my background, which is the first square I made. If I use the eyedropper tool, I can select one of these colors to mimic. So let's mimic this dark blue there. Cool. For my icon square, let's get this blue. Cool, I like that blue. You all saw this already, so you know exactly what I'm going to do. For the doughnut, I want a red doughnut and a yellow circle back there. We are done with our illustration. We can go ahead and delete that. 4. Setting Up Ring Lights: I almost forgot. There's one step here that's not going to make a lot of sense, but we're going to do it because we need this later. What we're going to do now is I'm going to grab my doughnut. I'm going to go to Object, Path, Offset Path. What this does is it pretty much creates another shape on top of the shape you have selected. It either outlines it over the shape or inside the shape, and you can see right here. If it's a positive number, it does it over the shape, so you can see how it's making that same exact doughnut, but perfectly contouring it and bigger, do you see that in the preview? If I turn the preview off and I turn it on? That's what Offset Path does. If I set it to a negative number, it does it inside of the doughnut. Any shape you have, it'll do it inside or outside, depending if you set a negative or a positive value. This is important. This is a very important tool in Illustrator. I use this a ton because I like framing things like that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to guess here, I want to say negative 0.05. I mean, that's pretty much what this is. It's a guessing game. Tap. That's what I want. I want it like really close to the trim there. Let's go 0.04. I like that. Okay. Like I said, you won't understand this now, but this is important later. Actually, it's not super important, if you totally skip this step, it's totally fine. But it adds a really cool thing to your paper illustration and you'll see it, just do it. Let's hit "Okay". I'm going to set here on that color section, on the toolbar here. I'm going to set that to Stroke and I'm going to make my stroke white. Cool. You have this white inside outline of your shape. What I'm going to do is I'm going to push Command + X to cut it because I don't want it on that layer, I want it on its own separate layer. I'm going to call this layer ringlight. Why? I mean, I could tell you now, it just won't make sense. Let's talk about it later in the Photoshop file. Okay, Command + Shift + V, it pastes it in the same exact spot onto that layer. Awesome. Let's do the same thing here. Object, Path, Offset Path. I want the same exact thing, 0.04, set that to a stroke and set it to white. Excellent. I'm going to push Command X to cut that, make a layer on top of the circle layer, I'm going to call that Ring Command + Shift + V. Boom. Let's do one more. We don't need it for the background, we only need it for this icon square. Like I said, you'll see why later. One more time. Object, Path, Offset Path, negative 0.04, "Okay", turn that to a stroke, set it to white. Cool. Command + X to cut it, make a layer on top of your icon square layer, call that ringlight again, Command + Shift + V. All right, so now that we've done all that, our illustration is done in Illustrator. Cool. Let's go ahead and export this over to Photoshop. I'm going to create a whole other video dedicated for that. It's going to be short probably. But it's a very important step, one of the most important steps here to export into Photoshop, to make sure the layers translate exactly the way they are in Illustrator to Photoshop. That's a very important step, so we're going to make a whole video about that next. 5. Exporting Files to Photoshop: What's up, everybody? We are going to export this bad boy over to Photoshop. I deleted my sketch layer and I deleted my color scheme layer because I don't need those. I don't need those in Photoshop. I only needed the shapes. I'm going to turn off my ring light layers really quick. I just want to tell you a really cool rule of thumb that I have when I make these. When I start this illustration process and I render it in Illustrator, I make sure the Illustrator version is cool enough to be it's stand alone illustration. Like I don't have to texture it and people will still think it looks cool in its flat mode. The reason why I do that is because you always want your foundation to be as strong as they can be. This is my foundation. If the illustration is awesome in its flat form, then it will be incredible in its textured form. That's kind of a rule of thumb that I follow is to always keep your foundations strong. I guess I'm contradicting myself a little bit with the sketch, but you know what I mean? The sketch changes all the time, so I don't like spending a ton of time on the sketch. So this is my true foundation right here. I turned on my ring lights again. Cool. We're going to go ahead and go to File, Export, Export as. If you see this format drop-down menu here, we're going to click that and click on Photoshop PSD because we want to export this as a Photoshop file. I made a folder called Skillshare Tutorial Files already, so I am going to save it into there. I'm going to call it shapes-simple because it's a simple composition of shapes. I'm going to hit Export. All right. This is probably the most important window in this video. Color model. Yes, RGB. If you set your Illustrator file to RGB, then this should be in RGB. You want your Photoshop file to be in RGB because you have a wider color range to work with in that mode. In CMYK things look a little muddy and washy and you have less to work with. You want it to be an RGB. Resolution, high 300 PPI. You know what's cool about this? You can set to 700. So if you want to make a gigantic poster, all textured and stuff later in Photoshop, you set this super high to something like 700 PPI. You probably need a faster computer or some type of fast computer for that, like 700 PPI. If you texture every single shape, that's probably going to need a beefy computer. But 300 PPI is perfect, right? So let's move on with that. You do not want to click on this flat image thing here. The purpose of doing this whole thing is to write our layers into Photoshop. Our layers in Illustrator transfers over to Photoshop. So make sure this is selected right there. You can take all the defaults here and hit "Okay." It's writing the Photoshop file. Boom, it's done. That was fast, probably because I don't have a lot of shapes here. Okay. Let's get into the Photoshop file. If I click on my desktop here, Skillshare Tutorial Files. There it is, shapes-simple.psd. Let's double-click that, and you can see my Photoshop is opening up here. Cool. I will maximize that window. Now we are in Photoshop. It looks nearly identical to our Illustrator file. Checked out our layers. Ring light, doughnut, ring light again there, circle. This is perfect. This is exactly what we needed because we want to texture each one of these things. So that's the exporting process from Illustrator to Photoshop. Again, super important step there. Now we can jump into the juicy part, I think is the part that most people wanted from me is this next part is which is texturing and bringing out that depth in Photoshop. See you there. 6. Adding Texture to Your Layers: You know what homies, this video and the next few videos are probably the reason why you're here or why most people are here. A lot of people asked me, why don't you just do everything in Illustrator? Why are we even jumping into Photoshop? The reason is texturing and lighting, anything with gradients and realistic looking texture, it just looks way way in Photoshop than it does in Illustrator. There's this weird fascination where everything needs to be vector for some reason. If you don't know what a vector is, that's basically saying, let's make our illustration infinitely scalable so we don't have to worry about sizes and things like that. Well, you would still have to worry about sizes if your illustration is complex in Illustrator. Because, if you have a ton of points, a ton of mathematical curves going on in your illustration, you would still need a powerful computer to run it. Working in high resolution in a raster program like Photoshop, and what raster means it means it's made of pixels, I think is a great solution for this and things will ultimately look better. That's why we are jumping into Photoshop. Seriously, homies, super high resolution raster images are perfectly fine and they will work for 99.999 percent of the applications you need it for. That was a super long answer to that question. I'm going to bring in my texturing file here. I have it prepared, it's this file here called texture. I'll double-click on that so you can take a look at what that is. This is the one texture image I used for the entire project. I got this texture out of a texture pack from designcuts.com. I believe it's called Kraft, K-R-A-F-T, Kraft paper texture pack. You should be able to find this texture and a bunch of other paper textures. Honestly, any paper texture will work with this style. I chose this one in particular because it has really nice grain, the grain is separated from each other and it has a really high contrast between the green and the lighter parts of the texture. That's why I picked this one and is why I continue to use it over and over and over again in a lot of my illustrations. If you look at a lot of my work, I use all kinds of textures; I use wood textures, I use watercolor textures, anything would work. What you have to do is sometimes your texture won't come like this, it won't come in black and white like that, maybe it'll come a little yellowish or maybe it's an actual photo of a piece of paper. It's usually like tarnish or there's some type of warm color interference there. All you have to do is set it to black and white in Photoshop. Maybe turn the contrast higher or lower so your specs in your grains can pop out more and save that as a JPEG and you'll have this same type of thing. That's usually what I do if I want to use a different texture and it's not really at my liking, I can always adjust it in Photoshop. Let's get back to our Photoshop file. The first piece I'm going to work on here is this icon square. We're going to utilize this thing that I have not explained to you yet so hang tight. Let's actually turn this off for a second, the ring light for that layer. Click on the "Icon square layer" so it's selected. Let's click on our "Finder" here, so our window with a texture pops up again. I'm going to grab that texture and I'm just going to drag it onto the canvas there. My texture is here in the Photoshop file and it's right on top of my icon square layer. Sweet. What I'm going to do is size this up a bit. The top and the bottom of it matches the square shape of this. We are going to be using this image over and over and over again, so it is important that you size them all the same so the grains they match with each other and things like that. I know what you're thinking, it's like why don't you just use one image for the entire thing? It's because we're extra like that, we want things to look cool and real and custom. If you do that, if you put one piece of image over the entire thing, it's going to look super flat and it's not nearly as cool. I think that's one of the biggest reasons why people gravitate to this style, or at least the way that I do it. Men, I'm really wordy in this. I dragged in the texture. It's on top of my icon square. I'm going to command, click, you see that? I command clicked on the icon square right here. You can see this little ant trail thing pop up on where that shape is. That just means that that's the selection of pixels that I'm working with. If you Command click a layer, and I did that with the icon square, it selects every single pixel in that layer. I call it an ant trail because it looks like a bunch of ants. Now that your selection is activated, you have your ant trail here, make sure we're on our texture layer. You click this icon here, I call this the Japanese flag icon, because it looks like the Japanese flag. But what I'm pretty much doing is I'm going to be masking this texture over that icon square. If I push that icon, cool. Now the texture is masked only on that layer. Cool. Does that make sense, everybody? That's that layer. See it's on top of my icon square. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to set this layer to multiply. It's a blending mode, and the blending mode we're using is multiply. What multiply does is it takes your black and white image and then it evenly spreads the darker parts of the image onto the color below it so that's why it's important to do that. If you think your texture is a little harsh, which I don't think so, but if it is to you, you can use your opacity to turn your texture down a bit. You see how it gets a little lighter like that. But I like it at 100. I like at 100 here. That is the texturing part of this course. I could go further but I want a single these out so you can go back to each one of these points pretty easily and things are nicely organized and everything. Next up, we're going to go over painting in your highlights and your shadows. Texturing, close. 7. Lighting to Your Layers: Now that we have our texture onto our icon square, let's talk about lighting. This is another massively important part in this course. It's actually a massively important part in all of my illustrations. Lighting is the thing that adds depth to anything that you do. Regardless if it's a minimal illustration or something more detailed and complex like this, lighting will make things pop out at you. The first thing we're going to do is we are going to establish a light source; what that means is, which direction is the light coming from? In most of my illustrations, it's funny, nobody calls me out for this, most of my illustrations have a light source coming from the top left-hand corner downwards. When you're working with this many layers, it's just easier to know that, "Okay, light is going to be coming from there most of the time." You can do that too. I don't think anyone will call you out for it. Have your light source come from the top left-hand corner, shining down on this whole thing here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to "Command click" my icon square, so those pixels on that layer are selected with the ant trail. I'm going to create a layer on top of that. I'm going to call this "highlight". I'm going to zoom out a bit because I'm using this cool gradient tool here. If you see my two colors here for the foreground and background, that's pretty much what it's going to gradient to; from white to black, it looks like. I want it to gradient from white to transparent, so I'm going to click on this gradient bar up here, under Basics. You see this little icon here where it's white to transparent, let's click on that and "OK". Now my gradient is going to go from white to transparent, zero opacity. I'll probably zoom out a little bit more. I'm going to select this icon here. What that means is it's just going to give me a flat gradient downwards. The one that's selected right now is a radial gradient. I'll just show that to you right now. The radial gradient will make things look round. You see how the light goes around like that? I want it to be more flat, so I'm going to choose this flat icon up here. I'm going to start from here and just to show you. I don't know if you can tell a difference. Let me make something a bit harsher. There you go. You can see how the gradient just falls flat right there which is what I want. If I do the radial gradient again, you see what I mean? Instead of this round shape, I want the flat shape, so that's what that icon does. I'm going to zoom out a bit because if I start the gradient from here, the light will look soft, like I did from here, it's a little too harsh for me. I want it to be soft and blending in like the light is obviously there, but it blends into the shape. I'm going to start from all the way over here. Cool. Oh, you see that's a little too soft. Let's make it a little harder, maybe from here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A little harder. Cool. No, wait. Harder, harder. From here. There you go. That looks pretty cool. When you have your ant trail selected, if you want to get out of that selection, push "Command D" to deselect your selection. Here, I have my highlight on the top left-hand corner. That's telling me that the light's coming from the top left-hand corner. What does that mean for the bottom right-hand corner? There's probably some type of shadow there. That's what we're going to do next. Let's create a layer on top of icon square, and let's call this "inner shadow". Cool. What I'm going to do, I have my foreground color here set to white. If I push "X", it changes it, it swaps it over to black. That's what I want because I'm coloring my shadow black. Instead of the gradient tool, you would think I would get the gradient tool and gradient from this corner and go upwards? No. I actually have some really cool control with a brush. You want to pick a brush that's super-feathered. See, my hardness is set to zero. That's exactly what you want, so you can see if I brush, it's a very faint feathered brush on the edges. Undo that because that's not what we want to do there. I have it set to black. I'm going to "Command click" my icon square. Cool. It's important to know which layer is selected or else we'll be painting on different layers, so make sure we're on your "inner shadow" layer there. Let's zoom out a bit. I'm going to increase the size of my brush because the bigger the brush is, the bigger the feather will go on the edges. What I can do from here is I can paint off the edge, and I get a nice soft shadow like that. Sweet. "Command D" to deselect that. Now, we have a highlight on the top left-hand corner. We have a shadow on the bottom right-hand corner, and everything in the middle is a mid-tone, and that's what you need for depth, mostly. We have something that's going to dramatically change the depth here, but if you add that, a highlight, a mid-tone, and a shadow to any of your shapes, you're doing a good thing for it to add drama to your piece. Now that we're still on the inner shadow, we're actually not done yet. We're going to set this blend mode to multiply, and you might not be able to tell the difference. But every time you push multiply, it evens out your darker colors to whatever it's on top of. You might not be able to tell right now, but in the grand scheme of things when your whole illustration is done, the multiply stuff would look so much better. If you do leave it normal, it might look okay. It'll just look a little muddier. One thing is my shadow, I think is a little too dark, so I have another level of control here, my opacity; I can turn that down a little bit, so we have a nice faint shadow there. Sweet. Usually, when people try this style on their own, they totally admit the highlight and shadow part. I think that's one of the steps that adds a ton of character to this, so don't forget to do that to each one of your shapes. Like I said, if you have a hundred shapes, you're going to be doing this a hundred times. It could be really tedious, but I promise you all it is worth it. There is a reason why a lot of people like the way I do this, and I think just going that extra mile really pays off. That should do it for this part of the video. For the next one, we're going to go over rim lights and outer shadow. Not to confuse it with ring lights. Rim lights, R-I-M lights and the outer shadow, which is going to make it really pop at you. Cool. Catch you guys on that one. 8. Creating Depth & Touch : Sweet. Now that we have our lighting established, let's go ahead and create the rim light and the shadow. What should we do first? Let's do the shadow first because that's the more obvious one. If I Command click again my icon square. We're getting that antral. Remember whenever we're working with a shape, we're going to be Command clicking and doing this antral thing a lot until everything for that piece is completed. After that, we're going to be doing the same exact thing to the other pieces. Just a heads up, if you haven't caught on that yet, that's pretty much what we're going to be doing. Command click, I get the antral, all those pixels are selected. I'm going to create a layer below my icon square and I will call this shadow. Cool. I have my black selected here on my foreground color. If I push Option Delete, that fills that layer with black. You can't see it because it's below my icon square layer. If I push Command D to de-select that, I'm just going to move this a little bit so you can see I made that same shape underneath. That's going to serve as our shadow, and I'll move it a little bit around right there. Cool. Remember our light source. If the light's coming from the top left-hand corner, that means it's going to cast a shadow down to the bottom right there. If your lighting makes sense, your illustration makes sense, and things look super awesome. Some of you might be wondering, why am I not using the drop shadow tool, which is this FX panel. I almost never use the FX panel. I just feel like I have more control this way. I customize my shadows by drawing them sometimes, and making it this way looks a lot better in my opinion. I'm going to show you a trick that shows you why. Now that my shadow is extruded a little bit and you can see it, I'm going to convert that to a smart filter. What a smart filter does, it just makes your layer indestructible so you have non-destructive editing. That means, whatever you do to this layer, the smart layer lets you revert it back to its normal state whenever you have to. If you don't do it, you'll make an edit to it and it'll look fine. But if you ever have to go back and change it, you might have a hard time, so that's why we use smart layers. We converted our shadow to a smart layer. I'm going to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Cool. Right now I have it set to 9.1. I'm going to turn it up to make it a bit softer. I want it to be coming out of that background. I want it to be popping out. I want this to be a really soft looking shadow and give us some cool distance. I'll have it set to 19. You're looking at it, you're like that looks just like a drop shadow dude. Well, check this out homies. I'm going to click "Multiply." Like I said, you can't tell right now, but I swear the multiply makes a huge difference. Let's turn the opacity down to 35. The reason why I say 35 is because I know that's a good number because I've been doing this for so long. You can change that opacity to whatever your liking is, if you like the darker shadows, cool. But I love 35 because I'm going to hold Option here and duplicate the shadow. I'm going to create that layer below it. Now that shadow is duplicated. If you notice this got darker, that just means that there's two shadow layers on top of each other. I'm going to drag that out even more. You see what I'm doing? You can't do this with a drop shadow. If I right-click this little icon meter here, edit smart filter, I can adjust the blurriness. I want this one even blurrier. I want that even more soft. Check that out. Why do I do this? This is a really Nieto trick that I think you should all remember. Because if you study how light behaves, and a good way to study how light behaves is to go into a bathroom, turn off all the lights, get a flashlight and then light a toothpaste tube and see how the shadows behave with that toothpaste tube, and usually you get a harsher shadow. Then you see the stepping to a softer shadow, below it, you see two levels of shadows usually when you shine light on something. That's why this is a Nieto trick and the drop shadow tool will just make things look very 1990s generic graphic design. Stay away from that drop shadow tool as much as you can. Obviously, it might be useful sometimes, but I don't use it. I'm going to group these together, so it's not confusing later, and I'm going to call that shadow. Now you can see we've already done a ton to bring the depth out and to bring life into this one shape. But it doesn't end there. We have rim lights and ring lights. The ring light is what we did in Illustrator earlier. That's like the extra secret. But let me show you a secret that's super easy to do that changes the whole field of this thing. It's going to make you want to touch this thing, you're going to get a paper cut. Everyone asks me how to do this and I show them how and the response I get is, I knew that, I should have known how to do that. Of course, it's like a magician never reveals a secret and when they do reveal that secret, it's like, that's not as impressive as I thought. That's usually the reaction I get when I teach in this really cool technique that changes the whole vibe of this to something super awesome. That just tells you that it's super easy to do and super useful. I'm going to Command click on my icon square. I'm going to create a layer above the shadow layer and below the icon square layer. You see how my white is on the background here. I'm going to Command Delete to fill that layer with white. You can't see anything because I basically filled and painted that layer with white below all this stuff. Push Command D to de-select. I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see what I'm about to do here. If I have my move tool, I'm going to push my arrow key, twice to the left and twice upwards. Look at that. We have this nice little ream of paper right there. Isn't that awesome? Is that it makes you want to touch it. That's one of the most easy useful techniques you can do to give this thing another layer of exaggerated realism. Cool. I'm going to call this layer rim light. Guys that is looking freaking awesome right now. Sweet. Remember this guys, the ring light? I turn that on you guys, wow, that looks disgusting and I know it does, but we're going to make it so cool. Let's select our ring light layer, perfectly contours the inside of that shape with my ring light layer selected. I'm going to go to Filter Convert for Smart Filters for that non-destructive editing, hit "Okay" there. When you see this icon pop up here, that's a smart layer. Now that it's a smart layer, I'm going to go to Filter again, Blur, Gaussian Blur. I have it set at 34 here, which is too much. I'm going to turn it down to eight. Look at that, maybe six, maybe five. No, 4.5. Yes, I like that. I'm going to hit "Okay", so cool. Look at that. I'm going to turn the opacity down because it's a little harsh. You see what that does? It adds another layer of touch. Your ring light adds another layer of touch. It's almost like if you were to use an X-Acto knife on paper and you were to crease it. It creates the creases on the edge of the paper. That's what this does is it adds a little crease to the edge. Nice little touch that I figured out how to. If you look at my early paper illustrations, I don't do this, but once I started doing it, I'm like, wow, that does add a lot to it. To make our ring light even more awesome, while it's selected, I'm going to click on that mask icon again. Cool. This might be a little hard to explain. What a mask does is if I paint black on the object, it erases it. The reason why you want to do it that way is because you're not permanently erasing what you're doing. Again, it's like non-destructive editing. If I erase something and want to go back later, it's easy to just delete the mask and the whole shape is still there. When I have the mask selected on the ring light, I get my brush, make sure I have that feathered brush tool. I think I had a huge before. I'm shrinking the brush down. You can make the brush bigger and smaller by pushing the bracket keys. I'm going to erase some of this stuff because I don't want it to take away from my rim light. I don't want my ring light to take away from my rim light. I'm erasing some of it. I'm not erasing all of it. As you can see, I'm just getting the edges of it, so it's a little faint. But check that out. I had this cool crease on the edge where you can't see a rim light and then the rim light pops out on the edge before it lights up. How awesome is that? That is pretty much the entire process for each shape. I basically showed you everything. What we're going to do now is we're going to finish this illustration off because there's probably a few other things you need to know. We're going to finish this simple illustration off and then afterwards we're going to dive into a more complex illustration that I showed you in the overview just so you have an idea of how long an illustration like this would take and what it takes to complete something like that. Cool, awesome. 9. Let's Finish This Thing Off!: All right, everybody, let's knock this thing out. I'm going to move a little bit faster just so we can get through this thing fairly quickly, also move slow. I'll just gradually ramp up the speed. Now that we have all those pieces set for the icon square layer or the icon square shape, I mean, I'm going to select all of those items from the shadow, all the way over to the ring light. That's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 layers, 7 layers, I'm sorry. That's seven layers for each shape. Keep that in mind. I have done illustrations where I had 100 layers, and you multiply that by seven. What's that? 700 layers. I have done crazy illustrations in this style, and it was well worth it. That is the icon square. Cool. If I turn this eyeball off, you can see that's all that we did to that shape. That part's done. Let's do this yellow circle first because that has something different that I haven't showed you yet. Moving a little bit faster, we're going to get our texture and move that in there. Again, I know some of you are thinking like, why don't you just apply one texture image on top of the whole thing? Because you'll see right now. If I size this up to the same size as I did the last one, they're all going to be the same. We have some uniformity there with the scale of this texture. What I'm going to do is I'm going to offset this a bit using my Move tool. As long as the yellow square is covered, that's all that matters. We can move this around and that's why you do this with each individual shapes so you can offset each one and things don't look like it's just one blend of texture through the whole thing. Do you see what I'm saying? Doing that step, which I get it, it takes a lot to do with a lot of layers and it makes your file super big and beefy, it's well worth it to get that randomization of texture because it's almost like it's a new piece of paper for each shape. Do things the right way, not the short way. I mean, the short way might look fairly decent, but like I said, I think there's a reason why people like the way I do things is because I don't really take shortcuts here. I'm going to Command-click the yellow circle layer to make sure that shape is selected. On my texture layer, I'm going to push the Mask icon again. Now the texture is laid onto that yellow circle only. If I click that and hit "Multiply", I get the blending mode. Perfect, that's exactly what I wanted. Above the yellow circle, let's create a highlight layer, Command-click. Instead of using the gradient tool again, I'm going to use a brush, change my color to white with a super zero hardness feathered brush. I'm going to increase the size of my brush so I get that extra softness there, and I'm going to paint white. You can see it, how you get that light color there. It's so cool. It adds so much character just doing this one thing. Command D to deselect that. We are done there. Let's Command-click our yellow circle again, create a layer above that, call that inner shadow. I'm going to do the same thing on the opposite corner with the color black. We're going to start painting those inner shadows there. Set that to multiply. Again, I think it's a little harsh. I'm going to turn that down a bit. Cool. Nice little depth we have there. While my yellow circle is still selected, let's create a layer below yellow circle. Let's call that shadow. Option Delete to fill that with black. What I wanted to show you here is I'm creating a very hard shadow or a harder shadow. See how this shadow here is very soft and gradual. We want one that's still soft, but not that much. We're going to blur this a little bit and the reason being is this circle, it's almost like it's glued on to that piece of paper below it. If it's glued on and it's right on top of it, it's not really going to cast a huge shadow if you were to shine light on the top left-hand corner. That's something that you should plan out ahead of time. Which shapes do you want it to be glued on to the thing behind it, and which shapes that you want popping out at you because that'll make a huge difference. Filter, Convert for Smart Filters. Hit "Okay". Filter, Gaussian Blur. We have it at 4.5. Let's set it up to, I don't know, six or seven maybe. A lot of just trial and error, do whatever looks right. Hit "Okay". Set that to multiply. Especially when you're playing with the opacity, the multiply will help out a ton. I'm going to turn this down to about 50 because I want it a little harder than my other shadows. Right there, you can see the difference. I have a very soft shadow here because I wanted that popping out of that surface, and I had a much harder shadow here to show that, hey, this piece of paper is glued to the paper below it. Awesome. Let's do the rim light. Command-click on the yellow circle layer, create a layer on top of that. Let's call that rim light. Command Delete, fill that with white. Command D to deselect so we can see what's going on here. Let's move that a couple of arrow spaces. That's looking super cool. Let's get our ring light. Convert that to a smart filter. Filter, Gaussian Blur, turn that down. 4.5 is where we had the last one. Cool. Then, we can mask it, paint off the edges so it's just not a ring circle around there. We can paint off some of these things so it only shows on the bottom right-hand corner. Man, I feel like I'm talking a lot. That shape is done. We select that. Go all the way to the shadow here, group that. Let's call that yellow circle. Should we do the rest of it? I think we should. I might talk less and move a bit faster because from here on out it's really just routine. You know what I mean? Let's get another texture thrown in their size it up. Cool. Let's offset that a little bit. The cool thing is that ring light actually shows you where the shape is. You know what I mean? If the ring light wasn't there, you wouldn't be able to tell what the shape is below this texture. I'll offset it somewhere random like that. Command-click on my doughnut layer, mask that. Set that to multiply. Awesome. Command-click my doughnut layer, create a layer above that, call that highlight. This is a fun one because it's a more unique shape. Let's paint over that unique shape, set the color to white and let's paint that highlight there. That's looking pretty sweet. See how I'm just painting off the edges there because my feather is leaking over to it and I don't want that highlight to be too harsh. There might be light touching this area here, so let's paint a little bit there too a little bigger. Now we've got a little bit of character there. Create a layer above the doughnut layer, let's call this, inner shadow. Command click the doughnut layer, set to color to black, paint off the edges. Let's increase our brush size, That looks good, and again, it looks, I don't know what it is, but the black is looking pretty harsh when I painted in, I said it's a multiply. Turn the opacity down. Awesome. Sweet. Let's move on. Command click. Let's make a shadow Option, Delete to fill that layer below with black. Offset it down to that corner. This one, I want this popping out at you, okay, this is not glued to whatever is below it, so I want this to be floaty. I'm going to give it that same floaty treatment. Set that to multiply. Filter Convert for Smart Filters. Filter Gaussian Blur. Let's set it to 19 or something like that, and let's turn that down to 35. My magic number 35. Duplicate that by only option and dragging the layer down. We're going to have the second shadow come down here. We are going to blur that even more. Right-click edit, smart filter. Turn that up a bit softer. Boom, that looks really Really, really Actually, I'm going to move this, shed them more, so you can see the two levels of shadow there. You have the harder shadow here and a softer shadow there. Looks so much more realistic when you study light and apply it onto your lighting. Subjects. We are almost done with this. We can group our shadows together so we don't confuse ourselves later. Command click, Create layer below doughnut, call that rim light. Fill that with white. You can't see it because it's below the doughnut. Get our move tool arrow to, arrow up to, and we have a cool ring light. Get to the ring light filter, convert for smart filters. Filter Gaussian Blur. Let's set the opacity down since it's a little harsh. Yes. Yeah, that's looking good. Click on your mask so we can safely erase some of that ring light. Have your brush set to black. That's what erases inner mask. I'm being very repetitive. I find that repetition helps you remember things, which is why I'm going over this again. You can even shrink this down here in paint to erase some of that off. Look at that. See it like just doing this little erase thing makes things look so much better. You know what? Now I want to make it harsher by turning the opacity up. The last thing we got to do, let's actually, okay before that. Let's group that up together. Call that doughnut. Now the last thing we got to do is our background. Can't forget the background. Let's get a texture there. Throw that on top of that. Let's offset that right there. Set that to multiply. You can't really see it because the color is dark. But if I zoom up, you can see it. Awesome. You know what? I want to offset it more. Because I noticed there's this spec here and that spec kind of the same spec, so I don't want that much repetition there. I'm going to offset that a little right there. Actually, Right there. You know what? We don't have to Command click because it's already covering the whole thing. We create a layer on top of background call that highlights. This is a good opportunity to use the gradient tool because we're going to have to create a much bigger highlights. If I start off far from the edge here, move it down. Nice. First try. I like that. It is harsh though. Let's turn it down a little bit. Honestly, we can leave it here. It'll be fine, but let's create the inner shadow. Get the brush. Turn that up, and let's paint the shadow on those edges. That looks really cool guys. Set that to multiply. We can even turn it down a little bit. What do you all think? Let's zoom up here. We did it. That's the whole illustration for this simple composition we got going. It's not that hard. You just get used to doing it with one shape and then you do that same thing over and over and over again. Like I said, you can do this with 700 shapes. I have some of those examples in my Instagram if you check it out. Is it worth it? Heck, yeah. Is it painful sometimes? Yes. Just imagine working with your clients too. You want to make sure they approve the sketch and they can't change anything, because if they make any requests for you to change stuff like when you have all this texture laid out, that's going to be a huge pane. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this process as much as I've enjoyed doing it for the past few years. You may find shortcuts to do it, and you might be satisfied with how it looks like with those shortcuts. But this is the way that I find works the best for me and how I want the result to be. I think you should all stick around still. Because I'm going to go over this process with a much more detailed illustration. I showed you that in the overview. You saw how long this took, so we're not going to create that entire thing. I'm just going to open the completed file and we're going to jump into each piece. We'll also go over the sketch in the Illustrator file to see how I organize all that stuff. Awesome. Sweet. See you in the next one. 10. Breaking Down a Complex Illustration: All right everybody, now that you know the entire process, because that really is the entire process what we went over, let's go over a composition that's a bit more complex and something a little more representative of something I would do for say, Instagram or maybe a client. Here's my sketch and again, I'm not the greatest hand-drawer ever, which I think is an awesome part of this style that you don't have to be an awesome drawer. You can rely a bit more on your design skills to make really cool stuff in this style. This is probably the extent of my drawing ability, which might be a lie. I think I could draw better than this, but like like I said, I don't like spending a ton of time on this part. I know the execution of this style is very heavy and very time consuming, so the more time I can shave off, the better. I like to sketch to a point where I understand how to build this thing in Adobe Illustrator. Quick tip though, if you were to take this sketch and turn it 90 degrees upwards, it's much easier to build out in Illustrator. Because it's symmetrical, you can kind of draw half of it, duplicate that, mirror it, and connect them together and it makes things a lot easier to make. That said this is not really an Illustrator basics course, I think I mentioned that earlier. If you want that from me, let me know, I'd be happy to make another course, building out compositions like this in Illustrator. If that interests you DM me. This is my first Skillshare course, so I'm not really sure what the DM situation is or you can message me on Instagram. My email is on Instagram you can email me too. Let's start with the Illustrator render from the bottom layer up, just so you can get a good idea of how I organize things. This is the bottom layer. This is one of the rings, the frames that I have here. Check out how I made this, it's pretty much a square with a circle punched out in it. That means a shadow could be casted in the inside there like that so that's why I made it that way. There's a ring light there, talked about those ring lights and how cool they can be. As I make these layers visible, you can see that the structure is exactly the same as I presented earlier. See even the small shapes get little ring lights. The main star there with a ring light. We're just going to keep moving up here. I think there might be a few shapes where I didn't put a ring light because they were too small, like maybe some of the stars. Cool, rocket booster. The point here is, I just hope you can see that the process is exactly the same. Heads up, you can see how many layers this is. I do that whole texturing process for each one of these shapes. Like I said, no shortcuts, it does take a while, but I'm telling you it's so worth it. Cool. That's how I built it in Illustrator. Let's check out our Photoshop file. Boom, it's already done. Seriously, I did plan to make this the main illustration for our tutorial, but it would have took way too long and I think I would have lost a ton of you, especially with a lot of these small pieces, because you wouldn't be able to see a lot of the highlight painting and things like that. Let's break this down by going through these layers here. At first glance, it might look like it doesn't match my Illustrator structure of layers, but it does. I just grouped them after I completed certain parts, like this whole rocket here. I grouped that to an entire layer. If I open that up, you can see I have rocket window one, rocket window two, rocket window 2.5 and so on. That's exactly how I made it in the Illustrator file. Let's open up one of these. Let's open up rocket window one, I'll zoom up so you can all see. This is rocket window one right here, this shine. You can see that's the texture that's masked. Here's the highlight. Can you see that it gets brighter on the edge of it? I didn't add an inner shadow because the shape is so small, and I just felt like it didn't need one. If the lights casted on it, the whole shape will be lit up like that because of how tiny it is. Check it out though. The rim lights there. The rim light is on everything. Then there's obviously the shadow. The shadow is small like this to represent, it's glued to that piece of paper below it. Let's check out rocket window two, which is that one right there. If I open that up, I have a ring light here. I didn't add a ring light to the shine because again, it's a small shape, you probably won't be able to see it anyway, so I didn't add a ring light there. You can see like the ring light. Look at the whole illustration here. Those ring lights really do you add that extra level of touch to this. Again, if you've got a piece of paper, cut it with an exacto knife, you'd have that crease on there. Hopefully that's a really cool representation of that or again, the texture. I just want to show you that the process is exactly the same as what we just went over with a simple composition. There's the original shape right there and the shadow. Look at that shadow, this shadow is softer and it lets you know that it's coming out of the shape more, that it's not glued to the bottom. Every time you do a shadow like this that's much blurrier and soft, those are the ones that pop out at you more. I think it's good to plan out the shapes that you want popping out at you. Let's check out 2.5, what's 2.5? These little rivets here. See even the small pieces get treatment. Look how tiny these are, I gave them rim lights. Rim lights are really exaggerated when you zoom up like that, but when you zoom out, that looks pretty cool. I think I called it 2.5 because of how tiny these shapes were. It's got a texture, a highlight, the inner shadow. Does it have an inner shadow? Oh my gosh, it does. I put an inner shadow on those, that's insane. I totally forgot. The rim lights very prominent there, and it has a shadow that tells you it is glued on top of that window shape. You get the idea, no matter how small the pieces are, they get almost the same treatment. There are a few things that I don't put on there. Maybe I don't put a ring light or maybe I don't put a inner shadow, but most of the pieces here get all the same treatment. Let's go down the list here. Or let's look at something that's a little more obvious. Let's look at this frame. Do you all see why I strategize it this way? I almost wanted to make it look like a tunnel, like a staggered circular tunnel. I feel like a composition like that just really brings out the depth and it draws your eyes to the center, like this window here. This window here is the center and then everything comes at you from there. That was the goal with this. Obviously hierarchy goes to the rocket, so it's the topmost object. I hope just by looking at this, you can understand how I planned out, which shapes would have a ton of depth and which shapes would be glued onto the piece below it. Let's dig deeper into frame 1 here, this layer. Should be really obvious with where all the highlights and shadows are. Look at the rim light, you see how the rim light comes out here instead of coming out of here, like all the other shapes, they come out of the top left-hand corner of them. This rim light comes out from the bottom right and the reason is I figured it's a shape that's punched in. You know what I mean? This entire piece of paper has a circle punched in it so when the light hits it down from the top left, I figured this part would hit the light the most, which is why I added the rim light there. It makes sense with the entire piece here. That's something to take note of there. Let's open this up. We've got the ring light. Again with my ring lights, where you don't see the rim light, I have the ring light more prominent, but where the rim light is, my ring light is a bit faint. Man, I just realized how confusing that is, rim lights and ring lights. I wish I called it something different but I'm sorry guys, it's what I called it for a couple years now, so it's stuck in the brain. Here is the inner shadow. Apologies, I think I just named it shadow, bad on my part for organization there. That's the original shape. Here's my rim light. Check out the shadow. We've got the two staggered shadows. That's that cool trick I told you where you have two shadows stack on top of each other. One of them that's a little harsher and then the other one that's a little more blurry. You get this cool light gradual effect like that. That's where you can see where the hardness is too. Can't do that with FX-Panel. Think about that. That's pretty much it with this illustration, I hope that gave you a good idea on how to execute something bigger like this. I'm pretty sure when you all want to try this style out, you'd want to jump into something like this. I would suggest trying something simple like what we went over in the past few videos first, just so you get used to giving each piece treatment like that. It could be pretty daunting when you have a ton of layers and you have to give each one of those layers that crazy texturing treatment, I would say 24 pieces is pretty hefty. I think this was about 18 pieces to texture, somewhere around there. It was under 20, I remember when I was making it. I think in average, that's a pretty decent amount of layers that won't take you too long. I've had somewhere I made like a 100 shapes texture. Realistically, I made stuff that looked insane, but was it really worth it? I don't know if it was worth it to make crazy illustrations like that. It would get clients really excited for sure. But then your client would ask that from you, "Now I got to make a 100 shapes with all that treatment, are you serious?" I guess if the price is right, what I usually do is if they pick something like that and they're like, I want this to look exactly like this. I let them know how much work goes into that, and you got to charge accordingly for sure. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as I did. Maybe I'll be doing more PaperStyle tutorials if there's a demand for it, if you guys come at me, you're like, "Hey, I want to see the a 100 layer thing," for example. I guess I could do that. Videos would probably be an hour or so, but if there's a demand for it, I'd be happy to do things like that. Let me know if you all really love this stuff I'd be happy to do more paper illustrations or be happy to teach you other stuff in texturing and lighting because that's what I do. I'm an illustrator that focuses on texture, lighting, and depth, and design. 11. Final Thoughts: Hey, everybody. Congrats on making it to the final video, thus completing the course. You just earned the Fugstrator degree. Digital paper degree of awesome, which exists here and here. If you have questions on the process, I believe Skillshare has a discussion section in the course, so please leave me a note there. If you have a question maybe outside of the subject of this course, you can DM me on Instagram. As long as it's nothing weird, I'd be happy to answer any type of questions you may have, especially if it's on the topic of the creative career, which I'd be more than happy to help you out with. Also, follow me on Instagram for the latest artwork that I do in this style. I also do this really cool thing where I combine augmented reality with this digital paper style. It's like an extra level of 3D depth and pop coming at you. Really super cool. Check that out. Always doing that cool stuff on Instagram. Stay tuned, everybody, for more Skillshare courses. I'm super happy to be here doing this. You'll definitely see more from me on this platform. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the course and I will catch you on the next one.