Transcripts
1. Introduction: The power of creative work is really what fuels everything that I do. I've been described as being not as feminine or small as I appear in real life and that's something that I really enjoy being surprising and well produced. My name is Jennet Liaw, I'm a designer illustrator. As a designer illustrator, I have a foot persona. I've specialized in doing a parallel. But I also do heals, and I work as artists on brand campaign. This class is going to be about exploring Adobe Fresco. We're going to do that by walking through an illustrator typography project together. You'll be putting your own creativity and add in your own unique spin to make something that is really your own style. Adobe Fresco is an incredible drawing tool that combined lobby elements that we know and love some Illustrator and Photoshop into a tablet drawing app. I think this class will be really great for anyone who is either pre-seasoned that working on an iPad or a beginner at Adobe drawing altogether. I started off my iPad drawing career with Adobe and I was a beginner. I was intimidated by drying on glass. I know that a lot of other people feel that way too and I just want to be able to encourage others to translate their ideas onto an iPad just as easily as you've been able to on pen and paper or in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. I'm so glad to be here with you for this class. Let's get to drawing.
2. Your Project: There are obvious benefits to designers, illustrators, creative people, being more visible in this day and age, but there's also a challenge and being able to set yourself apart from the rest. I think that being able to put your personality into your work is something that is a welcome and refreshing thing that we're able to do, to set our work apart. There's so many strong designers and illustrators and there's really a ceiling to how good you can be versus how unique and memorable you can be. By putting your personality, your personal tone, maybe you have a sense of humor or certain quirks about you, that you can put into your work that doesn't take away from the overall purpose of the piece, actually, will make you more memorable and desirable as an artist to work with. The projects that are really fulfilling to me are actually the ones where a brief comes in, but then something on the side of my notes actually happens line up with what that brief says I should do, and it comes together to create something that is based off of some very real, but very rogue thought from a past project, to create just a great combination between a successful client delivery, and also something that I personally feel like I'm proud of and came from a really real organic place. So to get our creative juices really flowing and to get you to begin to start to trust your creative sense of what references from your memory to pull, we're going to be working today on a piece that just really reminds you of a place that either you know and love, or somewhere you'd like to go to, or just somewhere where you've had a really important memory and will be expressing that in the form of a typographic illustration. A place is one of the biggest things that I think we all as people can associate with loyalty, somewhere where you might be really proud of the city you grew up in, sports teams. All those things are associated with our personal identity. So by choosing a place, we can really draw from things that we know well and love and are fiercely proud of, and express them in ways that are so personal and unique. I would just say to make sure that if you're first starting out, and you want to spend more time dedicated to each of these letters, to pick somewhere with a shorter name. So for example, I think I'm going to go with New York City, but if you were doing that, and if you wanted to really focus on your first lesson, then I would do NYC.
3. Opening Adobe Fresco: The first step is going to be research. When I think of research, I think it's equally important to research the information that you already have in your mind, and that you can expand on before you do any visual research. So we're going to be listing out just things that remind us of the place that we are thinking of. I'll be opening up the Fresco app and just writing as if I was taking notes in my notebook. So we're going ahead and open up the Fresco app, and you're going to select "Custom Size". Whatever size you pick, just make sure that the background is set to transparent. So I'll select that and open up this document. I'm going to start by laying down a background. It's not something you have to commit to, but I do want to show you the difference between creating a vector layer and a pixel layer. So we're going to make background and vector layer just so that we can potentially resize it pretty easily later on. To do that, you're going to select the Vector Brush icon here. Anything you draw using this icon is either going to draw directly into your vector layer or it's going to create a new vector layer so that you don't muddle up your pixel layers. So we're going to pick a color. I find it quite natural to almost set my background color to be that of a moleskine paper color. It just makes me feel more comfortable and at home but choose whatever color makes you less intimidated to start drawing on the screen. So this is a moleskine color. This is the color wheel that I'm using on the left side here. So now you're going to select the Paint Bucket tool and it'll just drop that color straight into this first layer, and it's going to ask you whether you want it to be a vector or a pixel. I prefer for the background to be a vector so that if I do resize my document later, I can easily resize the background as well to fit it without losing any image quality. After this, I'm going to create a new layer that's a pixel layer. So when you press this "Add Layer" icon on the right hand side of your app, it's going to create a generic layer that haven't been assigned to a pixel or a vector yet. So it's really determined by which brush you end up selecting and painting on that layer, and then that layer is going to become a pixel or a vector layer. So I'll show you now. This brush icon is the pixel brush and so when I draw directly onto this layer, this layer is going to become a solely pixel drawing. So I'm going to pick a color that I'm comfortable with. You can pick whatever color you're used to taking notes in. For whatever reason, I always take notes in red. So here you can see that when you tap one more time on the pixel brushes, you'll see all the different brushes that you could potentially use. For this step, I like to use something that's pretty similar to what I'll be drawing in a notebook. So I'm going to choose my pencil brush from the sketching brush category, and I'm going to pick pencil as you would think. So here's my pencil. Then on this left-hand bar, you'll see all the options you can select for the tool that you just chose. So here I can see that my brush size is at 10. I like to keep it around there actually. Then, this is the color that I'm going to be drawing with. Then, here you can play with smoothing which we don't have to worry too much about right now. Then, here are the brush settings which, I think, this is what really separates the style that different artists might want to be drawing in. So I tend to like to turn off all the pressure dynamics and velocity dynamics because there's just too much for me to think about when I'm ideating of how fast or how hard I'm drawing. So those are turned off. From here, we can start to take notes.
4. Initial Brainstorm: So the city that I'm choosing for my project is going to be New York. Just to really specify this particular project and make it less generic than a lot of the New York artwork that you see. I'm going to make it about summer in New York because we're fresh out of summer right now, and it's still humid, and the train is still gross and all of that emotion is still bottled up inside of me and I just want to get it on this paper. So we're going to do summer in New York. But depending on what city you do, you don't have to narrow it down in that way. I just like to pick an extra theme. If it helps you, then feel free to do that as well. So I'm just going to start jotting down some ideas. If any of those ideas spark a visual that I think could be really cool for this project, then I might make a little geometric note to myself just so that I remember why I wrote that down and how it might link with another visual later on. So stinky subway, I think this could be really cool because the subway is denoted by different numbers and letters. So we might be able to use that to cheat later on if something's not legible enough. Maybe I'll sub in one of the words in or one of the letters in New York with one of the commonly used subway lines. So just thinking about now, I'm going to write down the name of my city so that visually I can see what I'm aiming for, what word structures or forms that I want to start fitting illustrative ideas into. So looking at the word New York, I'm thinking about the subway. The end is a line that I take pretty often. The Y-O-R-K those aren't really subway lines and so we'll just keep it at this. So that'll be like a mental note to myself to refer to later if I need to. There's always really long lines in the heat, especially, that makes me think of like in Soho where tourists and locals alike will go and wait in lines for ice cream. So I'm going to write that down, like ice cream but like big New York ice cream places I really won't know, and people will travel from a long way. As a textural element and it's something that we could potentially use to add on toward the end of our project that I want to keep in mind is that everything is just sticky and drippy and gross. I love this city but it definitely has character to it and I don't want to leave that part out. So I just think the visual of having things dripping and steaming up could be a really great thriller illustrative element. Sticky, steamy, drippy. Let's see. When I think of summertime in New York, something I really look forward to when it's at dead of winter and I'm just longing for it are definitely barbecues in Brooklyn. Just to be on a rooftop that's away from the crowds, in the actual island of Manhattan, the shape of a girl could be interesting. So just I make a little geometric note to myself. There's like, it's a circle. My favorite letter is O, O with the New York, maybe your letter's O because you could really use so many different recognizable elements representing O and maybe barbecue girl could be the surface of that O, don't know. So we'll keep that in mind and I'll just keep brainstorming ideas.
5. Conduct Your Visual Research: So this is where I my list so far. As you can see I made a few visual notes to myself for certain things where I do want to highlight the shape up, if I potentially end up using as subject. From now we're going to take all the stuff that came out of our brains and we're going to expand on that visually by doing some visual research. So we're going to pull some references from Pinterest. What I like to do when I'm working on iPad drawing apps, is to have this page open on the right side of my screen because I'm right handed. Then I'm just going to pull up this bar at the bottom and bring up the recently used apps. So I have Pinterest here. I'm just going to bring it to this side of my screen. So as you can see, I can now access my Adobe Fresco App while also looking at some visuals on Pinterest that I can either screenshot and bring over to the app, or I can save into some boards to organize for this project. So I personally like to use Pinterest as my primary way of searching for visuals. The reason for this is because I think Pinterest is a rarity in like the social visuals sharing community, because it doesn't have such an emphasis on safe follower account or how your gallery looks and how much that represents you as a person. It's really about collecting ideas. So what I'd like to say of the reason why I'm such a proponent of using Pinterest is that there is a lot of really rich good ideas here. Whether they are graphic, or application wise, or I use it for a parallel design as well. But they're displayed in a pretty ugly way. So that keeps people from being inhibited to share their good ideas, because you can just throw a photo on there and not worry that it's representing you the same way that Instagram can sometimes feel like it is. So instead of searching for like New York typographic or New York illustration, we'll go straight in and look for maybe the West Fourth courts. It's something I want to emphasize. I want to look at different designs of basketball courts from the top-down, because think they make a really cool graphic and I just want to, a, make sure that I get the graphic right, and b, get any new ideas about maybe some unique courts or different color patterns on courts I didn't think of before. So I'm going to just look up basketball court and maybe basketball court design. See if anything interesting pops up. So you can see here that I'm getting a lot more expansion of that initial idea of using a basketball court as part of my graphic. There are these beautiful color block courts. There's a lot of artwork on them. So the great thing about working in typographic illustration versus just straight illustration is that, there are some boundaries and rules to it that really help you filter in ideas, and see whether or not they fit literally into the legible form of a letter. So I'm looking at the word New York and what could potentially fit in to that word that is the shape of a basketball court in one way or another. So far, I'm not totally sure, but all I only know that it is a really cool graphic that's on a really basic rectangle shape. So I'm just going to make a note of that, that that's what I thought in that moment when I did that research. So now I'm pretty happy with verbally what I have down as notes, and I just want to expand a little bit visually on it by making just more of these little chicken scratch visual notes to myself, highlighting the shapes that are part of the elements that I found that might be useful for making some type with. So I've just made a few more visual notes to myself. This is not everything I'm going to use, but just off the bat, there's always some things I'm a little bit more excited by, that I just want to make sure that I include. Something that I thought might be really unique but might also not work at all, which is pretty common of a characteristic for ideas that are really great. They might not be legible in the least but we've got to try it, is this arrangement of Morgenstern ice cream store front with their little ice cream case like on the inside. Maybe you can't see it, but I would say, maybe if this flips it can be like an n like this. This is a backwards n. I don't know. I got to try that out later. Either way, we're going to go ahead and get into the next lesson where we create geometric guidelines for our piece.
6. Create Your 3D Lettering Guide: So we're going to get into the next step by first closing out this step. We're going to merge any layers that we might have created along the way. To do that you're going to have the top layer that you want merged into the bottom ones selected, much like in Photoshop. Then go into this little options panel for that layer and select "Merge Down". Now you just have one layer. I'm just going to make this layer invisible so I can just pull it up again if I forget any ideas and I want to look at it later by having again this layer selected and then press this "Eye" icon and we'll just save that for later. So for typographic illustrations like this, I like to keep everything in perspective literally. I like to have some guidelines that help me to keep trying on the same planes. So I'll have this asset provided to you in the class, but I usually just have these sets of lines very simple saved in my camera roll and I just access that by clicking this little image, select "Camera roll". I usually keep this as my favorite so I can pull it up really easily. Here you'll be in the transform stage of importing an image. So if you toggle the corners of your image, you'll be able to size and resize proportionally but if you pull on left side or right side or on the top or bottom toggles, you're going to be changing the overall proportion of the image that you're importing. So I'm just going to make sure that it is the perspective that I want, click "Done" when I'm happy with it and I'm just going to keep this layer accessible to me the whole time as I'm drawing so I can keep either drawing using it, on top of it or I can refer to it as I feel like one of the angles is off or I need just some guideline. So this will stay here and I'm going to change up the layer opacity so that I can use it more as a guide and that it doesn't bother me as I'm drawing, it just serves as a ruler. The toggles for each layer for you to change up either the opacity or the blown mode are going to be up on this right hand top corner. Make sure you have the right layer selected that you want to mess with. Then you can play with the opacity there. I think I like it. I brought it here so I can see it, but it doesn't get in the way. If you ever, like I just did, create a layer mistakenly by having the brush selected, I mean that will happen. All you do to undo it is use your two-finger tap to reverse and then if you do want to redo that action, a three finger tap is going to redo or you just undo. So from here, I'm going to create a new layer. This is going to be the layer that I use to create my geometric guidelines for the letters I'm going to draw in. You'll see more of what I mean as I draw. So I'm going to create a new layer. Again, press this "New Layer" icon on the right side and we're going to continue drawing pixels. Since we're just sketching, I'm going to use a pixel brush, it feels more natural to me and it doesn't translate into the final image. So make sure we have our pixel brush selected. From here, I'm going to use this guideline I have to start drawing in the geometric little cubes are going to house the letters that we are going to be drawing. So I'm just going to use this as a guide and make sure I'm on the right layer. So I'm not the guideline layer but the new one that we just created. These lines don't have to be perfect, but they just have to serve the purpose of being accurate little cubes for us to put our layers in here. So as I draw, I'm just going to move my guide around as I need it, much like you would move over ruler around your sketch book. So if you have your guidelines selected, you can press this "Transform tool". You're going to be able to just move it around to where you need it to be, like I need a straight edge here so I'm just going to move this here, back to my drawing layer and keep drawing. Don't worry you will have to draw all of these boxes all over again for each letter. I'm going to show you how to duplicate layers later on so that this will be the only one you'll have to actually physically draw. So here we have our cube. I'm going to hide our guidelines so you can just see the full page clearly. So these cubes are a great way to figure out just how you want to align everything, for you have to think about what font you're using, how much space a letter literally takes up. We can get a sense of we want this to be a vertically aligned piece. We want everything to be spaced out and if so, how do they balance with each other. So before I duplicate all these cubes and start building out my word, I just want to tweak it a little bit just less of the rectangles. So I have the flexibility to make the letters either stand on its side, on its back. So as you can see, the Eraser tool is on the left-hand side of the toolbar, but you'd also press and hold with your other non drawing finger on this little circle right on your art board. That is something that you can change into an eraser. I'm just going to directly use the eraser tool in this case because I have more flexibility with controlling the brush size from here. So I'm erasing a bigger amount of space really fast, so this way just works faster. Okay, so I'll hide the guide layer. I'm pretty happy with the overall volume of this cube. So now we're going to go into duplicating the shape into the number of letters that we need for our word. To do that you're going to have your layers selected and then again we're going to go to the options for it and I'm just going to hit "Duplicate layer". Now it's duplicated so go over to your transform tool and I'm just going to keep duplicating, spreading them out arbitrarily and then when I have all my layers, I'm going to come back and just rearrange them until they feel good on the page. So as you can see, I have all the layers, my little boxes that I need to spell out each of the letters in the word New York. I'm just going to keep using the transform tools, letting each layer and moving them around the page until I find a balance that I like. Then after that we can start sketching your legs.
7. Sketch Your Basic Letterforms: So from here, I'm going to create a new layer, where I can start to map out generally what the letters look like. I would try to keep these letters pretty basic. I would think fonts like Helvetica or Gotham as reference, obviously they don't have to be exact. But just try to think of this step as somewhere to house the illustrations that you have. So having equal widths to each of the letters is important. So that we start off on a legible leg before we start illustrating. So I'll show you what I mean. So as you're drawing these letters out, just try to keep top of mind the lists that you made earlier of all the ideas that you had. I think this is where some connections can start to be made. For example, I'm about to draw an E and looking at this 3D space, to be able to draw an E, I'm thinking maybe because I have a few layers of just straight planes, and that made me think of the basketball courts I drew earlier. I'm also looking for a place to put some rectangles which are really useful basic shape and this might be the best place. So I'll just draw out what the basic recognizable shape of an E might look like and then later see if what I was envisioning for those basketball courts might fit in. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is totally just for your eyes to be able to see what illustrations that you've thought of earlier could fit into letter form. So not perfect but you can see that the three separate layers could translate as an E especially when it's next to a pretty legible N and W. So I'm going to keep working my way down. Thinking of my notes from earlier, I already know that I don't want the W to be like a really jagged form. There's something about that waviness that I want to work in, whether that's a bike rack which is a common site in New York. Maybe it's a sheet of paper. We can work out what that says later or maybe it's the chains that I was thinking of. Either way, I already know that I want to structurally set myself up for something wavy. So I'm just going to draw in, again it doesn't have to be perfect, I just want to see if it could work. So obviously we mapping these letters out, and then we'll see what we can plug in. So you can see how I've roughed out the letters, but also keeping in mind the ideas that I had in my previous list and working some of those into these initial forms. I want to work in this piece of pizza here. So that's how I drew the Y, just like super rough and these are trimmed symbol. This step, the most important thing about it is for us to be able to take just a wider look at everything together. See if it works, see if there's enough of a balance, of different elements like we have the R that reads really literally, we have the spherical shape, maybe it's a barbecue grill. That kind of creates a volume to the piece, gives it weight. Then we have like a sense of liberty to width, the way that everything is flowing together. So we have a balance of like flowy waited. I just like to make sure that there's nothing that's too similar that's next to each other. There's enough of variety and interest to draw you into the piece. So this step is finished. This is an exciting point in the project because we have all of the designs and aspirations of the elements that we want to put into our illustration and then we have also a structure to put them inside. So the next step is going to be putting them all together and really starting to visualize what the final piece is going look like.
8. Draw Your Illustrative Lettering: So I'm going to take what we made in the last step and I'm going to combine these layers into one folder much like you would combine layers in a folder in Photoshop. So to do that, you're just going to tap down on the layer that you want to combine with the other one, and hold it, and drag it directly over the layer you want to make into one combined folder. To access any of these separate layers within the folder, you just double-tap, and then you'll see that the separate layers are still available for you to use separately. But we're going to go back, just press the back button in your Back to your main list of layers. So for now we're just going to tone your opacity down so that we can use it just as yet another guide for our next step. So now we're going to begin on what I feel like is the first truly illustrative layer to your documents. So for this I would like to pull back up that initial list of ideas we had so we don't miss anything and just in case something comes up or there's a space that needs to be filled, we have those ideas ready for us on hand. So we will soon go back to that layer. That was the first one above the background layer and then unhide it and if you go to the transform function, I can just make it smaller, this is something you can't do in your notebook but I can just put it wherever I want for me to reference it and it won't be affected as a layer when I draw on other layers around it. So I think this is a convenient place for me to put it, for me to just look at it when I want to look at it and just make sure that the ideas stay flowing as I work. So now I'm going to create a new layer above all the other ones that I have so far and I'm going to tap that new layer button. For this layer since I want it to have a contrast with the guys underneath it, I'm going to try in blue, i selected blue and I'm going to just really try to commit to those ideas I had before. So I was talking about how I want to make that Morgan storerooms, ice cream store front into an end. It's a little bit of a stretch but that's what I do and I want to try to see if I can make it work. So here you go. Actually for this step I want to switch my brushes up a little bit. I've been using the pencil brush but now I want to use something that has a bit less scatter to it so that there is more of a solid line. Let's see what I have my favorites, i have sharp inker. I think that'll be good for this scenario. So picture inker and I want to go into the brush settings and just make sure that this is turned to none and of course this is personal preference. I think once you start using this up a bit more, you can play around with whether you want your brush to react to different things like how much you tilt it, what your pen pressure is and all that. So I'm going to try to draw this store front and I'm keeping in mind the colors that I might want to use, I don't like to work with color until later on in my development of peace. For now I'm just going to do this light background like default and then think about colors as I go keep that in mind but not have that inhibit my indention process. So I'm going to keep using this guide and just finish up this sheet. So now i finish drawing up the general outline for how I want the entity, you'll see that I decided to put an actual outline around the end so that it really comes out even though I know it's an end, I know that sometimes you have to err on the side of legibility for projects like these. So I can already see this is something where color is going to really come into play later on as a big factor to separate out the illustration from what it's supposed to say. So I'm going to move on to the next letter still using my guidelines. You know this one is already pretty drawn out for you but I'm not sure if I want it to be as thick as it is right now. So that's probably where the transforming will come into play since I want it to be basketball courts. I think this should be a little bit longer maybe than the cube guy that I previously drew. So let's try that out and see. Start drawing in these floating basketball courts. I'm going to make them a little bit thinner each plane than I had originally mapped out so just want there to be more of a sense of floating and also to match the width to the width that I set for the end for these projects that are based in type. It's really helpful as you draw to start to create a system in your mind of organizing what is illustration and what is type. Having a system to separate that really helps the viewer to understand that they're supposed to read something. So what I mean is that I'm noting that maybe for all the future letters I draw, the width should match the end just so that the viewer can tell that they're supposed to be reading it. If all the thinness and thicknesses were different for each of the letters, it might be just another layer of confusion. So that's a decision I'm going to make now is to make these thicknesses relatively the same. So I have this first panel and since I'm going to be duplicating this shape into three different layers for the three different tiers of an E, I want to make sure that I really like the shape that I have so far. So like I mentioned I do want it to be a little bit narrower so that it feels more like the proportions of a basketball court. So I can actually alter that directly in the layer by going to this tool which is a Lasso tool and I'll select this part of it. So I just draw the area that I want to be moving and I'm only affecting that area so I'm going to draw around it close Lasso and then you go up to your transform tool and it's going to just transform just that area that you selected. So I'm going to pull that in a little bit. You can see it's just a bit narrower without affecting the perspective at all. So I think that should be good just a little bit. Just so it doesn't feel so heavy with those three layers stacked on top of each other. So I think I like that, I'm going to press the select, all your options for transform are going to be at the bottom of your app. Then I'm just going to clean up these edges here. So you can tell I did some plastic surgery on them and then I'm going to go back in with the Lasso tool to just take that area that I wanted to duplicate it and duplicate it into three to make the shape of an E. So let's do that now. So this is called Lasso and then instead of going to your bottom panel here, you're going to go to your layer options. So those are going to be the same place that you were merging things down. So I'm going to click on duplicate selection and that's going to create a new layer with the work that I've selected in this little area. So to [inaudible] section as you can see there's that layer for me to work with and I'm already in my transform function. So I'm going to take that and I'll pull it directly down and there you go, there is a second layer of your E and you don't have to draw it over again. Since it's a different layer you can also easily delete or erase the overlap that you don't want to see without affecting layer that we were just working on. So they already have this selection selected. I'm going to go on and duplicate that and then now I have another one so this will be our last layer of E, pull it down. There you go, you have three planes to work with. Before I forget, I'm going to go into my layer actions again and I'm just going to merge it down so that everything is once again on the same layer. So now I have drawn all the basic elements that I know I want to include it in this illustration. This is the fun part because when I get to see everything together, see if they are friends, if everything works in harmony. So I'm just going to doodle a little bit and figure out what I want to use to fill in those spaces that could also help tell a bigger story. I'm going to draw it on a new layer just so it's easy for me to overlap stuff without affecting the layer underneath it. So I think I want to have some kind of hand holding the pizza and sometimes I like to go into Pinterest and find there's a lot of good drawing guides that people posts of different hand motions or you could just sit at a desk like I do and just stare at my own hand making weird configurations like all of these are equally acceptable options, no shame. Now that I think of it, I think it'd be cool to mirror this hand holding the pizza idea with the genes that I also thought was missing something. I think there's something, I don't know, there's something that feels like there is a story behind it to have a hand be dripping in things like super clingy pieces. So we can ramp that up later too with a bunch of sparkles and stuff but I'm getting ahead of myself. So I'm going to add another hand here and then I'll check back in. So as you can imagine, I'll just need a bubble down take some time and sketch through this and I'll check back in with you when I've added more elements and rearranged everything to fit.
9. Review Your Sketch: We're back, so I've just spent a leisurely afternoon finishing up this portion of the sketch. Let's just talk through some of the changes that I've made and why. I know that a lot of these changes are going to be pretty specific to my piece, but there are themes that I end up encountering, no matter what I'm working on. For example, you can see that the K has now become more of a least effect. Before, I just had part of a shoe lace section, and I'm sure that wasn't really reading as a shoe lace. So I've just built that out more, and I'm keeping in mind that I'm going to rely on color in the next few steps to really bring out the shape that I want to which is the shape of the K. Working backwards here, I've just added some subway doors to my little art train illustration, just to give it more of a sense of action and just wait to that particular letter since it was stand alone. I have also added some character to the barbecue grill, obviously some flames, just give it a dynamic quality. I've also added in the hand, holding the pizza, and I've just added a little detail here as a [inaudible]. If you know Roberta's, you live in the city, well, my favorite pizza place is in Brooklyn. So giving that plays a shout out. The W as you can see, I had started out with a pretty intricate chain design. I thought it was simple but, like I was saying before, I really want to keep the widths of each of these letter forms pretty consistent so that they read immediately as one type of layer. So you can see that I've knocked out the details in the chain so that later when I add in that brighter color to bring out the letter, that they're going to really stand out, and not be abstracted by all the detail regimes. So this is pretty much where I'll be ending this step for my particular piece. Take as much time as you need to play with those shapes, swap out content, as you feel fits into those letters. If you remember from my brainstorming stage, I had a lot of ideas that just didn't make the cut. Maybe they didn't speak to legibility or maybe they didn't work out in harmony with each other, and that's just something that I had to play a lot with before I came to this final sketch. So take your time, and come up with something that you're going to be excited to color in in the next step
10. Color & Finalize Your Illustration: Color is something, I think, that is so personal and potentially, it's a very subjective thing. I know I have my own colors that I always end up gravitating towards. Something that I like to do is to reference something from some error or some particular theme just so that all the colors that I'm choosing, especially in a pretty colorful piece, do end up being at least in the same family or have some reason or harmony to it. So something that I've personally been really into is finding inspiration from retro sport ads. I know that's not something that is a theme that is necessarily adjacent to somewhere in New York, but I think for color, this is something where you just have to pick something you like, to be honest. So today, I'm going to go onto Pinterest and I've just put into the search bar retro sport ad. As you can see, there's a lot of just classic colors, but in a faded way, which I think is pretty cool and also the whites actually translate more as creams. I think that creates color harmonies that feel really classic and relatable. So I'm going to reference that while I work. For whatever you're referencing, this step is meant for you. This is whatever you like, whatever speaks to you, it doesn't have to be this reference, you don't even have to have a reference if you have a strong sense of color already and what you'd like to use in your style. But for me, I just like to have something nice to look up at. We'll make the rest of the illustration pretty colorful but I want to keep one side of the spectrum, the background, being the darkest in this case, and then the type part of the piece the lightest so that it reads the clearest when you look at the illustration as a whole. So add another layer. I'm going to make this layer underneath my outline layer that we just drew in the last lesson, but above my background layer, and that's going to be the layer I use to start coloring in all the elements that we've drawn. So I think I am going to go with white or cream being that pop color of the typography. So I'm going to take my color wheel. Here, I've already selected the background color that I want to be using. You can see this looks like this yellowish color that's a little bit faded. I'm going to go into my Paint Bucket tool, and make sure I have my background layer selected, and color up that layer. So now you can see that if I draw a layer above it in a creamy white, it's going to really pop against that background. So I'm going to go up to that new layer that I had created and start drawing in just the letter part of the illustration. So I'm going to go in and select a pretty bright color. For this layer, I do want to select a vector brush. You can also fill in pixel brush layers but because there's more skipping in pixel brushes, sometimes, Apple recognizes the shape you drew as a closed shape if that makes sense. So if you draw in vector brush, you'll be able to close out your shapes more cleanly so that when you do fill them that they always fill completely and don't run outside of the lines. So you'll see what I mean when I begin to draw. So this will go into this end that I've already mapped out, adjusting the brush size as I need to. It's okay if it is not perfect at this stage because the outline that we drew previously, just really helps us to keep the illustration looking clean. What's great about drawing in vector in Fresco is that if you run outside of the lines, you can still go in with the eraser and erase that part as if you were erasing a pixel drawing in Photoshop. So I'm just going to go ahead and close out this in. This goes a lot faster now that I have the outline already for me. So now that the shape is closed, I'm going to select my paint brush and go in and just drop that straight in there. So it's just selecting the paintbrush and then tapping the inside of the outline that we created. Now you can see a really clear and that pops out from the page. So I'm going to go ahead and complete that for all the letters that I've drawn and I'll check back in. So now, I've literally highlighted all of the letter parts of our piece. Now we can have a bit more fun with the illustrative part of it. Just to inspire more variety in myself, I am going to recover some of these lines. So the way that you recolor something is the same way that you drop in color to fill. So I'm going to pick a rusty red tone to drop in, so I'm going to select my paint bucket. Here, you can see that there are fill settings that you can toggle with. This is especially useful if you have different colors next to each other and you want to control how much color floods into similar colors near it. It's much like if you're using magic wand in Photoshop and you want to change the tolerance. So I have my outline layer selected. I just want to alternate the outline color a little bit just to switch it up. So I'm going to select the paint bucket and pick out this rust color that I like and then just start recoloring in some of these lines. So as you can see, it was really quick for me to adjust, tap and change up the color of each individual shape within the same layer. So now we get to color in our piece. So we're going to add a new layer above our background layer but underneath that creamy type layer that we did. So I'm going to start off with a color that is going to be common across all of the letters. I just want to pick something that's actually pretty close to the background color because I like a sense of transparency. So I dropped the background color. To do this, you just going to take your finger and long press on to your background. As you can see, on your little color wheel here is already selected like an eye dropper. So now that we have that color that we want to slightly deviate from selected, I'm going to go onto that wheel and then just pick like a lighter version of that color. Then same as how we filled in that creamy layer of type, we're just going to fill in this layer with the areas that I want to share that common color across all of the letters. Make sure that shape is closed off and fill it in. I'm just going to keep going with this color across all of the letters. So have fun with it, explore, and then [inaudible].
11. Add Brush Lettering: So now I have more or less finished filling in all the color. I'm pretty happy with how it looks and feels overall. So now, what I want to do is just add some pretty obvious lettering just to help lead the viewer into the content. So I'm going to basically just write summer in New York, super simple, but I wanted it to have a lot of personality. So I'm going to go through these brushes and just play with a few until I find something that I like. Dry media sounds like something that could speak towards that fast and easy but still textural styles, so let's play with this brush first. So I'm going to play with this brush size, maybe up that a little bit. Again, play with the sheet dynamics, you can see that the control and according to the angle and etc is turned on. So I'll play with that a little bit but just turn everything a little bit lower just so that we don't go too crazy. So summer in New York. So it takes some time to get familiar with each brush and what it encourages you to do like angle-wise. But just have fun playing with it, and eventually you'll build up a toolkit of brushes that you really like and gravitate towards something that's good to play with when you're working with hand lettering or even calligraphy on your iPad is maybe the smoothing tool. That will help your lines come out a lot more fluid. So I'm just going to keep trying different iterations of this until I have a good set to look at. It's good to be able to see everything together and just take a step back and sometimes it's pretty obvious which one works best. So now we have a look at our final piece, and I think I've been pretty lucky with the sizing and placement but you're going to want to maybe adjust this at the end a little bit just to make sure everything is centered. So the best way to do this is to just start grouping the layers that you want to transform together as one group into one group. So you're going take this layer which is my lettering layer and combine it with my outline layer which is up here. It's going to group all these together and then as you can see, when I click on "Transform". You're selecting all of them at once and I can just make sure that everything is centered and good. I think that looks good. So let's move on to finishing up and looking at the different options for how we want to use this piece of artwork.
12. Experiment with Potential Applications: So now you've completed your beautiful artwork, what are you going to use it for? I like to always keep this in mind as I'm painting and drawing. I think being able to use your artwork from multiple things or at least consider using them for multiple things, is such a great way to extend the life of everything that you make. So I just want to show you how quickly you are able to mock-up either a wall, or a T-shirt, or just anything you want to show a client or a friend, if you want to propose a concept to actually make it real life. So I usually collect and prepare those mock-ups on my desktop. It's really easy to do in Photoshop. To clean up an image, take out the background, and content aware, any graphics you may not want in it. So I like to save those images as PNGs, just because they're easy for me to then later drop into decks if I wanted to do that, and then save them into my favorites folder on my iPad. So then I can easily go in here, and just import it straight from my camera roll from finding them in my favorites. This is something that I really love about working on my iPad, is that I can realistically or at least convincingly start to mockup potential products or potential murals for a client. I've often just mocked up everything straight in fresco and shipped it off to a client to review. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just make sure that the layer I have the mockups on is dragged to again the layer right above the background layer but underneath your artwork. First off, I think I'll try mocking up a mural, since I feel like these proportions are perfect for this mockup that I found. So I'm going to unhide the layer. Since we have all these artwork layers grouped together, but separately from the background, I can choose either use a background that I've made for this artwork, or I can just use this by all, and super quickly just size it for this mockup. Maybe I did like it with a green background. So I'll just pull that over the photo that I'm using, and resize background to fit. I can play with the blend mode to make it feel a little bit more like it's actually blending into the photo. I can go in and erase these little lines if I wanted to make this really perfect. But just to show you the gist of what I mean, you can see how I was able to just easily get a photo of what this mural might feel like if we were to paint it in real life. Then let's play with the T-shirt mockup. So with this one, let's drag the background back down. Go back into this grouping of mockups. Now, hide this one mockup. I feel like this would be a really cute picture. Yep. Okay. I'm going to hide this background layer, and then select the grouping of artwork. You know how to do this already, and then just transform it. Here, we have a little T-shirt. Who wouldn't want to print this? So again, you can play with different blending modes to see what works well. Obviously, some of these really don't, but where sometimes, I just lower the opacity just to make it sink in a little bit, and there you have a nice little mockup of a T-shirt ready to go. So say I'm really happy with this mockup and I want to just send it directly to a client. I can just go straight up to the top of my toolbar. Here, are the options you have for exporting your piece. So if I were to send to a client just really quickly, not in the deck, just a quick snapshot, I would just click on "Quick Export". Then here, I'm just going to send a JPEG of this image either to my iPad, I can message it to myself, all the options are here. Or if I wanted to go into Photoshop after I finished with my iPad work, then I would go to Publish and Export. I can Export As, and then make sure that the format is PSD, and then click on "Export" and then I can either AirDrop it to myself or e-mail it to myself. So I would love to see you take the artwork that you made today, and put it on some canvases like the ones that I showed you. Maybe it's a T-shirt, maybe it's a mural. It's probably something that I haven't thought of yet. Either way, I'd love to see what you do with your art.
13. Final Thoughts: So I hope that this class serves as a great jumping off point for you to explore the app and digital drawing even more on fresco, and hope that it opens the doors for you to take it even further. Everyone has a different process, everyone has a different way of going about working with the layers, with deciding on colors, and everything that we covered in this class. So I just hope that maybe with this exercise, at least you get the gears oiled and the wheels turning, and maybe you'll figure out processes and sets of brushes and all that you like to work with best. So I really hope that you take these things and explore fresco even further. I know that I'm still learning and I'm still going, so I would love to of course see all your artwork that you're making. I would love to hear from you. I would love to see you post in the comments and just interact with each other, share your favorite way of working with fresco, or maybe something new that you discovered along the way. So thank you so much for joining me today in this class. I hope that you had fun. I hope that you've learned something and I just hope that this makes you look forward to the next thing that you're going to make in fresco.
14. Go Further with Fresco: [MUSIC].
Jennet Liaw, Designer
