Transcripts
1. Let's Go!: Hey there. My name is Cat Coquillette, and welcome to my Skillshare class. When it comes to getting your artwork from paper to a digital file so it's ready to sell online, make art prints, or license, you have a pretty incredible opportunity to make your artwork on screen look just as good if not better than your original. This class is all about how to take your hand-done drawings and paintings, and digitize them to perfection. Once your artwork is actually on your computer, you can do some pretty snazzy stuff. You can erase mistakes whether it's paint smears or pencil marks. You can explore different color alterations and infuse metallic accents. You can even remove the original background and replace it with new options. Once you've cut apart these elements from the background, it paves the way so you can easily rearrange your arts into seamless patterns which means you can sell through fabric and wallpaper websites like Spoonflower. I even add the exact same CatCoq signature to all of my designs, so it remains consistent throughout my entire portfolio. In this class you are going to learn it all, every single step of the way. The best parts is, this is a beginner-friendly class. I'm all about demystifying the process and breaking everything down into really simple steps, so it's easy to follow along. Whether you're brand is new to Photoshop or already a pro, you'll be able to keep up just fine. If you don't have Photoshop, no worries. I provided a link down below in the class description to a free trial of Adobe Photoshop. I've tailored this class to make it as accessible as possible. If you already have a scanner, awesome. If you don't, you can still digitize your art using a camera or a phone. We'll be getting into all of the details of that later as well. As a professional artist and surface designer, I want to make sure that my artwork is looking it's absolute best by the time I upload it to a print-on-demand shop like Society6 or Redbubble, as well as sending files to a printer so I can order art prints for shows, and when I hand-off my design files to big companies like Target and Urban Outfitters to license on their products. My artwork needs to be polished and professional, and my exact process is exactly what you're going to learn today. Digitizing and editing hands-done artwork is definitely my forte. I've been scanning and polishing up on my paintings in Photoshop for my entire career in art licensing. I'm basically taking a decade's worth of knowledge in this very specific skill set and condensing it into the most basic and essential steps you'll need to professionally capture your artwork. Basically, you're going to get the benefits of my knowledge without all of the trial and error that I have along the way. This class is also a two for one. Not only are you going to learn how professional artists digitize and edit their artwork, but you'll also get a peek inside the art licensing industry. In addition to sharing optimal scan settings and nifty tips for photographing your artwork, you'll also learn about color palettes that tend to sell really well. Plus you'll learn how just a few clicks and drags can infinitely increase the potential for one design into tons of different product applications. I should probably introduce myself. My name is Cat Coquillette, and this is actually my 20 seconds Skillshare class. In addition to teaching classes here on Skillshare, I'm also a professional artist and surface designer. I do all of this while traveling the world 24/7 as a digital nomad. I've actually spent the last six years living out of a suitcase and creating new artwork as I go, and so a lot of my portfolio is actually inspired by my explorations around the globe. By the end of this class you'll have the skills to turn your hand-done artwork into a professional polished piece for your portfolio. In my usual fashion. I'm also hooking you up with a bunch of freebies just for taking my class today. You'll get a high res paper texture to add some [inaudible] into your artwork plus a collection of metallic textures to infuse into your designs. Don't worry I will be showing you exactly how to use both of these in the class today. Last but not least, I'm also providing you with a sample piece of artwork to practice with. Of course you're welcome to use your own artwork as we go, but this way you have the option if you want to follow my exact same steps all along the way. It is time to dive right in, but before we get started don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking that Follow button up top. This means that you'll get an email as soon as I launch my next class or have a big announcement to share with my students. You can also follow me on Instagram @CatCoq, and I'm all about social media engagements. If your sharing your project and your stories, don't forget to tag me @CatCoq so that I can see your stuff as well. Without further ado, let's get started digitizing your artwork so that you can start selling.
2. Supplies: The supplies you'll need for this class are pretty
straightforward. Starting with the most obvious, you will need a piece
of artwork to digitize. This can be a
watercolor painting, acrylic or oil painting, drawing with ink,
marker, pastel. Really any type of flat analog artwork
that you've created. I'm assuming you probably
already have something in mind, which is why you
probably are wanting to learn exactly how
to digitize it. So go ahead and
pull out a piece of your own artwork for this class
to learn how to digitize, I'll be using my Monstera
leaf painting from an earlier Skillshare class
as my example for today, I painted this during my class, learn to paint botanical
watercolors with a modern twist. If you love watercolors
and you want to learn how to paint
this exact same thing, plus three other floral motifs, go check it out. Anyway, you have two
options for this class. Option 1 is follow along in this class using
your own artwork. Remember, that could be
any hand-created designs. Option 2 is to follow along using my Monstera
leaf as an example. If you'd like to follow along for literally every
step of the way, you can do that by downloading the monstera leaf practice file. By the way, the other
freebies for this class are the high-res paper texture and the collection
of metallic tones. These freebies are totally
optional in this class. Think of them like
an extra perk. You're welcome to download these freebie assets
to use today, or you can follow
along and complete your class project using your own personal
favorite textures. It's entirely up to you. Either way, you're
going to wind up with a gorgeous class project. You can download everything by going to catcoq.com/digitize. Once you're there, you
can enter your email to unlock access to the
Dropbox folder that contains all of the
class assets and you don't need a Dropbox account to be able to
download the files. Just a heads up, this will also add you to my email list where I share weekly arts challenges,
freebies, and more. You can unsubscribe at any time. Anyway, when you're in
the Dropbox folder, you can select all the
files you need for today's class and download
them all in one go. The monstera leaf is
just for practice and it can't be monetized later since I'm the one
who painted it. But the paper texture and the metallic tones are
also created by me and you have my
permission to use them on whatever
project you want, whether it's commercial
or personal, without the need to credit me, consider this my gift to you. Let's chat about the
ways that you can get your analog artwork
onto the computer. There are actually two options here, scanning or photographing. Personally, I prefer
to use a scanner. The quality is crisper. You can scan at super
high resolutions, which means that even a
teeny tiny painting can be enlarged to much
larger proportions without jeopardizing
that resolution. I don't have to mess with camera settings or get that
perspective exactly right. I also don't have to worry
about lighting and I can scan at literally any
point of the day, whether it's noon or midnight. The scanning bed usually fits my artwork within just
one or two scans. For this piece right here, it's actually two
separate scans, so one scan and then I move
it up and do the second scan. I usually paint on
this 11 by 14 paper, which means it's really
easy to scan because it's actually fairly
small dimensions. Even though my scanning
bed is only nine by 12 inches like
I just showed you, I can still scan in two separate sections and then fuse them together
in Photoshop later, which we'll be getting
into later in this class. I've used a lot of different
scanners over the years, from Canon to Epson's and my favorite brand is
definitely the Epson. For this one right here, I'm using the Epson
Perfection V19 photo scanner, and just a heads up, Epson actually updates
their scanners about once a year or so, so the exact same model I use might not be
available anymore, but that just means
that there is a newer, better, upgraded
version available. If you're in the market
for buying a scanner, I do recommend the
Epson brands and definitely make sure that it is labeled as a photo scanner. Photo scanners are the
type you need for scanning an artwork like this at
super high resolutions. Other things to look
for if you're in the market for a scanner are making sure that it can handle very high-resolution scans. Some basic scanners only
go up to 600 or 900, but the one I use can go all
the way up to 4,800 DPI. That means at its
highest scan level, you can enlarge your
original artwork up to 16 times larger than it was when
you originally created it. That is insane. I've never actually had to
scan anything that large, but it's nice to know
that it's an option. Most of my scans are between 1200 and 1600 DPI
just as a frame of reference. We'll get more into scan size, DPI, all that stuff later. But for now, those
are the basics you should know if you're
looking for a scanner. Anyway, scanning is your first option and
it is the method that I definitely prefer
when it comes to digitizing an analog artwork. However, if you don't
have access to a scanner, you can always digitize
your artwork by photographing it either
with a camera or a phone. That is another pretty
quick and easy way to digitize as well. I'm actually going
to be going into both options, scanner, and photographing,
and show you how I do both so you'll be totally
set up either way. Regardless if you're
scanning your artwork, photographing it
with a DSLR camera, or just photographing
it with your phone, the process that you'll be
learning later on in Photoshop for digitally editing is actually going to
be the exact same. Don't sweat it. If you only have a phone to photograph with, you will be covered in
this class either way. The final thing that
you'll need for today's class is access
to Adobe Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop, you can download a
free trial with Adobe. Remember whether you are
a complete novice to Photoshop or you've already
been using it for years, I am breaking
everything down into a step-by-step process so you'll be able to
follow along just fine. I'll be using a Mac computer, but I'll be sharing
key commands for both Mac and PC so you're
not going to get lost. Now that all of our supplies are covered, let's jump right in.
3. Digitizing: Time for the hands-on parts. It is time to turn your analog artwork into a digital file. Remember, you have two options for this, scanning or photographing. But before we get into that, I want to give you a really quick explanation of what DPI means since it starts right here, and we'll be talking about it throughout the class. DPI literally means dots per inch. The industry standard for printing out on paper is 300 DPI. What that means is, my example over here, if I scan in this painting at exactly 300 DPI and I want to print it out later, I can print it at this exact same size or smaller, but I can't print it any bigger than this without it getting blurry and losing resolution. Scan in at 300, it can print at the exact same size as the original. Along those same lines, I'll use this as an example again, if I were to scan this in at a 150 DPI, I can literally only print this at half the size. If I were to scan this at 150 and print it the same size, it would be really blurry. Three hundred gets me the exact same size as the original, 150, it can be half as big. That's a pretty basic explanation of DPI. Of course, that 300 rule is for printing on paper only. If you're using an image onscreen like a website banner or an Instagram post, 72 is the industry average there. This is just because there are fewer dots per inch on a screen than there are on a printed piece of paper. But I scan all of my artwork with the intention of having it reprinted on products like tapestries, wall arts, and bedding, which means I care about print DPI, not necessarily web DPI. That's what I'm going to be telling you about during this class. Three hundred is going to get it printed out at the exact same size as the original. But what if you want to print it on something much larger, like I do, and have your original artwork be used on something huge, like posters or wall murals or even furniture. This is where your original scan settings really matter. If you scan in, a piece of artwork at 600 DPI, you could reprint this at exactly twice the size of the original. Because again, remember 300 gets you the original size. Twice that, 600, will literally get you double the size. Basically, rinse and repeat. Nine hundred is going to get you three times the size and so forth. The idea here is the higher the resolution of that original scan, the bigger you can possibly reprint your original artwork. Like I mentioned earlier, I usually scan in at resolutions between 1,200 and sometimes up to 1,600 DPI, depending on how big or small the original painting was. Because those scan settings are so huge, usually that file size that saves to my computer is pretty big as well. But for me, it's worth it because the higher the DPI, the more options I have deciding what I want to use this artwork on. Simply put, a high DPI gives me more flexibility. Now that you've got a basic understanding of the scan settings, all that stuff with DPI, I'm going to walk you through the actual process of scanning. First things first. Always make sure that you're scanning bed is totally clean. You'd be surprised how much grits actually winds up in here, dust, eraser nibs, and sometimes flaked off bits of paints. A pro-tip, I actually use my glasses cleaner to spray and then wipe down the scanning bed before I scan. If I'm feeling lazy, I'll just use this giant paintbrush I have and just brush down the scanner itself. When I scan my artwork, it's usually in two pieces, because as you can see, this artwork is bigger than the actual scanning bed. I'll show you later how to fuse those two scans together in Photoshop. But it makes it infinitely easy for me later when I light it up in Photoshop if I make sure now that I have it pressed perfectly parallel to the edge of that scanner. I would do one scan here and then simply push it forward, make sure the back edge is lined up absolutely perfectly, no crooked scans, and then I would do my second scan here. As you just saw, if you're going to be doing multiple scans of one piece of artwork, do it like this, where you're scanning at the exact same angle every time. Right now, my monster leaf is pointing this way, I would do one scan and then just push the paper forward to do a separate scan. If I were going to do my first scan like this and then flip my paper around to get the other side of the scan, then the scans are going to be slightly different because as that light moves across the scanning bed, it's casting a really slight shadow against the bumpiness of this paper. You want to make sure when you scan, that you're scanning in the exact same orientation each time. I know this is so minor, but it does make a difference. Otherwise, the shadows won't match up when you try to put those two scans together. It's a really slight difference, but it's easily avoidable if you just make sure that you're scanning the paper at the exact same orientation each time. Scanning usually takes a couple of minutes, especially when you're working with such a high DPI. While I am scanning, I usually take a hand or two and press it very gently against the scanner lid, so that paper is very flushed to the glass when the light is going over it. Don't press down too hard, otherwise, that scan will get compromised, and you'll get these weird streaks on your digital file. If you don't press down at all, sometimes it gets a little bit blurry because the paper wasn't flushed to the glass. A little bit of light pressure should do the trick. When it comes to saving your file, you usually have a few options here. TIFFs usually save as a slightly higher quality file than JPEGs. But to be completely honest, I typically save as JPEGs anyway, because when you're scanning at such high scan resolutions, that TIFF-JPEG difference isn't going to be that massive, and the file size has such an astronomical difference. TIFFs are massive files, JPEGS less so. Then that JPEG is going to open up faster in Photoshop anyway. Just a side note here, your scan setting dialog box, probably doesn't look like mine. Every scanner has a different type of dialog box. Just look for comparable settings that I'm putting in here. Now that you have the basics for scanning, I'm going to give you my best tips for photographing your artwork if you're going that route instead. Remember, photographing your artwork is option 2 if you don't have a scanner. Scanning is my preferred method, but photographing can be a close seconds. Let's chat about tips for photographing your work, specifically with the idea in mind that you'll be replicating that photograph into an art print or using it on a product. First up, hardware. You can use a nice camera, or you can just use your phone. I want to remove as many barriers as possible for you. If you don't have access to a really nice DSLR camera, you can always just use your phone. Whether you're scanning in your artwork or you're photographing it or using your phone, all of the future steps: the cleaning up and editing and photoshop, that's all going to be the exact same regardless of how you got your analog artwork as a computer file. If you're not quite ready to splurge on a scanner or a camera yet, just use your phone, and it will simplify the process. Later on, you can always upgrade to a scanner, and that way you'll still know the exact same tips that you'll be learning for digitizing and editing in Photoshop. For photographing your work, the most important thing is going to be the lighting, and natural light is going to give you the best results. Do not use a flash. Cloudy days are actually better than sunny days for photographing, which actually sounds counter-intuitive. But when the sunlight is filtered through the clouds, it'll give your photograph, a more even-toned appearance. Direct sunlight can cause some pretty harsh highlights and the shadows. If it's a sunny day, you can always step into the shade to photograph your artwork. Also, you want to avoid backlit lighting situations. That's basically like where the sun is behind what you're trying to photograph. We'll do this as an example. If I'm photographing this right here, the sun is actually over here, which is behind me. Which means if I photograph from this angle, with the sun over there, it's not going to turn out very well. It's going to be very dull and black and dark. Instead, I'd want to flip this around. The sunlight is coming from here, so I want to hold my camera right here to make sure that it's in the direction of the natural light. Next up, you want to capture a perfect straight-on shot of your artwork. If I were going to be photographing this piece, instead of scanning it, what I do is hold my camera directly from above, make sure that it lines up perfectly, not at an angle like this, straight on to get the perfect proportions. Remember the name of the game here is to get a perfect replication of your art. A perfect head-on shot is going to be better than anything from the left or from the right. This is always the trickiest part for me, is making sure that that lens is parallel to the painting, but it does really make a big difference. A few bonus tips, never photograph behind glass. If you've already framed your piece, just go ahead and pop it out of the frame to get your shot. If you apply varnish or any shiny coat to your artwork, especially for your oil painters, you want to go ahead and photograph it before you apply the varnish. One step before that artwork is actually finished. Dealing with any shiny or reflective area is a total nightmare if you're photographing this with the intention of turning it into an art print. Using a tripod will give you clear, crisper results, than if you were just holding the camera. If you're photographing a large piece, you can hang it on a white wall, which is going to help you balance out that color. The other option that I just showed you, you can just lay your painting out on a table and then photograph it from above. If you're using your phone, tap the screen to set the focus on the center of your painting. Some DSLR cameras also have this option for focus. Also, make sure that your camera mode is set for capturing the highest quality image that it can handle. These are all the basics for photographing your artwork. As you can see, photographing your work is definitely a lot or a little bit more complicated than simply scanning it, but it is another viable option for getting your artwork from paper to screen. Once you have your scans or your photos saved to your computer, the next step is creating our template file. Let's get started.
4. Template File: First things first, what is a template file? A template file is a layered Photoshop file that I use as a starting point for all of the artwork that I scan into my computer, and it's got a couple layers. It's got the PaperTexture layer and a Signature layer. Once my artwork is scanned into my computer, I just click and drag that scan straight into my template file and resize it to fit. Essentially by creating a template file, it's doing two big things for me. One, it's a shortcut. Once my template file is made, I can reuse it every single time that I scan in new artwork. This just cuts down on the extra steps on my end which is going to save me time. Two, by using a template file it keeps my portfolio really consistent. Nearly all of my vertical art prints are the exact same dimensions because everything starts with the exact same template file. Of course, if I ever need to change the dimensions of my artwork; say I want to make it a square or a horizontal, that's no problem to do as well. It's really just a quick adjustment like rotating the canvas or using the crop tool. Either way, super simple. But we're going to go ahead and start with a vertical sides template file, and I'm going to show you exactly how to put that together right here in Photoshop. This is my starting screen with Photoshop. To start a brand new file, I can either go here to Create new or File New. Like I mentioned, I want to come up with a brand new custom-sized canvas. I'm going to go over here to my width. Make sure that it's on inches right here, and I'm going to change it to 31 inches by 42 inches high. I want to make sure that, that resolution is 300 PPI. I'm on RGB color mode, eight bit is totally fine, and the rest of the settings should match what I've got up here as well. The reason that I chose these dimensions; 31 inches by 42 inches, is because this is a pretty universal size for framing art prints. These dimensions scale down really nicely to 16 by 20 or 8 by 10, which are all standard art print sizes. Remember all of the artwork that we're scanning in is rasterized artwork, it's not vector. We have some limitations when it comes to scaling up that artwork. If we scale it up too high, it's going to get a little bit blurry and it'll lose that resolution. That's why I like starting with such a massively large canvas size. For this monstera leaf watercolor that I scanned in I will probably never print it out to be 31 by 42 inches high, but I want to have that option in case I use this artwork later on for something that's a large product size. Maybe it'll be a huge wall mural or maybe it'll be a duvet cover. Either way, I want to keep my options open which is why I always start with a really large canvas size. So 31 by 42, perfect. Once your settings look like this, you're going to go ahead and click "Create". Now we have our completely blank canvas. Before we go any further I know we've literally only done one thing, but I want to go ahead and save this file. I'm going to go up here to File, Save As. I always save to My Computer, so we'll go ahead and tap that and I'm going to name this file Template. Saving on my Desktop looks perfect, and one more thing I'm going to do is change the format from a Photoshop file to a large document format. What that means is it's still a Photoshop file. It'll still have all of those layers intact. Well, the only difference between a Photoshop file and a large document format is Photoshop files have a size limit of two gigabytes. Large document formats can be much bigger. You're thinking two gigabytes, "Oh, my gosh, I will never have a file that large." Just wait until you're using all of these layers, all of these textures, plus working on such a large dimension. File sizes can add up really quickly. Even though this template file is going to be far less than two gigabytes, chances are that my future artwork files that I'll be building on top of this, they might be a little bit larger. In fact, they probably will be when you consider all the different layers and textures that'll be throwing in there. Right from the get-go, I like to go ahead and make sure that I'm working on a large document format instead of a standard Photoshop file. Again, it is literally the exact same type of file except Large Document Format allows you to go bigger in file size. I have Large Document Format selected. If you check up here at the extension, you'll notice that now it is a PSB as in bravo instead of a PSD as in Delta. Everything looks good, saving to My Desktop. Go ahead and click "Save". Awesome. I can actually see it over here on my desktop already ready to go. The next thing I want to do is add my paper texture to my template file. I've already downloaded it from Dropbox, so I can go ahead and go over here to my Downloads. There it is right here, PaperTexture.jpeg. I can just click and drag it straight in. When I made this paper texture, I made it at those exact same dimensions; 31 by 42 inches at 300 DPI so it will be a perfectly snug fit. You don't have to resize it at all, you can just go ahead and press "Enter" to set the transformation. Now that I have that paper texture in place, I can go ahead and click my background, hit "Delete" on my keyboard, and get rid of it. I no longer need that background layer since I've got the paper texture in place. Now when you take a look over here at your layers you'll see that you just have one layer intact, and that is the PaperTexture layer. In fact, if we zoom in; so I'm pressing "Z" on my keyboard and I'm just going to pull my cursor inwards, you can actually see the truthiness of this texture. I'll zoom back out by again clicking and then pushing my mouse back out, so zoom in, zoom out. Remember Z is how you get to your magnifying glass to be able to zoom. Next up, the other thing we need to put into our template file is your signature.
5. Adding Your Signature: I know a lot of artists who drew their signature on their iPads using the drawing app Procreate, because it's super simple. When you draw it in Procreate, it's already digitized. But I drew my signature by hand and scanned it into my computer years before I even knew what Procreate was. I'm going to show you that way. It's the analog way of doing it. Consider this a little bit of a mini practice with digitizing before we dive into our full artwork. I'm going to show you really quickly how to digitize your signature. Step one: get out a piece of paper, pencil or a pen, and draw your signature out on paper. When it comes to signatures, I always prefer to have mine be in pencil, but I know some artists prefer pen or marker as well. It really just depends on personal preference. I use pencil because I think it blends best with watercolor, but if you want to go with a pen or a sharpie, go right ahead. The way that I usually do it is, I'll try a few practice rounds, draw my signature out a few different times in a few different styles. With my signature, I want to make it really legible. The reason this is important is if someone purchases an art print of mine or a product where my signature is in place. I want them to be like, "Oh my God, this artwork is so cool," easily find my name, google it, and then buy more stuff of mine. By having a very legible signature, it makes it really easy for customers to find me later on. The number one thing I want to do with this signature is make sure that you can read that it very clearly says CatCoq. My full name is Cat Coquillette, but I went ahead and shortened it for the sake of my brand because no one can spell or pronounce Coquillette, so it just made it a little bit more easy to google. I've done a few signatures, they're looking pretty good. Again, they're all pretty similar. But what I want to do is find one that I think is working the best. This one right here, the second one, I think that's going to be the winner. What I'm going to do is put a star over it so that I don't forget. Now that I have my preferred signature, I've started, it's time to scan it in. Exact same thing as before, I'm just going to place my notebook on my scanner. Gently hold down with one hand on top of the flat bed so I get a nice crisp scan. I'm going to go ahead and scan this one in at probably 1200, maybe 1400 DPI. My scan has completed, it saved right here to my desktop. I can go ahead and click it and drag it right into Photoshop. Here is my lovely scan. I can't look at things upside down. The first thing I'm going to do is just rotate my canvas. Image rotation 180, perfect. Now I can actually see what I'm looking at. Same thing, I'm going to press Z on my keyboard to pull up my Zoom Tool. I'm just going to click and drag in like this. This was the winning signature right here because I put my nice, lovely star on it. The first thing I want to do is just cut out all the information on here that I don't need. I just want to be looking at my signature. I'm going to go over here to my crop tool. You can also get there by hitting C on your keyboard. I'm just going to click, drag around my signature, make sure the whole thing is encompassed, and then press Enter to set that crop. Now I've cut out all that extra stuff I no longer need and I can focus on just making my signature look beautiful. I'm going to hit Command 0 on my keyboard so that my canvas will fit to screen. Command minus, minus, minus will make my canvas smaller. Command plus, plus, plus will make it a little bit bigger. Step one is going to be cutting out any errant pencil marks that aren't part of the signature. To do that, I'm going to use my Lasso tool. You can get that by hitting L on your keyboard or by going over here to your Lasso, click and hold. I want to select the Polygonal Lasso tool. What that means is, now when I lasso, it lassos in these straight lines. The original lasso, which is up here, you can draw it out all curvy, however, you like it. But for me, again, I want to use that Polygonal Lasso. It's a personal preference, but for me, it just gives me a little bit more control. The way the lasso tool works is you can click these individual points and then wind up connecting them back together at the start. If you ever have trouble connecting to that original point, just double-click and it'll go ahead and finish the selection. I'm simply just going to cut this straight out of the canvas. You can get there by clicking Edit, Cut. If for whatever reason this area you cut out from isn't white, which is exactly what it should be, there's a quick fix for that. That just means that you need to readjust your default foreground and background color. It's pretty simple. You can get back to basics just by hitting D on your keyboard. Say I had some crazy color in the foreground, red is not that crazy, maybe a blue in the background, and let me just show you again, I'll lasso something out and I cut it. Blue is getting filled because that is my default background color. But again, if you push D on your keyboard, D as in delta, you'll notice down here that those have switched to defaults, which is black foreground, white background. I've made sure that my foreground and background color are set to the default, which is black in the foreground, white in the background. I'm just going to go through with my Lasso tool. Remember it's over here and I'm using the Polygonal Lasso tool. I'm just going to cut out everything that's not my signature. There's this little guy up top. I'm going to press Z and pull in here. It looks like there was something on my scanner that was in the way, so I'm going to be really delicate with this one. Press L for lasso and just carefully cut out this blob. Remember, you don't always have to click it right at the exact same starting point. You can always just double-click wherever you left off and it'll automatically finish the rest of that connection. Again, Edit, Cut or what I prefer doing Command X. Command minus, minus, minus, minus. Let's find those other bits and bobs and just go ahead and cut them out. It looks like all those little bits of debris are gone, I'm going to go ahead and select the paper and then cut it all out so that it's just my signature isolated from the background. To do that, I want to use my Magic Wand. You can get there by pressing W on your keyboard or going over here to the toolbar, clicking and holding and selecting Magic Wand Tool. Some quick settings I want to point out for the wands. Tolerance is set at 32. That's the default and I'm just going to keep it right there. But what I do want to change is this box here that says contiguous. Contiguous means that if I select something with my magic wand, it'll select only the similar colors that are touching each other. For example, if I click and grab this C, it's only grabbing the part of this gray pencil mark that's close enough in color with a tolerance of 32 to be touching each other. If I turn contiguous off and I make that selection again, it's going to select all the dark gray areas within my entire signature, which is exactly what I want to happen. Again, tolerance is at 32, contiguous is turned off real quick, I'm just going to hit Command D on my keyboard, which will deselect that selection. Instead of selecting from within my signature, I'm actually going to be selecting the background. With all of these settings in place and contiguous turned off, I'm going to start by clicking the white area that I cut out earlier. That got most of that paper background you can see. But all of these little dots over here means that it didn't get everything. I'm going to press Z and go ahead and click and drag in. The reason that these areas right here weren't selected, is because it was past that tolerance of 32. No problem, I'm just going to go ahead and select the rest. I'll press W again to get to my magic wand. Now I'm going to press and hold Shift on my keyboard. Now I can go ahead, click within these areas that weren't previously selected. Because I held down Shift, it counted my previous selection along with this new current one. Now when I zoom out Command minus, minus, minus, I can see that all of that white area has now been selected. Now I'll press Z on my keyboard. Click and drag in and look for areas that weren't selected. I've got this random yellowish area right here. Again, press W to get my wand back, press and hold Shift on my keyboard. Then click this extra area. Now I'm just going to zoom around. You've got this little guy right here. It looks like this is a pencil mark that I missed. But if I grab this area with my magic wand, it's going to pull a lot of those same grays for the signature. To cut this area out, I'm going to switch to my Marquee tool. You can get there by pressing M on your keyboard or going over here to your menu bar, clicking and holding, and selecting the rectangular Marquee tool. Now same as before, I'm going to press and hold Shift on my keyboard and just make sure that I grab that little guy as well. Command minus, minus, minus. I just want to be going through and making sure that I got all of that white paper background and any straggler pencil marks, all selected. Command 0 will fit to screen. I can just take another look. It looks like there's one little area over here I didn't get so I'll press M to get to my Marquee Tool, hold down Shift, and then grab that little bit. The first thing I want to do is switch my selection so that I'm only selecting the pencil marks and not the paper texture background. I'm going to go over here to select Inverse. It's hard to tell that anything happened. But basically what happened is that selection. Now instead of grabbing all of the white paper, has now only grabbed my signature itself. Now I'll go back to select, modify, expand, and I'm going to expand the selection by two pixels and then press, "Okay". Let me press Z and pull in and show you what happens. Let's go to my history. Before it looks like this. It was a very tight selection and by expanding it by two pixels, it just made it a little bit thicker, which is exactly what I want. Before I cut it out, I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to go to select, modify, feather by one pixel and then press "Okay." That feathering has actually added a very slight blur to my selection. Before I feathered it out, if I were to cut it out now, it would basically be like scissors cutting straight through paper. It would be a very sharp line but by adding a one pixel feather to that selection, now when I cut it out, the edges are going to be a tiny bit blurry, which is perfect because now when I cut this signature out and then put it on a piece of canvas later. It'll look a little bit more integrated and natural. You won't see that really sharp line of where the signature got cut. Instead it'll just sink into that paper a little bit more thanks to that really soft feather blur. I'm going to hit "Command 0" to fit to screen again, checkout my entire selection. I can press Z and then just pull into certain areas and make sure that I got that entire signature in place with no extra bits or pieces. You can see right here it's grabbing something. I don't want that little piece. I'll press M or go over here to my marquee tool. Remember our selection is inverted so instead of holding down Shift, I'm going to hold down option instead and that will remove that part of the selection. Shift if you want to add more parts to your selection, option if you want to cut more areas of your selection out of it. Now that I have my entire signature selected, I'm going to go over here to my layers click, make sure that, that background layer is selected. I'm going to hit "Command J" on my keyboard. It looks like nothing happened on screen. But what really went down is now we have two separate layers over here. If you go ahead and click the eyeball to hide the visibility of the background layer you'll see that you have your perfect signature layer here in place with the background entirely removed. This is exactly what we want. In fact, I'm going to go click my backgrounds and then just hit "Delete" on my keyboard so that the only thing in place is my signature layer. The signature is looking absolutely perfect. Let's go ahead and save it to our desktops just so we don't lose it later. File, save as, I'm going to click, do not show again because I always save to my computer. I'm going to title this signature and right now it's a large document format, but I know that this file is never going to be more than two gigabytes. I'm just going to switch it to a Photoshop file. Make sure it's saving to my desktop and click "Save". Now it's time for the fun part, which is bringing your signature onto your template file, which is also the final step for creating your template file. To do this, I'm just going to grab my signature tab, move it slightly over so that I can see both overlain tabs all in one go. Now I want to use my move tool, which is V on your keyboard. You can also get there over here by clicking and making sure that your move tool is selected. I want to grab that signature. It's tricky because you have to make sure you grab exactly where the signature is, not the background. Grab that actual signature, click, drag, and it'll drop right into your template file. Command 0 will give me full screen. Command T will open up transform. I'm just going to grab that signature, bring it right down here to the bottom corner and press "Enter" to set the transformation. Now, because I love staying organized, I'm going to go over here to my layers, double-click where it says layer 1 and call this signature. Last but not least, I want to go ahead and blend that signature into the paper, so it looks like it was drawn on that same to paper. We'll press Z on my keyboard to get my zoom tool. Click and pull so that I can see my signature nice and clear. Actually, I'm going to go and even tighter. Right now these are two separate layers. But if I click, make sure my signature layer is selected and change the transparency blend from normal to multiply. What it's done is it's blended this signature onto the paper behind it so that you can see a really subtle tooth of that same paper coming through on the signature. Again, let me show you before and after. That multiply effect really just helps the signature feel more integrated with that paper texture background. Command 0 to fit to screen. It's looking really nice here on the bottom corner. I'm going to go ahead and call that a final template file. Some going to go over here to file, save. I always want maximum compatibility as well. Click, do not show again and press "Okay". Once my file is saved to my desktop, I'm going to go ahead and close it. That is it for your template file. Once you've gone through all of the strenuous work to put that together you will never need to do that ever again. This will be the file that you'll be duplicating every single time that you're creating a new piece of digital artwork. I made my template file like six or seven years ago, and it has literally turned into probably hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of artwork by now, all originating from that exact same template file. I hope that yours serves you just as well. Like I mentioned before, now that your template is created later on you can always crop it, rotate it, adjust the size as needed depending on your specific piece of artwork. Just make sure that you're never saving over that original template file because you always want to have that in place as a starting point for any new piece of artwork. Let's dive into the next lesson, which is going to be using two scans together in Photoshop.
6. Fusing Scans Together: Now it's time to do a deeper dive into the Photoshop part of this class. At this point, you should have a few things on hand. You should have your template file that's saved to your desktop or wherever else and you should have a digital file of your artwork, whether it's a photograph or a scan. If you're using my MonsteraLeaf file as an example, remember you can go ahead and download the sample scans from catcoq.com/digitize. Or you can be following along with your own artwork and that's totally fine too. But the whole point of this specific video is going to be showing how to fuse two separate scans together into one image. As I mentioned earlier, I paint on 11 by 14 paper, which is just too big for my scanner, so what I usually do, again, scan in one chunk, move the paper, and then scan in the second chunk. What winds up happening is, I have two separate files that I need to fuse together in Photoshop to create one flushed out full scan. Because I like using larger paper, this is what I do about 99 percent of the time when I paint so I have it fully systemized into a very tight process. I'm going to show you exactly how I do it. The first thing I'm going to do is click and drag that template file straight into Photoshop. Before I do anything else, I want to go ahead and save it as a different filename. Remember, the worst-case scenario would be writing over the template file because then I lose it altogether so I want to make sure that I named this something entirely different so that my template file stays preserved on my desktop. I'll go to File, Save As and instead of template, I'm going to call this. MonsteraLeaf with the extension psb. All looks great. I'll go ahead and click "Save". Now you'll notice up here, my file name no longer says template, it says MonsteraLeaf or whatever the name of your artwork is. The important thing is it does not say template anymore. When you go to your desktop, you'll see that you still have your template and then up here you've got your new MonsteraLeaf. Like I mentioned, I've already gone ahead and downloaded those two scans. I'm going to go to my downloads and open them in Photoshop by clicking and dragging them into the icon. I don't want to drag my scans into the template file because the DPI is different. Remember, this scan has a DPI of 1,200 and our template file only has a DPI of 300. I don't want to drag the scan file directly into the template. But that's pretty easy, all I have to do is drag it into Photoshop and let it open in its own documents. Cool. So same as before. I'm just going to pull these tabs apart, press V to get to my pointer tool and click and drag my scan and now I can drag it into that template file that's now been renamed as MonsteraLeaf. Same thing. I'll grab my other scan, click, drag it in. Now I can go back to those previous two scans and go ahead and close them since I don't need them anymore. Cool. Now if you take a look over here at our layers panel, you'll see we actually have four layers. You've got that paper texture, the signature, and then our two scans. The first thing I'm going to do is reorient those two scans, so they're facing the correct direction. I'm going to click Layer 2, hold down Shift, and also grab Layer 1 and then I'll use my transform tool, which is Command + T. Once I get my cursor over here to the side, you can see that it changes to this curved double arrow and now I can click and rotate it exactly to be the right dimensions. If you press and hold Shift as you're rotating, you'll notice that it locks into these 15 degree increments, which makes it a lot easier. I'm actually going to make it a tiny bit smaller as well so that it fits on that template file. I'm going to go over here to one of my corners, click and drag. Same thing. Tighten it up a little bit in the corner. You'll note here that I'm actually not holding shift. If you do hold down shift while you're changing the size, you won't have control of those locked in proportions, it'll just be going all over the place. But if you don't hold down Shift, then it will stay in the same proportions that it originally was as you painted it. It's a little bit confusing. Hold down Shift when you rotate it to lock it into those 15 degree increments but do not hold down Shift when you're changing the scale of your piece otherwise the proportions might get a little bit off. I've changed the size a little bit so that I know it's going to fit within the dimensions of my art board and I'll just press Enter to set the transformation. Cool. You can see again that both layers are selected down here, but that top layer is covering the bottom one and I can't really see what's going on. What I'm going to do is, again, with both of these layers selected, I'm going to go up to where it says normal and change that transparency effect to multiply. Now the transparency effect has blended those two layers together. Here let me zoom in so you can see, so that you can get a pretty clear view of each one. Command + 0 to snap back into place. Now what I want to do is select that bottom layer only, so just click where it says Layer 1. Use my transform tool, which is Command + T and drag that second layer so that I can lock it in place right where it belongs. This is where you get into those really nitty-gritty details. You want to have this be as perfect of an overlap as you possibly can. What I'm going to do, still with my transform tool in place is hit Command + and now I have an even closer look of my scan. Now I'm just going to use the arrow keys on my keyboard to shift it around. Wrong direction. Try to get that as tight as possible. It's looking pretty good. Command + to get an even closer. Now still using those arrow keys, I'm just going to move it over ever so slightly until it locks into place. This looks really tight. This really illustrates the importance of when you're scanning, making sure that you're locking it up and hitting those edges really perfectly when you do both sets of your scan because if it's slightly tilted like this, then this part of the process is going to be a lot more challenging for you. If you can make sure that you're aligning it up on those edges so that when you fuse both together, they lock into place without having to rotate them, side to side, it'll be a lot easier for you. It looks really locked in, really tight. Just going to go through and check both sides. Yeah, this looks pretty awesome. I'll hit Command + 0 to go back out to full screen and then press Enter to set my transformation. Cool. We have the transformation set and these two scans are perfectly aligned. Now it's time to fuse them together into one layer. To do that, I'm going to go back to my marquee tool, which is M on the keyboard. You can also get there over here on your toolbar, click and hold and make sure you're using the rectangular marquee. Now I want to select that top layer up here. Here I'll turn on and off the visibility so you can see, it's this upper part of the leaf. With that layer selected and using my marquee tool, I'm just going to click and drag. Make sure that I get the whole upper section of that leaf and then end the selection about halfway through of where these two areas overlap. This overlapping section is grayed out. What I've done is cut it through, basically right through its half. Now I'm going to go to Select, Modify, Feather and I'm going to go a little bit crazy here. I'm going to feather this by about 20 pixels. Again, the reason we're feathering is, instead of just having a really straight cut out edge, it's going to blur that selection a little bit so it feels a little bit more integrated and natural. I've got a 20 pixel feather. I'll go ahead and press Okay. You can't really see that anything happened just yet. But now again, with that layer selected, I'm going to go down here to my mask icon and click Add layer mask. Cool. I'm going to press Z and pull in a little bit so that you guys can see this really clearly. Now you can see what that 20 feather pixel has done. It's really blurred and softened these edges when we apply the mask. But we still have this much darker area on top because we used that multiply effect. Let's go ahead and click both of our layer thumbnails, hold down Shift to get both of them and change it from multiply to normal. Now as you can see, her I'll do Command + 0 to fit to screen. You can see that it's really come together. I'll zoom in a bit into a seamless single image. Since we still have that mask in place, I'm going to show you what the exact selection looks like. Over here on Layer 2, we have these two different parts of the layer. We have the layer thumbnail, which is currently selected and you can tell because it has this white crop marked border around it. But if we go over here and click on the mask, again, now this is selected because it has that white to crop mark border. With that mask selected, go ahead on your keyboard and tap backslash to show the visibility of that layer. Now that red, it's not real, it's not actually a piece of your artwork, it's just a way for Photoshop to show you what the selected area of the mask is. Let me zoom in a little bit. It shows you the exact boundary of where that mask is overlaying on top of the layer directly beneath it. What I like to do is to go through on my illustration and again with that mask layer selected, hit backslash and just make sure that everything is lining up really well and it doesn't look crooked in any way. I'll just go from left to right, periodically hitting backslash on my keyboard just to make sure that things are blurring and blending really well together. I'm just checking this as I go to make sure that it's lining up absolutely perfectly. I call this the eyeball check because so much of when you're editing in Photoshop, it really just depends on you staring at that screen and just making sure that everything is looking perfect. This is the eyeball check to make sure that your two scans have fused together seamlessly. Command + 0 to snap back to full screen. I can go ahead. Now that I know these two scans are perfectly fused, I can go ahead and merge them into one layer. Layer 2 is already selected. I'm going to hold down Shift and also select Layer 1, and then hit Command + E on my keyboard, which merges the two layers together as one. You can also get there by going up here to Layer, Merge Layers. But Command + E, if you are obsessed with keyboard shortcuts like I am. Let's take a look over here at our layers. We're now down to just three layers. We have our artwork layer which I'm toggling on and off the visibility of. We have our signature, which you actually can't see right now because it's hidden underneath that artwork layer and then we have that paper texture backgrounds. Now that we have all of our layers exactly where they're supposed to be and we have those two separate scans fused into one layer, it's time for the fun part, which is going to be removing that paper texture background.
7. Removing the Background: Once your multiple scans are fused together into one layer, it's time to go ahead and remove that background. For all of my scanned in artwork, I always remove that paper texture background, and then I replace it with a very similar paper texture background. That's right, I actually remove the paper background and then put a brand new one in place. If you're listening to me, and you think I sound crazy, hear me out. There are actually a few reasons why I do it this way. One, if you plan on selling your artwork through print-on-demand websites like Society6 or Redbubble, especially on products like kiss-cut stickers, apparel, and clear phone cases, it is vital to have a transparent option for all of your artwork. Two, cutting out that background makes it a lot easier to move parts of your artwork around on the page. Whether you want to adjust the positioning of a very specific part of your artwork, or you want to cut and rearrange the entire thing into a pattern, you're going to need that background texture isolated on its own individual layer, so you can easily move your artwork around the artboard. Three, having that background texture on a separate layer makes color editing a lot easier and a lot more precise. By keeping your artwork on a separate layer from your background. It ensures that when you're doing color editing, you're only editing the color of your artwork, not that background layer as well. This is especially true if your artwork has a darker background, to begin with. Like for example, if you painted acrylic on craft paper, if you try to change the color of these leaves, the background layer is also going to change unless you separate them out first. Now that you know why it's so important to remove that background, let's dive into how you can actually do it. I've got my Monstera File over here. Before I do anything, I want to go ahead and save it. File, Save, or Command S. It's always a good idea to save as frequently as you can because you never know when those dreaded Photoshop crashes are going to happen. Keep in mind, save as you go. The first thing I'm going to do here is actually define the widest area of this paper. The reason I always start by defining the white points is one, it makes removing that white paper a lot easier because it brightens it. Then two, it also brightens my original watercolor painting or illustration and brings it back to the levels of the original when I did it by hand in the first place. When you scan things then, you can sometimes lose the integrity of your original. What we want to do is build that back into place. If I zoom into my paper texture here, so I'll Press Z on my keyboard and pull in. You can see this really nice texture. But my scans always tend to be a little bit darker than the original painting. But it's a really easy fix, it's just a matter of defining the white point. Let's do that first. Over here on my layers panel, I'll just do a quick double-check. Yes, my artwork layer is selected. You can see the layers highlighted, and it's got this border around the thumbnail. Now I'm going to zoom in somewhere around the center of the painting. Really close up to that paper, and it's time to define that white points. We want to go ahead and open up our levels. You can get there by going to Image, Adjustments, Levels, or Command L on your keyboard. The Levels tool is something I use pretty frequently. I'm going to zoom out real quick, so you can see what it looks like. You can adjust these toggles on the spectrum to make your illustration much darker or make the white areas much wider. Here I'll zoom out even more. You have a lot of flexibility with the way that you adjust the brights and the darks of your illustration just within this level dialog box. But that's actually not what I'm going to be messing with, right this minute. We'll get into it later. First, I just want to define the widest point of my artwork. I'm going to zoom in again Command plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. Go over here to my eyedropper, click the far right option that has a little bit of white filled into the dropper. This is how we select a sample point for the widest area of our page. Now I'm just going to go through, find the widest area of this paper, which looks like it's probably this bumpy ridge right up here where it cut the highlight of the scan. I'm just going to click it. It was pretty subtle, but what you can see, I'll go ahead and press "Okay", and then zoom out Command 0. I'm going to open up my history over here, so you can see the before and after. Before we set that white point, it looked like this. The paper was pretty gray. After we adjusted that white point, the paper got a lot brighter. The reason I like to start with this is if you take a look in here, not at the paper, but at the Monstera leaf itself, I'll do a before and after. Before, after. The Monstera leaf gets visibly brighter. In my mind, that's more accurate to what the original looked like as well. Before we start cutting out that paper backgrounds, define the widest area of this paper. Now that we have the levels adjusted, I'm going to come back over here to my artwork layer, make sure it's selected, and then duplicate that layer by hitting Command J on my keyboard. Now, I'm just going to toggle off the visibility of that layer underneath it. Your layer's panel should look like this. You still have your paper texture, your signature layer, and then you have a duplicate of your artwork. The layer underneath it has that visibility toggled off. In a second you're going to see why we duplicated that layer. My top-most layer is selected. It's got that little box around the thumbnail. I want to go to my Magic Wand. You can get there by pressing W on your keyboard or by going over here to your menu bar, clicking, and holding, and making sure that Magic Wand is selected. Let's take a look up here. Tolerance is at 32. Again, that's the default. We can keep it right there. For this one, I want to make sure the contiguous is turned off. Now I'm just going to click anywhere on that white paper, and you can see that it selected most of that background texture. I'm going to hold down Shift and grab this bottom bit right here. Remember by holding down shift, you're adding to your selection. Now I'm going to zoom in on some of these areas to see why they weren't selected. I'll press Z, click and pull in even tighter. It looks like it's the darker gray areas of that paper so same thing. I'm going to press W to go back to my ones, press and hold Shift, and then click one of these gray areas. Well, that pretty much got all of it. Let's Command 0 to go back out and fit to screen. There's a little guy up here. I'm going to zoom in on him, so Z and then pull it pretty tight. It looks like that area we didn't get was yellow. I don't want to grab that one just yet because chances are there is some yellow within my illustration that I don't want to be selecting. I'm just going to ignore that one for now. What I'm looking to grab is just the whites and the grays of the paper. I'll write Command 0 to fit to screen. Now I'm going to zoom in on one of these tight areas between the segments. Click, drag, pull in maybe even tighter. What's going on here is all of that white paper has been selected. But if you look within my illustration, it's also gotten some of the whiter areas within my artwork. I don't want this to be removed and turned into a white paper background. I like the subtlety of watercolor and having these really nice lighter areas within my illustration. I'm going to show you how to address that. Right now, I just want to make sure that all that paper has been selected. Again, we'll get to the stuff within the artwork later. Command 0 to fit to screen. It looks like we've gotten all of the paper except for a few stragglers, which again, I'm not super concerned about right now. Now what I want to do is invert my selection. Instead of having all of the white selected, I want to turn that around and select all of these greens. We'll go to Select, Inverse, and now, I'll go to select Modify, Expand by one pixel. Here I'm going to zoom in to show you what that looks like. Before I expanded, it was a little bit tighter. Then by expanding by one pixel, it just ever so slightly increases that selection. One more thing, select Modify, Feather. We're just going to do it by one pixel this time. Go ahead and press "Okay". Remember by feathering, you're slightly blurring those edges so that it's not a sharp line. It'll make it a little bit easier for this watercolor painting to integrate with that paper texture background after the fact. It'll just blend seamlessly into the paper instead of looking like it was cutout. Now again, with that layer selected, I'm going to go down here and add a layer mask to that layer. Awesome. What's happened is a mask has been put in place to hide that whole white paper texture background. What you're seeing here are actually the layers underneath. Just to make it simple, I'm going to go ahead and toggle off the visibility of my signature and the paper texture background. We're just seeing that grid in place which indicates a transparent background in Photoshop. Now the first thing I want to tackle are all of those areas within that illustration. They got cut out by the mask. Remember, those are the really delicate white areas within my watercolor painting. If you are a watercolor artist, you know that sometimes your paint gets really, really light on paper, which is perfect for that medium. We don't want to lose those areas when we're cutting out that paper texture background. I'm going to show you how to bring those back in. The first thing I want to do is go ahead and select my layer thumbnail. Remember, don't select the mask, select that layer thumbnail. Then I'm going to go over here to my special effects and add a color overlay. Here's maybe gray or something entirely different. Go ahead and click that icon. I'm going to change mine to a bright blue and press Okay and Okay. If you're wondering why your entire illustration just turned bright blue, or bright pink, or black, or whatever color you chose, this is temporary. We're using this as a guide so that we can see what areas got cut out and what's still there. Within your Layers panel, you can always toggle on and off the visibility of those effects at any time. They're not permanent, they're just an overlay that's in place, but I want to go ahead and keep that visibility on. Press Z. Pull in. This is my opportunity to paint back in any of those areas that were accidentally removed when we were removing the background. To do that, I'm going to go ahead and select my mask. Very important to make sure your mask is selected, not your artwork thumbnail. Go ahead and click on that mask to select it. We are literally going to be brushing back in the areas of the illustration that were accidentally cut out. To do that, you'll want to press B to get to your brush. You can also get there over here on your toolbar. Click and hold on Brush and make sure that your primary brush tool is selected. Next up, I want to go up here to my brush settings. There's a little arrow right next to the size of your brush. Go ahead and tap that. I can bring that size way down. I want to bring that hardness to 100 percent. Instead of having really feathery edges like this, is going to have really flat, hard edges like this. Now that we have the size around 50, give or take, and we have that hardness at 100 percent, what we're going to do is brush in the areas of our illustration that accidentally got cut out. Go ahead over here and take a look at your mask. In fact, this is a really good time to make sure that your mask is selected, not your thumbnail. Click that mask to make sure that this is actually what we'll be painting in. If you take a look at that mask, you see that our monstera leaf is white and the background is black. That means that any areas we want to be part of the monstera leaf, we should paint him with white and any areas that we don't want included, we should paint in with black. I'm going to go over here to my colors. Right now it's black with a white background. I'm going to go ahead and click that switcheroo arrow to make sure that white is my foreground color. Up at the top, make sure your settings match mine, we're on a normal blending mode and the opacity is 100 percent. Then you can literally just click and paint these areas back into your mask. I'm just clicking and holding and painting this back in so that those white areas are no longer in place. If you go back to your layers and you toggle off the effects, you can see that we've replenished those areas within our painting. Before, those areas had gotten cut out as part of the background, but by painting this back into our mask, we got those really light greens back into the picture. I'm going to turn my effects back on. Again, the reason I have this bright blue and place is so that I can better see what I'm doing. I'm going to hit Command zero to zoom all the way back out and then press Z and pull in. I just want to take a look at one segment at a time. First two segments are looking pretty good. Third segment, great. What I'm looking for are those white flaky areas that indicate that that part of the illustration has gotten removed when we pulled that background out. Actually, the rest of this is looking pretty solid. We got one right here. Again, I want to make sure that my mask is selected. I've got my brush, so B on my keyboard. I'm just going to click and fill that little guy in right there. Command minus, minus, minus, minus, minus. Same thing, I'm just going to be going through. Here's another one. Z and then pull in, B to get to my brush, and I can just paint that back in. If you're curious to see what that looks like before we paint it back in, let me show you. Command Z to undo. Let me go ahead and hide that color overlay. Here we go. You can see here that this part of the illustration was cut out because it was too light. Again, my mask is selected. I'll press B on my keyboard and I can paint that back in. Now you can see that that very light green is still intact with the illustration. Command minus, minus, minus, minus. I'm going to go ahead and pop that color overlay back on. Make sure my mask is selected, and just go through press B to get my brush and start filling in some of those white dots. There's one right there. Go ahead and paint that guy in. Overall, this looks pretty good. I think one thing that helps, let me go ahead and turn off my color overlay, is that the illustration itself is pretty dark. If my watercolor were actually a lot lighter, I'd probably be having to paint in a lot more of those areas, but because this artwork is in general pretty dark, it's actually not a big problem. But if you're a watercolor painter and you have very light areas within your painting, you're probably going to have to spend a little bit more time gently brushing in those areas within the mask. At this point, I've gone ahead and painted back in the lighter areas within the illustration. Now it's time to go ahead and remove some of these stragglers, some of these little bits and pieces like this guy over here. I think I see another little one over here. I'm going to show you a really simple way to just get rid of those all in one fell swoop. Command zero to fit to screen. I'm going to go ahead and click just to the left of my effects to turn back on my Color Overlay. Now I'm going to hover over that layer name. Right-click and then go down here to rasterize layer style. Essentially what that's done is it's just flattens that layer with all the bells and whistles in place. It's flattened it with that mask in place. It's flattened it with that color overlay. Now we just have this bright blue silhouette of our illustration hovering above that actual artwork layer, which is still just beneath it with the visibility turned off. Now is the point where I want to get rid of all these little bits and pieces that got scanned in. I'm sure there's a lot of little, here's some over here, these little blue pixelated areas, I want to get rid of all of those. Command zero to fit to screen. I'm going to go back to my magic wand, which is W. Except the key difference here is I want to go turn contiguous on. That means that when I select one area within the illustration, it's only going to grab that blue that it's actually touching. This segment is isolated. It's not touching any of the other segments. Real quick, let me just show you if contiguous was turned off and I clicked that same segment, it's going to select all of the blue on the entire page. Even all the stuff going on up here. Instead, Command D to de-select, make sure contiguous is on. It's only going to grab the blue that's touching each other. What we want to do is one-by-one holding down Shift, select all of the different segments of our illustration. I'm holding down Shift and just grabbing these with my magic wand as I go. Some of these segments are slightly touching each other, so it's actually grabbing more than one, probably just by one pixel or so. I think I've gone ahead and grabbed everything. I want to test it out by going to Edit, Cut. Awesome. My whole illustration has been cut out. Then all you see that's left are these blue areas that I want to get rid of anyway. I'm going to undo that, Command Z. My selection is still in place. I'm going to go to Select, Modify, Feather, you know the drill, one feather press Okay. Then turn off the visibility of that mask layer with the blue. Turn on the visibility of that original layer that I copied. Go ahead and click it to select that layer. I'm going to hit Command J on my keyboard. That copied our entire selection onto a brand new layer. I no longer need the layer beneath it. I'll click it. hit Delete on my keyboard. Now as you can see, we have a perfectly cut-out layer with that whole background removed and none of those little straggler bits in place. We have completely isolated our artwork onto its own individual layer. At this point, we can go ahead and click that mask and hit Delete on our keyboard since we no longer need it as a reference. Now we just have our single artwork completely removed from its paper texture background. If you look over here at your Layers panel, you should be down to just three layers again. We have that artwork layer with the background entirely removed. You have your signature layer, which you can toggle on and off, and you have your paper texture layer. Very important reminder to go ahead and save your progress. File, Save. Those are the steps for removing your paper background in Photoshop. I want to point out that there are a lot of ways that you can cut out the background in Photoshop, but that process is tried and true what works best for me. As you can probably tell, I am very precise when it comes to removing that paper background. I want it to be as smooth and natural as possible, which is why I spend all that time feathering by just one pixel, repainting in that mask manually with a brush tool, adjusting the white point. All of that very minutely detailed stuff. At the end of the day, I make a living by licensing this artwork on a professional level so that attention to detail really matters. It'll probably take a few tries before you really get the swing of removing that paper background, but that is totally normal and you can rewind this video as much as you need. I have definitely bookmarked a lot of removing background in Photoshop tutorials when I was first getting started. Now that your artwork is completely removed from the background, it's time to erase out those little mistakes and enhance your illustration.
8. Erasing Mistakes: Now it's time to erase out those mistakes. Paint splatters, smears, pencil marks, even little bits of gunk that got stuck in the scanner bed when we were capturing the original scans. This is a pretty quick and easy step. First things first, I've got my artwork over here. I want to make sure that that artwork layer is in fact selected and then press Z and pull into the most obvious mistake within this illustration. One option is to simply use my eraser tool, which is E on the keyboard. You can also get there over here on your toolbar and make sure that your eraser is selected. You could literally just erase out these paints smears. But I don't prefer to do it that way because what if I get in a little too deep like this and erase out part of my actual illustration. I could always Command Z and redo it again, and then Command Z and so forth. But for me, I like to have a little bit more precision and flexibility when it comes to anything that has to do with erasing out part of my artwork. For that, I like to use a mask. My layer is selected. I'm going to go down here and click my mask icon to throw a mask over it. Same as before, I'm going to press B to get to my brush tool. Take a look up here. The size is medium, mode normal, opacity 100 percent. Now I want to switch my foreground color to black. You can always get there by pressing X on your keyboard, which will switch the foreground and background colors. If you have any weird colors here that aren't black and whites, go ahead and press D on your keyboard to reset to default, and then X to switch black to that foreground color. Now again using my brush, I can literally do that exact same thing. Start painting it in. Except I got a little too close to my illustration. I'll press Z. Pull in, B again for my brush. It's really easy to paint that back in. We'll press X to switch white to my foreground color. I can literally just paint that right back in. X again to switch black to my foreground color. I can finish erasing out that little mistake. It looks like up here, we've got a big paint splatter. Command minus, minus, to see it full on my page here. I'm actually going to increase the size of my brush. I can do that by hitting my right bracket key to enlarge the brush, and then my left bracket key to make the brush smaller. You can also do that up here manually by adjusting the size of your brush. But I prefer the bracket method because again I love those key commands. I want to make sure that my foreground color is black. Then I can just click a few clicks with my massive brush. Then hit my left bracket to make my brush a lot smaller. Z to zoom in, B to get back to my brush. I can just paint away that splatter. Perfect. I'm going to zoom out a few times to make sure that I got that entire splatter. Looks like I did. If you want to see the before and after, you can right-click on your mask and click Disable Layer Mask and you can see what it looks like before. Then right-click, Enable Layer Mask, and see what it looks like after. I believe that's the only area of my illustration where I have a big splatter mark. All looks good there. I actually no longer need this layer mask. It's done what it was there for. What I'm going to do is go down here to the button where you can add a new layer. Click that, and with that layer selected, I'm going to hold down Shift and select the layer just beneath it, and then hit Command E on the keyboard to merge both of those layers into one. The reason I do that is just to go ahead and flatten that mask onto the layer since it's no longer needed. Step one was removing those paint splatters down here. Step two is going to be removing grit and textures and splatters within the painting itself. The first part I want to address is right over here, exactly where we first were. I'll press Z on my keyboard and pull in. I removed the part of the splatter that went over the illustration, but what about the splatter that's contained in here right now? That's the first thing I want to get rid of. The first step is to go over here to my layers and Command-click on my layer thumbnail, which is going to select the entire layer. Since we've removed that paper texture background, everything it's selected has been the painting itself with no background in place. Z and then pull back into that problem area. Now I'm going to get rid of these areas by using the clone stamp. You can get there by pressing S on your keyboard or by going over here to your clone stamp icon, clicking it, and making sure that the clone stamp is selected. The way a clone stamp works is, think about a real-life stamp and an ink pad. You're holding your stamp, you have your ink pad over here, you're going to press it onto the ink, turn it around, and then press it on the paper. The clone stamp in Photoshop is the exact same thing. We have all of these settings over here, but I'm actually going to leave exactly in place. What I want to do first is find the ink of the ink pad. You can get there by holding Option and then clicking on your artwork. What that's done is it's just sampled this exact piece. Again, I have my clone stamp. I'll find a place close to that original smear. Press Option. Click once, come over to my smear, and then click and fill it in. You've got to look closely here. But if you see this plus sign, that indicates the stamp pad, and when you see this circle over here to the right, that's the stamp actually stamping. Everything it's stamping is sampling from the area where the plus sign is. I'm going to go over here to this area, sample it, Option-click. Then I'm going to go to a totally different part of my artwork and start filling it in. You can see the plus sign area, that's where it's sampling from, and then where my brush actually is, is where it's painting in. I don't need a big light green area right here. I'm going to go ahead and do Command Z to undo that and then go back, tighten with the rest of my illustration. That was just to illustrate how the clone stamp works. The key here is to sample areas really close to where the actual blemish occurs. If I'm trying to fill in this area and remove the blemish, press S for stamp and Option to sample. I don't want to sample it from right here and then fill in this area because that does not look natural. Instead Command Z. I want to sample from an area really close to the imperfection I'm trying to cover. Just like you can make your brush larger and smaller by using the right and left bracket, I'm going to hit the left bracket a few times. Make my clone stamp a little bit smaller. Then press down Option on my keyboard. Sample from an area. Click once, that's right next to the blemish. Then I can paint it in like this. That feels a lot more natural, sampling from right here when it does if I sample from a completely unrelated part of the illustration. If you haven't picked up on it yet, the reason that I put the selection in place is so that as we clone stamp along these edges, it still stays nice and crisp within our illustration, we're not accidentally crossing that boundary as we clone stamp out those imperfections. By selecting our entire artwork, it just keeps everything within the correct boundaries. Time to get this guy. Press S to get to your clone stamp. Press and hold Alt on your keyboard and click once to sample from that area. Then I'll just go through and start painting this back in. That looks awesome. I'm going to do Command 0. Now you can see that the paint splatters within this area have been completely removed. Now it's time to eyeball it and see if there's any other areas that I want to clone stamp out and smooth over a little bit. In particular, I'm looking for eraser nibs or pencil marks or paint splatters, or anything that got stuck in the scanner bed as I was scanning. That's what I'm going to be looking for. I'll press Z on my keyboard and pull in and just start from the upper left corner and work my way down. I see here that there's actually some pencil marks on the original here and only come in tighter. For something like this, usually, I'll just leave them in place because they're not that noticeable. But I'm going to show you how to remove them just for the sake of practice. Same as before, I'll press S on my keyboard to get to my clone stamp. I'm going to make my stamp a lot smaller by hitting my left bracket a few times like this. Now I want to hold down Option and sample from just beneath for those pencil marks are, so I'll click once right here. Now I can come up and brush out those pencil marks like this. You can see that plus sign just beneath the brush, that's where it's sampling from. This is how we can erase those pencil marks. There's some right here. We'll go ahead and resample. Option-click just beneath it. Then I'll go ahead and paint that back in. If you want to get rid of these little freckles within your illustration same thing. What I would recommend doing is one, making your brush just about as small as the freckle is. Then holding down Option to sample right next to it, click once, and then go over to that imperfection and paint it in. Just like that, it's gone ahead and been removed. But I'm not that picky with my illustrations. I don't care about those really minute imperfections. I want to look for the big problems. Again, I'll zoom out a little bit. I'm just going through, eyeballing this, seeing if there's anything weird. Oh here's something, so I'm going to zoom in right here. It looks like a little piece of dried paint. I'm going to go ahead and remove that as well. I'll press S to get my clone stamp, right bracket a few times to make my brush a little bit bigger. Hold down Option, click right next to it to sample, and then come right over and just softly paint it then. Just like that, it has been erased entirely. I'm going to continue going through, seeing if there's something really bad. In my old scanner, I actually had a piece of dog hair, thank you, Jack, stuck under the glass bed of the scanner. I've no idea how it got in there, but it was super annoying because every single time I scanned for whatever I scanned, I'd always have to go into my artwork, find the piece of dog hair, and then use the clone stamp to clone stamp it out. I had this scanner for years. For years, it was like the dog hair scanner with this like one little piece of dog hair. Anyway, that's why I go through and look through my paintings to make sure that there's no imperfections or blemishes or dog hair because of situations like that. I'm just going through, make sure that there's nothing totally obvious and bad that needs to be removed. I think we've got something right here. It might be an eraser mark. It's not, but let's just pretend it is and I want to get rid of it. Same thing. I'll press S, hold down Option, click here to sample, and then go back down and simply brush over. Command minus minus minus. I think that's it for this guy in terms of clone stamping. I'll hit Command 0 to snap back to full screen. Once those smears and splatters are brushed over and removed, it's time to enhance our artwork. Sometimes the color vibrancy and the values get a little bit lost during the digitizing process of scanning in your artwork or photographs. But no problem, I'm going to show you how to add that back in. We're even going to take it an extra step and I'm going to show you how to make your digital artwork even more vibrant and saturated than the original painting or drawing was. Again, this is a pretty quick and easy step.
9. Enhancing: First things first, let's go ahead and get that artwork blended onto the paper. I still have that selection in place around my artwork. I want to go ahead and deselect it, so Command D. You can also go up to select Deselect. Now, let's go ahead and turn on the visibility of both that paper texture and the signature. Just like we made the signature multiplied on top of that paper, I want to do the same thing for this artwork layer. I want to click and select my artwork layer, click "Normal" to adjust my blending mode. Here, you have two options. You can either do Multiply or Linear Burn. They are very similar. Let me go ahead and zoom in so you can see closer. That Linear Burn is a little bit more dramatic. Here's Multiply again. Here's nothing at all. Here's Multiply and here's Linear Burn. Multiply and Linear Burn have very similar effects. What's happening is you're actually seeing this paper texture come through within the artwork itself. Again, this is no overlay. Let's go over here to a lighter area. Perfect, right right. This is no overlay and this is Multiply. You're seeing that paper texture come through the artwork. Again, it's really subtle. If you want something with a little bit more drama, Linear Burn is the way to go. I like living on the edge, so I think Linear Burn is the move for this one. Command 0 to go back to full screen. Now I have that artwork blended onto the paper beneath it. My signature is looking a little overpowering. I'm actually going to go click my signature layer, Command T, to open up Transform, and I'm going to make it a little bit smaller, and tuck it in just here to the corner of my illustration. I'll go ahead and press "Enter." I think that just feels like a more natural spot for my signature rather than hanging out here all lonesome in the corner. Now that we have our artwork blended onto that paper backgrounds, let's go ahead and amp up that saturation a little bit. Again, click your artwork layer to make sure it's selected. We want to bring up our hue in saturation, Image, Adjustments, Hue and Saturation. You can also get there by hitting ''Command U'' on your keyboard. Like I mentioned, the digitizing process, especially with scanning, can sometimes desaturate your artwork a little bit. I want to bring back that saturation to beyond what the original even was. I can do that over here by selecting the Toggle on the saturation spectrum. If I bring it all the way to the left, it becomes entirely desaturated. If I bring it all the way to the right, it becomes almost neon fluorescent. That looks awful, I do not want that. Let's bring it back to around the middle parts. I just want to bring it up ever so slightly, maybe 17 is the way to do it. I think that's looking pretty nice. Go ahead and press "Okay." Again, I'll show you before and after. Before, it looks like this, a little bit dull, and then after I adjusted the saturation, it got much more vibrant. I'm actually really loving these results. I'm going to go ahead and stick with that. Next up, let's bump up that contrast a little bit and make it a little bit more dramatic between the darks and the lights. Again, with my artwork layer selected, I'm going to go up to Image, Adjustments, Levels. You can also get there by hitting ''Command L''. We were in the same dialogue box earlier when we were establishing the white points over here with the eye dropper. We don't need to do that anymore. But what I generally like to do with my illustrations, especially with watercolor, is amp up that contrast to little bits. The first thing I do is go over here to the far right side of the spectrum, grab this Toggle, and just bring it a little bit to the left. As you can see, what that's doing is brightening the whitest areas of the illustration. If I were to bring this super crazy to the left, it gets really white in the whitest areas. I don't need anything that traumatic, maybe just about here is good. Then, I like to grab this Toggle on the far left, which represents the darks. Again, if I went really crazy and brought it all the way over to the right, it would get very dark within the darkest areas of the artwork. I don't need anything that crazy, so I'm just going to grab it and bring it ever so slightly to the right so that the darkest areas of this illustration are even more pronounced. Again, I grab that far left Toggle and bring it slightly inwards, and then I grab that far right Toggle and bring it ever so slightly inwards as well, to just very naturally adjust that contrast so that the lightest areas are more white and the darkest areas are more dark. I'll go ahead and press "Okay." Again, if you want to see it before and after, here's before, and here's after we adjusted the saturation. Again, it's really minor tweaks, but it's stuff like this, that in my mind, makes the difference between an average painting and a very professional painting. The very last step, is the easiest parts, it is to save. Command S will go ahead and save all of our progress. Give yourself a round of applause because you have officially finished all of the technical stuff. You've digitized your artwork, fused the two skins together into one, removed the background, erased out mistakes, and enhanced your artwork by bumping up the saturation and adjusting the contrast. From this point onwards, it is all fun stuff starting with color exploration.
10. Color Exploration: This is actually one of my favorite parts about digitally editing. It is exploring color palettes. Not only is this just fun to do, but there is a strategy to choosing colors that are going to sell well. More color options equals more sales opportunities. For every illustration that I make, I usually create about 5-10 different color variations out of that original artwork. The more color options I create, the more chances I have of selling that design. I'm going to show you some quick and easy methods to achieving some fabulous new palettes and spicing up your original artwork. This is where we left off with our canvas. The first thing I'm going to do is go over here into my layer palette, double-click my original layer, and I'm going to call this green. I'm not even going to touch this layer, I'm going to keep it all alone as the original palette. Instead, I'm going to make a copy of this layer and start playing with that one instead. Again, with my layer selected, I'm going to hit Command J on my keyboard, to duplicate that layer. Now if you take a look over here at the artboard, you'll see that everything just got a lot darker. The reason that's happening is because of those transparency effects we applied. Since we have this linear burn transparency effect in place, it's literally linear burning on top of this green layer underneath. No worries, I'm just going to temporarily hide the layer visibility by turning off the eyeball for my original green layer. Now with my new layer selected, I'm going to hit Command G on my keyboard, which is going to put it in a group. When I make color adjustments like this and create a lot of different color options, I like to keep my layers panel very organized. For this, I just use a lot of groupings. I have a group of one right here, it's just that green copy. I'm going to go ahead and select that layer thumbnail. Green copy is selected, not the group folder, but the layer itself. Then I'm going to go up here to Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue Saturation. Go ahead and press Okay. What that's done is it's created a new layer on top of my artwork. We have the hue and saturation adjustments, and then we have the layer mask. But I want to go ahead and make sure that the hue and saturation adjustments area is selected, not the layer mask; this guy right here. Now we have an opportunity up here in properties to adjust the hue and the saturation of our artwork. But just a quick tip, I usually never adjust lightness and brightness here, I do that in levels instead. I'm going to bring everything back to zero. If you're wondering why we went to the effort to put a layer adjustment on top of that layer instead of just doing what we did before and applying the human saturation directly to the layer itself, it's because it gives me more flexibility. By adding a layer adjustment, I will always be able to go back and see exactly how much I finagled with that hue and saturation down to the exact number because that information stays in place over here in the adjustment layer. If I were to adjust to the hue and saturation, not in an adjustment layer, for example, on the original artwork itself, remember Command U brings up hue and saturation. Let's say I adjusted the hue and brighten saturation to plus 41 and plus 34 and pressed Okay, that information just becomes part of the layer and there's no way that I can go back later and see those exact adjustments that I made. Command Z to get rid of that. Again, I'm going to toggle off the visibility, turn back on the visibility for my layer group, toggle down that carrot, turn on the visibility for my adjustment layer, and click my layer thumbnail. Anytime I go back to this, I can see those exact numbers. That way, I always have that information in place and it's easy to just click and drag literally that adjustment layer over into a new artboard. Again, a little bit later on, when we get to the pattern work, you'll see why this just makes things a lot simpler. But for now, what I want to do is make sure my layer thumbnail is selected. I've got my hue and saturation up here on properties. I'm going to bring that saturation right back to zero and start playing with this hue, and see some cool things that I could get. There's some really interesting things happening over here with the indigo. Then if I go a complete 180, this means that the colors are the polar opposite colors of the original. That goes for either side of the spectrum. Whether you go to the far left, it's negative 180, or the far right, it's positive 180. It's the exact same thing. At this point, I just like to toggle through and see if any interesting things are happening. When I'm adjusting color like this with hue and saturation over the entire layer, my preferred go-to is usually a 180. I feel like these are usually the most pure and interesting colors. They don't get very muddy and they tend to work really well together, again, because it's just literally the polar opposite of that original palette. I love how that's looking. I'm going to go ahead and call this one My First Alternate Color Palette. Here in the group name, I'm going to double-click where it says Group 1 and just change it to indigo. Again, since I adjusted the color through a layer adjustment, I can toggle on and off that visibility at any time and still have that original green just beneath it. Next up, let's try another alternate using a different method called Color Balance. I'm going to go ahead and toggle that carrot closed for my indigo folder. Go back to my original green, hit Command J to duplicate it and bring it right up to the front. I can literally click that layer and drag it on top of the stack. If your layer just disappeared, it means you probably accidentally dropped it in the indigo folder. If you did that, all you need to do is toggle down indigo, grab that layer and pull it above the folder itself. No big deal. I'm going to close indigo, turn off the visibility for that layer. Turn on the visibility for my copied layer. With that layer selected, hit Command G to again put it in its own group. Now I want to go down, make sure that layer is selected and go back up to Layer, New Adjustment Layer. This time, instead of Hue and Saturation, I'm going to choose Color Balance. Go ahead and press "Okay" and now you can see it's really similar to what happened before. We have that color balance adjustments and then we have a mask right here. I want to go ahead and click that layer thumbnail so that I can come up here to my properties and start playing around with some fun adjustments. Within color balance, you have a lot of flexibility over here. For example, within these mid-tones, I could see what happens if I bring it really red. That's interesting. It looks like an autumn leaf or all the way down here to the deepest cyan. Same thing. can see what happens if I really bring out those greens or quay everything into a more magenta tone. I like this. It's starting to look like a galaxy palette and then same thing. We can see what happens if we skew it all the way blue or all the way yellow or just somewhere in between. I liked what was happening over here, when I brought that cyan all the way to the left and brought that blew up a little bit to make it feel nice and cool. But you're not just limited to the mid-tones. In fact, you can click that. You can also adjust the shadows and the highlights. Let's do shadows first. It looks like there's a lot of blues and cyans within my leaf. Let's see what happens if I just really deepen that contrast and make the shadows really red. Also bring in some magenta and maybe a touch of blue. This is actually getting really interesting. It's a little too dark though. Let's go into highlights and play around here. You can bring that red up a notch, bring a lot of magenta in. Now that's interesting. Then maybe some blues as well. There's some pretty interesting things happening within these colors. This doesn't feel at all like my original palette. We are onto something completely new. Also, something that I want to point out as we've been making these adjustments to the color balance, my signature has also changed color and the background paper has also been tinted. We want to avoid that. We want to make sure that whatever color balance for doing over here on the layers is only affecting the layer directly underneath it and to ensure that that's the case, all you need to do is go over here to your properties. There's this little box with an arrow crossed out next to it. If you tap that, what it's done is gone ahead and clipped to the layer directly beneath it. Again, here's what it looks like without that adjustment clip. Here's what happens when we clip to adjust that layer. That's just a little tip of something that's going to make it a lot easier with adjusting color. After all, that's a really big reason of why we removed that background in the first place. It's so that we can make adjustments to the artwork layer without adjusting the background color as well. At this point I just want to do some fine tuning. Some of those dark areas are looking a little bit too dark. I'll again make sure that that layer thumbnail is selected. I think I need to go into my shadows and make them a little bit less intense. Maybe that red comes back a little bit. Maybe the blue as well. Maybe I leave that magenta in place. I'm going to show you another reason why I like working with adjustment layers. It's right over here. It's this layer mask that's kicked in automatically every time you add a new adjustment layer. If you go over here and select your mask, right now you'll see that the entire mask is white. That means that nothing underneath that mask is showing through it all. It is entirely blocked out by white, but you can actually cut some holes in this mask if you want to see the layer underneath peeking through. Let me show you what I mean. First of all, I want to make sure that this mask is selected, not the group name or the layer thumbnail, but the mask itself. Now let's go ahead and cut sum holes in this mask. Remember, the whole mask is white. Anything we added that's black is basically going to count as a hole to whatever layer is underneath. I'm going to get my brush out by pressing "B" on my keyboard and I want to go ahead over here and double-check and make sure that black is my foreground color, which it is. Right now my brush is really teeny tiny. I'm actually going to press my right bracket a bunch to make it a lot larger. Remember, you can also adjust the brush size over here with this toggle. Much larger brush size. What I'm doing is I'm actually cutting a hole in this mask. By painting with black, you can take a look over here on your mask, and see that this black area represents the layer underneath it peeking through. Again, the reason why masks are great is because it's a non-destructive editing technique. You can seen that I've got my brush over here a little bit. No problem. I'll just switch to white. Remember you can press X on your keyboard to switch the foreground and background colors. Now I can just paint back in those areas that I accidentally painted over in the first place. If you've hit "Backslash" on your keyboard, it'll add this red overlay so you can see exactly what was included in that layer mask. Hit "Backslash" again and it goes away. Cool. At this point, I have my layer mask with one little hole in that mask, which is allowing this original green to come through. Let's go ahead and cut out one more whole. Again, Layer Mask is selected and now we'll go back to B, which is my brush and of course nothing's happening because my foreground color is white. Go ahead and press X to switch that back to black. Now I can literally just go through and paint out a hole in that mask so that the layer underneath it is showing through. I really liked this original green, not a huge fan of that, Marcella color. I'm just going to go ahead and cut that out of the mask left bracket a few times to make my brush smaller to get to those finer points and then I'll press my "Backslash" to see if I got any other spots I wasn't supposed to get, which definitely was the case. I can just go ahead and very carefully paint out those areas that overlapped the existing segments. Backslash again to get rid of that little prompts. Now Command Zero to fit the screen. That's cool. Some nice things are happening here. We had that crazy galaxies space theme color palette over here with a little bit of that original green peeking through as well, just to add some fun color variation. One more thing I want to show you with this mask in place is using a really soft brush to make some subtle color blends. Again, I'll press for brush, make it a lot bigger with my right bracket tool. Then over here on my brush settings, I'm going to bring that hardness all the way to zero percent so that it'll be a very soft brush with feathered edges. Now I can paint through. Let me zoom in. You can see that with such a soft brush, it very gently blends the colors together. This area of the mask, I'll press "Backslash" so you can see, is so subtly blending over the existing color. Over here we had some really hard lines when we used our very hard brush, and over here it's much softer, which means, again, I'll hit that "Backslash", that it does this really gentle blend into the mask. That's pretty cool as well. Maybe I'll do the same thing up here. I'm just very gently brushing and maybe just on this upper edge right here. I can always press "X" to switch back and maybe bring some of that purple back in. Command+0 to fit to screen. Now we have some really interesting color effects happening here. If I toggle off that adjustment layer, you'll again see our original watercolor. If I toggle it back on, you'll see the adjustments that we made, both through color balance and through making holes in that mask. I'm going to go ahead and say that another color alt has been finalized. I'll go back up here to my group name, double-click it. I'm going to call this one Galaxy because that's what the color palette reminds me of. I'm going to toggle down that carrots. Turn off the layer visibility for Galaxy. Go ahead and go back to my original green. Make a copy, Command+J. Bring that right back up to the top. Go ahead and turn on that layer visibility. With that layer selected, Command+G to group it. Now I want to turn this green leaf into a really light and airy cotton candy pastel pink. I'm going to show you my trick for pastels. My write is selected. I'm going to go ahead and go down to this little icon to add a new layer just above it. Then I'm going to go over here to my foreground color. Click where it has whites and now toggle up on that spectrum and choose a really vibrant bright pink. That one's looking pretty nice. I'll press "Okay", and then press "G" to get to my paint bucket. You can also get there over here on the toolbar, click and hold and make sure Paint Bucket Tool is selected. Now with that new layer, that new blank layer selected, I'm just going to go ahead and click my paint bucket to fill the entire layer with bright pink. If you're wondering why I just covered my entire illustration with bright pink, don't worry, you can still toggle off that layer visibility and see our original right here underneath. With that layer turned on and selected, I'm going to go back up here to my blending modes and change it to Lighten. Lighten and Screen are my two favorite blending modes when it comes to making these really juicy pastels. It's actually hard to choose between the two. I think for this one I'm going to go with Screen because I like that pure pink coming through. Lighten, I don't know, it's a little bit too much yellow coming in, so we'll go with Screen instead. Now again, you can turn on and off that layer to see the original and then see what happens if you have a bright pink fill with a screen transparency mode applied over it. You can play around even more by selecting that bright pink, opening up your hue and saturation, so Command+U, and seeing what different hues look like with the transparency mode applied over. Some of them are a little bit too intense and aren't working very well at all, whereas others are also pretty nice. You can see down here that that color of the layer is changing as we play with the hue itself. But like I mentioned, I like the hot pink. I'm just going to bring that right back to zero or press "Cancel". If you take a look down here, we're having that same problem as before. That signature has also turned bright pink, which actually looks cool, but I want to go ahead and make sure that whatever I'm applying over here is only affecting the artwork layer, not the rest of the layer. That pink is even coming into some of the shadows within the paper, which I definitely don't want. Command+0 to fit to screen, and that's a really quick fix. We'll go back to my green layer, select it. Now I want to select everything within that layer. Again, with that layer selected, I'm going to hit "Command" on the keyboard and click that layer. Now you can see that a selection has been put in place for that whole layer. Because I like to keep things soft and integrated, I'm going to go back to select, modify, feather one pixel. Looks good. Now select my entire pink layer. Make sure it's selected and go down here and click to add a layer mask. Now if you take a look over here at your mask, you'll see the white area is the leaf, and that's the area where this pink is coming through. Everything that's black is blocking the pink, which means that the layers underneath it are visible. Including way down here, my paper texture and my signature layer. I'm going to right-click my mask, disable it to show you what it looks like before. Take note of how tinted pink that paper is. I definitely don't want that happening. Then after. Right-click, "Enable layer mask". In my mind, this is more controlled. It's definitely cleaner and it feels more professional. Now I'll go back, double-click my layer name and change this one to pink. Then toggle down that carrots to consolidate the layer and keep my panel nice and clean. I'm going to show you one more cool way to adjust color within your illustration, so that way we'll have one original and then four brand new pallets. Same as before, I'm going to hide the visibility of that pink layer. Go back to my green, make sure it's selected. Hit Command+J to duplicate that layer, and click and drag it all the way to the tip-top, making sure not to accidentally dump it into one of these folders. Now I can turn on the layer visibility. With that layer selected, I'm going to hit Command+G to put it into a group. Another color palette that tends to sell pretty well, especially for home decor products, is navy blue. Navy blue is a classic color and a lot of people like using it to decorate their homes. If my artwork incorporates navy blue or is all navy blue, chances are it might be picked up and sold, especially for home decor. I'm going to go with that. This is going to be pretty sweet and simple. First, I want to select my green. Go back up here to layer, new adjustment layer, hue and saturation. Go ahead and press, "Okay". Now instead of just bringing that toggle all the way to the right and left like we did earlier, I'm going to go down here where it says colorize and click to enable that. Now what's happened is that entire layer has the color-keyed in to the exact same hue. I'm going to go ahead and bring that saturation back up to where it was at 50. Now I can toggle along the hue spectrum and see what happens when the entire artwork is keyed in to the exact same color. You can literally make this any color you want. But like I mentioned, I want to try at navy because it's always a strong seller. I'm going to hover right around here. It looks like 227 is my sweet spot and then maybe bring that saturation a little bit down so that it's just ever so slightly desaturated. Last but not least, I want to go ahead and clip that adjustment just to the layer beneath it so that my signature goes back to gray and it doesn't get keyed into blue. I'll double-click that layer name and title it Navy, and toggle that carrot to keep it nice and consolidated. At this point, we have five color palettes, all derived from the original design. You can keep exploring this to your heart's content. There are literally infinity color possibilities here. If you enjoyed this really quick exploration and you want to try a deeper dive, I have an entire class dedicated to what we just did. It's called Cultivating Color: Vary Palettes and Original Art and Grow Your Portfolio. You can check it out by clicking my name up top and scrolling down my profile to see my other classes. Now that we've explored some color, let's try infusing some metallic accents into our design.
11. Metallic Accents: As part of the bonus for enrolling in this class, I'm providing eight high-res texture files so you can start infusing metallic accents into your artwork with Photoshop. I'm also going to show you exactly how to do that, so you're not going to get lost. First things first, remember you can download all the freebies for this class by going to catcoq.com/digitize. Once you're there, you can download the metallic textures straight from Dropbox. Just a warning, they are pretty large files. If you're trying to download them all in one go, you might have some issues. You might need to do one by one because again, these babies are massive. Which is good because they're super high-res, but it's always that trade-off. Anyway, you can create some really cool digital effects with textures in your artwork. I really love this mixture of mediums and enjoy playing with the possibilities. Today I'm going to show you two ways that you can infuse metallics into your artwork; the full motif and by-spot editing. Let's get started. This is exactly where we left off. What I'm going to do is repeat that same process similar to how we created these color alts. I'm going to hide the visibility of my navy palette, go back to that original green, select it, and hit Command J on my keyboard. Then bring that one all the way up to the tip-top and turn on the visibility. With that layer selected, I'll hit Command G on my keyboard to make a group. Now I'm going to go into those metallic textures that I downloaded. What I want to try is this copper-glitter option. I think this one's looking really nice, so I want to see what that looks like as my Monstera leaf. I'm simply going to click, drag, and release it into my artboard. Go ahead and press Enter to set the transformation. Now, the cool thing about these textures is I've gone ahead and sized them to the exact same size and dimensions and DPI as your template file. They're all 31 by 42 inches at 300 DPI. You can simply click and drag them in and they'll be able to fit perfectly. I've got my copper-glitter layer. I'm just going to click it and drag it right here into the new group so that it is just above the artwork and therefore covers everything that's underneath it on the layers panel. This next step is pretty easy. I'm going to command-click on the thumbnail of my green Monstera leaf. You can see here how that's made everything selected. Then same as before, go up here to Select, Modify, Feather, one pixel. Now making sure that that copper-glitter layer is selected, go down here and click your mask icon to toss a mask over that. This is pretty cool. This is what it looks like when my entire artwork is masked out with a foil texture. I want to show you something cool over here. When you apply a mask, it's automatically going to add a link between your artwork and the mask. If one moves, both of them move. Here I'll show you what I mean. I'll hide the layer visibility beneath and then using my move tool, which is V on the keyboard, I can click and drag this around. Whether I have my mask selected or my layer thumbnail selected, when I drag these around, both of them are moving. Let me go back to where I was on my history. But if you click and break this link and make it disappear and now I'm going to move that layer underneath it, the mask is staying in place and only my layer is moving. That's pretty cool. Command Z to go back to where I was. You can do the same thing with your mask. If you select your mask, you could move that around separately from that layer underneath it. Command Z, again, to go back to where I was. The same goes for resizing. If you select your artwork and that link between the two is broken, you can go to your transform tool, Command T, and resize those textures entirely. But I don't need to do that because everything is already sized to fit. I'm just going to press Escape to leave the transform. Come back here to my mask and click between these two to reapply that link. Just something cool I wanted to show you to show that flexibility you have within masks. That is our first metallic. It's that full-blown metallic, where that entire layer becomes metallic and you see none of the original painting. Now that you know how to apply metallics to your entire layer, I'm going to show you how to spot-infuse metallics, which is what I typically do. But first, I'm going to come down here and consolidate my layers. Because this mask covers the entire artwork, we can go ahead and select this layer and delete it since it's not needed for this color variation. I'm going to double-click on the group name and change this to copper. Toggle the carrot to consolidate my layer and now it's time for our final color variation. I'll hide the visibility of that copper layer, come back down to my green, select it, Command J to make a copy, and drag it all the way back up to the tip-top. Turn on the layer visibility by clicking to the left and with that layer selected, I'm going to hit Command G to group. Now, I'm going to go back into my metallics. Let's try this gold foil. I'm going to click this gold foil, drag it straight in, and then press Enter to set the transformation. Cool. Let's go ahead and keep it organized. I'm going to grab that gold foil layer and make sure it's tucked in nice and neat in my group, just above that green Monstera leaf. Now with the gold foil layer selected, I'm going to go down here and toss a mask on it. Except instead of keeping this mask white, I'm going to switch it to black so that everything shows through. All I need to do is come back over here to my foreground background colors, tap this switcheroo arrow so that black is now in the foreground. Then we'll press G to get to my paint bucket, which again, is over here on your toolbar. Now I'm going to double-check that my mask is selected, not the gold, but the mask itself. Then click to fill the entire layer with black, which means the mask has been entirely cut away. Now what I can do is simply paint back in the areas that I want to have the gold foil. Again, I'll press X on my keyboard to switch the default background and foreground colors. Press B to get to my brushes. I'm actually going to go back up here and turn that hardness back up to 100 percent. Now if I were to brush it in like this, you can see how my brush cuts through the mask. Take a look over here. These black areas are where the background is showing through, but this looks absolutely crazy. What I want to do is just select certain segments within the illustration and have those be gold instead. Command Z to go back. To make sure that I'm only going to be brushing in the segments of the leaf, I'm going to come back down here to my layers, right-click on that green layer, which remember, selects the entire layer. Go to Select, Modify, Feather, this should be so routine by now, one pixel, and press Okay. Now, again, with that black mask selected and a white brush, remember B on your keyboard gets you a brush. Now when you paint in, you're only painting in in that selected area, which is the Monstera. Command Z. What I'm going to do is press Z on my keyboard, zoom in a little bit, press B to get my brush back, left bracket to make that brush a little bit smaller. What I can do is literally just paint in the areas that I want to have be gold foil instead of that original painting underneath. Remember, the left bracket will make your brush a little bit smaller and the right bracket will make it a little bit bigger. But I want it to be a little bit smaller to get these detailed areas. I'm literally just brushing in to cut through that mask and have that gold foil show. Awesome. Now I'm going to zoom in a little bit tighter. Press B again to get to my brush. Press X to change the foreground color back to black and make my brush a little bit smaller with that left bracket. Now I can go through and clean up those areas that got a little bit sloppy. I'm just brushing in carefully the areas that I accidentally filled with some of that gold. A little bit right there. Then this chunk right here. Now I just want to take a look and see how this is balancing. Right now, those selection lines are a little bit distracting. I want to go ahead and hide them. I don't want to disable them because I still want to be able to use them when I'm filling in the mask. But I can just hide their visibility by hitting ''Command H'' on my keyboard. The first time you do this, you'll get this dialog box that pops up. Just go ahead and click ''Hide Extras." Now that selection is still in place. It's just hidden for now. You can always get it back by hitting Command H and there it is. ''Command H'' again to hide. Now, I'm getting an uninterrupted view of my artwork to see how that gold foil is balancing against that monstera leaf. I think what I want do is add a little bit of gold over here on the right side. Maybe I'll have gold in two of these sections just to keep it a little bit off balance. I'll press ''Z'', click and drag B to get to my brush. Make sure that my foreground color is white. Either click that switcheroo or press X on your keyboard. I want to make sure that my layer mask is selected. Now I can just come through, make my brush a lot bigger and start painting this end. Remember that selection is still in place. We just Command H to it, which hides it for now. Command H. The selection is still there, we're just not directly looking at it. I'll press ''Z'' and pull in a little bit B to get back to my brush and X to switch that foreground color to black. I can paint out those slightly sloppy mistakes over here, where that gold came through is the next segments. Fit to screen. I think last but not least, I want to have this segment painted in gold. I'll press ''Z'' and pull in B to get back to my brush and X to switch that foreground to background color and ensure that my brush is white. Right bracket a bunch of times to make that brush bigger. Left bracket to make that brush smaller. I'm just going through starting with those edges and then filling it in. Nice. Fit to screen, there I have my spot edited metallic colors. Very important, don't forget to de-select. Right now our selection is still hidden. If you press Command H, you'll see that our selection is actually still in place. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to do something and then really frustrated because I can't figure out why it's not working. It's because I've hidden a selection and forgotten about it. Command D will de-select, and now we have no secret election in place. Now if I try to brush something in, it would go all over the place, not just contained to the monstera leaf itself. Command Z to undo. One thing I want to show you over here. We have this mask in place that's basically allowing parts of this gold to pop up and cover the layer beneath it. But if you want to try out a bunch of different textures, you can do that because the hard work is already done. We've already painted in our mask. At this point, all we have to do is drop in additional metallic textures to try out some different tones. Let me show you how. I'll go back to my folder. Let's try this rose gold glitter. I'll click, drag it in, and press ''Enter'' to set the transformation. I've got my mask in place down here. But I'm going to do is with that rose gold glitter layer selected, hold down ''Shift'', and also grab that gold foil texture. Now press ''Command G''. At this point, it is a group within a group. If you toggle down the carrots, you can literally grab this layer mask. Again, not the thumbnail, but the layer mask itself. You can grab it and put it on top to apply it to that new group folder. Now everything that's within this folder has this layer mask applied to it. At this point, there's two things in this folder. That's the rose gold glitter, and the gold foil. If you turn off the visibility of the rose gold, you'll still see the gold foil underneath. I'm actually really liking that rose gold glitter against the original watercolor. It's a really nice play off of complimentary colors, that reddish rose gold against a green. You can add as many new textures as you want to and play around. You don't have to create a new mask every single time. You can just apply it to that group. One more fun thing I'm going to show you real quick is if you go down here and you turn off your green layer, that original painting, you can actually come down here and turn on other layers to see how they look with that metallic spot editing in place. Now, pink is fun and contemporary. I really like it on that galaxy palette. You can just continue going through and seeing what those existing palettes look like with different types of foil, because that foil is on the topmost layer. Remember in Photoshop, the way layers works, are whatever's on the top of the stack is going to show up first and obscure whatever's underneath it. That just illustrates some of that fun flexibility you have within layers and metallics and the way that you organize your stack. This could be an option as well. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the visibility of that galaxy palette. Go back and turn on my original green. Since I'm not using the gold foil on this layer, I can just go ahead and delete it just to keep my stack a little bit more organized. I'm going to rename this one, green plus rose gold, and then toggle that carrot to consolidate the stack. Now, I can toggle through and look at those different color options I've created. Some with metallics and some just with color variation. I'm just going to end by selecting that original green. Very important. This is a great time to save. Command S on my keyboard is going to go ahead and save this monstera leaf file. Because I have so many layers in place at this point, I'm betting that this file is going to get pretty narrowly and big. Chances are, we're probably going to be over two gigabytes at this point, which is no problem because we originally saved that template as a PSB file, which can handle larger file sizes. As always, you can continue exploring metallics to your art's content. I usually include at least one or two metallic options in my color ways for each design. I want to answer a question that I get asked a lot when it comes to metallics and print on demands. Do metallics print true and shiny through print on demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble? Answer, no. These companies use standard digital printers and they're not equipped with specialty metallic infused inks. Instead, they'll just to basically print a "foe" metallic. Exactly what you're seeing on screen, except printed out as flat colors. They're not going to be embedded with foil or anything glittery or shiny. It'll just be a standard CMYK version of what you see on screen. Personally, I think they look great. I sell a lot of metallic infused palettes through print on demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. I have yet to receive a customer complaints. I've also worked directly with specialty printers to create true metallics for some products, always using foil or metallic ink. Those have been big hits as well. Although hosting my own inventory is a totally different monster, and I much prefer licensing and print on-demand. Side note over, let's get to what everyone has been waiting for, which is creating seamless patterns out of your artwork.
12. Seamless Pattern: Seamless patterns are the most versatile design type out there. What makes them so magical is that the blocks will line up perfectly, which means these patterns can scale up infinitely. This is the key to creating designs that work on wallpaper, fabrics, bedding, you name it. If you were interested in surface design, seamless patterns are a must. Bonus, this opens the door for you to upload your designs to print-on-demand sites like Spoonflower, where you can start earning an income with your artwork on products like fabrics and wallpaper. Without further ado, let's dive right into seamless patterns. All right. This is exactly where we left off. If you haven't already saved, go ahead and do so right now. I start my seamless patterns with a block. For that, I'm going to need a new documents. File, New. I'm going to change this one to pixels, it's already there for me because I make these all the time. It's set up 5,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels. Make sure that you're at 300 DPI or PPI in this case, and that you're on RGB color mode, everything else should look the same as mine. With your very small artboard in place, you can go ahead and click "Create". Now we have a brand new blank Canvas. What I want to do is pull that tab out from my MonsteraLeaf, grab that original green, click that layer and drag it straight into my new artboard. Let me zoom out a little bit and press "V" to get my move tool. As you can see, this artboard is much smaller than the previous one we were working on and you can tell because this leaf is just a ginormous in here. But that is totally fine because what we're doing here is making a block. The idea with the block is that you'll be able to stack it and repeated infinitely. If the block is small, it doesn't really matter because the pattern can be much bigger. First things first, I have my green layer selected. I'm going to hit "Command T" to get to transform. I'm just going to bring this guy way down and make him a lot smaller. Maybe about yay big. Next up, this is a personal preference. But for my repeat patterns, I think it looks more dynamic and exciting if the primary element is skewed at an angle. In my mind, these always look cooler than perfectly straight on gridded patterns. Personal preferences go with whatever one you like. But for me, I'm going to go ahead and still with that transform tool and place, hover my cursor until I see this double arrow. Then I'm just going to tilt this guy this way, so he's at a little bit of an angle. Then I'm just going to click and center it so that it's exactly perfectly centered. We'll see those pink lines which indicate it's in the exact center of that Canvas. Then press "Enter" to set that transformation, Command 0 to fit to screen. That was the easy parts. Now it's time to start duplicating that motif into a seamless pattern. I still have my green layer selected. I'm going to hit "Command J" on my keyboard, which just duplicates that green into a brand new layer. Then Command T to open up transform. I'm going to move this guy over to the left. Now, he's going all over the place right now. Go ahead and hold down "Shift". That will snap it exactly on this horizontal axis so that it's not moving up and down, it's just going perfectly over to the left. Once it's about halfway off the page, again, I'm using my pink guides here, you You go ahead and press "Enter". Again, with this layer selected, I'm going to hit "Command J" on my keyboard, Command T to open up my transform tool. I want to take a look up here specifically at the X and Y numbers. The X number indicates the x-axis, which is right and left. You can see as I move this along that X number is changing, Command Z to go back to where I was. If I move it up and down along the y-axis, the vertical axis, that Y number is changing. Command Z again to go back to where I was. These are the numbers that we're going to be playing with to create our seamless pattern. When we created this Canvas, we created it at exactly 5,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels, which means if an element is slicing off over the edge, we need to move it at exactly 5,000 pixels to have wherever it gets cut off, show up on the other side. I'm just going to show you what I mean right now because I center that exactly perfectly, the x-axis should be zero. Which means if I put in 5,000 pixels right here, it'll bounce to the exact other side of the artboard. Again, the key to a seamless is this block is going to stack infinitely. Whatever gets cut off the edge on one side side to be repeated on the other side. That way when it stacks, it'll line up exactly perfectly. In case you're a little bit lost, don't worry, I'm going to back up a little bit and show you a slightly different scenario that might help clarify for you. I'm just going to get rid of these guys and start back with my centerpiece. Make sure that layer is selected. Hit "Command J", "Command T" to bring up transform. I'm going to bring it over, taking a look up here at my x-axis I could get it exactly at zero. But what if it's off just ever so slightly? Not perfectly cut, 143, sure, sounds great and press "Enter". Now I'm going to make a copy of that layer, so it's still selected Command J to duplicate it exactly in place. Then Command T. Now if I take a look over here, what I want to do is move it exactly 5,000 pixels over, but it's already at 143 pixels. Here's my shortcut. Because I'm moving it horizontally, which means x-axis, I want to take those 143 pixels, Command C to copy them. Open up my calculator tool over here, Command V to paste to that 143. Because I'm moving it positively across the x-axis, I'm just going to add 5,000 pixels, and here's the final number. Command C, go back to Photoshop, click and paste in the exact pixel amounts, and press "Enter" to set that transformation. The key here is because our canvas size is 5,000 pixels, if we have an element getting cut off on one side, it needs to move by exactly 5,000 pixels in order to line up perfectly when we make that block. I'm going to show you how to test that. To test your pattern, go up to Edit, Define Pattern. I have a lot of patterns up here, so sure, Pattern 24 looks good. I'll press "Okay". Now I'm going to open up a new canvas to test this out. Command N, and I'm going to make this one 12,000 pixels by 12,000 pixels, because that is the uppermost pixel size that I can upload to Redbubble. If you switch this to inches, you'll see that that's exactly 40 inches by 40 inches. Whether it's pixels or inches, it doesn't really matter, it's the same thing. Everything else looks the same. Press "Create". This is where we can test our pattern. First, let's go to our paint bucket tool which is G on your keyboard. Or you could go over here to your toolbar and make sure that paint bucket is selected. Here's the big difference. Instead of filling in the foreground color, which right now is still set at that hot pink, I'm going to click where it says Foreground and switch it to Pattern. Now over here we have a little dialogue box. Yours is going to look different than mine because mine has previous patterns in there. But you can toggle down this arrow and select the very last pattern in this group, which is what we just created. You might have no patterns in here or you might already have a lot, but just make sure that that very last one is the one you're selecting and then you'll go into your artboard and click once to fill the pattern. Cool. So you can see here that it actually has lined up perfectly. So Z, and I'm going to pull in a little bit. The reason we know it's working is because all of our leaves are full leaves. There's nothing getting slightly scattered or cropped off in a weird way. Don't follow along for this, but I'm just going to show you an example. If we're back here in our original pattern file, and let's just take this one and move it like ever so slightly to the right, again, don't follow along, this is what not to do. But say we just move this ever so slightly to the right, which means that it's not exactly 5,000 pixels, and we went to Edit, Define Pattern, and went back over here to test it. Here I'll hide that original layer, start a new one, press "G", and remember to change out to my new pattern which is the wrong one, and then fill it in. Check this out, our leaves are getting cut in a really weird way. The reason that this error is happening is again, because that previous leaf over here doesn't match perfectly at exactly 5,000 pixels away. Again, because the size of our artboard is 5,000 pixels. It's really important that if you're going to have something like this slicing off the side of your canvas, it needs to repeat on the other side exactly at the same place where it originally got cut off. The way you can ensure that is by counting pixels. Let's keep building up this pattern. First of all, on this guy, I'm just going to Command Z to bring it back to exactly where it was. Now that I know that these two sides, again, are exactly 5,000 pixels apart. Then I'm going to go back to that original green layer, click it, hit Command J, and then press "V" on my keyboard for my move tool. I'm going to put this one up here where it's getting cropped off the top. What needs to happen is the place for the pattern is getting cropped off up here, it needs to start popping in down here at the bottom. Again, that's the key to a repeat pattern. I've got this guy popping off the top. What I'm going to do is hit Command J to duplicate that layer, Command T to open up my transform, and now it's not the x-axis that I care about, it's the y-axis because y is up and down. I want to copy whatever the pixels are here, 288, command C for copy. Go to my calculator, paste it, 288. Since I'm moving this in a positive direction down the artboard, I'm going to plus 5,000 pixels. I probably didn't need a calculator for that one, it's 5,288. So Command C for copy and then I'll go back to my artboard and paste that new number in and press "Enter". Now this part down here represents the exact chunk that this top part got taken out of. We can go ahead and test it again. Edit, Define Pattern, sure. Go back to our new artboard, hide that layer, start a new one, press "G" to get to my paint bucket and don't forget to go up here and click it and switch it to the newest pattern that you've created. Then go ahead and fill it in. Awesome, so it's really coming together. The important thing we're looking for here is to make sure that all of the leaves represented are entirely whole. There's nothing getting sliced apart and put back together the wrong way. This means that back here in our pattern block, it's working. Where this falls off the edge, on its opposite side, it gets repeated. Now let's go ahead and add that last bit to the pattern. I'm going to press "V" to get to my move tool, click this layer, hold down Shift, and click down this guy right now too. In my layers panel, both of these are selected. I'm going to hit Command J to duplicate both of those layers, Command T to open up my transform tool, and I'm just going to move these over and try to find a nice spot to fit them in. As I'm moving, I'm holding down Shift on my keyboard to make sure that it's locked in perfectly along that horizontal axis. I'll find a good spot and press "Enter". Here's the most important parts for repeat pattern building. If I'm going to move this leaf over here, the leaf that it's connected to, that fills the other side of that block, must also move in the same way. For this example, I want to move this entire row down a little bit. I want to press V to get to my Move tool. Click this leaf, hold down shift, click this leaf hold down shift, click this leaf Command T. Now holding down shift, so that it locks in that vertical axis and it only moves up and down, I'm just going to move this down ever so slightly, using my arrow keys to nudge it into a central position and then press Enter. What I'm looking for is that there's a nice even balance of spacing between these leaves. One thing I'm noticing after that is there's more space between these two leaves than these two. I'm going to click on my art-board to clear the selection of my layers, and now click on this leaf. Using my arrow keys, I'm just going to move it over ever so slightly. This balance is looking pretty nice. Let's go ahead and test this pattern. Edit, Define Pattern. I'll go to my new canvas. Go ahead and hide that layer and open a new layer. Press G to get to my fill tool. Don't forget to toggle down and select your latest pattern. Now you can go ahead and fill. This one's coming together pretty well. The important thing are there is no split leaves. Everything is an entire, whole Monstera, no weird cuts or jugging edges. That is perfect. That's the most important thing in a seamless pattern. The reason we're getting whole leaves here is because over here on our block layer, everything has been spaced out perfectly. We're at the top of this leaf gets cut-off. It repeats perfectly here on that bottom edge. Same thing with this left leaf. The area that's getting cut-off is being repeated perfectly, exactly to the right side of it. Let's go back to our pattern and take a look. The repeat again is great. But one thing I do want to fix is the spacing between the leaves. Right now, there's a little gap here and a bigger gap here, and I want to resolve that. Let's go ahead, go back to our block, and I almost forgot, let's go ahead and save our block. With our block layer open, I'm going to go to file, Save As, I'll just keep it on my desktop for the sake of continuity, click MonsteraLeaf, except I'm going to call this one Block. This is MonsteraLeaf-Block, and it is a large document file. PSB, go ahead and press Save, and now, no matter what our progress is saved. Again, what we want to do is address this gap issue that's happening in our test pattern. We can fix that on the original block. Looking at my block, the problem isn't here, these are actually balanced really well. The problem is here. This is a small gap, but then this plus this is a big gap. What I'm going to do is press V to get to my Move tool, click and grab this upper Monstera, and remember, if I move this alone, that is a big no. Anytime I move this top leaf, the bottom leaf has to move as well. That's the only way to ensure that that repeat actually works. Command Z to go back to where I was, I'm just going to click anywhere on the art-board, to reset that selection. With my move tool selected, I'm going to click my upper Monstera, hold down shift, and grab this lower Monstera as well. You can double-check over here in your layers panel that both of these are selected. Now I'm going to hit Commands T to open up my Transform. I'm just going to use my right and left arrow keys to move this slightly over to the right. We're just eyeballing it here. That looks great. I'll press Enter. Now I'm going to click that upper left Monstera leaf, hold down shift and grab its buddy Command T to open up Transform, and just use my left arrow key to move this ever so slightly to the left and press Enter. Again, this is the eyeball test. Does this gap right here look to be as big as the two combined gaps of this side and this side? I think it looks pretty good, but let's test it out. Edit, define pattern. Since we saved it, the file name has changed. Looks good. If you can't tell, I don't really care about the name that photoshop gives my pattern blocks because I save those separately anyway. Let's go back to our test file. Turn off the visibility of our layer. Go back down here, click to add a new layer, press G to get to my fill tool. Don't forget to come up here and select your newest block, and then click to fill. This one is looking much nicer. Actually, I don't even really see anything that needs to change in here. What I'm looking for is to see how well it's lining up. Like, are these gaps in between leaves consistent across the board. It looks that way. It looks like a really nice balance of whitespace to actual illustration in artwork. In my mind, this looks like an absolutely perfect seamless pattern. Let's go back up here to our block, Command S because we definitely want to save our progress. If you find that you're still needing to make any adjustments, now's a great time to do it. Again, you can press V to get your move tool. Click anywhere in your canvas to de-select what was already previously selected. Then just remember that if you grab one leaf, so I clicked it to select it on my layers panel. If you grab this one, you've always got to grab its buddy leaf as well. Again, hold down shift, click and now you can see in your layers panel that both are selected. No matter how I move this around, it could literally be just a sliver of this side and most of the leaf on this side. That's still totally fine and it'll work for a seamless pattern, because the important thing is, wherever this gets cut off, it's repeated perfectly on the other side. I'm going to press Command Z to go back to where I was because it was already perfect. Just know that if you're going to be making any more adjustments, and you grab a leaf, always shift-click, grab its buddy leaf so that they're both moving together. Command Z to go back to where I was. If overhearing your pattern, something isn't lining up right, what you'll need to do is go back to your block and figure out where the problem is. For example, let's say I move to this one without moving its buddy leaf, and this came down ever so slightly, and I made a new pattern, so edit, define pattern. Then I went back to my test file and then I hide this, start a new layer. Press G to get to my fill bucket and change it to that updated pattern. You'll be able to see it here in the repeats that it didn't line up perfectly. Let me zoom in a little bit. You can see that where this pattern falls off the edge, it's not perfectly connecting to the other side. Because over here I adjusted it to show you this example. If you have anything in your pattern that's looking like this where it's just not perfectly connected, they should be whole icons, whatever you're painting is, then that means you need to go back to your block and find out where the problem is and then fix it. In my bad example, where this pattern gets cut off isn't being perfectly replicated on this side. If I wanted to fix that, I would press V to get my move tool, click that problem leaf, delete it from my canvas, go back to one side of it, so we'll go to the side right here. Click it to select Command J to duplicate that layer. Command T to open up transform. Remember this one's moving across the x-axis, which is back and forth. I'll literally copy this, Command C. Because I'm moving it to the left, I want to subtract 5000 pixels. I'll go to my calculator, paste minus 5000 pixels equals 143. I'd go up to my x-axis, click that number, Command V to paste it, and then press Enter. Again, the reason I keep doing 5000 pixels every time is because that is the exact size of our canvas. If your block was 10,000 pixels, then all of these equations should be plus or minus 10,000 pixels. Whatever the size of your block is, just make sure that you're adding those numbers up here into the x and y-axis so that it perfectly flips over to the other side. My pattern is really good to go. Let's go back over here to our tester. This was the example of a bad pattern. I'm just going to delete it. But this is the last pattern I was at when I left off. It's cool, you can go through and see all the iterations of your pattern until you got to that perfect pattern which should be the topmost layer. Let's go back to our block and Command S to save our progress. Now that you have your block perfectly designed and ready to go, I'm going to show you how you can infuse those other color palettes we came up with so that you can have a pattern for every corresponding color palette.
13. Color Patterns: Now that our pattern block is designed, it's time to take those color palettes that we created earlier and start infusing them into the block so that we can create a corresponding pattern for every one of our color arts we created. I've got my block already opened up here. The first thing I want to do is go into my layers, select that first layer, hold down Shift, grab all of my layers so they're together, and press Command G to group them all together. Now, I'm going to call this Green Working. The reason I put working in the title is because if you toggle down that carrot, working indicates that all of the individual elements of this pattern are in place. If I ever need to go back later and make some adjustments, I can always do that on the working file. I'll toggle that carrot to consolidate. With that entire group selected, I'm going to hit Command J. First, I'm going to go ahead and toggle off the visibility of my working layer. I'm going to toggle down this carrot and click everything within this layer, hold down Shift to make sure I grab them all, and press Command E on my keyboard, which merges all of these elements into one layer. I still have the folder name, but now, instead of individual leaves, they're all within the same layer, flattens. Now, it's time to bring our color palettes into the next. I'm going to go back to that original artwork layer. He was hiding in the background. I'm going to start with indigo. We'll turn this layer on, toggle down the layer. This is why when we played with the color, we did it as an adjustments layer. Now, all I have to do is click that adjustment layer that says Hue and Saturation, drop it onto my block here, and bam, the color for everything has been adjusted for that indigo palettes. This is why I love adjustment layers because they're so versatile like this. I'm going to double click that layer name and change it to indigo so that it matches the layer name on that original artwork file. I'm just going to go through and repeat that process. I'll toggle down indigo, click that group name, hit Command J to make a copy, hide the one underneath it, toggle down that carrot, click that layer mask, and just delete it. Sometimes, you got to click "Delete" twice. We're going to use this as our blank canvas to drag in another layer adjustment. We'll go back to my original, consolidate the layer for indigo, hide it. Next, I'm going to grab this pink layer. We'll turn it on, toggle down, grab this entire adjustment layer, click and drag, and it has been put in place. If you're wondering why it didn't do that perfect fill like the other one did, it's because of this layer mask. Quick fix. All we need to do is right click on the mask itself. Control click and select "Delete Layer Mask." But remember, that layer mask was there for a reason. I'm going to command click on that green layer which now has selected everything within that layer. Select, Modify, Feather, one pixel looks great. Then with that pink overlay, I'm just going to go down here and add a mask to it. I'm going to double click that layer name and change it to pink so that it matches the original artwork file. Cool. I'll toggle that carrot to consolidate the layer, and go back to my primary file. I can get away with just dragging those layer adjustments on to my pattern block for most of the colors, but for some of them, it gets a little bit trickier. For example, I'm going to consolidate that pink and open up my galaxy layer. For this one, it's a slightly more complicated mask. Remember, for this mask, here, I'll press backslash so you can see where the mask is in place. This is such a complicated mask. We used it really soft over here on these edges, really hard cutouts on these leaves. Again, backslash will hide that visibility. This isn't just a very clear cut mask, it's actually a lot more complex. Instead of just clicking and dragging over this color balance on top of this, what I tend to do instead for the more complicated versions is just repeat the seamless process. It's a little bit of backwards steps, but ultimately, it's worth it for me because I want to have that seamless pattern. For this one, I would simply grab this whole galaxy folder, make sure the folder is selected. Click, drag it into my template file. Of course, it's just going to be massive. Now, I'm going to click that adjustment layer, hold down shift and grab that original artwork, and press Command E to merge them together under one layer. Now, Command minus, minus, minus, minus to zoom out, then Command T open up my transform. I'm basically just going to redo that entire process that I did to create the seamless pattern. Except now, it's a little bit easier because I already have that guide in place. Command zero to fit the screen. It doesn't have to be a perfect match, but I'm just going to use that underlying layer, the pink as a rough guide. Same as before, Command J to duplicate that layer, command T to open up transform, and then hold down shift as I move it to the left to make sure that it locks in on this horizontal axis. Then press "Enter", Command J to duplicate this layer, Command T to open up my transform. Remember, since I'm moving this along the x-axis, I want to add 5,000 to this number. All you do is you command C to copy that number, open up your calculator, command V to paste, and then you add 5,000, Command C to copy, and Command V to paste, and Enter to set that transformation. It's the exact same process as before of creating that seamless block. Except for some things, you've just got to do it twice or three times because the way we adjusted color was slightly more complicated. Same as before, I would copy this leaf, drag it up here to the top. Command minus to see what I'm doing. Then Command J to copy that exact leaf, Command T to open up transform, and I want to add 5,000 pixels to the y-axis. It's actually easier than having to copy it to my calculator because it's only 291. If I just add a five in front of that, that's a quick way to add 5,000 pixels. This one is pretty easy because what's 5,000 plus 291, 5,291. Super simple. Enter to set the transformation. Now, I can grab the top leaf, hold down Shift, grab the seconds, Command J to duplicate both of them, Command T to open up transform, and then I hold down Shift as I move these over, and press "Enter". We basically just repeated those exact same steps for making the seamless pattern block. But no worries, the more you practice, the better you get. I don't need this pink layer underneath anymore. That was serving as my guide but it's no longer necessary. I'll scroll down, turn off the visibility of that pink, and then select all the individual leaves within that galaxy folder by holding down Shift and then hitting Command E to merge them in place. Just rinse and repeat this process to transfer all your color alts over into your pattern block. You can always test it at any time by going up to Edit, Define Pattern, pressing "Okay". Then going back into our test file, remember, turn off the visibility of that layer. Create a new one, press G to get to your fill tool, and toggle down to choose your latest pattern, and then go ahead and fill it in. Voila, it looks absolutely perfect. The spacing looks fantastic and all the leaves are here in their entirety, nothing is getting cropped off or readjusted in a weird place. I'm going to go back to my block file and save it, Command S. Now, you can finish going through and transferring those color palettes over to your seamless pattern block, and don't forget to save. In addition to uploading my seamless patterns to print on demand sites like Spoonflower, I also use them on products for Society6 and Redbubble, even though true seamless patterns aren't actually required on these other two sites. For Society6 products like benches and yoga mats, any pattern will work here as long as the file size is large enough. It doesn't matter if it repeats or not. But for sites like Spoonflower, it must be a repeat because of the way the fabric and the wallpaper is printed. In my mind, the hard work is already done once I've created the seamless pattern. Whether I need a true seamless pattern or knots, two birds with one stone, I can still upload at that same seamless file that I've created. Speaking of, that is the segue into the next lesson which is about the way you can save and export your file types.
14. Saving: Now that you've completed all of these exercises and created some truly stunning artwork, it's time for the final step and arguably the most important step. Don't let the ball drop before you save your files to the most optimized settings. I'm going to break it down to the five basic files you'll need if you want to be uploading to print-on-demand sites like Spoonflower, Society6, and Redbubble. Let's start by making a folder to house this design and all of its iterations. Pretty simple. I'm just going to right-click on my desktop, start a new folder and call it Monstera leaf. Now, before I drag these guys into the new folder, I want to go ahead and close them in Photoshop so that I don't accidentally duplicate my files. I'll go back to Photoshop and go ahead and Command W to close this file. Same thing with my Monstera leaf, Command W. The reason that my files are closing so smoothly with no hesitation, is because I've just saved them. If it prompts you to save before you close, go ahead and save. Now we have our pattern file over here that we actually haven't saved yet. I'm going to go to File, Save As, and I'm going to click "Monstera Leaf Block" and just change block to pattern. Then make sure it's saving as a large document format and press "Save". That's a big file. It might take 10 or 20 seconds to save on my laptop. Once it's saved, I'll go ahead and Command W to close. Then go back to my desktop and pull all of these Monstera leaf files into my new Monstera leaf folder. Now, instead of just having everything scattered on my desktop, it's all consolidated within my Monstera leaf folder. Again, all of these files should be closed in Photoshop, none of them should be open right now so that when you go to Photoshop, there's no files open. The reason that's important is it just keeps you from accidentally duplicating files, having one saved to the desktop and then one in your Monstera folder. Let's get started with the first file you'll need, which is your optimized art print file. In my case, this is that Monstera that we started with. Most of my art print files are vertical 31 by 42 inches, and they're intended specifically for art prints and other types of wall arts. For that, I'm going to go ahead and open up my original file, that Monstera leaf PSB file. Click and drag it into Photoshop. I have my artwork open right here. What I'm going to do is go through each folder and save each colorway as an individual JPEG. I'm going to start with the very first color iteration, which was our original green. We'll go down here, consolidate the color for that galaxy layer, turn off the visibility, and go down here and make sure my green layer is on. This is a good time to double-check a few things. I want to go ahead select my layer and make sure that that blendy mode is linear burn not normal. I want to make sure that my paper texture layer is turned on and that my signature layer is on as well. Then maybe do a little bit of a zoom out and just make sure this whole composition looks absolutely perfect. Everything looks great. Let's go ahead and flatten this into a JPEG to save. File, Save As, and this is easy. We're already in that Monstera leaf folder. Since this is an art print, I like to end it with art print. Pretty simple, but also we're saving the green colorway. Back here at the beginning of the file, I'm going to call it green. The full filename is green Monstera leaf art print and now instead of a PSB file, we want a JPEG. We need to go down here to Save A Copy, click where it says Format and switch it to JPEG. Now I can just double-check up here. Filename looks fabulous. The extension is JPEG, that matches the format down here. We're saving in the Monstera leaf folder. That looks perfect. Let's go ahead and press "Save". For that quality, I always want it to be at 12, which is the maximum. The rest of these settings are just the default settings, which are perfect. I'll go ahead and press "Okay". Now while that JPEG is saving, I can come back here to my Monstera leaf folder and see here it is, right here in the folder. It is a completely flattened JPEG, which means if we tried to open up this file in Photoshop, here I'll show you, I'll double-click and here it is in Photoshop. It looks the exact same as over here, our layered Monstera leaf file, but, let me go back to that JPEG, take a look over here, all of those layers have been flattened and consolidated just into one layer. JPEGs are great for when you finalize your artwork and you want to consolidate all those layers to one and then save a copy. JPEGs are fantastic for uploading to print-on-demand sites or sharing on social media like Instagram or Facebook. JPEGs are considered a universal file type for images. You'll be able to view them or upload them on pretty much any platform or any device you're using. I upload these JPEGs to print-on-demand sites like Society6, which we're going to get into in the next video. But for now, I can go ahead and close this JPEG, I don't need it in Photoshop. The only file I want open right now is that Monstera leaf PSB file. I have my green version saved. I'm going to go ahead and toggle off the visibility for that, and then turn on the visibility for that next colorway, that's indigo. Again, I'll toggle down that caret, select that layer, make sure it's on linear burn and everything's looking fantastic. Then I can go to File, Save As, I'll click "Green-Monstera Leaf" and just change where it says green to indigo. Then make sure that I'm saving as a copy so that I can save as a JPEG. Now my filename looks great, Indigo-MonsteraLeaf-artprint, and the extension is JPEG, which matches the formats down here. Go ahead and press "Save" and "Okay". Same thing. I'll go ahead and consolidate that caret, hide that layer visibility, open up galaxy, and do the same thing. File, Save As. I'll just tap where it says green, change it to galaxy, save as a copy and make sure it's a JPEG. Always make sure that your extension up here, JPG, is matching the formats and press "Save". I'm literally just going to go through all of these other folders and rinse and repeat that exact same process. I'll speed it up for you guys. As you'll notice, the color name that I'm giving these files is matching the same color name that I've labeled over here in the layers. It's stuff like this that just helps me stay more organized. All right, the final one, save as a copy. Make sure it's a JPEG and press "Save". Now we'll go back to my folder and now I'm seeing all of these colorways that are now saved as art print files. Art prints is File Type 1. Next up it's going to be the exact same thing we just did, except on a square canvas. Why square? Because this is the optimized dimension for products like wooden wall arts, wall murals, coasters, acrylic boxes, tote bags, you get the idea. Verticals are really good for art prints to hang on the walls, but square formats fit a lot of other products really well. I'm going to start by making a new canvas, so File, New. I want this canvas size to be 12,000 pixels by 12,000 pixels. Again, everything else down here stays the same, 300 PPI and RGB color mode. Remember, this is actually the same size that we made our pattern file earlier as well. If you switched from pixels to inches, that's 40 inches by 40 inches, which happens to be the maximum dimensions that I can save to Redbubble, which is why I'm going with that file size. All right, so inches, pixels, it doesn't really matter, they translate equally and they're the same thing. Go ahead and press "Create". Now we have our blank square canvas. What I'm going to do is just pull that tab out from that Monstera leaf, select my top-most layer, scroll to the bottom, press and hold "Shift" on my keyboard and grab that very bottom layer and then click and drag everything into this brand new square canvas. Perfect. Command T will open up transform, and I want to go center everything. I can pay attention to those pink lines, those guides are helping me find the exact center. Press "Enter" to set the transformation. We just dragged in a lot of files, so this transform process might take a minute or two. All right, finally, that transformation is complete. Before I do anything else, I want to go ahead and save this new file. File, Save As, also in that same Monstera folder, I'm going to click where it says Monstera leaf block and just change this to square. Make sure it is a PSB format. That matches here with large document format and press "Save". That way if we ever need to get back into the square file, we'll have that layered file ready to go. All right, there's a couple things I need to do here before I start saving this as flattened JPEG's. The first thing I need to address is this background. It's not covering that entire square, so I want to go ahead and fix that. I'll scroll to the bottom. I can go ahead and click this background and delete it straight from my layers, since I already have the paper texture background that I use instead. Now what I need to do is make sure this paper texture background fills the entire square. What not to do is use your transform and expand it to fit. That is a big no-no. Never scale up any objects in Photoshop that are rasterized, which means they're flattened images, because if you scale them up past what they're capable of, they are going to get really pixelated and blurry. You can always scale down, but you can't scale up without jeopardizing that resolution. Press "Escape" from that bad example. What I'm going to do instead is just make a copy of this background texture and duplicate it to line up and fill the rest of the backgrounds. Again, I have my paper texture selected over here in my layers. I'll hit "Command J" on my keyboard to make a duplicate, Command T to open up transform. Now I'm going to Control, click and go down here to Flip Horizontal. You can probably barely tell that anything even happened, but that duplicate of the paper texture just flipped like this. Now I'm going to hold down "Shift", so that it's dragging perfectly across on that horizontal axis. I want to rely on those pink grid lines to show me that it's lined up absolutely perfectly. Then I'll press "Enter" to set that transformation. Now let me show you why I flipped it before I lined it up. I'm going to press "Z" and pull in really tight and I'm going to turn on and off the visibility of that layer so you can see where it starts. The reason I flipped it is so that it will line up absolutely perfectly with the other edge. You can see where it's lining up right here because we're having this interesting texture that gets flipped and mirrored on the other side. In my mind, this integrates a little bit better rather than just having a sliced-off edge and then duplicated on the other side without having it line up very well. All right, fit to screen. I'm going to scroll down to my layers, make sure that one of my paper textures is selected. Hold down, "Shift", click the other one as well. At this point, since both of these layers are selected, I can merge them together by hitting "Command E". Now that those two paper textures are flattened and merged into one layer, it's time to reposition it on our artboard. Again, with that paper texture layer selected, I'm going to hit "Command T" and just bring this over until that paper texture entirely covers the rest of the canvas and then press "Enter". Now that that background is entirely covered, I can go ahead and make sure that my signature layer is toggled on with the visibility. I'm just going to start up here at the very tip-top and save each of these color iterations as its own JPEG, starting with the green and rose golds. I'll go to File, Save As, click green rose gold, double-click art prints, and change this to square. I want to save a copy and make sure that I'm saving it as a flattened JPEG. Back here, our file extension should be JPEG, and that should match the format which is JPEG. Go ahead and press "Save" with the maximum quality enabled. Just like we did with the art prints, we're going to go ahead and repeat that process again for all of the individual color variations. I will turn off the visibility of that layer, turn on the visibility of copper, File, Save As, click "Copper", change it to square, save a copy. Make sure the format is JPEG, which matches the extension of JPEG and press "Save", and so forth. I'm going to speed this up for you. Last but not least, I have my final color option, which is the original green. File, Save As, tap "Green", change it to square, Save a Copy, and make sure it is a JPEG. Go ahead and press "Save", and save that JPEG. Now we can go back to that Monstera Leaf folder, and make sure that we have squares of all of our color palette iterations saved within that folder. Because I have seven different color palettes, there should be seven different square files. Let's go back to that working file and hit "Command S" to save. Now that all of our JPEG squares are saved, it's time for the third file type. This next file type is super simple, it is literally this exact same file, except we're going to turn off that background so that we can save it as a transparent PNG. Files with a transparent background are absolutely crucial for very specific products like apparel, tank tops, hoodies, t-shirts. Plus, they're great for products like kiss cut stickers, which by the way, happen to be my best selling product type on Redbubble. I have sold thousands of stickers through Redbubble, so don't underestimate those low-cost products. If you sell enough, those royalties really add up. It's all about those bulk quantities. Let's get started. Go ahead and come back to that file we just made, that square PSB file, and then come over here to the layers palette, and toggle off the visibility of that background texture. This is essentially what we want, it's that square format on a transparent PNG. Because I painted this original Monstera leaf on watercolor paper, I already have that watercolor paper texture background happening within the original painting. In my mind, I can justify just turning off this paper texture background, but if you still want to have that in place, maybe your artwork is a little bit flatter. Maybe you painted on very smooth paper, and you like how that texture paper is looking infused and multiplied on top of that painting, I'm going to show you how you can still put that back in place while retaining the transparent backgrounds. Fit to screen. I'll turn that paper texture back on, and then right-click on my Monstera green layer, which will select the entire painting. Go back up here to Select, Modify, Feather, one pixel. Now, with this paper texture layer selected, I can just go ahead, click the icon to throw a mask over that texture. Remember within a mask, the white area of the mask indicates where this layer is showing through, and the black indicates what's been hidden. If I zoom in, you can see that paper texture coming through on the artwork. Here I'll show you what it looks like when I toggle off the visibility, and then back on. It's very slight, but it is nice to see that paper texture coming through. Again one more time without the paper texture, and with that paper texture. Command 0 to fit to screen. Before I start saving those PNGs of the different color variations, there's one more adjustment I want to make to this file, and that's the placement of the signature. I could leave the signature exactly how it is right now, but then if this product gets printed on a t-shirt or a kiss cut sticker, it might look a little weird to have the signature hanging off the edge like this. I'm going to show you a trick I use to tuck it into the artwork. I have my signature layer selected, I'll hit "Command J" to duplicate it. Go ahead and turn off the visibility of that original signature, and now I want to take the copy, click it, and drag it all the way to the top of my stack. I don't want to drop it in the folder. I want it to be cleared with everything, so it is first and foremost in my layers panel. Now, we'll press "Z" and pull in so I can get a close up look. With my signature copy selected, I'll hit "Command T" to open up transform. Shrink this down a little bit, and find a nice little spot to tuck it into my artwork. Press "Enter" to set the transformation. If you're looking at this and you're wondering why I just entirely hid my signature, I'm going to show you how to bring it back into visibility. Right now with that signature copy layer selected, if you take a look up here at your blending mode, you'll notice that it's on multiply. You go ahead and click that, you can bring it down here, and switch the blending mode to screen. Now, all the sudden, my signature is bright and visible against that background. I'm going to zoom in even tighter so you can see. But we're getting this weird halo around the signature, it doesn't look very natural, so I'm going to invert the entire signature. You can get there by going to Image, Adjustments, Invert, or Command I. Now, my signature looks much more natural, it looks like it was drawn on with a white pencil, but it's barely visible at all. Let's go ahead and brighten that up. Again, signature layer is selected. I'm going to open up my levels, Command L. Then over here on the far right, I want to grab this toggle and bring it all the way to the left to brighten up the signature and make it look like it was drawn with a very opaque white pencil, so that it really pops off that watercolor. Go ahead and press "Okay". Now, if you zoom in, you'll see that this looks much more natural. That pencil really blends in with the water color behind it, and overall, this is just a much more professional look. Fit to screen, Command 0, and now we have our signature literally tucked into our artwork. Let's go ahead and get this saved as a transparent PNG. I'll start here with my green, since I already have it selected, and then I'll go to File, Save As, I'll click one of the green options, and change it to transparent. Save a Copy, and make sure that instead of saving as a JPEG, like we have with the others, we're going to save this as a PNG. PNG files allow you to keep that transparency in place. If I were going to save this exact file as a JPEG, all of the transparent areas will just flatten to white, which is the opposite of what I'm wanting to happen here. But by saving as a PNG, it will enable that transparency. I'll show you what I mean. PNG is selected, filename looks great, the extension matches the format. I'll go ahead and press "Save". All the formatting options here are defaults and look fantastic, I'll press "Okay". Now you can see that transparent PNG has saved in my Monstera Leaf folder. If you preview that file, with Macs, you can do that pressing Space Bar. You can see that, that background is entirely removed. There's no paper texture backgrounds, it is completely cut away. We have our little signature reversed out within the illustration. This is perfect. This is exactly what it should look like. You'll also notice that the file size over here, is considerably larger than its sister file, which is just that square JPEG. But we need to have that transparent background, so it's necessary to go through and save the rest of these as transparent PNGs as well. Same as before, I'll just repeat that same process. I'll turn off the visibility of the green layer, turn on the visibility of the indigo, make sure my signature is still visible, and go up to File. Save As, I'll click "Indigo", change this to transparent, Save a Copy, and make sure that this is a PNG. Extension matches the format, absolutely perfect. Go ahead and press "Save". I'm just going to complete these same steps with the other color variations as well. All right. Something that I want to point out here with my copper color iteration, if I zoom in, my signature is almost entirely lost. That white just is not holding up against all of this glitter. I'm going to show you how to fix that. I'll go back up here to my Signature Copy, select that layer, hit "Command J" to make a copy of the copy, hide the visibility of that original layer, and let's see if we can just bring this back to multiply. We'll go from Screen, backup to Multiply. Don't forget that we inversed this. Command I will bring it back to darkness. I'm going to zoom in even tighter. That's looking better. There's just a lot of contrast going on back here with all this glitter, so I think I'm going to go ahead and throw a color overlay on top of my signature to make it really pop. Again, with that layer selected, I'm going to go to my effects and choose "Color Overlay." Now let's see what happens if I pick a really bright cyan blue. That's doing okay. What if we just go to black? Honestly, that might be the answer here. As much as I'd love something like this to work just because it looks really cool, I think for the sake of visibility, I'm just going to go pure dark black on this. Press "Okay." This is working a lot better than that white one was. We're simply just going to have another signature option for cases like this or that background gets really difficult to read. Command 0 to fit the screen. I'm going to go through and continue that saving process. Just don't forget to go ahead and switch that signature back to the white version when you save your final color options. That is a wrap for those transparent files. You can go through your folder and count to make sure that you went ahead and remembered to save all of those different color variations as transparent options. At this point, our folder is really starting to bulk up, which is a good thing. Now that we have our art prints, our squares, and our transparent files saved, now it's time to save our pattern files. I start with the block, because that block is the file that I upload to Spoonflower. You can also upload the block to Society6 for their wallpaper option. But that's about the only product you actually need it for when it comes to society6 and Redbubble. Remember, that block is the file they can stack and repeat infinitely. Spoonflower limits uploads to 40 megabytes and under. This is another reason why I prefer to work with smaller blocks like that 1500 by 1500 file that we set up earlier. Let's open up that block. Cool. I have my Monstera leaf folder open. It's really starting to bulk up as we fill it with art prints and the squares. But for now, I want to open up that block file. Go ahead and find the block PSB file and double-click it to open it in Photoshop. At this point, my block file is finalized. I have all of my additional color palettes over here stacked into the layers. There's not a ton of extra work to do before we start saving these JPEGs. Remember, the only reason that I'm saving this block file as a JPEG is so that I can upload it to Spoonflower. We're going to be saving that much larger pattern file next, so we already have the pattern covered there. But again, if you're intending to upload your designs to Spoonflower, then you'll want to save this block as a JPEG. If not, just keep it as a working file, no need to turn it into JPEGs, except maybe for Society6 wallpaper. Very important here, for my block file, I'm actually not going to include my signature. That is a very rare occurrence for me not to include my signature in my artwork. Usually it's on absolutely everything. But again, because this file is a block and the whole idea is that it stacks and repeats infinitely, it would look a little weird to have my signature stacked and repeated all the time. About the only exception I ever give for not including my signature is for fabrics and wallpaper, just because it looks weird to have that repeated over and over again. Same as before, I'm just going to start with that original green and start saving these as flat JPEGs. File, Save As, I'll tap that green to get a headstart and change art prints to block. Save as a copy and make sure it's a JPEG and that the extension JPG matches the format JPEG. Then go ahead and press "Save" and "Okay." These files are actually going to save pretty quickly because they're smaller dimensions. If you take a look over here in your folder, you'll notice that this file is only a little bit over 14 megabytes. That is so much smaller than just about every other file size we had saved here, which is fabulous. Again, Spoonflower's maximum file size you can upload is 40 megabytes. Over here, at 14, we are well beneath that, which is awesome. I'll go back to my Photoshop file, toggle off the visibility of the green layer, turn on the visibility of indigo and do the same thing. File, Save As, indigo Monstera leaf, block. Save a copy and make sure it's a JPEG, then press "Save." I'm going to repeat this process for all of the other color palettes. That is a wrap. Now we have all of those individual color palettes saved for our block file. Last but not least, the full pattern file. This file itself isn't a true repeat because I just filled in the pattern with the paint bucket tool. Unless the Canvas is perfectly double or triple or quadruple or whatever, the original size of the block that pattern fill is just going to end arbitrarily on the edges of the Canvas. Which means you can't stack this pattern file and expect it to line up perfectly. Remember, that is what the block is for. But that's totally fine because I save this pattern file to use on all products since most POD sites don't require true repeats. This file is going to work on Society6 and Redbubble products like leggings, curtains, pillows, rugs, miniskirts, furniture, phone cases, backpacks, couches, you get the gist. This pattern typically winds up being my most versatile file because it just looks so good on products. Let's jump right in and start saving those individual JPEGs. First, I'm going to go ahead and Command S to save that block and then go back into my Monstera leaf folder, locate the pattern PSB file, and double-click it to open in Photoshop. The first thing I want to do is over here in my layers panel, I want to clean up some of these older layers. Remember, some of these older layers are where we were testing that pattern in the first place. We don't need any of those anymore, I'll just delete them one by one. At this point I have my green layer, and that galaxy palette because those are the two that we tested out over here as patterns. To keep things nice and tidy, I'm going to go ahead and double-click that galaxy palette, change the layer name to galaxy, double-click the green, and change the name to green. Perfect. We have two color palettes down. Let's go ahead and bring the rest over here as well. I'm going to go back to my block file. Let's go ahead and do this in order. I'll turn off the visibility of that green and rose gold and I'll methodically go through just to make sure we don't lose anything. The green file, we've already turned that into a pattern, so I can hide it. Indigo, we have not yet turned into a pattern. With that indigo block turned on, I'll go up to Edit, Define Pattern and press "Enter." Then I'll go back into my pattern folder, click the plus to add a new layer, press "G" to get to my paint bucket. Make sure that I'm over here on pattern. I want to toggle down and again, select that latest pattern, which is the indigo we just created. Then go ahead and click in my artboard to fill that pattern. Now, over here in my layers panel, I'll double-click where it says layer 1 and change it to indigo. Three palettes down, a few more to go. Back to my block. I'll hide the visibility of indigo, turn on galaxy. But remember we actually already have our pattern of this one over in our pattern folder over here, so I can go ahead and skip that and go straight to pink. Edit, Define Pattern, press "Okay," and then go back to my pattern file, add a new layer down here by clicking this plus sign. Press "G" to get to my fill bucket, toggle down on my patterns and choose that latest option, which is the pink, and then click within my Canvas to fill. I'll go ahead and double-click the layer name and change it to pink. At this point, I'm just going to go ahead and repeat the process to bring all those additional color palettes over here into my pattern file. It's time for that very last color iteration, the green and rose gold, edit, define pattern, press "Okay" and then going back into my pattern file, adding a new layer, pressing "G" to get to paint bucket, and selecting that latest pattern and filling that layer and now we'll double-click that layer name and change it to green plus rose gold. At this point, it is a fantastic time to go ahead and save your progress. Over here on my pattern file, I'm going to hit Command S to save, and then go back into my block file and hit Command S to save as well. At this point, my pattern file is almost ready to start saving as a JPEGs. I just want to do a couple more things. I want to bring that paper texture in, and I want to bring my signature into that file as well before I save as a JPEG. Let's go ahead and do both of those. I'm going to toggle on over here back to that square format file that we did and this is where I'm going to grab that signature and paper texture. Since again, the square format file is the exact same dimension as our pattern file. They're both 12,000 by 12,000 DPI squares. I'm going to scroll to the bottom of the layers, go ahead and grab this paper texture first. Here, I'll pop this out of the tab and then go back to my pattern file. I'll pull it over here so we can see it pretty well. I want this paper texture and I want this signature. With that paper texture selected, I'm going to hold down shift and grab that signature as well, and then drag them straight into my pattern file. All right, let's go ahead and clean this up a little bit. The first thing I want to address is this paper texture and I want to go ahead and remove this mask that we had placed on it for our square file. Right-click on that mask and then just go ahead and click ''Delete Layer Mask". Now I'll tap Command T to open up transform and just bring that paper texture to a point where it really encompasses that entire canvas. Press "Enter" to set that transformation. Right now, this paper texture is at the top of our stack, which means it's obscuring all of the other layers beneath it. Quick fix here with the paper texture layer selected, I'm going to go up to where it says normal and change that blending mode to Linear Burn. Perfect. Now we'll go ahead and turn on the visibility of my signature. I don't even see where. There it is right there. If you ever have trouble finding a layer like I almost just did with my signature, with that layer selected, you can hit Command T and you'll easily be able to find it because the transform boundary box is a dead give away. Command Plus to zoom in a little bit. I want to find a nice spot to tuck my signature away. Surely, maybe right here will be pretty good. I might shrink it down just a tad and then fit it nicely between these monstera shapes. Press "Enter" to set that transformation, and then fit to screen, oh you know what? I don't like that placement at all. It looks like it's right in the middle. That's why we always double-check. Command T and I'm just going to tuck it in closer to that bottom right corner. Press "Enter". This placement feels a little bit more natural for a signature. I'm going to press "V" on my keyboard to get my move tool and then use my right and left arrows to just get that placement even more snug. It feels like it really belongs in this space. All right, those were the two modifications that I wanted to add over here to my pattern file. Now that I have the paper texture in place and my signature is nice and snug, it's time to save those individual JPEGS. Same as before, I'm just going to start with right up here, green and rose gold because it's at the top of the stack and work my way down as I go. With that layer visible, my signature looks great, the paper texture looks fantastic. I'm going to go over to File, click that green rose gold to get a headstart and change our prints to pattern. Don't forget to click "Save as a copy" and change that format to JPEG. Again, you can double-check your extension. J-P-E-G should match the format which is JPEG. Go ahead and press, "Save" and press "Okay". Cool I'm just going to repeat that exact same process of saving each individual color layer as its own JPEG. One down, think I've got six to go. File, Save As, click that navy to get that headstart then change it to pattern. Save as a copy, JPEG Save. I'm going to go ahead and speed things up a little bit. Last but not least, that original green palettes. File, Save As, click that green, change it to pattern, save the copy then make sure we're on a JPEG and press "Save". All right, now that all of our patterns are saved as JPEGs, that is it, those are our five file types that we needed to save. Taking a look over here at my folder, you'll see the five types we had. The art prints, the block, the pattern, the square, and the transparent file. What's those five file types across all seven color palettes that we created. So there's a lot of files going on plus, we have our four PSB files. Remember, those are our working Photo shop files and these four are arguably the most important files that you'll save and that's because they're all layered and they have editing flexibility. It's possible that at some point in the future, you might need to add a new color palette. Maybe a client approaches you and they ask for this specific artwork, except in a black and white palette, which is pretty common. In that case, all you need to do is open up these PSB working files, make those color adjustments like you learned how during this class today, and then resave those files. You can resave the art print as a new color palette, maybe black and white, the transparent file, the pattern, everything. Again, keeping those working files here saved, they are precious cargo, so please keep them safe. The rest of the files here in the folder are all those flattened JPEGs and PNGs. These are the files that you'll actually be uploading to print on demand sites. These are the high RES, flattened files, both JPEGs and PNGs. I want to show you a little trick I do over here in my folder just to keep things more organized. I have a Mac, which means I can right-click on a file and assign a color tag to it. I use these color tags to remind me which files I've already uploaded to Society6 or Redbubble, and which I haven't uploaded yet. Because when I make so many color palettes like this, I don't upload everything all in one go. I like to space it out over a few weeks or months, so it doesn't look like my entire portfolio is just one piece of artwork and a bunch of different color palettes. I spread out those uploads a little bit and by using color tags like this, it'll help me stay organized of what's already been uploaded and what hasn't been. Here's how I do it. I'll Command A to select all of my files, right-click and assign a purple tag. Now purple tag means that I haven't yet uploaded it to print on demand sites. Right off the bat though, I can go ahead and select those four working files, right-click and uncheck that purple tag since I know that those working files will never be uploaded. There's no need to upload a massive PSB file to print on demand sites like Society6. That's what the JPEGs and PNGs are for. Now at this points, I can see everythin
15. Print on Demand: This is a little bonus video to show you how I streamline the process, when I'm uploading designs to the three primary print on-demand sites that I use; Society6, Redbubble, and Spoonflower. I've heard from a lot of people that uploading their files for POD sites can be a huge pain, and trust me, I have totally been there. So I'm going to show you my method which makes it a little bit simpler and a little bit faster. Plus, I'll show you how I optimize for keywords and titles, to get the most traction and visibility out of my work. I'm going to start this process under the assumption that you already have an account set up with these sites, and if not, it's a snap to get them set up. I'm going to start with Society6, and I'll be uploading at my green monstera leaf. Also, quick reminder. If you followed along using my watercolor monstera as an example for digitizing in this class, which is totally fine, you cannot upload it to print on demand sites like Society6, since I'm the one who painted it. However, if you have your own artwork that you digitized in this class, that is not my artwork, you can totally go for it. Cool. I'm here at the Society6 homepage. I'm going to go ahead and tap cell This is going to go ahead and take me to my artist studio where I have all of the designs that I've uploaded through Society6. Some are still in draft mode, as you can see here in red, but most of these are already published. What I want to do is add new artwork, click where it says "Select file," open up that monstera leaf folder. I'm going to start with green. While I'm here, let's just go ahead and select all those files, right-click, and turn off my purple tag. Because remember, that tag is an indicator for designs that I haven't yet uploaded to POD sites. I'm going to turn the purple tag off to remind myself later if I tried to upload this file, that it's already been uploaded, because there's no color in place. For Society6, I always start by uploading the art prints. I'll go ahead and press "Open." This is called monstera leaf green. While this is uploading, I'm going to go ahead and open up a new tab, and go to Redbubble to start uploading there as well. This is my homepage for Redbubble. I have a bunch of France stickers up here. These are all private designs. I just uploaded them to read so that I can print off stickers for a retreat that I was hosting in France last summer. I'm going to go to Accounts, Add New Work. Here's what the uploader looks like for Redbubble. I'll click "Upload new work." Instead of the art prints, I'm going to go ahead and upload the pattern here. Because for most products, I think patterns look better than just standalone motifs. If I start by uploading the pattern, that means I have to make fewer changes later in the backend for Redbubble. Let's start with a pattern here. It's the exact same title, monstera leaf green. Here's where I have an opportunity to start adding in some keyword tags. Keyword tags are really important, especially for print on-demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. This is how your customers are going to find you. For example, if someone's looking for some tropical-inspired pattern for a duvet cover, they might use the search function on one of these sites to type in tropical. This is me typing. Even though our artwork itself isn't named tropical, it's called monstera leaf green, we can go ahead and type tropical in as one of our keyword tags to increase the chances of a customer finding this artwork because it aligns with the same theme they're looking for. When I come up with keyword tags, I want to think of words that relate to my actual artwork. Tropical is one. Tropics could be another. These are things that people might be searching on the web sites. Nature, jungle, rainforest, leaf, leaves, watercolor. I usually put my brand name, Catcoq, summer, vacation, beach, plant, plants. Basically, I'm just thinking of words that relate to my artwork that people might potentially use when they're searching for new artwork. Modern, mod, minimalism. These are all really hot search terms to use. I think that's enough for now. What I'm going to do is Command A and Command C to go ahead and copy all of these tags. Now we'll go back to my Society6 tab. Everything's finished uploading by now while I was talking about keyword tags. Now we can go ahead and click "Continue." This is my own artwork. It's not mature, continue. Now I can go in here for the tags and hit "Command V," to paste all of those same tags in from Redbubble into Society6. So that just cuts out some of the extra effort on my end. I already have the tags created. I don't have to rethink them for a whole new print on-demand sites. The category for this is painting. To be honest, I usually just skip the description and hit "Save details." Awesome. This artwork isn't published yet. You can see up here it's still in draft mode. What I need to do is go through all of these products and enable them. You don't have to go one by one. You can actually batch enable, and I'm going to show you how. First of all, I'm going to go ahead and toggle on all of these wall art options. Because remember, that vertical size is what I was intending for wall art. That's perfect. All of that looks good. But then we get to a product like this, wall wood arts. It is a square dimension, and right now things are getting cropped off of this. We're losing my artwork at the top and my signature at the bottom. Let's go ahead and click "Edit." This is where you have the option to bring up the scale, bring down the scale, move it from side to side, and recenter. But if I scale this down, so that you can see the entire artwork within those square proportions, we're getting this weird whitespace on either side. This is exactly why we saved that square format file. It's for stuff like this. Let's go over here and click the Upload arrow. I want to grab my square monstera leaf, and go ahead and press "Open." While that's uploading, I'm going to go back to Redbubble. I juggle between the two, so that I'm not wasting time just waiting for something to upload. I'm back in Redbubble. I'm going to go through and optimize a few of these products. We'll start up here with a t-shirt. I'll click "Edit," "Replace Image." This is exactly why I saved that transparent file. It's going to look really good on a t-shirt. I'll add that there. Same thing with its large print clothing. I'm going to put that transparent leaf in place. I think the pattern's looking pretty good for most of these products stickers. I also want to switch it back to that transparent PNG. Honestly, the pattern is working really well on most of these products, and I don't really need to switch it. Although I think for this pillow, I'm going to go ahead and click "Edit," and make that pattern just a little bit bigger. Don't forget to move it, so that your signature is still in place. Yeah, that looks great. Maybe I'll move it up just a tad, and then press "Apply changes." For the wall art right here, I'm going to switch that back to my art print file. So Edit, Replace Image, and I want to select the art prints , that vertical prints. For these patterns looking fantastic. Same here. Some of them are automatically disabled. Just go ahead and click that to enable it. Still scrolling through. Honestly, I'm liking the pattern for most of these products. Actually maybe clock, I'll replace it with that transparent PNG as well. Art board prints are sized automatically at squares. Good news, I have a square format saved. So Edit, Replace Image, with that square JPEG. Some other products, I'll go ahead and toggle on the visibility for. But for the most part, I'm leaving that pattern in place for all of these products. That pattern doesn't really look that great on a backpack. I'm just going to go ahead and disable that product altogether. Everything else looks good to go. Now I'm just going to scroll back up to the top and wait for these guys to download. Let's go back to the Society6 tab and see what's going on here. Our square art has gone ahead and finish downloading. We're going to go back up here and click, "Save and Enable" This is where you have the opportunity to batch-edit a lot of products all in one go. Now is the time for me to decide if I want this artwork on any of these products. Throw pillows and duvet covers, those usually look better with patterns. We'll go ahead and skip those. I know this will probably look good as a side table, tote bag, acrylic box, wall clock, and let's go ahead and try out the shower curtain too. I've gone ahead and clicked "Enable", now all five of those products now have that new square dimension enabled and in place. Now you can see my wooden wall arts looks so much better when it's actually fit appropriately to that product. Let me go ahead and toggle on metal prints. That one's looking really nice. Now we have this curtain. I know curtains always look better with patterns, so I'm going to go ahead and click, " Edit" scroll down, and click the "Upload" arrow. I have a chance to upload my green Monstera pattern. So while that's uploading, I'm going to go ahead and go back to RedBubble, see how the progress is coming along. If you have really fast Internet, this process is just going to be a snap. But if your internet is a little bit laggy, especially for uploads, then this can take awhile sometimes. This is a great opportunity to listen to a podcast or read a book. But anyway, I'm going to open up a new tab. While this is marinating and uploading, I'm going to go ahead and multitask a little bit and start my Spoonflower upload. New tab, Spoonflower. I'm already logged in, so I'll just go straight to my studio. Here's what my interface looks like in the back-end. I have my design library. If I were to click that, you would see that I literally have hundreds of designs uploaded to Spoonflower. I don't need to go into that, but instead, I want to click "Add Designs" here's where you're going to see that 40 megabyte limits. But that's no problem because remember those files were about half that. I'll click "Choose Files", this is where I can grab the block. Remember, not the pattern, but the block itself. I'll go ahead and press "Open", yes, I own the rights to my own artwork and upload. Awesome. So it looks like the file has finished uploading. On either side you're going to get these nifty rulers so that you can see how big your watercolor elements are. But I am a very visual person so just trying to imagine this as four inches or six inches is challenging for me. Instead of just looking at the rulers, I prefer to look at product previews. If you go over here, there's an option for view all products. I'm going to right-click that so that it opens in a new tab. That way I have my editing in place over here. I can just open up this new tab to see exactly what this design looks like on products. What I'm looking for here is the size. It looks like for some of these products like placemats, tea towels, these elements are way too big. They're just getting cropped off and you can't even really tell what it is. It works over here for bedding, but even within these pillows, these leaves are just too big. I could continue looking through the rest but I've already made up my mind that I need to make these leaves a lot smaller to sell on fabric. I'll go back to my editing. Over here on the right, we have an option to go smaller. I'm going to click that once, maybe twice, and then select, "Save this layout". While that's saving, I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of multitasking and check on my previous uploads. First, let's go back to that RedBubble tab. Awesome. It looks like everything finished uploading, perfect. At this point I usually make a few edits. For this t-shirt, for example, I usually like to bring the motif all the way to the tip top of the product. I'll click "Apply Changes" and same thing for the large print clothing. I'll edit it and If the whole idea is large print clothing, then I usually like to make my design as big as possible within those parameters. I'll go ahead and apply. Sticker looks fabulous. The new art prints looks wonderful as well. I'm just scrolling through making sure that everything uploaded the way it was supposed to and that everything is looking great. Which it is. This was both a design and illustration and a painting. We'll go ahead and check both of those. No, it's not mature and yes, this is my artwork. Real quick, before I click "Save", I want to scroll back up to the top. Click "Command A" to select everything. "Command C " to copy, go back over here to Spoonflower and I am just going to "Command V", paste all of those tags in place. But real quick, going back to Redbubble, at this point, we can go ahead and save work to publish our project. Redbubble is finished. That is good to go. It's going to go ahead and enable all of those products and then go live on my page. We're good there. Let's go over to see how Society6 is doing. This looks perfect. This is the curtain. One thing I'm going to do is move this design over so that my signature is still visible, and then I'll go ahead and re-center here and press "Save". Again. It's really nice that Society6 does give you this option to bulk edit because I can go ahead and enable all of these products with the exact same layouts. Now I can see what my pattern looks like on both of those curtains. Wall tapestry, that looks good to go and through this throw pillow, I want to have that be a pattern as well. So I'll click "Edit", and the good thing here is I don't have to re-upload that pattern. It's saved right here in my library. All I need to do is click it and it will automatically apply to that product. Looks good. I think I might make it a touch bigger, then again, I want to make sure that my signature isn't getting cropped off. That looks great, then I'll press "Save and Enable". For this, I want to keep that pattern on comforters, maybe the coasters as well, bar stool, do they cover counter stool? A lot of stuff is going to look good with that pattern. I'll choose "Enable". Now it's just a matter of going through selecting individual products and then finding the application, whether it's a stand-alone Monstera or a full pattern or a transparent background that's going to look best for that specific products. Redbubble has already completed the upload. In my experience, Redbubble usually goes a lot faster than Society6. But then again, I get most of my sales on Society6 not Redbubble. There's always a trade off there. I'm going to go back here to Spoonflower. I'm going to go ahead and plug in the name. I always prefer to keep that name consistent across the board so whether this design is on Spoonflower or Society6 or Redbubble, as long as the name stays the same amidst all of those different platforms, I'm good to go. Click "View All Products" one more time just to make sure everything is looking good. In this case, it's looking pretty fantastic. Making my design size a little bit smaller was definitely the right move. Now I can scroll down here to the bottom, choose the best thumbnail, usually Fat Quarter is the way to go, then I click these boxes to enable all product types. By checking these boxes, I've gone ahead and enabled these products for sale. Spoonflower is a little bit different from other print on demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. For Spoonflower, specifically, you actually have to order a sample of your design before you can list it for sale publicly. It's a little bit or a lot bits a pain in a way you can't just immediately have a product for sale. But the idea here is they want you to double-check again because seamless patterns are so tricky to make. They want you to double-check, order a sample of your work and make sure it looks absolutely beautiful before other customers can purchase it. At this point, I'm just going to be going through the Society6 back-end and optimizing the rest of these products based off of the design that's going to look best on that product type. This bulk editing option does make it go a little bit faster even though Society6 does tend to take the longest compared to other print on demand sites where you can upload. Once you have all of the products you like enabled, you can go ahead, click " The disclaimer" and then publish your artwork. Then you'll see that the status up here has changed to published. Then you can click "View my shop". Now you can go through and see your product live on your sites. If you scroll to the bottom of your product page, you'll see all the product applications where your artwork comes into play. It's pretty cool. I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes peek into my uploading process. At this point, I have a few final thoughts to share with you for today.
16. Final Thoughts: First of all, huge congratulations on finishing this class and getting your artwork digitized. I hope you enjoyed the process of digitizing your analog artwork, editing it in Photoshop, and playing with color patterns, and more. Fun fact, throughout this class, you actually learned 44 key command shortcuts because I counted. I am really looking forward to seeing your final artwork. Please share your work in the student project gallery down below and that way I can take a peek and leave a comment on your project. You can find the gallery under the projects and resources tab. On the right, you'll see a green button that says, "Create Project." Tap that, and once you're there, you'll have the option to upload a cover photo, add a title, and write a little description. You can include both text and images here. If you're up for sharing, I'll love to see your original artwork and then the final version of it. In my case, I just snapped a quick photo on my phone for the original artwork and then I took a screenshot of that final file in Photoshop. The reason I did it this way is because phone photos and screenshots aren't really big files at all so they're going to upload really quickly to that project gallery. Once your project is uploaded, it'll appear in the student projects gallery. You can also view other projects here so I encourage you to check out other students' work, like, comment, all that jazz. If you'd like to share your project on Instagram, please tag me @catcoq and Skillshare, @skillshare so that we can like and comment on your post as well. If you share your work to your Instagram story, please don't forget to tag me so that I can re-share your story to my own audience as well. Please don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking that follow button up top. This means that you'll get an email as soon as I launch my next class. Plus, about once a month, I'll send a message directly to everyone who follows me. Speaking of other classes, I have a few more to recommend. If you enjoyed this class and you want to check out others along the same vein, I recommend checking out cultivating the color, vary palettes in original arts, and grow your portfolio. In that class, you'll take a deep dive into color exploration in Photoshop. Plus, I drop a lot of value bombs in terms of color palettes that sell especially well, and how to track color trends so your artwork can rise to the cream of the crop. You can find that class by clicking my name above this video and scrolling down my profile to see all my other classes. Another one you might be interested in is a step-by-step guide to art licensing; sell your first piece of artwork online. In that class, you'll basically get a head start in how to sell your artwork online through print on demand websites just like Society6. I've sold over 100,000 products on Society6 alone so that class is basically me telling you everything that's worked really well for me. Last but not least, if you want to see what your artwork looks like on actual product files, check out my class; design top-selling product mockups with your art. Bonus, 10 free downloads. Spoiler alert, for this class, I give away the most freebies ever for any class I've ever done. It's 10 professional mockup files. You can download them, learn how to use them during the class, and then keep them forever so that you can continue to digitally mockup new artwork. Again, you can find all of my classes by clicking my name up top and then scrolling to the bottom of my profile. While you're hovering over my name, again, please don't forget to click, "Follow." I have a lot of fun stuff to share with my followers, like freebies, giveaways, advice, and big updates like when I'm hosting my next watercolor retreat in France or Spain. You can also follow me on Instagram to see new artwork I'm creating and where in the world I'm living at the moment. Right now, I'm in my Airbnb in Mexico where I have been living on and off for the last year. If you enjoyed my class today, please leave a review. I love reading through these reviews because they give me so much fulfillment as a teacher. You are the reason I am here teaching on Skillshare. Thank you so much for joining me today. I cannot wait to see your polished up artwork and I will see you next time.
Cat Coquillette, Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
