Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi I'm Mikey Burton. I'm a "Designy" Illustrator. The title of this class is Editorial Illustration. We're going to make some stuff together and it's got to be awesome. I do a lot of editorial illustration for a lot big publications that I never thought I'd get to work for like the New York Times, TIME magazine, ESPN, Esquire, Playboy. You will see a lot about how I approach projects. Behind the scenes and how an actual editorial illustration goes. And then we will illustrate an idiom together and I'll walk you through that process from start to finish. I typically refer to myself as a "Designy" illustrator. I started as a designer, I went to design school. I feel like my aesthetic comes from that. It's like a designer approaching illustration. I really want the students to gather that sketching is really important, even though the final product might look simple and effortless, a lot of ideation and thinking went into that simple solution. Sketching, thinking and ideating, that only makes a project better. I don't think you have to be a designer illustrator, you need to want to make something cool, and you solve a problem, and it's really for everybody. It's going to be fun and we're going to make it happen.
2. Your Project: The project we're going to do today is illustrating an idiom. An idiom is typically a phrase that has a meaning outside of its literal meaning. If we had the phrase, "It's raining cats and dogs," it doesn't literally mean animals are falling from the sky and it's some awful thing happening outside. It just means it's raining a lot. We're all going to pick idioms. I have a couple I've picked out that I'm going to sketch towards. You are going to pick out some, maybe you'll narrow down which one to select, and hopefully together, we'll make some really cool visual interpretations of idioms. The reason I picked this project is, it's funner than doing an editorial restriction. It has some play. There's room for interpretation. You don't have to literally pick the actual meaning of the idiom. You can illustrate the weirdness of, if it's raining cats and dogs, you can illustrate that in a weird way and in a new way. The materials you'll need for this class are basically whatever you want to sketch with. A pencil and paper is a great place to start. A lot of it's about the ideation part of it. I'm going to be using Adobe Illustrator, but I wouldn't let that deter you from using whatever you want to. It's more about having a good idea and going into the problem than letting the program solve the problem for you. In the gallery, feel free to show your whole process. If you're having trouble picking idiom, maybe somebody can help you narrow it down. You sketch and you're sketching towards maybe two idioms at once, maybe you share sketches for both and people will be like, "That one sucks. That one's awesome." That'd save you a lot of time of stressing out about it. I'm more interested about the fun that you had with this problem versus what the final product is. You're taking on this project to push yourself forward as a creative. The only way I've ever got better in my life is by working with somebody and then pushing me to the next level. That friendly competition that happens when you're a designer, that always pushes me to a new place. So share work, don't be afraid. Put it out there. Give some reason behind the feedback you give somebody, and that's only going to help them, and it's only going to make you seem not like a jerk.
3. What is Editorial Illustration?: Before we get into the fun of researching idioms and finding your idiom, I'm going to talk a little bit about my editorial process and how I approach editorial illustration. I do editorial illustration, but what is it? What is that? It's just adding interests to a article. Like, you're just highlighting an article that might get looked over in a way. The first editorial illustration I ever did was for Wired Magazine. I'd been making big posters and it was just a fun side project thing. Well, I have this poster I did for Wilco and somebody at Wired Magazine saw this and they were like," Hey, that's really awesome. I love that poster. Do you happen to do editorial illustration?" First time I did this, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just was just doing it. I thought they'd want to see final art for some reason. I thought they'd want to see finished, final illustrations for each step of the phase, when all they really wanted to see was sketches. The article is about design thinking and it solving global problems. A lot of these weren't necessarily right for the project. They were nice enough to let me finalize the illustration and it did end up in a place where it was this. It would've been so much easier if I just sketched, if I just taken my time and really tried to solve the problem versus just getting on my computer and being like, "I'm going to be awesome and illustrate stuff." Think about that when you guys are doing your idioms. This was the final illustration. It's funny because even though I went through all that rigmarole and stuff, I think the article got killed anyways, so it was a funny learning experience. The way I approach it now is, the first part of the phase is just reading, and, drawing, and not thinking about illustrating on the computer at all. It's just about solving a problem, getting approval from the art director, and then going to the computer. The phase up front just as takes as long as the phase of actually illustrating it for me. So typically, I'll get emails saying if I'm available to do an illustration. The amount of information you actually get about the article varies vastly. They can usually be like two sentences, versus like a nice paragraph summary, versus like the full article. This was one I did recently for Money Magazine, but this one was about how do not work on the weekends and vacations. So, it just kind of like this illustration of this surf board with a laptop plugged into it. For this, I have a nice paragraph. The overview of the article it says, "How to not work on nights, weekends, and vacations", from there, I'll start sketching. In this case, I actually had like a word list of things, I immediately wrote down just from my own brain that immediately came into my mind from thinking about vacation. Even just doing that, by the end I'm talking about with a grill with a iPhone on it, like what's that? That's just a weird thing that came on my head. I think, that's what a word list can kind of do in a short amount of time. It's just taking your brain to somewhere new. After I read the article, I kind of get the main idea and do a little bit of word-listing. I started sketching. A bottle of sunblock. I wrote, "The book you've been meaning to read", on this book. I don't know what that- that's just goofy. Oh, I think this was the second round of stuff. We refined this idea and this idea, but we ended up going with this one. When I'm saying "we ended these things", it's like me and the art director are a team and we're trying to get this thing approved by the editor. So, this was like a series of icons I did for the Atlantic recently. There's six icons here, but I still did a ton of sketching for that. I just to send a lot of ideas and I like the ideas to be good, obviously. So, this was one I did for Playboy, which was the one of the funner jobs I got to do. The article title was Car Castration and the whole idea was like the last shred of our manhood is basically driving a car really fast. When a robot car drives you from point a to point b, how that will kind of go away. You can see lots of really goofy ideas came to me immediately. The first idea, obviously had, which actually they went with in the end, was to have a guy looking at a rear view mirror and these fuzzy dice being cut off by this giant, comical pair of scissors. You can see the different bobbles of the process where I just made everything in grayscale. Then, added some texture in there, and that was it, and this is it in the magazine. Editorial illustration isn't always necessarily illustration, you get to do like a lot of logo-ey stuff for magazines. This was actually a series of badges and icons I did for Esquire, it says Culinary Education Program, so let's just go with that. I made these little icons. This was one of those jobs where they just wanted me to make one. Since, I did such a good job with sketching, I actually made like four or five other little icons spots for it. I gave him like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and that's how it ended up being like more of a job. This is a piece I made for Real Simple Magazine about decoding food labels. This is a kind of a good example for when you're thinking about on the idioms you're going to be creating because this was a nice balance between type and image, and balancing illustration with typography. A lot of the idioms you guys are going to be creating, you don't necessarily have to use the words, but it can make it a lot funner if you do. Typical turnaround times for editorial illustration, it's all pretty quick. That should be a restriction of this class is to do this pretty quickly. Because sometimes I'll get to do something for the New York Times and that's done within the day, most are like a week. Sometimes if you're- if it's a bigger package, it could be like two weeks. It's not for the faint of heart and you have to be comfortable with that. You have to be comfortable with things being done. I like that, I like to just make something, and be done with it, and move on to the next thing. So, now that you've seen me talk about some of my own work, now I can show you some of my favorite tools for drawing and illustrating.
4. Tools and Materials: Now, I'm just going to share a couple of my favorite tools that I use. I have this drafting pencil. If you buy a nice pencil, you don't lose it. I really like Faber-Castell pens. I made a switch from Micron. This is really nerdy stuff, but I really Faber-Castell pens. I always use a black 18 eraser. I don't think it's smudges as much as a white eraser. When I do my sketches I usually start in pencil and then finish in pen. It makes a very nice sketchbook. I liked the way it usually looks that way. For texture making, these are a Chartpak Blender pen. I really like Moleskine notebooks. They're just a nice thin paper. You can put a lot of sketches in one book. I typically like to brand them in my own way. This one has deviled eggs on it. My dad likes deviled eggs a lot. This is for dad. I keep a food blog where I draw a lot of what I eat became like a way for me to experiment and try different styles of illustration. One of my favorite things from doing that experiment is illustrating on my phone with a thing called Adobe Ideas. In Illustrator, there's a tool called the Blob tool. You'll see me use that in my process when we get on the computer. But, this is basically like the Blob tool and just an app. But, I typically really like to use the Cosmonaut pen by Studio Neat. It almost feels like a video game in a way. It has like a lot of restrictions. So, it lets you just try to draw the best way you can. The more refining I do of a sketch the easier time I have illustrating a final, lately more I'll take one of the sketches from here, get in, print it out again, and size it up a little bit, so I can put more detail in it. I usually will just use marker paper, color comes later, and I do most that on a computer. So, for you guys, you can use whatever you want to. My challenge for you is just grab a pen, a pencil, whatever you feel comfortable with, and paper, and just start sketching. If you don't keep a sketchbook, today might be the day that you start doing that. Makes a very nice visual record of your work. So, yeah, that's the tools that we use.
5. Inspiration: There's so much visual inspiration sites like there's Pinterest, that have visual inspiration nowadays. I always like to keep books around and look at books. There's something refreshing about looking at a book and looking at pages and flipping through things. These are a couple of books I used just to keep around on my desk when I'm stuck, when I really can't get another idea, when I just want to look at some things. There's these book trademarks and symbols. I think most designers will tell you to buy these. They are really expensive. But if you happen to run across these in a thrift store and the person doesn't know what they have, and they're cheap, pick up these, they're amazing design resources. Just really chock full of really inspiring things. Every page has something awesome on it. Look at that sweet eagle. That's a sweet eagle. Another book I talked about a minute ago, Hand Book of Pictorial Symbols, literally every icon that's ever been made is in here. It's a lot of really good icon research. This is just a Dover Book. I really like letterpress. I've always had an affinity for letterpress. If you can pick up specimen type books too, I think that's a really cool thing to have around and to see how letterforms work and if you're doing some lettering, I'm sure that helps guide that process too. Those are some of the books I like to use. I just find it refreshing to just sit, and when I'm sketching, if I'm stuck, I'll just reference these and look at them and see where that leads.
6. Picking Your Idiom: Why are we illustrating idioms? You might be like, "Well, I want to do editorial illustration Mike." because idioms are fun. By the nature of what they are, they're kind of ridiculous and kind of silly. I think that's a great place to start with an illustration because when I'm doing an illustration or editorial illustration, I'm trying to make something that is maybe kind of silly or playful. With idioms, like that's kind of already baked into the phrases. So, it's a little bit less work to get to that point. Another reason idioms are really good is because there's a whole like typographic component to play with too. For this assignment, you can use the word, you don't have to necessarily use the words. You can just focus on the type. You could make it just a completely typographic solution, you could make it play with type and image. It could be a lot of different things. Whatever your personal aesthetic is, whatever even aesthetic you want to explore for this assignment, you have that opportunity within idiom. When you're picking an idiom, it's all personal preference. I have actually a dictionary of idioms which is a fun thing if you want to pick one of these up. I actually might actually just start with like a Google search and search idioms and go through a couple of idioms sites and start there, and maybe if you want to take the idioms that you like and find a little bit about the history or where they came from, you can actually use this and kind of find that too. For this phase of the project, you could just have one idiom and just go for it. Find like ten different ways to solve it, pick one, illustrate it. I wrote a list of 50 idioms here and it was just kind of like stuff that I was responding to early to bed, early to rise, don't put all your eggs in one basket, and other one I have circled here is bite off more than you can chew, better late than never, keep your head above water, there's like I don't know how many other ones here. Cut your teeth, cut the mustard, grocery palms, crash and burn don't count your chickens, cool calm and collected, there's lots of them. If it helps you guys to write a list of these out and kind of look at them and see which ones and do research a little bit of each of them, I would encourage you to do that. After I got this list down, I actually picked like three that I really enjoyed, which are share and share alike because this is a skill share class as we're sharing it. You are what you eat because I like to eat and keep your head above water, because lately I feel like I've been very busy with work and I literally just doing everything I can just documented but water. You can see even when I'm writing this list I'm kind of testing out simple little ideas. Keeping your head above water is a little guy with a sailboat. For no's like his heads above water, chew the fat bunch of fast food and then share and share alike. I thought that was a really interesting thing because it seems like such an old, kind of old English, phrase and almost like religious and away, but when people say share and share are like, like nowadays I immediately think of social media and liking everything. So, you can see lots of different thumbs up and different things like that. It's very open-ended, you're going to pick idiom and you're going to make it and you don't necessarily where it's going to go, it's the idea of like picking something, like marinating, like thinking about it, like looking around, like doing a little research online, finding these things and then just seeing where that takes you. You might pick an idiom and end up somewhere completely different. If you're just like stress that about the idiom you have, just pick a different one, which was to have fun with this. Just take something you like and run with it and see where it goes.
7. Sketching: After you select whatever idiom you ended up with, time to start sketching. In this case, I had three that I picked, which were "Share and share a like", "Keep your head above water", and "You are what you eat." I started sketching toward "Share and Share Alike" and I liked what was going on. It seemed one-dimensional. There was only about the idea of me thinking, "This has something to do with social media because of the like aspect of it." I was intrigued about making it. If you don't really like what you're doing, pick something that would be fun. So, I avoided that one. Then, I went to, "Keep your head above water." You can see the ideas I had there. A boat shaped out of a man's head with him blowing air to keep the boat sailing, which is weird. I really like this idea, "You are what you eat." So, where do you start there? Let's just start from the beginning. A blank sketchbook page. You are what you eat. The first thing I would do, would just to make a word list. What comes to mind. Okay. So, first off, obviously, food, maybe junk food. Junk food is really fun to draw, I found. What's the opposite of junk food? Health. Healthy body, a healthy mind. Mind, body, spirit. So, we're already at a spiritual level from "You are what you eat." That's weird. I don't know how we ended up there. What's the opposite of healthy mind, body, and spirit working together? Unhealthy. What is unhealthy. Make me think I am fat? Fat could lead to thinking about waste. For some reason, I think of Texas when I think of a belt buckle. I don't know where this list is going. A guy with sausage fingers. I don't know. They have mustard on them. I have no idea. Maybe it's not food. Maybe that's a better way to look at it. Maybe it could be the things we eat in different ways, the things we consume. We listen to music, that's something we consume. Is it the media we read, the websites we visit? Okay. That's a word list. When you're writing a word list, there's no bad ideas and I know this list is very all over the place. It opens you up to a lot of different ways of looking at something. If I want to look at some visuals, I'll look at old books. There's a figure of doing everything that we ever do. These universal icons, I always look at them as a really great way to start thinking or start brainstorming. So, we're talking about food and look at all these little fun little icons about food. Drawn eggs and different things, and that cabbage is really sweet. So, there's a bread. I think I had something about being gluten-free and I think that's really funny how a loaf of bread looks. Something funny about a can. Maybe if a can had built around it or something. This kind of bulging out. It could also be like, "You are what you eat." You could also just go down the road of making funny characters that look like food. So, I saw a picture of a beet. Maybe it's like a beet-guy, I'd like some glasses on. So, a lot of times I'll do a lot of these things in pencil, and then just ink over them in pen, just so I get a round of revisions in there. I really like the idea that I was talking about like the it not being about what you eat, but more about the things we consume of like media versus sport and TV, and all these things we watch. Maybe it's just like making a simple collection. Maybe this is a book. Maybe this is like a soda. Maybe that's a record or something. What would that be? Some kind of sandwich or something. I don't know. I feel like this idea is pretty good. Typically, even if I found the idea I wanted, I would just fill this page up and see what else I could find. I feel like that's how I've always approached design and illustration, it's always just like trying to push myself to come up with a better idea or like a sillier idea or just something different. There's something about spending time in a sketchbook away from that computer. Here's your mind in a way. It's like a way to detach. It's a way to just focus on the ideas and not focus on how you're going to render something or create something in the end. I think they lead to something else. When I look at one thing to another thing, maybe I'll combine those things visually in a new way. I don't think that necessarily can always happen on a computer. I like to sketch. I do it a lot. I'm very comfortable. I feel at home doing it. One thing that you can do to loosen the gears and get into the mode of sketching is just to simply take two to five minutes and just draw as many animals as you can. You can jump from the word list to sketching when you have an idea. Sketch that. I think you can go back and forth like I think, you can sketch a little, keep a word list. At the end, you're just trying to get an idea.
8. Refining: So, you saw me sketch, brainstorm, make a wordless, now that we're done with all that, let's take that to the next phase. Yeah, this is the idea I really like here. Just like how it has different elements coming together with type and image and a nice balance between those things. I think it will just be a really fun one to execute. I redrew that sketch here and then I was just working on these sketches, refining them a little bit and seeing what other items I could put in there. We have the book, we have this, maybe there's a little globe in there. So, I'm pretty happy with this direction, I'm just going to refine this a little bit more. I've taken this sketch out of the Sketchbook Xerox to a bigger size. So, I could actually take a piece of marker paper and add a little bit more detail in here, and change a little of the details I don't like. The reason I refine a sketch is, the cleaner I make a sketch the easier time I have illustrating on the computer. So, I have my pen, and I'm just going to sketch over this, maybe add in some things I want, maybe take away a few things I don't. That's about it, so I'll skip to sketching. Just as long as you get the general sense of where everything is, you get all the type and you get all the big areas, you work on a little details. Yeah, all you're really doing is creating a base that helps guide me through the illustration. I find if it's cleaner and simpler for me to understand this level, it's less funny stuff on the computer. I sketch what I have and scan it in, and then we'll go right into Illustrator.
9. Illustrating: We've come up with an idea. We've sketched. We've refined the sketch. Now it's time, after all that labor, it's time to make something in Illustrator. I'm just going to walk you through the high-level points of this, because a lot of it is like the digitally part of Illustrator. Once you see how I'm using Illustrator, I think you'll understand why you don't necessarily need to see every step of it because I'm not using the most sophisticated parts of Illustrator here, I'm actually using maybe the simplest tool in Illustrator. So, we've got our sketch in here. So I scan this in, and what helps me get down with illustration, and have actually helps me finish something, if I have two layers here, and I just take one of them, and make it a sketch layer and art layer, and I'll take the sketch, put it in this layer, and then just put this about like 10 percent dimmed, and then I'll basically just start drawing this. There's plenty of stuff you could use in here, but for today, I'm just using the old Blob Tool. We've the Pen Tool. That's nice. That actually make straight lines. You can edit that and add points to it. The Blob Tool is not like that at all. It's actually this big kind of vector piece of garbage. You can see it's not just one line. It's actually this outline shape. But, I enjoy Blob Tool. I think it's hilarious and fun, and makes really fun illustrations. So that's what I'm going to use to draw today. Then, I'm just going to start drawing like I've done before in the Pencil Sketch. I guess this way of illustrating for me is basically just like refining and refining again. Like every step of the process, you're just refining the illustration a little bit more. You can see, it doesn't always want to do the exact right thing. If you hold on Shift, it will draw straight line. That's one of the benefits of the Blob Tool. It's okay if things are a little wonky, because they're not going to be perfect. It's not a perfect tool. I am trying to basically replicate more honest kind of pencil line anyways. You could obviously do this in Photoshop really easily too. I just really like Illustrator, and it's really fine. I feel like most people will probably cringe at watching this video because I'm not using a Wacom tablet. I'm using the worst tool in Illustrator, and I'm using a mouse. People would just be like, "You're crazy Mike. That's ridiculous. Why don't you get a Wacom tablet? Why don't you get all these other stuff?" Well, you know what? We don't need it. You can have fun, and just use the Blob Tool in Illustrator and make something fun and interesting, and that's okay. It's probably not far off of drawing unlike Microsoft Paint, to be honest. If you use that Adobe Ideas app I talked about earlier, it's a pretty similar process but it's just has even you get to use your finger, you can use like a stylus, which was fun, but a very similar thing. I've went through and got basically all the shapes in the illustration here with the Blob Tool. I like how it's looking. It's looking pretty fun. I mean, this could just be like a one color illustration, but I want to try to add another level of color in there. So, I'm just going to basically take like a 50 percent gray and just start blocking in some different values in here. So this could be like a two color screen printer or something. I always use a pretty limited color palette just because that kind of helps me solve a problem better. I'll just start kinda adding color into the each places here. For me personally, it's better if it's not always in the lines. Let's change this degree too. This gray in here. The other tool I use quite a bit with the Blob Tool, but also the Erase Tool. So, it's just kinda like having a pen and pencil in a way. We can select this gray part and erase the thing behind there that had little buttons in there. It starts having a little bit more depth to the illustration. Maybe we had some color in here to give some depth to the fries, kind of put a shadow underneath there. See now, it starts to kind of come together. What if we make some other type of different color? That's getting pretty cool. Starting to feel pretty interesting. You know, I got this to where I want it. It's pretty easy just to add some color to this. If we select the gray, select Same. Then, we have all these gray parts, and we can actually kind of play with what colors we want in here. And you know, what if we just make it this blue color I already have over here? That's pretty cool. What if we wanted to add a third color even? So I've started to colorize, make some of the type weight, started add some other details in there, changed some things around. Let's say we wanted to add yellow into this, so we could just take the yellow from over here and just start filling in. Maybe we'll just select this, and copy it, and place. Look at that. All I did there was just copy this, command F, and then I dropped with the yellow. So that's a cool kind of green record we have in there now. I think this basketball should be yellow, because that's kind of close to orange. So now you can see how we kind of get a little bit more color in here. French fries are obviously yellow. Yellow over a blue make the green. I've taken a program that so many people are like, "I don't know how to use Illustrator. I don't know to use busier curves. I don't get this stuff." Just use it the way you want to use it and see what happens, because I think there are a lot of tools and different things that you can make work really fun for you in here. Just by using the Eraser Tool, and the Blob Tool, and just a little bit of having fun, these things kind of start to work together. You know, this isn't a place where I'm pretty happy with it. Some people would say like, "Hey, this is it. This is my final illustration." I like adding textures to my work. It's something, it's my signature move, you know. I want to add some of those soft kind of things back into it through texture. So that's what the next lesson we'll be, adding texture.
10. Texturing: We've done illustrating, in Illustrator with the blob tool, your new best friend. Now, what are we going to do? We're going to add texture. Everybody wants to know, "Mikey, how do you make your textures?" Well, I'm going to tell you a little bit of that right now. I make them all by printing. We have the final illustration here. Everything's in place the way we want it. It's kind of a leap of faith in a way because you're going to take this thing that you've just preciously made, and then tear it apart again. I have three main colors here. The yellow, the blue and this will be made by the colors overlapping. We don't need to separate that out. I want this type all together, so I can edit that later. I'll select all these type pieces. I'm going to pull these up here. I've taken all these pieces out of this. Now, I'm going to select this yellow and do select same fill color. So, that selects all the yellow pieces, kind of drag this over here. Now, I'm going to select the blue. Do the same thing I did for the yellow. Select same fill color. I'm going to drag this over here. Now, these are all the pieces that we have and I'm just going to then turn everything black. So, we have a type on one area, blue, the key black on the line work and the yellow. So the next step is, basically to print this out. The way I do this, it's not going to work if you have an inkjet printer. You need a laser printer, probably go to Kinkos to do it too, but it's definitely something that needs toner. So then, I just press Command+P, printer noise, and then we have a print out. So now, we're going to add some texture with the blender pen. These are pretty cheap, just a chart pack blender pen. So, I'm going to take this piece of paper and I take another piece of paper, put it on top; doesn't have to be perfect or anything, and then you just take this pen and basically transfer the print out onto the new piece of paper. It's smarter if you do the flat areas first. It's kind of like this weird process where, hoof, do this in a ventilated area, by the way. It's kind of like a process where it's separating the toner from the paper. So, it's like releasing the ink a little bit. So, you're going to want to do the big flat areas first and then do the line work second, because they're going to continue to bleed a little bit. So, you just do all this stuff. Don't just go to Kinkos and get one print out, get like 10. So, I do the type blast, because that's the stuff that you want it to be pretty preserved. So now, you can see on the back of this piece of paper, it's left little distressed areas and little pieces are missing now. But, it actually adds this great modely printed textured everything. But one thing that you should do when you're doing this, if you want to check it and see if it's transferred the right amount of information, just hold your finger on part of it and peak so it doesn't move, so you can put it back down and then transfer a little bit more. Especially on the type areas, I kind of messed it up a little bit, but that's why you get a couple of printouts, try it a couple of times. That's how you make this really fun modeled texture. I don't do this all the time. Sometimes you can literally just print out the page and scan it back in; and depending on the age of your printer, it might have some interesting qualities to it that you can scan in, and then you can pull out of it. I think anytime you're printing something in and scanning it back in there. It adds a lot of character that Photoshop packs or different things just aren't going to get at. It gives a little bit of life to something that could be really flat and vectory. Now, we've got our transferred illustration bits. Now, we're going to scan this in. You can import it right into Photoshop. We imported probably a 600 DPI. Please wait, it's really soothing sound. It's just graphic design. It's just scanning. Now, we've got this in here, but we did transfer it so it is backwards. So, we're going to flip it. Just scale or crop in there. Now, what we have to really do is, get the levels right. I usually like to change the levels of each section as I go, not all at once, because I like to control the level of texture in each area. Let's resize it first. I'm just going to make it twice as big. So, I'm going to use the selection tool, select this area and mess with the levels of bit. You see how much organic quality the transfer put into that work. Just by using my levels, I can control how much I actually want in there. Actually, this area seems a little bit too textured because I know there's going to be type over there. You can even take the burn tool, another really simple tool and darken that area up a little bit. Adjust that a little bit more. I'm pretty happy with that piece. For the line work, do the same for this side. The type, oh, that EAT looks a little bit worse for where. I could probably burn this thing a little bit. So, adjust the levels here. Let's just get rid of the gray. Now, we have all these pieces and they're all texturery and fun. Now, we're going to add color. So, a little trick I learned from somebody, if you just press Command+all to select all, you copy it, and this has to be a grayscale document. You press Select+all, Copy, enter Quick Mask, and then press Command, and then paste, then de-select out of Quick Mask and then select Invert, that selects all the black areas. That's like a nine-hit combo in like some Street Fighter game. So, that I'm going to basically make solid color fill layer black. Let's just make a solid white layer, and let's just throw it as background. Now, we have control over this, I forgot to change the mode to RGB. Now, we have control over the color options here, so I can put these colors back in. So, there we go. I'm just going to copy this layer, drag this over here, make it a multiply. I'm going to copy this one, drag it over here, and then I'm going to drag this one right over here. So, you can see, all this textured goodness. So, let's add the colors we had in there before. That's black, let's take a little bit more of a gray. Some reason had to, this is yellow. That yellow seems a little bright, so let's make it a little bit more rich. There's the blue. Let's make these line up a little better. Oh, look what we did. Would you look at that. It all lines up pretty well, and it's a bunch of chalky fun colors. Let's erase that. I'm going to make this a darker color. Now, I want some of the type to be white So, I'll just copy this layer, and select the ones I want it to be wide. So, I copy this, so I have two copies of it. Wrong one. I'm going to do the opposite for this one. So, select the inverse. So now this is on two layers. I'm going to make this not a multiply layer because it needs to be white. That's the illustration from just sketch to using Illustrator, to adding some textures in there, to bring it back into Photoshop. We've replicated something that feels very hand done by just using Illustrator in this transfer process that I use. So that's about it.
11. Final Thoughts: So, that's it, we did it. I made my illustration I think it's cool, I think it's fun. I think it's all about the process. I think it's getting from point A to point B. I think every time you do an illustration it just makes you a better designer illustrator. I think this is a project that is more about the process and about solving a problem. You could do a lot of the things with your final illustration besides share it. You could turn it into a poster. You could turn it into a T-Shirt. There are few things that we've done. Hopefully, I've given you a glimpse into how editorial illustrations are approached from my standpoint and how I ideate and make things within this realm of illustration. I'm really looking forward to seeing your work. I'm really looking forward to commenting on it and saying what I think about it. I'm sure everybody else in the community is too. So, three things, pick your idiom. Do your sketches. Share it in the gallery. Get to work.
12. More Creative Classes on Skillshare: [MUSIC]
Mikey Burton, Designy Illustrator
