Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Brad Woodard, I'm the co-founder of Brave the Woods, a design and illustration studio. I've been teaching on Skillshare for five years now. Majority of my courses have been aimed at beginner level students teaching things like introduction to Adobe Illustrator and color theory courses. The students have even a very basic knowledge of digital art, respond really well to those courses. But what about those of you who are analog artists taking your artwork to the computer for the very first time. It's pretty damn intimidating, and I've had to go through the same thing and so as every other artist, so you're not the only one. I started off as a painter and an illustrator, I did sculpting. Making that transition in college was not easy. But think of this class as your prerequisite to all other digital art classes. There's no dumb questions in this class as we explore the very basics of the most common art programs; Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop. We'll cover things like how to use layers and why we use layers, setting up your document, navigation tools, bleeds, resolutions, all those things that you may be wondering about. But sometimes are glossed over in other beginner courses. Basically I want to take away all of your fears of jumping into the digital art world by addressing the pain points that I've had to experience, I'll be using visual aids to help you make that connection between what you know in the analog world and see how that translates onto the computer. My main hope is that you gained enough confidence that you can be excited and comfortable taking other courses, other beginner courses in digital art. Digital art isn't always for everyone, but for me, I love the flexibility it gives me to experiment, to explore. It doesn't really replace all my artwork. I still do a lot of artwork off of the computer, but I love that I have that option and translate my art there into another medium and a medium that's really flexible, scalable, shareable, all of those things. Let's go ahead, set aside all of our fears and doubts about jumping into the digital art world and get started.
2. Setting Up a Document: All right. You guys made it, so let's go ahead and start our very first document. It tends to be the highest point of anxiety for a lot of people. Just because we're opening up a new program, you're going to see this dialog box pop up with lots of different settings, don't worry, we're going to slowly work our way through it. We're going to be bouncing around between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop quite a bit. You'll notice that the interfaces are very similar, which is very handy for us. Once we learn one interface and one set of tools, we're going to be able to bring those over to the next program and learn them very quickly. But I'm trying to not focus on one program because the things that we're learning are very universal amongst all digital art programs. We just happen to be using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Because the two look so much alike, I don't want you to get lost. So pay attention here in the top left to make sure you're in the same program I am, because if you click on Photoshop, you'll see that change. I don't want you to be looking for tools that aren't there because you're in the wrong program. Anytime we're going to start, you're going to be given the option to look at all these other projects that you've been working on and you can click on them and easily access them. Fantastic if you've already had the project, but to start a new one, create new over here. This new document window's going to pop up, take a deep breath, we're going to walk through it. It's not all that bad. Here on the left-hand side, these are just document presets that you've already created. For projects that you've already made, it's going to show them over here to make it a little bit quicker for you so you don't have to manually input all the dimensions or things like that. It'll have that set up for you over here. Later, that's going to be handy. Right now, not so much. We need to set up a brand new document. You can start by naming it Super cool. Why is it so hard to type in front of people? You're not even really here in front of me, but it's still hard to type. Then you have your width and your height. Easy enough, you can input those and if you want to swap them because you wanted to change your orientation from portrait to landscape, you can click there. Then you have your units of measurement. You're probably most familiar with inches, millimeters, and centimeters, don't need really explain that. Pixels, we will explain that further later on in a different video, but that's mainly for web. Then you have Picas and Points, there's a whole history lesson attached there I could give you, but just know that that's mainly for typesetting and laying out type. You're not really going to need that in here. If you do use those, I would assume you'd use them in design because that's where I've used them. You've also [inaudible] Points from when you're trying to choose a font, you want to pick what size it is. They are usually measured in points, so you'll see 12 points, eight points, 11 point fonts, that's where you see those. Let's just stick with inches. You also have Artboards, you can change the number of those. I'll explain what those are. Then you have Bleeds and Color Modes and Raster Effects, and a bunch of other things. Then if we go to Photoshop, you'll notice and we create a new document that'll look pretty much the same. There'll be a few different things on there, like the resolution will be right here and that's a little bit more important here in Photoshop than it is in Illustrator, and we'll explain that further. But the main gist of all of this is, I want to gloss over this really quick because then we're going to go and break down all these individually in different videos because it's important to set up our documents beforehand correctly the way that we want just because it'll save us a lot of hassle later. Just like if you're setting up any art project, you want to make sure you have everything in the right size, the right tools you have. All that ready at your disposal so that you don't have to make those changes later.
3. Bleeds: Let's talk about bleeds for just a second. That's this section right here. Now it's not going to make a whole lot of sense until you get into the document and you see the artwork in there, so I'm just going to make the bleed 0.25 inches and I'll make a lot more sense later. It's automatically changing all of these because I have this linked, If you undo that chain here. You can do each one individually, but you're typically going to want these all the same. You can change that around and then just hit "Create". Now that we have the physical document open, you can see that red bleed line surrounding our art board. Now the art board is just where you're going to put your art. Exactly what it sounds like. it's like your canvas, it's like your paper. This is 8.5 by 11, so think of it as an 8.5 by 11 white sheet of paper. Now if I was going to drop an image on here, you can see that this image is bleeding over the edge. A bleed is when the image goes beyond the art board or beyond the canvas. That's why we have this guide. A lot of the printers will ask for a specific distance that they needed away from the edges. That's the bleed line, that's the bleed distance right there. Everything beyond it could be beyond that because it won't matter, it's just going to be trimmed down anyways. What that means is bleeds are only for printing. You're not going to need them any other time. It's just for when the printer needs to cut them down. But we're going to try printing this a couple of different ways on my home desktop computer and see how it goes. We have this bleeding off of the edge over here to all the edges so we're hoping to get an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper covered with art, all the edges with no border. That's the goal. Then we'll have another one that we're going to test out, we're going to shrink this down. Don't worry about how I'm doing this at the moment. There's a few tools that you won't know how to use at this point. But I just want to show you just to show you how this works with in terms of what a bleed is. I'm going to grab a shape tool here. Actually, I'm going to click on this, "Go to Effect, Go To Crop Marks". These just help you have a line to cut along especially if this is a full bleed of color and you're not sure whether that line is right here. We see the line because it's the edge. But I'm going to add a little bit extra behind it. Let's do this with the eye, which is the eyedropper. Then I'm going to click on the color I want. I'm going to send this to the back which is Command Shift and then your left bracket on your computer. Not a big deal if you don't know that right now or or if you feel like If you don't understand what's going on, I just want to show you for the sake of this demo. Now that it's there, I have that. Now you can see I moved that beyond this. This is basically a bleed line. Command y, you can see an outline version of everything and you can see where the lines are. Now I'll know once I print it off, I can cut along these lines and there's either side is the color. There's not white on one side, so there's no chance I'll leave that little extra bit of white when I cut it. Let's print these both off. Now that you've seen the document on the computer, this is what it looks like printed. Now you'll notice immediately that this is white border and we didn't want that. We wanted the image to print all the way off the edge. The problem is we're using a home desktop computer that doesn't allow you to print a full bleed, meaning it's going to leave this border along there because it can't print all the way to those edges usually because there's like a little roller and they're feeding the paper through and it's not able to print over where the roller is, so you're left with this. On the actual file we saw that we went past the art board, the artwork went all the way up to here to our bleed line. You have to know the size of the printers output and so you could go to a print shop and they can print on larger sheets of paper. Because if I want this to be 8.5 by 11 in the end all the way to the edge, it's going to have to be printed on a larger sheet of paper and then have those cut lines those bleed lines. Here will have little crop marks, so we can cut it out to the 8.5 by 11 size. Just like if we added the crop marks on there and now you can see it on this other piece of paper where we had to just make the image smaller to print on this specific printer. But it allowed us to keep the crop marks and so you can see on there it goes to these crop marks to allow you to cut it. When I'm cutting in, as you can see, another reason why you use crop marks is because then when you're cutting, if I was to cut like this, this as if I didn't have the crop marks, for example, you'll notice that I'm cutting off and there's this little, you may not be able to see it too well, but there's a little white edge. It's hard to get it off without cutting a little bit of the art off for leaving. It's hard to get it right in the middle. That's what you leave that little buffer there. When you're cutting or trimming you're not cutting off any of your actual art. You're not leaving a little white edge. You're cutting all the way down and it's going to be perfect every time. It helps printers out when you're taking it to them and it helps you out if you're cutting it out by yourself, but that's how bleeds work and that's how they look.
4. Bonus: Bleeds in Photoshop: For those of you just learned about bleeds, and now want to go print something using Photoshop, I feel bad because there really isn't any bleed settings in Photoshop, but there is a way to do it. There just aren't any normal settings. I feel like I need to just give you this quick bonus video so you're not completely lost while you're waiting to take another course that teaches you that so good. This is Photoshop create new. You'll notice that there isn't that option to set up your bleeds, so just even if you go into advanced options, it's not going to let you, so just go ahead and create at 8.5 by 11. I'll just keep it the same dimensions. I'm going to drag in that image again. I'm going to size it up a little bit. Now what we're going to have to do is something really weird and I'm not sure why they don't have bleed settings. You're just going to go on the side here, see these easier rulers. If you don't have them hit command R and they should pop up and disappear every time he hit it. When they're there, these are your rulers which are really handy. What you're going ton do is just go all the way to the perfect edge of your document, of your art board here. Just to the edge as close as you can get at. Drag this one down all the way to the bottom, and then what we're going to do is go to, "Image" and go to, "Canvas size." They call it a canvas in here, it's an art board and illustrator, same thing. What you're going to do is you're going to just make it a little bit bigger. If you wanted your bleed to be, let's just say it's a half inch bleed. Then we're going to add a half-inch to this width, so nine, and then we're going to add, [inaudible] , whatever, 11.5. Then we're going to click, "Okay." You'll notice now in our document and has that extra little buffer that you can call your bleed. Then if you need to add, if you needed to make this bigger field, it's not big enough. Luckily, your artwork, just this background, just plain. Not what I'll do actually I'll just make it bigger. I go, "Command T", so I can transform this illustration and move it around and click, "Okay." There you have it. Now it has that extra little bleed settings. Now when you go and send it off to a printer, just say the final cut size or you know what that final dimension is. The final dimensions or you want them to be 8.5 by 11 cut down, but you gave it a half-inch bleed. All they have to do is cut in half inch on all the edges and it works just the same. That's how you do bleeds in Photoshop.
5. Color Modes: When you're setting up a document, it's really important to get the color mode correct. We're in Photoshop right now, so it gives you a few more options than Illustrator. Illustrator only has RGB and CMYK, which is pretty much the ones that you'll use. Bitmap and Lab Color not so much. Grayscale is just black and white. But the reason why it's important to choose these is because they give you different ranges of color and different vibrancy in terms of your colors. RGB might be more bright and give you a lot more color options than what you would say CMYK. If you're going to create your whole piece of art in RGB with these bright colors, and then you go to a printer who prints in CMYK. Your pictures will look a lot more dull. You're going to want to make sure that you change that beforehand and create the file with that color setting in mind. Let's go ahead and start. We'll talk about the difference between RGB and CMYK. Your two main color modes are CMYK and RGB. You might be more familiar with CMYK if you've ever changed the ink cartridges on your home printer. You would have seen cyan, magenta, yellow, and key or black. Adding those colors together create any colors you need for print. RGB on the other hand, red, green, and blue, creates color by lighting up pixels on a screen. CMYK for print typically and RGB typically for any sort of screens or Web. You'll have more color options available with RGB and will be more vibrant.
6. Resolution: Resolution. It's not that fun to talk about. It's not that fun to learn about, but it is one of the most important things that you can be doing when you're setting up your document. You want to get this right. We're working in Photoshop because we're dealing with pixels and pixels have to do with resolution. Vectors? Not so much, which is Adobe Illustrator and so I'll talk about the difference between vectors and pixels here in a second. Right now for setting up a new document in Photoshop, you're going to want to look right here at this section called resolution. Now it says I have it set at 300 pixels per inch that's what PPI stands for. If you've heard that before, you'll see it right over here. And pixels per square inch, it's basically how many pixels you're going to use to create your artwork. The more pixels you have per inch, the finer the detail on the print, and it'll be sharper and clearer and when you're setting these up, you have to think of what the output going to be. I typically just default at 300, just so it'll make it easier for you as well. I default at 300, which makes it clear and crisp, but it's also a large file size. The only reason people would use them smaller is if they didn't need to retain that much information, use that many pixels, it was going to live a lot smaller. For example, on web where a lot of people will do it at 72 pixels per square inch. The thing is, if you start at 72 and decide later you want to make this thing larger. It'll be blurry pixelation blocky, all of the above, and it will not look good, think about the output if you know, it's just going to be a living online, it's going to be small. You're not going to want it any bigger then you can keep it at 72. Otherwise, default at 300 PPI, especially if you're going to be printing things. What's the difference between vectors and pixels? Well, pixels are what your screen is made up of and it may be made up of hundreds of thousands to millions of these different little pixels. And each pixel lights up to a specific color to reveal an image. If you were to think of that as a grid, I can do this nice little apple on.You can see every little square would be considered a pixel and when you light them up with a specific color, it reveals that image for you and in this case, I'm using a low resolution not very many pixels are being used. You can clearly see the jagged edges and the jagged pixels. If I were to add more pixels per square inch at a higher resolution. You'll get something closer to this. Now admittedly, the illustration is not great and I ran out of sharpie markers halfway through but I think the idea holds. You can start seeing now that you are getting these curved edges whereas before you saw the real blocky edges and when you can start seeing that the more pixels you add, the clearer the image is going to be. Unless of course, if you're going to take this little guy and you wanted him, you didn't use any pixels, then you'd have to view it a whole lot further away or a whole lot tinier for it to be clear. Otherwise it's going to look nice and jagged and that what pixels are those individual little squares that make up the image. Now we're here in Adobe Illustrator because we're dealing with vectors. The coolest thing about vectors, is the fact that they're infinitely scalable, It doesn't matter how large you make thick the edges in the image quality is going to stay exactly the same, crisp and clear, no pixelation no, jagged edges are blurriness. It's going to be exactly the same and how does it do that? Because you can zoom in as far as you want and it's going to stay exactly the same. That's because vector graphics are made using mathematical equations that calculate where the edges of the shapes sit in relationship to one another. If I made that bigger, it's going to be taking the tip of that antler to the bottom of that hoof and it's kind of measure that distance and make sure in relationship to all these other edges that they stand exactly the same. When I make it bigger, it's going to build it bigger and keep it completely crisp. Now the opposite happens when you're dealing with pixels, when you're talking about a pixelated image. You can also call it a raster image and that's what this is, a made it in Photoshop, brought it in here as a JPEG file now if I zoom in or if I enlarge this file just like I did, my other moves here, starts to look a little different, a little blurrier. The edges here are pixelated and blocky that's because the computers guessing it's not using that mathematical equation, that it's using for vectors and it's guessing what those shapes will look like and what this whole image will look like when you make it at a larger size. Why are we using vectors for everything? Because vectors are great, but they don't necessarily get you that fine quality that you could get from pixels. Think of photos, all those little details that you can pick up in photos to make something look photorealistic. You lose that with vectors because it starts to build out little shapes and it doesn't quite look as crisp and that's just because pixels you can get a lot crisper image. They're still definitely useful, and a lot of times when you're doing things like digitally painting and things like that, it looks a lot more. You can get a lot more of those fine details with using pixels. But vectors, if you can make things using vector, it's something that you want, that you can blow up as big as you'd ever want it. Think of logos where you can put them on the side of a truck or you can put them on a tiny little spot on a website as a little icon and then you could keep that same file for all those things, which is amazing. So that's the difference between vectors and pixels.
7. Artboards and Workspace: Well, we finally finished or documents setup. It took us a long time, but I wanted to make sure you set it up correctly. You understood why you were setting up the way you did. Now we want to talk about our art board in our workspace. Let's start with art boards. They're basically canvases. Think of an artist busting out the paints, painting on this canvas, getting paints everywhere on the canvas, off the canvas. They'd have their tools all around them and all of this mess that they make at the very end of it when they pick up that canvas, the only art that's going to be hung up on that wall is what is on that canvas. That canvas is your art board. Let's first take a look at art boards in Adobe Illustrator. When you set up your document, you went ahead and added a height and a width right here. That was designating the size of your art board but let's say later on you want to change the size of that art board. It's really easy. You just go to document, set up, edit art boards, and just click and drag. Or you can just add a new value into these little areas up here, your height and your width. You can also add a brand new art board by just clicking on this little icon over here, the little turn page. It will add one the exact same dimensions. You can also delete that art board. If you wanted to add another art board, you can even just click off to the side and drag and create any custom size you desire. Art boards in Photoshop are a little bit different, mainly because I have no flipping clue. They really should be exactly the same as illustrator. They're both Adobe products. I don't know why they had to change them. There's no reason to but in Photoshop they are. Let me try to make sense of this nonsensical situation. We're setting up a new document. You have the option to make this an art board or just leave it as a canvas and I'll show you where that is. I'm going to just leave it unchecked and let's see if something actually happens. Well, it still created something and it should be called an art board but here they call it a canvas. You've got image canvas size and you can change it just like you're doing in document setup in Illustrator. Let's just change it to 5 by 5. It magically changes it to that size. The only thing is you're not able to make multiples of these like you would normal art boards in Illustrator. How do you do that? Well, you have to do a new document, but it has to be set up as a art board. Now you get the magical little word right here that says it's an art board. Then if you want to add more of them, you have to go up to layer. Yeah, layer, say "New," and go to art board. Create a new art board. You can set, reset the size, the dimensions that you'd like or keep it the same. It creates another art board. Yeah, I don't know why they don't just call them art boards and never call them canvases and just always have the option to go between one art bored or multiples. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's how it works. Everything that's not your art board just consider it your desktop. You have this canvas, I can't call it the canvas now, you have this art board that's on top of your desk, this dark gray area. You can be drawing all over it and it won't let you go off of it. It's different in Illustrator, in Illustrator you can actually move elements or create elements outside of your art board and on top of your desk. That's one of the unique things about Illustrator. It makes it really nice to work with because then you can create things off to the side, change, the colors, keep some options over here. Then you can arrange it on your art board. Then when you're done and you go to print this, it'll only print what's on your art board. All the rest of the stuff out here will only be saved when you save it as an Illustrator file, which we'll talk about at the very end but just know that it's a really cool function but this part acts as your desk and this part acts as your art board. Outside of your art board in your desk space, you're surrounded by tons and tons of tools. It's like if your own little space to create art at home on your desk had every tool imaginable and you had it all organized, and then someone else came in and reorganized everything is really hard to find things. You're going be taking lots of other courses beyond this that will help you pinpoint what those tools are but in Illustrator and Photoshop you can rearrange that space as you continue on and learn what tools you use so that they can be more accessible to you. There's a few different ways to do that. This entire interface here is called your workspace. So if you go up here on the top here it says essentials classic because I'm boring, I guess when it comes to how I lay out my illustrator interface but you can go down and maybe you're more into painting in Illustrator. You can click some of these def, these little presets that pull up a lot of the things that many painters would enjoy if they were going to be coming into Illustrator. The same would be for web. It would change up the different tools that are handy for you. I like to keep it at essentials classic because I'm boring and I know everything is now, but it's hard for me to switch but you can also have all these little arrows and things to expand different panels to see exactly what you're working with. I like to hide them actually and then go into each of them individually. It's really up to you and you can move these. I mean, you can drag and drop these and move these heart, rearrange them however you like. So it can make your workflow that much smoother but you also, if you don't know where something is like a tool, there's a couple of things that you can do. You can go up to the window and you go down here and you can click and maybe I don't have, let's see, SVG interactivity, I guarantee I don't have that one up. Click on it, and it pops up for you in a little window. Then you can drop it into your toolbar. You can use that at any other point. You can also go if you can't find it at all or you don't want to do something, you can always go to help search. Let's just say I need to do and look for my type tool. It'll highlight it there. You can just hover over it and it'll show you where things are. The same thing goes in Photoshop. The help bar, the window to bring up new tools. Your main tools are always in window. Then you can change up your workspace. Just the same, but it's looks a little bit different. You click down here and you can go through, and let's say you're a photographer, you click on it, it'll change it. So you have your histogram, you have your swatch libraries. A little bit different. Motion might look a little bit different. You have your little timeline bar down here for your keyframes but I just like it set to brad watered, which is what I always keep it out. This works for what I do. That's your workspace. You have your workspace and contains all your tools, your art board, your desktop, everything that you need. The next thing we want to do is talk about how to navigate through it.
8. Basic Navigation: Here are the three basic navigation tools for both Illustrator and Photoshop. A lot of these tools share names, even the same icon, but they act a little bit differently in each program. In Illustrator, we'll start over here on the left toolbar, oh, and if you hover over any of these icons because you don't know what they're called, it'll pop up what their name is and that helps out quite a bit. Let's go down to the hand tool first. This is just a general allowing you to move around your entire workspace. It's doesn't grab anything specific, just lets you move your whole workspace around. You can also hit your "Spacebar", and it does the same thing. So if I Click on another one but a hit Spacebar, you'll notice that it goes back to my Hand Tool. Then you have your zoom icon and you can click and it'll incrementally get closer, it'll zoom in. If you want to zoom out, you hold "Option" or "Alt" on your keyboard, and notice the minus sign goes in the magnifying glass and you click and it'll zoom out for you. Fun fact, if you are all over the place and you want to quickly get back, reset it to center, just hit "Command 0", and it will bring it right back to the center at full size. Just a nice little shortcut, "Command 0". Now this is a unique tool. This next tool is unique to Illustrator only, and they are actually two tools. It's the Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool. So this first and the black arrow, if you click on it, and you click on any object that just moves the object, and that's it. It just makes your life easier, by been able to manipulate specific things. If you want to change the shape of any of these things, you have to use the Direct Selection Tool, and there's, you'll see all of a sudden when I click on things, you'll see all these different little things, little dots are called anchor points. I'm not going to go into what anchor points are all that except for that's what makes up the shapes. When you take an intro to Illustrator class, hopefully mine, you'll understand exactly what those mean. But for the sake of this video, when you click on one of these, you can start manipulating the shape by moving those anchor points. That's what the Direct Selection Tool does. So over here on Photoshop, two of those tools are exactly the same as Illustrator. You have the Hand Tool, to let you move things around. You might find to be a little bit frustrating because it won't let you move anything at a specific size. Usually [inaudible] to zoom in a little bit further, which you still have the magnifying glass, which is your zoom tool, and you click and zoom in and then you go back to your Hand tool, and notice that it works almost exactly the same as Illustrator, just slightly more frustrating. Yeah, you can even hold the Alt Option to zoom back out. Instead of a Selection Tool or the Direct Selection Tool, you just have the one and it's called the Move Tool. That's just if you want to move as specific element and it has to be on its own layer. If everything is a single layer, the entire thing will move. So we'll talk about the importance of layers next, but that's just how that works in Photoshop, the Move Tool.
9. Layers: If there is one section of this entire class that I wouldn't want you to miss, it would be layering. Layering saves your life. You do it all the time as an analog artist, but sometimes there's a disconnect when you're trying to bring it over to the computer. It just seems not super intuitive, but once I'd talked you through it, you'll be like, "This is amazing" because there's so many different options that you can have that things you cannot do analog and it'll blow your mind and hopefully it'll help you out and that gets you really excited to get on the computer. Some common forms of layering you're probably familiar with, it would be using things like tracing vellum, just going over your original sketch and cleaning it up with tracing vellum, or even just going on the light table and taking your original drawing and doing the same type of thing, or layering multiple layers of acetate, or even a painting, just painting different layers of paint. That's all different types of layering that you do, and you can do so much more on the computer. Layers in Illustrator and Photoshop are basically the same thing. I'm just going to stick with Photoshop just to make your life a little easier, so not the toggle back and forth. If I was to collapse this window over here, the layers icon looks like two stack sheets of paper, which is super fitting. Then when you have, it will look like this down here. Now, I've opened up a file that I've already created and I want to show you the different layers and then I'll show you how they work with each other. You'll notice that I have a sketch layer. You can turn these on, this little eyeball here, you can turn it turn to see the layer or to not see it. It's not going to delete it. You can delete a layer by hitting the trash can, but if you just want to keep them there and just not look at it at the moment, then you can just click the eyeball. Now, if I click on these little arrows here, I can open up different folders that I've created to see all the different layers that I've created. Why are we doing different layers? Just like if you were to make something analog, if I want to go back and edit specific parts of this, let's say colors or if I want to put something else, I'm like, "I made this but I wanted the type here", let's see, I have it all labeled. You can also label these by if you double-click on them, so it makes it a little easier for you. Let's say I want to do the ice cream type. Let's say I wanted that in front of the cookies instead of behind them. I actually did have it in front before and I want to move them behind. I'm going to bring this all the way to the top, all the way to the top, and you'll notice now that it's over top of the cookies. That's the benefit. If you were just to paint this, in real life, you would have had to color or paint over top of this, but it's just so much easier just dragging and dropping the layers so you can move. You can see how they can come to the front or to the back, which is incredibly handy. I can go back, and let's say I just wanted to change the color. I'm not going to go through colors now, but just to show you, I could change the colors of just that specific part of my illustration. When I'm working with layers, I do so many different ones and I try to label them and keep them separate. I try not to flatten it. When you flatten things, for example, let's take everything here, I'm going to click all of these layers. I can right-click on it. Wait. I can right-click on it and I can merge layers right here. If I merge them all together, that is one layer. Now, if I was to try to move it around, now I'd have to individually. All this information behind here, there's no rest of that A, it's gone now. It's part of this image. Keeping layers, I could go back and adjust and put things in front, put things in back, change the colors, all of that, I can do that because I made so many layers and then try to keep them organized so you can easily maneuver throughout your illustration. Now that you've seen one of my illustrations with the complex layering, let's go really simple just so it's a 100 percent clear. Now, in this simple illustration, I have a few different aspects that I want to use to show off some of the things that you can do with layers. This first part, like a sketch, for example, this little sketch portion, you can do exactly what you did. Let's turn these layers off. Just like you are to use tracing vellum. You can go over here to opacity and knock that back so it's really light, and then you can create another layer down here and put it on top, and then you can start drawing all over again and just clean it up. Just like you would with tracing vellum. I'll clean up that lightning bolt shape. But you can still keep that layer underneath. Let's see this. Now I have this original layer. You can delete it by hitting the trash can. Right now, delete this layer, your other one that's turned off. You have to make sure you're highlighted on the one that you want to interact with, and then you can delete that layer if you like. It will ask you. Now, I don't want to do it right now. Then I have this cleaned up version and I could bring back my other shapes. Again, you can just click and drag and move those shapes around. You can do different things to this specific shapes if you like. You can even change, not just the opacity, but you can also go over here and you have these transparency options for your layers. Things like multiply, where it multiplies the two colors together, like two pieces of colored acetate overlaid. You can do all sorts of color screens, endless. There's so many different possibilities. You can play around with them and I'm sure there's specific courses that will go over those. I just want you to know that those are a possibility. Let's go bring this back. If you just wanted to do an overall color, so I put that as a color down here instead of just normal, where I would just fill the whole thing, or you can do multiply and you can see, then I would change the opacity. Basically what it's doing is it's saying, how much of that effect do you want? You can knock it back just a tiny bit, just like you're using Instagram filters. You can go through and change it up, add more yellow if you'd like, or go to color and do something very similar, and it just adds it to the colors that are on that layer. But it's really, really good to know how all these things work and being able to just use layers in your Illustration will save you so much time and hassle. It really gets addictive. It will make it so that you'll be wanting to create on the computer a little more often. Sometimes, at least for me, because then I know I can highly organize my illustrations and go back, which is really, really important for working with clients that I can come back and change those things. Maybe just change a color on one layer very, very quickly. You can also, just so you're aware on how to group things, if you hold Shift and click, and then click on this little folder here, it automatically adds it into its own group. Then you can turn off the entire group or just individual things within the group, individual layers. It's just another way to further organize. Then there's a whole lot other buttons that you don't need to know about right at this moment, but just understand that that's what layers are and it's important to use them.
10. Color Tool: This is just a quick basic overview of color. Now, a lot of your other intro courses that you'll be taking, they'll go over this more extensively. For this, I just really want you to feel familiar with the interface and understand just the really basic things so that you can feel comfortable moving on. That's basically the same in Photoshop and Illustrator so we're just going to stick in illustrator and review these sliders over here, this color panel. You might not see it before, but it looks like a color palette. You click on it. This also might be shrunk and you'll be like, what the devil. All you have to do is hover over it and clicking the double arrow pop-up, you can click and drag. Basically, it's like a color poker. You just go ahead and click and you'll see that it changes the color [inaudible] that region that you poked. Now, it's playing out color poker. Spectrum of colors, the RGB spectrum is the more technical term, but then you also have these little sliders here, red, green, blue. We already learned that. You can manually input percentages. Let's just say I want 20% red. You'll see that that changes, or you can just click and drag and get it to the right color that you want. Now there's all different ones. If you go in here, the other color modes that we had gone over, you can even go just to gray scale and so you're just really work in black to white. You can poke it if you like. There's also HSB, which some people find just easier to work with because it's a little bit more natural, but I'll typically stick in RGB or CMYK. HSB means just you have your hue, so you can go up and down the rainbow, the saturation, just more of that color, more intensity in that color, or more or less black so you can make it darker. Maybe that's easier for you to use. I don't use it very often, but that doesn't mean anything. You can do it. CMYK, same thing. You can change those percentages and you can keep messing around to get the perfect color for you. You can add a little bit more yellow if you want it. This is why I feel most comfortable using. Just if I think about it, you're just like okay, I want to add a little magenta to this. This is going to make it a little redder. I'm going to make it a little bit darker, add a little bit more black. You can play around all you want with that, but that's the basic introduction to color and if you want to change the color of things, you have an eyedropper tool all the way over here. If you want to pull the color from things, it's your eye key on your keyboard, and so if I have this section highlighted and I hit the eyedropper tool, I can swap out that color. That's an illustrator. It's slightly different in Photoshop, but not important to go over right now. It will have an eyedropper tool though in Photoshop that's very similar.
11. Saving Files: You've made this awesome piece of artwork, but you want to share it and you don't know how. So let's talk about saving our files. We're going to be jumping back and forth through an illustrator and Photoshop. So you might as well just start here in Photoshop. Let's say we finished this project, and we want to save it. Go to the top left here at file, go down to Save As, you'll get this box here, you can rename your file to whatever you'd like, and then it'll have this little extension is what you call it. Everything a little dot JPEG, everything after that's called your file name extension. That's basically saying what type of file this is, how you want to save all of this information. That depends on where you're going to send it, and how it's going to live. We'll talk more in depth about that in a second. But you can change that extension manually right down here. You can go change it to a Photoshop PDF and I'll say dot PDF or just a Photoshop file, any of those types of things. Then I have it. I have it on the Mac, so this is how it will look for me, but you can choose where you want that file to be saved when you're done, and then all you have to do is click Save. There's also another way, so that's like your general ways to save it if you want to retain as much information on those files, but say you don't want this, you don't necessarily need this file to be that large. It can be a little bit smaller, load quicker. That's typically for a web. So that's how I see the export function. It's just another way of sending it off, but you go to export and you can export as right here, and then it gives you a rendering. You can get more detailed in how much information you want to save in this file and what the actual size will be at the end. You can crop it down and save our period of the former. You can save it as a GIF, SVG, all these different extensions for different things. PNG or JPEG when I'm doing it online. I maybe over your head at this point, but I just want you to know that, that exist. That's what the export is, that there's a couple of, and that's the same as an illustrator. So an illustrator, we'll talk about this in a second. Let's say I'm going to save this file. We're going go to File, Save As again, it does the same thing down here. You have EPS, SVG. There's a difference on this one. Use art boards when you're saving it. If you click that, it'll keep the art boards because you're not opening up this file, unless it says illustrator. If it says illustrator automatically does that because it's going to just open it up using this program. So it'll pop up exactly like you created it with all your layers and everything. But if it's not an illustrator, it's in a different program that you're opening it up in, you need to assign and say like, yes, use the art boards. I don't want it just to pick up everything. We wanted just to pick up the information that's in the art boards. Then you do the same exact thing right there, name it, there's your file extension, save, and you're done. If you want us to export it as well, which is the same thing we had talked about export as more web options. Basically, you have those options as well. There's a bunch of them. Definitely no need to go into them all right now. This is my best attempt at demystifying, saving files. The best way I could try and explain it is that you're packaging up physical boxes full of things and you're sending them places. Just think of that's the equivalent to what we're doing when we're saving files. So we have this piece of art, let's say we're working in Adobe Illustrator. When we're going to save that file like we've just done, we give it a name, and then we give it a dot, What? a dot AI or dot PDF, whatever it is. If we're in Illustrator, and we want to save it as a working files, what we call it, which means it's within that program that it has all the layers, everything that you have when you created it in that program. If someone opened that up in Adobe Illustrator, it would look exactly the same for them. You got to loaded full of all the shapes, all of the colors, everything, the layers, everything is all just packaged nicely in there for someone who has Adobe Illustrator. It's sent in that language for that program. If you opened it up and other programs, it won't read it the same way. Same with Photoshop, if you have dot PSD here, you can load it full of all this. It has all the layers, has everything in it, but if you're going to be sending this to another person who doesn't have Photoshop, they're not going to be able to open up that file or it's not going to look correct. They're not going to have access to all that. So if you want to send a working file to somebody that has all the pieces, all the layers, you can't send it. If they don't have that program, then you can't send it as though. So what's your backup? So this is what you save your main files of on your own computer so you can go back and continue saving it, that's how every project you save it as a dot AI dot PSD, and keep those as like your main working files. Then you can go back and save them as whatever else you want if you're going to send them for other uses, which are these other extensions here. Let's say we've created our art in Illustrator or Photoshop, but we want to send it to somebody who doesn't have either one of those programs or we're going to post it online and it doesn't even read those file formats. What do we do? We're just going to have to create different extensions and think of them as different languages. So when you're packaging up the information, like we have here these little instruction manuals that are in specific languages that can only be read by specific programs if that makes sense. So an illustrator, if this is a dot AI, that's a specific language only an illustrator, can understand that language. There's some more generic, more universal languages and that's what these other extensions are. You may also notice that there's two columns here, vector and raster, that's because the file types here is slightly different. The way that they package them is different. So if you remember from our older videos, the vectors are infinitely scalable, and they're using some mathematical formula to figure out the distances and recreate the artwork. That's why these little blueprints are here because that's the way that it packages them. So these are typically able to have more, so you can save them with like layers and things because it's allowing them to recreate the art work without losing any quality. Raster, you're going to lose quality if you change it at all, but these things are going to be still be able to change it. These are going to be flat images with just the straight data exactly how it was built. So let's look at these different extensions then and see how we might be able to use these. So EPS, that's a universal vector file. If they don't have Adobe Illustrator sending it as an EPS file is a really great option. People can open it up using all different types of programs that will read vectors. So EPS is great if you're creating logos for a company and you want to save it there so that anybody can open it. PDFs are basically made by Adobe, and they allow you to do so much that you can have flat images, you can save different pages. So many things you could do, but I put them under here as well because if you're saving it as a vector PDF, then you'll still be able to mess with it with layers. The other PDF over here, I'll just jump you right over to the raster side. PDFs are typically how you'd save images like if you wanted to save multiple pages. If you have multiple art boards, you can actually save it as multiple pages. Those each art board makes up a page that it saves it into a PDF and keeps it in one document, which is really nice. But you can also save like really high res images as PDFs and send those off to the printer. They typically like those because it's an easy language to read and it saves all the quality that you need. You can also save it as a high res JPEG if you're talking about your artwork or a low-res JPEG, JPEG are pretty awesome. You can use them on web if you just like, want to save it as a smaller JPEG, you can save it for web, or you can save a really high res image as a JPEG. PNG is mainly for web. It takes away a lot of the detail in data and then tiffs, keeps a lot of the information, but that's typically, people usually use that for photography. I know this is a lot of information, so I hope this helps, honestly the best way to do this, since we didn't dive crazy deep into this, just ask whoever you're going to be sending the file to, how they want that file saved, what extension they wanted to see. If it's a printer, they might be wanting it as a PDF. Then you can even ask them more specific questions on how they want that saved, so that you do it properly. But just know, where it's going to be sent to and make sure you know the language or the file extension that you need to use to send it. Always hold the Han to those working files. Hold onto that AI and PST files, those are the original files, and you can save them as any other type of thing, but make sure you keep those original files so you can continue doing so if you need different applications or to send them different places. So I hope this helped.
Brad Woodard, Illustrator + Graphic Designer
