From Paintings to Prints: How to Create Prints from Visual Artwork

1. Intro: Hi there. My name is Corey J. And I'm a Serialism pop artist. My work consists of vivid paintings that I turned into Prince and cars and selling shops in person and online. This last will show you how to take a piece of visual art like a painting or a drawing, and turn it into Prince that you can sell in person and online, too. For this course, we will be using a scanner as well as the program Adobe. Now you don't have a scanner and don't have the funds to buy a brand new. You can always go and pick one up second hands. There are lots of scares for under $50 that you can find on platforms like Facebook, Marketplace or KG or your local thrift shop for under $50. That will give you really good results. The scanner that I'm gonna be using for today's that you know, I drifted and I was under $50. Also, if you don't have photo shop and you can go on to the website and download a free trial, that will get you started. So now we have everything we need for today's video. Let's get started 2. Prepping for Scanning: this section, we're gonna talk about having your work and your scanner for scanning. The first thing that you want to do is ensure that your artwork is clean and dry, so you want to make sure that you given your our time, it needs to fully dry. And then also, you want to make sure that it's clean of any marks or pencil marks. Anything like that smudges that you want to clean up before you do your scanning. The next thing you want to do is make sure that the scanner is clean before each use, so you want to make sure that there's no extra particles that show up on your scan image. So just go ahead and clean the plate of your scanner. Make sure that there aren't any little specks or anything that could show up on your work. If you are is larger than your scanner, you'll need to decide how many scans you'll need you to complete your rent. Today I'm scanning a 16 by 20 inch painting on my scanner faces nine by full inches, so I will be scanning in four different sections. You need to make sure that you account for some overlap on each scan to make sure that the image and lighting line up properly as well when you bring into fuller shop, so keep that in mind connective standard to the computer and open your scanner program. I am using Windows Fax and Scan, which is program that came with my laptop. Then we'll be transferring the files that I scanned into Photoshopped to stitch together and at. 3. Scanning Your Artwork: in this section, I will teach you how to scan your artwork. The first step is to set up the fields in the scanning program. You want to make sure you are scanning an appropriate resolution. The scam works using DP I or dots Courage. The higher is at the DP. I better the resolution today I'm going to be using a 600 dp I, which will give me a good resolution for most standard sized friends. I would suggest you don't use a DP I lower than 300 for print materials because they will come out and be slightly pixelated. Your next step is the line of your armor. For the first scan today I will be scanning a painting I did on professional canvas caper. But I will also show you how I scan traditional canvases in this. Well, if I know I'm going to be transferred my painting to Prince, I use canvas paper as it is flat and easier to scan. Line up your our order the scanner and make sure the talk edges lined up perfectly as we will be using the top and bottom edges of our work as guidelines to ensure that all the scans fit together as close as possible, but we move on to join them into Photoshopped. For your next scan, you want to make sure you reset the DP I just 600. Then open the scanner and move the image over, making sure that there's at least two inch gap, which will be re scans. Be careful to make sure when you line up the piece at the top that it's perfectly lined up with EJ again. You will want to float your piece around and do the same for the bottom two skins. Once again, making sure lineup the scandalous pose as possible. Once you have your scan files, you want to put them in a folder in an easily accessible place on your computer. 4. Scanning a Stretched Canvas: Hey, guys. So I just want to show you a quick demo on how to skin a stretch canvas like this one here . This stretch canvas is the same size as the campus people that I was using. So it's a 16 by 20 inch campus, and again, I'm gonna do it in four sections. And I just wanted to show you one feature of the scanner. That makes it, uh, three. Great. To scan a picture. Ultra. So when I placed the skin Sorry. Painting down. I'm gonna line it up along the top, and you're just like we did for the other piece. But for this, I'm gonna hold it so that it doesn't go along key. But then also, when I bring the top down, you'll see that this scanner has a little bit of edge. Uh, raises. Nothing. Makes it till over nicely so they can flatten right on top. If your scanner just go straight down without having that for part, it will be a bit more difficult to get your scan, um, the top sitting on it properly. So I would suggest just to use a big panel of some sort on the back just make sure that the lighting is similar. But again, after you have your first scan, you're gonna leave a couple inches in an overlap it on to the next dam so that we bring it into full of felt we could get them lined up properly. So when you do get number one and scan number two, you're gonna poke around the other side and repeat the same process inside. 5. Stitching Scans Together in Photoshop: All right, So let's dish our files together, your shop. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go file and new, and then we're going to select inches here, and we're quite to change it to the exact size of our original scan. Eso The painting that I did was 16 by 20. So that's what we're gonna change too. So it's actually 65 by 20 high, and then we're gonna make sure that we change the resolution to the same resolution we scanned it in, as which was 600. And then the rest of these feels are fine to start. So we're gonna create new, and then we have our new or here. The next thing we're gonna do is we are going to go file and place embedded, and then we're gonna grab our scans. So the first man that we're gonna grab, I will start with the top left corner hit place and then that into the top left corner and you'll see that I have a layer started here for it as well. And then I'm gonna go and place the next one, so place embedded, and then I'm gonna go to the one beside, which is this one here. And what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna try to line it up as close as possible. Just double click there, and I'm gonna go to the magnifying tool and zoom in push space far down to get this little hand grab. And then I'm gonna go back to the move tool And I think my key, my keyboard arrows, just to move it down, um, and be to place. So action is like here. And then I'm gonna scroll down and see how it's lining up at the bottom here. What actually looks really good. So another thing that you can do is you go over to a little I last year or I and click on it and see where the pieces laying underneath. That's very close. Some I'm pretty happy with that stars. So the next thing I'm gonna go go to Dio is I'm gonna go to use Theirry Racer Tool here, and I'm gonna click on this one here and here. You can see the air, the area here, that, uh, where the scanner starts to taper off, it starts to get dark, and you can see the color difference here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to go through. I'm gonna make my a race or a bit bigger, and then I'm going to go in a race, this area here and back up until they lay pretty flat over top of each other. So I'm just raising that area where the lighting of the sander is different. And it's for me, just like an inch between the two. So I'm gonna go ahead or restocks all over here, and if I go too far, you'll see that I've erased all the way over, and I'm seeing everything underneath there. So I'm just undo that there and do a bit more off. Look here, all right. And that's pretty good for now. Let's push control zero and get back to the main screen. You can see that it's starting to look pretty seamless here, So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna drop my third file. Here was the whole shift down and turned around, and then you same thing. Here's no line it up as, uh, closest possible start, and then I'm gonna zoom in. And actually, this one since I already lined up the 1st 2 Really? Well, I'm gonna actually take this one on the later side here and put it behind. So driving into the bottom puts it behind the layers on top of it there. And now I'm just gonna lining up behind here. So now the only thing that I'm affecting is the bottom half of the piece. I'm gonna go ahead and go back and use my He's again. My arrow. He used to get this pretty pretty close. That's pretty close. So now I'm gonna see how it's very close. So now we want to do is I want to soften this line here. This harsh line here. So I'm gonna go to the layer that's sitting on top, which is this layer here. And then I'm gonna click the eraser. Just look down. Look, ok, And then I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing. I'm just gonna race across this line here, try and make it nice and stewed with all the way out there. It's looking pretty kid. So lastly, I'm gonna do a place embedded. A file based embedded for my last piece. Small piece here. I'm going. Teoh turn it around and pop it into place it. I'm gonna do the same thing and grab it. Bring it back. No. Only areas that I have to deal with this this little area here. I'm gonna go to the move to a year, and I'm gonna use the keypad and moving into place feeling like that's looking pretty good . You will notice that it's a little bit off right here. But that's OK, because let me crop it down. I'm gonna crop out this outside border, so don't worry too much about that. So now I'm gonna go to this top layer here, select the top layer on the side panel and then again, go to the eraser tool. I'm gonna erase this part here away more a seamless fit, and then we're going to do the same thing for this here. A little part here. So we have to find fish. While that is, I believe it. Is this here? Right. Go ahead. Go down here. This one. Now, for some reason, you can see here that my scanner makes this weird line, but we're gonna fix that way to fix that. All right, last I have this weird little bit on the lift here. So just going to zoom in, kind of figure out where that's coming from. Oh, and it's this one here. So I'm gonna select that file, and then I'm gonna go to be a racer and Ray, stop your area there, then you out. I feel like that's looking pretty good. So before I started clean of any of these little details here, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to file. I'm gonna go state as and then in my folder, I'm gonna call this dreams Stitch. I see. That way, if I have any issues as I go forward and I want to go back to my main stitch file, I have that. So I like to save a couple files along the way. So before we start to clean up this area, just zoom in here and make sure that everything's lining up pretty closely. It's all looking pretty good. The area looks pretty good. This area looks pretty good. Okay, so the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to the crop tool. I'm gonna crop this. You want to prop it in a little bit past where the Peattie ends. Um, that way you don't have any were shadows or anything on your piece. So I'm gonna cropped at all, and then I'm gonna go to file save as I'm gonna save that as greens that would go ahead and go Teoh file. Sorry, layer, and flatten the image down. So it's just one flower. And this is where I'm going to start to clear to clean up these extra little lines here. I'm just gonna zoom in and I'm gonna go to my clone stamp tool. I'm gonna use it fairly small as you could see here. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna push Ault and get my little trigger here. Click and gather a selection. Right? He signed where this lies. I'm gonna do that all throughout here is keep grabbing beside it. Not so bad. Here, do that. Everywhere. There is this weird lying here to get rid of that. All right. Another thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in really close now and get rid of anything that looks weird, so I can hardly see that there's little here that grabbed out of the standard here so I'm going to remove that by doing the same thing. So pushing old and then grabbing a selection of pixels right beside and then covering them up like looking down and you'll see that you can actually get a really good result totally gone now. So, yeah, I like to do is go in across the top here. Just make sure that none of the edges have any weird were coloring to them. Sometimes you have to crop it in a little bit closer just because of the end of the standard. How it scans These are all pretty good. Another little hair here, so get really great. And once we looked over your whole picture and you're happy with it, you're gonna go file safe as I'm going to see one more file dreams full. So I know that this is my full image. Now, the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to enhance the color a little bit. So didn't goto adjustment, brightness and contrast Been up the contrast just a little bit. You click on three of you and Cassie have that changes things. And then another thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to file image adjustments and I'm going to go to selective color. I mean it. Make sure that I've selected my rez, and I just didn't enhance the magenta loathe piece little bit back. I find that when I scan the image into the computer, the scans are often a quite a bit lighter than the actual piece on if I don't deep in them that they print to light. So I like toe enhance the colors just a little bit on a little bit more contrast for lead prints because it makes more visually appealing print. And it's less washout looking when you get the print back. So what? I'm gonna hit okay and file safe. And there you go. I now have my image here. So now would be the time. If you want to crop it to a certain ratio, you could do that up. Here s O, for example, if I wanted to make a 12 by 16 prints, I take that in there and then I get my crop bars here, and I could go ahead and proper to that size. Um, and then, yeah, you're pretty much done here. So that was the time when you want Oh, uh, ask your printer what steps you need, and then you could use those to send them the proper file. 6. Advice for Printing: So now that you have your work scanned into the computer and running for print, let's talk about printing. If you haven't at home printer, you can go ahead and prove your work after you size until the appropriate signs. But if you don't have a really good quality at home printer, I suggest using a local print shop. Local print shops are really, really good color matching on their prints, and they turn out really, really good quality were I always use a local print shop for mine. Eso What you want to do is you want to contact your local print shop and ask them what specs thing you to set your file up properly for. Brent will let you know things like if you need a bleed in your work or what signs they use or what size paper they have. And then you can go ahead and Satre file properly before you send it over to them. 7. Class Project: So now that's been gone to the class project now that you have all your skills that you need to take your artwork and scan it in and make a print of it, what I want you to do for the class product is grab one of your favorite pieces scanned into the computer and then stitched together in both shot like we just learned. Then, once it's in voter shop and it's all stitched together and dropped to the way that you like it. Take a screenshot of your photo shop program with the peace in it and then posted for us all to see by taking the screenshot, you'll have a very, very low resolution file, also in the photo shop program that only make it really hard for other people to steal. So, yeah, I look forward to seeing your work 8. Outro: I want to thank you guys so much for joining me today. Hopefully I helped you and learn some things that you can fly into your own art practice and make prints of your work. And I hope to see you again soon. I