From Paper to Screen: Digitally Editing Your Artwork in Adobe Photoshop

1. Let's Go!: Hi, everyone. I'm back for another class. For those that don't know me, my name is Cat Coquillette, and I'm the founder of CatCoq, which is my illustration and design brand. I'm 29 years old and I'm a professional illustrator and designer, as well as a full-time traveler. Thanks to my success with licensing and print on-demand companies, I'm able to fully support myself and travel the world. During my class today, I'm going to show you how I get my work from paper to computer, so I can digitally edit and enhance my paintings to create top-selling pieces of artwork. There is so much more to the process than just handing in your artwork and uploading it to sell online. What you do in between those actions can make the difference between an average piece and a bestseller. I'll walk you step-by-step through my entire process and I'll show you all the tips I use to increase my chances of getting artwork noticed and creating a viable income as an artist. I'm coming to you from Chiang Mai, Thailand, it's my current home away from home. I'm originally from Kansas City, USA, but in the past six months I've been in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea. Traveling inspires my artwork, so my portfolio lately feels like a visual diary of all the incredible places I visited; from lush jungles and mountains to restaurants and city life. Can you tell that I have a thing for watercolors and cute animals? In conjunction with traveling 24/7 and running my own business, I license my artwork to various companies and my income is 90 percent passive, which means I don't need to punch a clock to get paid. Passive income is the money I continue earning long after the work has been completed. For me, that means creating an illustration and then earning royalties from sales off that piece in the following weeks, months, and years. This is what allows me to live my life as a permanent traveler. As long as I have creative inspiration flowing and excellent Wi-Fi, I can continue earning a living. One key factor with succeeding with passive income streams like licensing and print on-demand, is making sure that your artwork translates beautifully from paper to screen. My class today is going to be all about that process, as well as optimizing your artwork once it's digitized. We'll cover all the basics from scanning in your work, to digitally cleaning up your artwork by removing the paper backgrounds, pencil marks, and any sorts of errors. I'll also use some of my own paintings as an example to show you how to explore color variation, create patterns, and adjust your work for various template dimensions. I'll also show you how I save my files for optimization, and what I always keep in mind when I upload my work and share it with the world. We'll begin the class by going over how to scan in your work and get it from paper to screen, and then we'll work on specific techniques for optimizing your artwork. This is an intra level class and we'll be using Adobe Photoshop to edit our work. You don't have Photoshop, no problem; you can sign up for a free trial online in just a few minutes. The best way to get your paintings digitized is through scanning even if you have to scan in multiple images and fuse them together in Photoshop. Don't worry, we'll cover that too. If you don't have your own scanner and you aren't quite ready to invest in one, just Google artwork scanning services plus your city name and you should be able to find a business that offers scanners for use. As a bonus for this class, I'm including a free digital guide that covers all the basics of what we talked about today, plus a high-res watercolor paper texture so you can get started immediately with digitizing your own artwork. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking that, Follow button up top. This means that you'll be the first to know when I post giveaways for a free year of Skillshare, or I launch a new class, or just have some cool announcements to share with my students. Ready to pick up techniques and make your own artwork shine? Hit "Enroll" and let's get started. 2. Scanning Your Artwork: All right, let's talk, scanning. I prefer to scan may work rather than photograph it for a few reasons. One, it's easier. I don't have to mess with camera settings or get the perspective exactly right. I also don't have to worry about lighting and can scan at anytime of the day regardless if it's sunny or not. Two, I generally paint on 11 by 15 inch paper, which is pretty easy to scan since it's fairly small. Even though my flatbed is only nine by 12, I can just scan in two pieces and fuse together in Photoshop, which is what we'll learn how to do in the next video. I use an Epson V550 Photo scanner. While I travel, I use a Canon scanner that's lightweight and easy to toss into my backpack. I scan my paintings at a super high resolution, usually around 1600 DPI or so. The files are huge, but this allows me a lot of flexibility. You can always scale down, but once you start scaling up, you'll lose quality. So it's better to start with a higher RES file than you actually need. It's important to clean your scanner bed before every use as well. You'd be pretty surprised about how much grit winds up in there. It's dust, eraser, scraps, and sometimes dried flakes, the paint as well. Scanning in my work usually takes several minutes, and I usually hold my hands over the lid to make sure the paper's pressed really firmly against that glass. You have to stay incredibly still while it's scanning or else the area where you moved will start to blur. I try to line up my paper as best as I can while I scan, and this helps when I'm going to be fusing two scans together into one image. If both files are lined up well, it's less work on my end when I adjust them to blend together in Photoshop. You'll learn more about this later in the next video. Also, if you're going to be scanning in multiple images of the same artwork, make sure you're always laying the paper out in the same angle. The reason this is important is because when the laser highlights the paper, a slight shadow is cast over the texture of your paper. If you have to do a multiple scan of the same artwork and you weren't consistent with the angle in which you laid your paper out, the textures won't match up and half your painting will look slightly different than the other half. If you have the option, you should save your files as TIFFs. This will give you a truer scan and prevent quality loss that would otherwise occur in JPEG. Once you have your image or multiple images of your piece saved as TIFF files on your computer, we'll learn how to fuse them together into one image. Let's start the next lesson and learn how. 3. Cleaning Up Your Work in Photoshop: This video is all about cleaning up your artwork once it's been scanned in and it's digitized. We'll fuse multiple scans together, remove the paper background and replace it with a fresh new layer and erase out any imperfections like pencil marks are paint splatters. Let's get started. Now we've got two scanned files of the same artwork and we need to fuse them together in Photoshop to make one cohesive file that looks flawless. Here's what they look like separately, and here's a sneak peek of what it will turn out looking like. Everything blends together really well. You can't tell that it was two separate files that were fused together. In addition to merging the scans into one file, we'll also be cleaning up our artwork to remove pencil marks, errors, and imperfections that came through in the scanning process. We're also going to be removing that paper texture background from the illustration and adding it into a new one on a separate layer, so it looks like this. Let's get started. First things first, we need to merge our two separate files into one flawless illustration. We're going to start by pulling both into a master file, which I have ready over here. I call it a template.psb. The reason I saved as a psp is because I'm able to save a file that's over two gigs. Not all my files are that huge, but if I have a ton of color palette options and layers, then sometimes they can get to be that big. I use this master file for all of my paintings and call it template because that's exactly what it is. It contains two layers, my signature layer, as well as the paper texture layer. It looks like it's white, but when you zoom in, you can really see that actual texture. My template file is saved at roughly 31 by 42 inches at 300 DPI and is in RGB color mode. I chose these dimensions because they're similar to my original painting dimensions, and I chose this size because it's large enough to be printed on any product including mall tapestries, bedding, and all wall art sizes. Always make sure you're in RGB mode if you're going to be uploading your work on print on demand sites to sell. If you use CMYK, the colors will get wonky when you upload. I've added the multiply transparency effect to my signature layer. Let me show you right down here. Over here in your transparency effects, there's Multiply. This is what it looks like when it's turned off. By adding Multiply, it helps it blend into the paper texture background and seem as if it was really drawn on that exact paper. Again, that's what it looks like. It's pretty subtle, but I think it makes a difference. What we're going to do is dropping our scanned files into this master file and blend the illustration together into one layer. I'll start by dragging my scans over into my template file. You don't need that guy anymore. I'm going to put a multiply effect on both of these layers. This is just so that I can see what I'm doing when I drag one above the other. What I'm going to do is just lay it over, it doesn't have to be perfect at this point. Select both layers and rotate it to fit the dimensions of my template file. Scale it down a smidge. Cool. Now that we've got both of our illustration layers roughly overlaid, now's the important part to make sure that they are absolutely perfect or as close as you can get to being a perfect overlay. I'm going to drag it in, that actually looks pretty good on the left-hand side. Not perfect on the right, but that's probably because I wasn't exactly perfect as I scanned it. That's all right for now. You can hold down the control key if you want to bypass Photoshop's tendency to move images by jumping several pixels. When you hold down the control key, it lets you move exactly pixel by pixel. That can be really helpful here. You click and then hold control. That's pretty close. Let's zoom out. Looks good. The reason it's darker in this area, again, is because Multiply is on. Now that we have everything laid over, pretty close to perfect, what we're going to do is isolate the upper half of that illustration. I'm going to leave Multiply on for now, just so that I can see what I'm doing and I'll have a good idea of what the middle ground is here. Selecting my lasso tool, you can also just push L. I'm going to go through and cut all this out. There's some areas like here that I have no choice. I'll just have to cut right through the illustration. No problem, we'll go back in and blur those in later. It gets pretty tight in some areas so you can zoom in if you need to. It's another leg I'll have to cut off, we'll fix that later. Once the entire upper selection is selected, I'm going to toss a mask on there. You can just click this right here, bam, we've got a mask. I'm going to turn Multiply off since I don't need that to see anymore. As you can see, the paper texture is a little bit lighter than it is on the bottom. That's not really going to matter because we'll be removing that texture altogether. What I'm going to do first is zoom into those areas where I had to cut directly through the illustration to make sure that they're blended well. That's where it got pushed through. I'm going to make sure my mask is selected, get a pretty small brush in there. I'm going to put the opacity at 100, and just wiggle that through to soften that hardline. Because that illustration was laid over the other ones so well, there's not much of a difference there, so we're pretty lucky. Let's find out what the other line was right there. Again, you can barely see that line come through, but I'm just going to soften those edges. Perfect. The reason I've been using a mask is I have the opportunity to redraw in the illustration that's covered up. It's not disappeared completely. It still lives under there, and if I want to bring it back, all you have to do is draw it in, like so. I still have access to the full illustration underneath the mask, so if I need to go back later and bring something back in, I can do it pretty easily and that data is not permanently lost. Let's zoom out and make sure everything looks great before we flatten. When we merge the two layers together, we're going to lose the illustration that's hidden in the lower half of that mask down here. It doesn't matter right now since everything's blended perfectly, so I'm going to flatten it. Cool. Here's our flattened layer that contains our full illustration merged together seamlessly. Now let's remove that paper background. What I'm going to do for this is utilize my magic wand tool. It's over here. You can also push W. I want the magic wand tool selected. I'll put a tolerance on there, about 40. Because the illustration is so dark and that paper is so light, 40 seems like a pretty good number. I want to make sure that Contiguous is turned off. What that means is it will select everything regardless if it's touching it or not. Say there was a whitespace area in the middle of this jaguar, it would still select that. Contiguous was turned off, then it would not get that area. This just means all the white areas that are touching each other. Let's zoom out. It looks like almost all of that white is selected. What I'm going to do is zoom into a tight patch and see if there's any other areas. You can see places like this where it's a little bit lighter green, probably it paints water from those leaves. It wasn't selected, but we don't really need to worry about that right now. We got everything we wanted. What I'm going to do is invert that selection. After it's inverted, I used the key command for that by the way. I'm going to go into select, modify, and expand. What I'm doing now is expanding that selection of the two pixels. You can see barely that it came out a little bit. It used to be flushed with that lead, and now the expansion has come out about two pixels. The reason that's important is because I don't want to cut off any precious parts of the illustration. To make it a little bit more seamless, I'll go into modify and feather, feather it by one. You can't really tell the difference here, but all that doesn't let the edges a little bit more. Now we're going to go into my favorite tool again. You get mask out of that. Now, what we've done is isolated the paper background from the jaguar itself. It's hard to tell since manipulator is turned on. When I turn that off, you'll be able to see. That grid in the background indicates that this is a transparent layer. Remember those areas up around here where there were little bits of paint splatter, those weren't selected. Now I want to take care of those. What we going to do is copy this layer and then rasterize it. I'm getting rid of the mask, and what I'm going to do, this is just an easy way for me to see the areas that are affected, I'm going to pop a color overlay on there. Doesn't even matter what color I pick, this is just that I can see what I'm doing. Flatten that again. Now we're going to use our magic wand tool again over here on the left. This time we want to turn contiguous on. Now, when I make a selection like this front, the only thing that's selected is this font and nothing else is. It's a little bit tedious, but what I'm going to do is go through and individually select every item that's on here. The reason I'm doing that is so that these other little random areas, a paint spotters, you can see them in here, those will not be selected. This is just a quick way and really precise way of getting only the painting parts that we want into the final. I will go through and select everything individually. I'm holding down my Shift key and that way I can make multiple selections at a time. I'll fast forward so that you guys don't have to watch this entire thing. It only takes about a minute, but still it's boring. Now, I think I have everything selected, I'm going to check by cutting everything out. Oh, I missed some guys in the bottom, so undo that and go through and grab these guys. Cool. Let's zoom out and cutting it away. Awesome. Everything is selected that I wanted. What I'll do is go ahead and delete that layer, I don't need it anymore. We're going to apply that selection. As you can see, everything is still selected. We're going to paint over our mask over here. I'll get a pretty big brush, and what I'll do is invert my selection. Now, making sure that black is selected, I'll go through and paint over everything. You can't really see what's going on here, but what's happening is those little area of the paint spotters have just been erased. Let's zoom in. Yeah, they're no longer there. Now, the only parts of the illustration that are on this page are the intentional pieces that we want in there, so the jaguar and all the leaves. I'm finished with this mask, I'm going to flatten it, we'll add the paper texture, and there's our seamless illustration with and without that paper texture background. Now, what I'm going to do is we want that painting to look like it was actually water colored on that paper. I'll zoom in close so you can see. Right now it's just lean over the paper texture, but there's no integration. Within my transparency effects, I'm going to turn multiply on. There you see it's pretty subtle, but the illustration is a little bit darker as it sinks into that paper, so that paper texture comes through on the illustration. I'll show you the before and after again. Here's before and after. You can really see that paper texture coming through and it feels like the watercolor was done on this exact paper. I'm going to move my signature to an area where it fits. It's pretty snug in there, that's pretty good. Now I'm going to select both layers and shift this around. We'll do the down shift, so that jumps a little faster and get it right into the center of that page. Perfect. There you have it, we have our seamless illustration with and without that paper texture background and the signature on that page. One thing to keep in mind is when you scan in your work, you lose a little bit of that saturation and depth of color from the original. What I'm going to do is artificially add that backend. I'm going to go to my levels and drag the mid tones just to be a little bit deeper. Doesn't have to be huge, 85, 84 looks pretty good. I'll show you that before and after that. Here's before and there's after. This feels closer to what my actual illustration, McClellan, and I'm going to go into my hue and saturation and may get a smidge more saturated. I think three will do it. Now it feels more accurate to what my original illustration was. You can even make it more saturated, even darker, even lighter than what you painted. That's one of the great things about Photoshop, you can tweak things around and have opportunities to make adjustments to your painting that you would be limited with with the actual medium. If you've got any errors on your illustration, maybe some ink smudged or some pencil marks or leftover, we can get rid of those pretty easily as well with Photoshop. On this one, let's zoom in here. I've got an ink spotter. The best way for me to get rid of that is to throw a mask on there. I'm going to use my brush, needs to be a lot smaller. Perfect. I can just really easily draw over that at a reset. Right now the edge of the brush is really hard, which is fine for the areas that I'm erasing, but when I get close to that edge, I want to make sure my brush is a little bit softer. It's bringing up hardness down. You can see how the edges, the brush feathered off a little bit and feel more natural against the watercolor edge. I'm just playing with the different sizes and seamless theories in that. This is the same technique that you'll use if you have any extra pencil marks on the edges of the paper as well, it's the same method. Now I just want to get a little bit tighter. All I'm doing is clicking and dragging my mouse to make that bush move along the edge. Well, I'll show you the before and after. Beautiful. If you want to get rid of that ink spotter within that leaf, you can do that as well pretty easily. Now that that inks mage has been erased out on the outside, we don't need a mask anymore, just going to flatten that layer, but we still have that ink smear right in the middle of the leaf. How I'm going to get rid of that is using my clone stamp. It's over here, clone stamp. Basically what a clone stamp is, is you use part of your illustration to ink and then you stamp in another place. What I'm going to do, take a little bit of a larger brush, so I'm holding down my "Alt" key and I'm going to click. I've just inked my stamp pad, and now wherever I draw in, it's going to reference from this area right here. What I'll do is just lightly pull out in. One of the limitations with ink pad is once you get to the full edge, you don't have any more ink. As you can see, it's drawing a little bit over the line, which I don't want. What I'll do is just constantly re-stamp and then refill. I'll make my brush a little bit smaller as I tape it down. If you see the plus sign that occurs up here, you see it moving around, that's showing you an indicator of where the inking is taking place when it fills again. Now that we're at a good place with this, let's go explore some color variation. 4. Color Exploration – Digitally Editing in Photoshop: In this video, we're going to walk through all things color. I'll show you how to optimize the color within your existing illustrations that the tones are deep and saturated, then we'll explore color palette variations and tricks to adjusting the color to create a variety of options. I'll also show you how to spot edit colors so that some areas within your illustration can be adjusted separately from other areas. Photoshop provides so much flexibility and it can seem a little bit daunting at first, but once you get the hang of the ropes, you'll go wild with the limitless possibilities. Let's get started. I'll do a quick recap of what I showed you at the end of the last video. This is what my painting looks like after I fused both scans together and removed the paper texture background. I'll ask some of the color, depth and saturation in the scanning process, so not only am I going to add that back in, but I can make my painting even more color optimized than the original painting. This is the great thing about Photoshop, you can achieve things digitally that you would otherwise be restricted to with a particular medium. This process is pretty quick and simple and only requires a few steps. I'm going to go to Command L to access my levels and make it a little bit deeper, not too much, but just enough to get enough of the deepness in tones. Then I'm going to do Command U to get my Hue and Saturation. I'll make it a little bit more saturated to get closer to the original painting, press "OK". Then the last thing I'm going to do is go into color balance, so Command B, and I want the shadows to have a little bit more red in them, so I drag the red cursor over a smidge, and maybe add some yellow in there as well. Perfect. Press "OK". That's a pretty quick and easy way to get your color back to where it originally was with your illustration. Even within this one, I pushed it a little bit more saturated than my original painting was, just because I can in Photoshop. Let's move on next to exploring color variations. There's a few different ways we can play with color palette exploration. The easiest thing to do is to go to Command U, which opens up Hue and Saturation, and just dragging this toggle around, and you can see the illustration changes quite drastically as we go to different areas of the spectrum. You can also play with the saturation within this as well. You can get pretty bright, almost neon, and then bring the saturation all the way down to desaturate the painting itself. You can play with lightness and darkness here, but I wouldn't recommend it, I'd stick to levels for that. Your quick levels is Command L, and this is where I play with your darkness and your lightness. Another way to explore color is to get into color balance, so Command B will open up color balance. There's three options here, you have shadows, mid tones, and highlights. Shadows take the deepest part of your painting and infuse color, so I'm adding a lot of blue to my shadow tones, I would be adding red, it'll look like this. Select is zero, mid tones, exactly what it sounds like, it just takes the medium tones and infuses a certain color. Then Highlights can bring the whole painting to be a lot brighter. Another way to explore a color variation is to play with Transparency Layers. What I'll do is just add a gradient over the top of this, and go into my Transparency Effects and see what happens if I put lighten on top, and you'll get a screen. Full Dodge is pretty ugly. I like what's happening here with lighten, and this is a more natural way of getting the lighter color than it would be otherwise if you used the levels. Now that you have an idea of what we're able to do with the tool set, let's make a couple of color options. I'll start by making a copy of my original layer, I'm using Command J as the key command to make a copy of that layer. What this does is duplicates the layers so that I can keep my original color palette down here and start a new one. I'm going to click the I to turn off the Original and change my Transparency Effect to Linear Burn so I can see totally accurately what it'll look like on that paper. What I want to do is keep that jaguar color the same, but I want to make those leaves blue. I'll show you how to adjust to color within some parts of the illustration, but not the entire piece. First things first, I'll zoom in on the jaguar, and I'm going to use my Lasso Tool over here, and just select around the entire jaguar. Cool. The whole selection has been made, so now what I'm going to do is cut, I could also do Command X so that jaguar is gone and then start a new layer and do Edits, Paste Special, Paste in Place. Don't forget to turn the Transparency Effect back on. Now we have our jaguar separate from those leaves, so we can adjust the leave color separately from the jaguar. It's pretty simple to do, just make sure that your leaf layer is selected, and go into Hue and Saturation, that's Command U, and we can drag that hue down. That's the wrong way if I want blue. Here we go. Another thing I could do is click the Colorize option, and what this does is makes all the tones the same hue. Let's bump Saturation up. There's no hue variation within this, that's not exactly what I want, I want to see a little bit of tonal differences, so I'm not going to turn Colorize on, but it is an option if you want everything to be that same hue. Instead I'll make this a little bit more blue, perfect. Now I'm going to polish it off with color balance, which was Command B, and bringing a little bit more that cyan with a shadow of that, maybe. There we have it. Now for the sake of organization, I'm going to group those two together into one group and call it Navy Leaves. This just helps everything stay organized, so when you have multiple color palette variations, everything looks nice and tidy over in your layers. Once you have all of your color palette options established, you can flatten those so you no longer have to group it, it just minimizes the layers you have over here in your panel. Within this, I have my green leaves, black leaves, blue, all of the palette variations. What I'm going to do is make sure my transparencies are all on Linear Burn, and turn off all my layers except for one. Now it's nice and organized and the transparency effects are on place. Now that we've learned how to explore color palette variation and organize our color layers, let's move forward to making some cool patterns in the next video. 5. Creating Patterns: In this video, we'll be exploring methods to create patterns out of your artwork. Patterns are great for particular applications in ways that your original illustration might lack. For me, patterns self particularly well on phone cases, betting, leggings and curtains. When you create a pattern, you open up the possibilities for broadening your product selection, especially if your original painting doesn't really match with certain products with dimensions that are vastly different than the dimensions of your painting. Patterns provide an opportunity to take your illustration to the next level beyond your original artwork. I'll be focusing on two types of patterns, structural patterns and loose patterns. Depending on your motif, you can choose whichever one feels right for you. I'm going to use a variety of my artwork for this video as each painting lands itself best to a particular pattern style. Let's begin with a simple-structured pattern will adhere to a tight grid of columns and rows and simply repeat your illustration or selection of your illustration that you isolate out specifically for the pattern. I'll use my raccoon as an example. Here's my raccoon, it's already been isolated from the background, and I'm going to open a new doc, Apple N for my pattern. I'll change it to 10,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels, 300 ppi, and RGB color palette. The reason I'm choosing these dimensions is this is a size that's large enough to be printed on even the largest print on demand products like tapestries and towels. Here's my brand new document. All I'm going to do is drag the raccoon over, and now here he lives. The first thing to do is make your raccoon a lot smaller. This seems like a pretty good size for a repeating pattern, and now the process is pretty simple. All we need to do is make copies of this layer and drag it into columns and rows. I'll do Apple J to make a copy of this layer, and just bring it on over Apple J again. You can rely on these grids, these pink lines that Photoshop's providing. These lines are here to give you pointers on spacing. You can see here that everything is in equidistant departs, and it helps you with alignment as well. I've got my three, make sure all those layers are selected, and you want to drag them all at the same time. I'm going to make a copy of all three at the same time, Apple J and drag down. Apple J again, and drag down. When you adhere to those grids events, it really, really simple. You can even do things like group certain rows together. I'm selecting the layers, and Apple G, which groups them together, and I can make some grids off centered from the others, like seven. If you want to flip your illustration within the pattern, you can do that as well. Just do Command J to make a copy of that layer. I'm using my transform tool, which is Command T. When your transform tool is selected, you can right-click, and I'm going to go to flip horizontal, and drag it over. This can make just a mirror image. You can also flip vertically. I'll show you what that looks like. If you want a vertical flip to be incorporated within your pattern as well. I like this horizontal flip has been working out, so I'm going to copy, and repeat that. With both of my layer selected, I'm going to Apple J to make a copy, and then drag it over to a place that feels about right. Now, I'm going to flatten all of these together. In grouping, they still remain individual within their group, and you can move each piece separately when you flatten it all goes on at the same layer. Right now, same layer is great. What I'm going to do is copy that layer again, Command J, drag it down, and make my pattern just so. To resize everything at once, make sure all your layers are selected, and then Command T to go into transform, and you can drag everything at once to make it smaller within the page. Don't forget to hold down Shift as you transform that, when you put down Shift, you're scaling within proportion, which is really important. Without Shift being held down, you might skew it like this, which never looks great. But when you hold down the Shift key, everything goes within proportion. Now that we've learned a few techniques to achieve structured patterns, let's explore some ways to create looser patterns. Let's start with something fairly abstract. Here, I've got my painting of cat positions. This would be a good example for a loose pattern because the way this was painted, it wasn't really adhering to a grid, the cats are just loosely placed in according to the positions of the ones around them. What we'll do is take these nine cats and turn them into a larger pattern on a page. First, I'll click and drag, and already isolated the cats from the background, and pulled them into my pattern file. I'll make them a little bit smaller so they put on the page. Cool. The first thing we can do is make a copy of that layer, Command J, and drag it over like so. This alone is starting to work out pretty well, except one thing I'm not liking is this weird space in here, so what I'm going to do is take this cat, and drag it down a little bit to fill in that space. I'll use my lasso tool to isolate that cat from the rest. Check which layer it's on, okay, this one. I'm going to do Command X, which cuts that cat out, and then Command V, which pastes it in place as a new layer. You can see it over here. Now I can just simply take it, drag it around. I can rotate it if I want to, but I think just dragging it down does the trick for me. One problem you can see here is that its tails can bring annoy here, and it looks super weird. I'm going to now use my lasso tool and cut this cat out. Which layer is that on? This one. I'm going to paste it, and what I'll do is rotate it horizontally that fits in a little bit more like a puzzle piece. The last thing I'm going to do is drag this cat down to fill in that weird gap. Make sure the correct layer selected, and I'm just going to drag it down, and actually rotate it a little bit as well. Cool. Now what I'm going to do is take all of those together and flatten them into one layer, Command E, and make a copy of that layer, Command J. Drag it up to the top and fill in that extra space. One thing I'm going to do is rotate it horizontally so there's not too much repetition there, and press "Enter". Now, I want those cats to be a little bit smaller, and I want more of them on the page, so what I'm going to do is select both layers, and use my transform tool, which is Commands T, and while improving my Shift key to make sure things scale proportionately, scale them down a little bit, and then drag them back down onto the page. Great, things are starting to come together a little bit more. Another thing I want to do is address this space right in here feels a little bit barren, so what I'm going to do is cut this cat out. Make sure you're selecting the layer you want it to be cut out from, Command X to cut it, Command V to paste it as a new layer. I think I'm going to do is see if it fits in there, they do a horizontal transform, and it does. One more thing I'm going to do now that I see it, is take this cat flip it horizontally so it'll fits more slightly in this space. In order to do that, I'm going to select all my layers, pull them down a little bit, and then use my lasso tool. She is passing L to 2 year lasso, and share the crunch layer selected Command X like cat out, Command V paste it anywhere, and then I'm going to flip it horizontally, suite fits in there really well. I'm going to flatten all my layers, which is Command E. Now everything is on one master layer instead of four, and I'm going to drag them up a little bit, like so. Cool. Now it looks like a pretty organic pattern. There's no structure, no grid on there, it's just loosely placed based on the forums around it. I'll show you the before and after. Before, this is what the cats look like on their own, and then after things are put together on the patterning. Making a pattern like this is pretty circumstantial based on your illustration, so what I did might not work for every illustration. But if you want something a little bit looser, just know that there are options where you can isolate certain elements, cut them out, paste them in, flip them around, rotate them, do what you have to do to make sure we can independent fits together snugly to create a pattern like this. Let's move on and try another one. This one's pretty simple. All I'm going to do is flip my illustration and crop it in pretty tight. Here's my original, moving it around again, it's been isolated from that background. So I will make a copy, Command J as I rotate it, I'm holding down my Shift key, and all that's doing is making sure that the angles that whichever rotated are pretty precise. Oops, overshot it. Cool. Press "Enter", and now I'm going to drag that to the left to my illustration, grab both layers, and see how it starts to look. This looks pretty interesting, what I might do is make a copy of this one, Command J, and use that to fill in that space. For this one, I'm going to make a copy as well. That looks pretty cool, and I'm going to save that as an option, but I also want to try something else. That's all over here saved, it's an in-group, and this will be my new one. For this, what I'm going to do is make the copy, transform it by vertical, see if I can put it in right there. Now what I'll do with such both layers, Command T to transform, hold down my Shift as I'm transforming. We're going to duplicate those layers again, since they're both selected, I can hold down Command J, and it gets smaller. It gets pretty interesting as well. Now that we know some pattern basics, let's move forward to the next video. 6. Resizing for Various Template Dimensions: If you're planning on uploading your artwork through a print on demand sites or license it out at all, you'll need to know how to resize and reformat your work for various template dimensions. I create most of my artwork at 11 by 15 dimensions, but some templates like mugs or beach towels require extreme vertical or horizontal dimensions. Instead of just mixing these products for my shop altogether, I'll adjust my artworks so that it can fit a wide variety of dimensions. There are some tricks to doing this successfully and I'll walk you through my list. I have five main files that I saved for each piece of artwork. Number one, the original. I merge my layers together, which are paper background, artwork and signature, and saved as a flattened JPEG. This gets printed on wall art, which makes up a big chunk of my sales. Number two, the original minus the signature and paper background. The reason I remove these things is because I want to save this as a transparent PNG so that it can be printed on t-shirts and transparent phone cases. Leaving the signature on or off is up to you. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It just depends on the application. Many people don't like their T-shirt graphics to have a pencil signature on the bottom. Number three, a pattern. I save this at very large dimensions so that it can be applied to any product regardless of size. I make all my pattern square and can crop accordingly based on the particular dimensions. Number four, a pattern with the transparent background. This is the exact same file as the one before it minus the background. This gives me flexibility in case I want to use the pattern as a transparent phone case instead of the main artwork image. Number five, in some cases, I'll create a fifth file that contains the original artwork mirrored once. This can come in handy if I want something with more of a horizontal pull, but I don't want to use a full pattern. You can achieve all of these options by implementing the skills you learned in the pattern-making video. I'll show you how I save each of the file options and give you a quick recap as well. Let's start with the original, which will be created from my master template file. I have all of my color options and my signature and paper background in my layers. I'll turn on the layers that I want saved and turn off the ones that I don't. Make sure that you don't have any extra layers turn-on, especially if you're utilizing any transparency effects. I'll simply go through turning on and off layers that I want saved to reach flattened JPEG, making sure that I capture all of the color palettes. I'll show you how I save each of these individually. I save them based on the color palette name. That's the information that goes first. Then I end it with what the file actually is so large prints. Make sure that you change it to a JPEG, and what this will do is flatten the entire file and press Enter. Next I'm going to save this again, but I'm going to remove my signature and remove the paper background so that it's transparent. Go into save it'll be the same file, except instead of a JPEG, I'm using a PNG. This just preserves that transparent background. You can repeat this process for the rest of your color palette layers as well, alternating between saving as a JPEG and saving as a PNG. Now let's go into our pattern file and do the exact same thing. Make sure the layer you want is turned on and we'll save as a flattened JPEG. This just helps me keep my files a little bit more organized. Then we'll turn that paper texture off and save it again, same filename, but instead of a JPEG extension will do a PNG to preserve that transparent background. Go ahead and repeat this for all of your color palette options over here in the layers panel as well. Option five is to mirror your illustration to make it more horizontal composition. Apple n will open a new doc we went 10,000 pixels by 10,000, 300 dpi and keep it at RGB color mode. I'm going to click and drag over into my new doc and resize down a little bit so that I can put it on the page. Now I have two options here. I can make a copy of this layer, Apple J, and drag it over, or I can flip this image. For this composition, I like it more when the colors were alternating, I'm going to switch it back. I'm going to save this file as a JPEG as well. By the time you've finished saving all the variations in your various file formats, your folder should be pretty full and look like this. All right, now we've got a feel for best practice when it comes to resizing an optimal saving, we can wrap up with some final tips in the next video. 7. Final Tips!: Thank you for taking my class today. We covered so much, and I know I packed in a ton of information, so I put together a free downloadable guide that references all the basics we discussed today. It breaks concepts down per video, so if you're looking for a specific technique, you'll be able to quickly skip through to find it. I'm also including a free watercolor texture that's adjusted to the same dimensions, size, and color settings I used from starting to edit a new piece. All you have to do is download it and drag in your artwork to get started. I hope you feel pretty excited about digitizing your artwork. This class was about more than just getting your artwork from paper to computer. It covered all the little details that can enhance your artwork and do a top-selling piece, and I hope you learned a lot. Remember, please click that follow button up top so you can follow me on Skillshare. This means that you'll get a notification as soon as I launch my next class or have an important announcement like a Skillshare Premium giveaway, new freebies like color palettes and brushes, or I'm highlighting the artwork that you upload to the project gallery like I frequently do on my Instagram page. Feel free to comment below in the class discussion. I read all of your comments and try to respond to everyone. See you next time.