Transcripts
1. Let's Roll!: I'm always looking for
new and original ways to turn messages and wordplay
into unique designs. In this series of short classes, I'll share my techniques for turning your favorite messages, wordplay, and quotes into
beautiful illustrations. I created this class to show you that lettering doesn't
have to be complicated, and with a few simple techniques
and a bit of practice, you can make your
own unique designs. I'll be sharing how I create my lettering designs in
Procreate and hopefully give you the confidence to experiment and find your own style and
elevate your lettering skills. You'll also get my custom brushpack for Procreate to help
you get started. Whether you're a master of
puns and dad jokes or love creating greeting cards or simply want to improve
your lettering skills, this class will help you to make your designs stand out.
Let's start drawing! :)
2. Sketching: We're going to make
a square canvas of 2,500 by 2,500 pixels. This is pretty big, but it's a good resolution for
printing as well. So if you ever
want to turn this into a greeting card
or a small poster, this is a really good size. In the next few lessons, we're going to go over
steps pretty quickly, so a bit of experience in
Procreate would be helpful. And you can also slow down the speed of the
video if you need to. The sentence that
we're going to start with ' You spice up my life' is such a great example of a pun that works really
well on greeting cards. If you want to start with
a different sentence, there is so much inspiration
for puns in general, but specifically this topic
of spice and hot sauces, is such a fun topic to
work with and perfect for Valentine's Day greeting cards and birthday cards, for example. To this, I've also
added the topic of Taco Tuesday because it works really
well with the theme of spice and there are so many great wordplay and puns that you
can work with here. A few years ago, I created
this mini collection of Taco Tuesday designs,
puns on chalkboards. There's just so much inspiration there that you can pick from. If you're going to pick
a pun within that topic, have a look at some lettering
inspiration as well. When I was doing
research for this topic and I was working with a
lot of Mexican restaurants, I really dived into the world of Mexican typography
Mexican lettering artist, and there is so much
inspiration there, especially in traditional sign painting in restaurants,
which is so fun. I would suggest picking a short sentence or
pun because that's going to be a lot easier
to work with and you're going to have some space for
illustration there as well. And we're starting out
with a thumbnail sketch just to see where
the text can go in our canvas and
to come up with ideas as well for illustrations
and lettering styles. Especially if you're picking another sentence as
your starting point, thumbnail sketches are
a great opportunity to come up with ideas and
different compositions. And in 'you spice of my life', spice and life, those words are going to be most important, so that's where we want
to put the emphasis. That will give us the
opportunity to experiment with the lettering there and the other words can just
be a bit smaller as well. To make things a little
bit easier though, we're going to start with an
already done composition. If you go to the brushes, you'll find a stamp
called the Spice stamp, and this is the layout
that we're going to be using as our base
for this design. As you can see, the blocks here are going to be used to
put our lettering inside of. I'm using the snapping here to put our
composition in place. Then we're ready to start
with our lettering. I'm not really thinking
about style here just yet. All I'm doing is
adding the letters to our blocks and spacing
the letters out evenly. I'm thinking it
might be fun to turn our 'life' lettering into a script and 'spice'
could be block letters. I'm just doing a really
messy rough sketch of that to see if the letters
actually have enough space. And you can use the select
tool for this, cut and paste, and move stuff around because this
is just our sketch, so that will really help us
place everything perfectly. And then the lettering for 'life' could be like
maybe the sauce itself. So lots of droplets as well. That's what I have in mind here. As you can see, I've added some lines for a couple
of illustrations. You can change these, of course, but as you can see, I've added this pepper, and then I thought
it'd be fun to add this skull with some
flames as if it's on fire. Feel free to change this up. Those triangles at
the top, originally, they were actually
nacho chips because this composition comes from
another design about nachos. But you can turn that into maybe hot sauce
bottles that might be fun. The whole theme is hot
sauce and chili peppers. I'm also removing some
of the lines from this sketch to clean
it up a little bit. Once you're finished
with your sketch, create a new layer and fill
that layer with a dark color. I'm using the dark blue in our color palette
because this is going to be the base
of our chalkboard. For now, I'm just turning down the opacity so we can
still see our sketch. But this way, we're keeping
in mind that everything needs to be lighter
to create a contrast.
3. Illustrating: Let's start firstly with
the 'spice' lettering. And I'm going to add a
background here first for that kind of star shape. I'm using the bright yellow from the color palette for this, and I'm not going
to use a brush. I'm just using the select
tool to create sharp edges. And then filling that selection. Because we're going to be moving stuff around every
now and then here, you want to make sure that
your interpolation settings are set to 'bicubic'. When you move layers around and scale things up
and down sometimes, the lines can come out
looking a little bit blurry. With this 'bicubic' setting, you're making sure
that those pixels will retain as much
information as possible. Next up on a new layer, let's create our 'spice' letters. For that, we're using
the monoline brush and just tracing our letters. This is just a super easy
way to make block letters, as we've done in other
classes as well. Then I'm just using the eraser
to cut off those edges. And then filling in those
corners a little bit more, making them a bit sharper. I like how naive this looks because of the angle
of those letters, it's like it's an
explosion a little bit. To make these letters
actually look like they're 3D block letters, we're adding shading to this. For that, we're going to
duplicate this layer, turn on alpha lock and
then I'm going to use the pink in our color
palette, the light pink. And then just move
that layer slightly. Actually I think it will look
better with a slightly darker pink, more contrast. Let's change that.
Fill that layer. You can see you've already
got a lot more contrast. Then to just finish this off, turn off that alpha lock
and now we can edit that layer again and just
connect those edges. Now we're going to add
an extra step to this, and this is optional, by
using the darker pink, almost red color to add some more shading to
this block letter, by basically making
the bottom half of those letters a bit darker. Again, on alpha lock, I'm just adding that red to the bottom half
of our letters. Then I'm going to use that
same red or dark pink for our other letters, for 'life'. And in this case, I'm going
to turn that into a script. It's not going to be perfect, but we're just going to start
with a simple monoline. If you need some more help
here with your lines, a bit more control, you can
turn up the stabilization. It doesn't need to be perfect. As you can see, I'm
giving things a try because that's the
beauty of this design. Normally, I would suggest not moving stuff around so much, but this is a small
size and the idea of this piece is that
we're going to scale it down eventually anyway, so it doesn't matter too much
that we're moving stuff. The point is to experiment with new lettering styles
and give it a try. And then we're just filling
up those lines a bit more, and it doesn't really matter
too much where because it's supposed to look a bit messy, like it's a
sauce of some kind. To our letters here, we're going to add some shading
and highlights to make it look 3D. We're going
to duplicate this layer. We're going to just
move it slightly. We're going to select
that layer and then tap on the other layer
and cut and paste. That way, what we have left is only the outlines
of our other layer. Basically, we just
cut off a tiny part. Now if you change the blending
mode of that to multiply, that will become a bit clearer. I'm just moving this
back on top and now you can see that this is just basically a different
way of adding shading. This way, instead of adding
the shading underneath, we're creating a 3D effect. The only thing that's left to do now is just make adjustments. And make sure to turn on a
clipping mask for this, too. Next up on another layer
we're adding our highlights. And I'm just
bringing the opacity down a little bit to make it look kind of realistic
or not so white. And to check if everything
is actually correct, just zoom out a bit and then you'll see if
everything is in place. Lastly, we're also going to add some shading underneath. I'm just duplicating
that main layer, turn on alpha lock and then I'm
going to turn that blue. When you'll see this
on our chalkboard, with the blending
mode set to multiply, you will see a slight
shadow and that makes it feel like it's on top
of our chalkboard. Now that we've done the most important parts of our design, I'm going to use white
to fill up the rest of the letters and finish all our remaining parts
or illustrations. For the remaining letters, we're using the same technique as we did with the
'spice' letters. Use the monoline brush, trace your letters, and then cut them off
with the eraser. But feel free to try
something else here too. And something to keep
in mind here for the remaining illustrations
around your lettering, to make sure that they
don't take center stage and they're more an
addition to your lettering, make sure to reuse your
colors as much as possible. This also helps with creating
a bit more balance in your design and it's just a really easy way
to unify everything. I'm simply using
the monoline brush and the studio pen
for everything, and then later on, we're
going to add texture to this. For all of these shapes, I'm using separate
layers so that I can make changes later if I
need to to the colors. For example, now that
everything is done, I can actually see that
this pepper is quite light. I thought pink
might be good idea, but it just doesn't
really stand out. Let's see how it looks
when we change it to red. That looks a lot
better on our blue. Now let's add some
finishing touches to this. On our white 'spice' letters, let's add a little bit of
texture with this felt tip pen, and I'm just adding
this inline on top to make it a bit
more interesting. If you need a bit more
control here, for example, with the S and the C, turn up the stabilization to make those curves a
little bit easier to do. And let's add some
texture here as well. So I'm going to use this
speckles texture brush, which I really like just
to add a little bit of noise or shading. And then we're going to use that orange on top
of the yellow. And that really subtle noise creates a little bit of depth. I'm going to use that same
shading brush on the skull as well with a bit of blue to make it feel
a little less flat. To add just a little bit of shading to this pepper, as well, because this red is
already our darkest color, I'm just using a layer on top and then set it to multiply. So we just get a slightly
darker version of that color. And that's it. Those
are our final details.
4. Finishing Touches: Now that all our details
are added to our design, you can take a break for a
little bit and come back with a fresh perspective. That really helps to see if everything
is actually in place. What also really helps
is to flip your canvas. That way you're less
focused on the letters, and you can actually
concentrate on the shapes and see if
anything is out of place. You can decide to stop here, but what we want to
do is actually place our design onto our chalkboard.
That's the last step. What we're going to do
first is group our layers. Without the background, we're going to copy canvas and then turn our layers off
and then paste canvas. Now you can see you've
got your design in one layer separately, and that is what we're going
to use for a chalkboard. Now let's create our chalkboard
using another stamp. You can decide to
make your own here, but we've also got a stamp
that's really easy to use for a little A-chalkboard or a sandwich chalkboard,
that's what it's called. I'm going to make this in pink, but you can decide on
another color too, and I'm using the snapping tool to place it in the middle. And this stamp is pretty
much ready to use, so you can just fill this
with the color that you want. I'm making that back part to create a bit of
depth, a darker pink. Now we want to make the
center of our chalkboard, our actual chalk,
our dark color. We want to put that
on a separate layer so we can make changes there. Create a new layer, and
then we want to turn our chalk frame layer
into a reference layer. This way, we can color
in our chalkboard, but do this on a separate layer. And here you can see
that we can actually adjust our chalkboard
to our frame. And now we're ready to
put our lettering design on top of our chalkboard. As you can see, we
have a little bit of space left on our chalkboard, so I'm just cutting that off
and creating the right size. I'm also actually
making it a little bit wider and we
can do that by just duplicating that layer and adjusting it a little bit to
the left and to the right. I'm using distort here to show off the angle of the
chalkboard a little bit. For the finishing touches, we're going to add just
a bit more texture because it is a
chalkboard after all. Make sure to select your
actual chalk layer, your blue, and then
on a new layer, select black and
the ink speckles and just fill up that selected space with
those ink speckles. On a new layer, do
exactly the same. Then we're changing
the blending mode to overlay and divide. As you can see,
those black speckles turn into colored speckles like saturated and the other,
divide, into white speckles. And then you can turn
down the opacity here slightly to change
the intensity. I'm going to add a slight
background as well, which is actually
just that yellow. If you want a simple,
a subtle background, it helps to just
pick a color from your design and then turning down the opacity
to transparency. This way, you're not drawing any more attention to
the background, but it's just a subtle color. Of course, don't forget
to add your signature. I have this saved as a stamp
brush which is super easy. I can highly recommend that. Then we're going to add
one last texture on top of our entire design with the speckles, which
is my favorite, it's going to add
just a bit more of a subtle noise to our design and this would look really nice
with printing as well. I'm just adding the
speckles in black to the whole canvas and then
turning that to overlay. And here you can see
what that looks like. And it looks like our
design is finished. I'm really looking forward to
seeing what you've created. So before you leave, please
upload your sketches or final pieces to the
student project section, even if your work
isn't finished. If you're not done creating yet, feel free to upload
more puns or creations to your project or check out my other short classes
in this series, where we'll be creating
other lettering designs. I really hope that you
enjoyed this class and it boosted your confidence
and creativity, and I hope that this
showed you that lettering does not have
to be complicated. Please don't forget
to leave me a review. I would also love to hear your suggestions on topics
that we should cover, puns you want me to work on or any questions that you have. You can leave those
in the review section or in the discussions tab. If you enjoyed using the
brushes in this class, you might also like my pun
toolkit for Procreate, which is available on
Skillshare, as well. If you want to stay up
to date on new classes, brushes, drawing tips, and more, subscribe to my
newsletter below. See you in the next class! :)
Claire Makes Things, Illustrator | Lettering Artist
