Hand Lettering: Add Digital Color and Texture for Final Polish

1. Introduction: My name is Mary Kate McDevitt. I'm an illustrator and letter in Brooklyn, New York. I work on a variety of projects like book covers, editorial stuff, ad campaigns, stationary, anything that needs letters, lettering done, that's what I do. My Skillshare class is called the final steps of hand lettering, and students will be creating a hand-lettered illustration, but the focus is going to be on digitizing, adding color, and texture to your illustration. I'm going to be taking you through my process of creating a final hand-lettered illustration. That's going to be digitizing your illustration without losing the integrity of your hand-drawn edge, choosing color palettes that are unique and make sense to your concept, and adding texture without relying only on Photoshop brushes. We're going to experiment with some handmade textures, and this will really bring your final piece together in a really special way. This class is a follow-up of my first class, the first steps of hand lettering. If you took that class and you want to bring your final ink drawing into the digital world, this class is perfect. But if you also want to just brush up on your texture, digitizing color skills, this is a good intro for that part of your process. I'm really looking forward to seeing how everyone's project comes together. [LAUGHTER] 2. Getting Started Part 1: Welcome to class. The first thing we're going to do is get to start our drawing. What you have to do is choose your phrase or quote. Basically, you should just choose something that's personal to you, choose something that is short, nothing super long, I'd say under 10 words, and take that phrase and do some research behind it. You can do just simple brainstorming, write stuff that comes to mind when you're thinking of your phrase, and just write lists of words that relate to your phrase. That will help you come up with ideas that are more unique than just what you initially think of. So you don't just jump right into sketches, you're considering different ideas and different themes that can go with your quote. From there, you're going to do thumbnails, do a whole bunch of them. For this particular project, I did four or five, and I'm just picking two or three of my favorite thumbnails to take to sketch. From your sketches, you'll do more of refined drawing. For this project in this class, I chose the quote, Wicked Sweet Tooth, and I did this sketch. I just went with a sparkly, I did some black letter inspired lettering, and I'm really excited. I think it's going to be really fun to work with color and texture on this one, which is why I wanted to do this for yourself. If you think about the class as an inspiration for your quotes, something really color and texture inspired will be really fun to work on for this class. I'm not going to go too much into the sketching, and really in depth with the lettering side. If you do need a refresher course, I actually have one. The first steps of hand lettering is available at all times. If you want to check that out, if you feel you need to brush up on your learning skills, that would be good. But I want you to follow this process to do your hand lettered quote because we still want to ink and color a drawing that is really good. That will be really important when it comes to inking and scanning. You have your refined final sketch, and we're going to start tracing over it or inking right on top of it. I like to do my ink drawing on better drawing paper, not quite watercolor paper, nothing that toothy, and nothing quite as smooth is just the front of paper I used to do my sketches on. But I use a light pad to do tracing, it makes easy to put my sketch down, put a clean piece of paper on top and ink right on top. We're going to get started on that now. When I'm working on my ink drawings, I have to be mindful of how it's going to work in layers. This is the illustration I did in my last sketcher class, and I broke it into two layers because some of these elements overlap the designs. I had to make sure that I was working in layers so that it was easy for me to put it on a computer and compile them in. But sometimes I'll work the details right on top, instead of filling in the lettering. In this illustration, I have the details. In the lettering, I just do the outline of the letters. Then this one, I worked in a bunch of layers. Sometimes I'll have to scan something in or something doesn't work and I just redraw it. There's a lot of redrawing and working in layers. That's something that's going to happen: redrawing, re-inking, always working in layers because once you see it in the computer, it does sometimes change. But let's get started on this illustration. This is the paper I use for all my inking. It's B paper, it's a big fat notebook, and it's a good paper. It's smooth, but not too toothy. This is what I'm used to using. I'm going to be using my uni-ball Vision pen, fine point. I just like the line it gets, but you can experiment with different tools. Go to your art supply store, check out the pen aisle, and pick 10 pens up, and try them all up. I have some of my illustration already inked, and we're going to do the final layer. I have my sketch under this, and I taped it down so it doesn't move. I have my light pad here, and I'm going to start inking. 3. Getting Started Part 2: While I'm inking up my drawing, I'm making sure that all the lines are smooth and clear. If I'm noticing anything that needs to be corrected from my refined sketch, I'm making those corrections here. But you should really have a really clean illustration at this point. I'm just tracing the outline of the letters. But at this point, I know all the letters are spaced evenly because in my sketch, I made sure that the sketch had shading so I can see the real shape of the letters. One of the things you have to be careful of when you're inking just the outline of the letters is to make these little connectors in letters that have a counter form like O. Because when it's digitizing, these will become two separate shapes and it'll probably make more sense later, but I just draw a line so that they're connected and it'll save me a few more seconds of when I'm cleaning up my digitized illustration later on. Another thing I did in this ink drawing is when I have these loops, I continue drawing the outline of loop rather than only the outline of the letter because I want to keep the line weight consistent. If I were to just draw the outline, I might get to this point, and it wouldn't be aligned and it would look off and the line weight might shift and it just looks awkward. When you're drawing something like this, you want to be sure that these are all connected in one even shape because you want it to look like it's made from one smooth stroke. If you're doing just the outline, there is going to be shifting weights and lines aren't going to be lining up correctly. That's something I'd like to give in mind, especially when you're doing just the outline. But one thing you could easily do is fill in this shape to make sure. But then you run into the issue of making it fatter than what you had initially intended. In my sketch, I have a drop shadow in all of these words. I'm not drawing the drop shadow in my sketch because I have a plan to do that on the computer. But I did make sure that I am leaving enough space and you can see when you're inking that there is a drop shadow. There's also a few other elements I have these little arrows that I'm going to be drawing in separately, and I'll combine those into computer later. But I am going to be inking up these. I have a little line detail in this drop shadow. I'll be inking that here. I don't need to create a second layer. But one thing you have to be careful if you're doing this type of drop shadow shading is to be keeping all of your lines at the right angle. Because if you start shifting the angles, it's not going to be a very convincing drop shadow. Another part of this illustration is this background pattern of swirls. I know I want them to be a different color and a separate layer than the words. While they are going to be going under the words, I want them to look like they're coming from the background, I don't want them to touch the illustration. I'm drawing them and I'm being careful that they're not touching any of the line work. That again, when it's finally digitized, I don't have to separate it and worry about having to cut it out like there's a couple of spots where they ended up touching and I'll have to go in and erase that little spit out so it's separate. But for the most part it looks like I was pretty successful keeping them all separate. It basically will save a little bit of time, even though I'm going to have to adjust each little swirl in the end. But that's the fun details that this part of the process is. Another thing you want to do when you're finishing up your ink drawing is just making sure if there's a line that looks lighter or maybe it broken up especially if you're working on [inaudible] paper. You want to make sure you go over it again. If you can see that even if it's just a little thicker, not adjusting the thickness of your letter, but just making sure that the line is going to translate to the computer really well. Because if the line is broken up, I'll show you an example. If I was just really lightly drawing with my pen, this gray area is going to show up when it's digitized. Even if I use a really high threshold and a really low path fitting option on live trace, it's going to look broken up and you're not going to have one smooth line. If you press down just a little heavier, that's a line that's going to translate really well when it's digitized. I'm going to finish up drawing these swirls and adding little speckle patterns and little other sparkles, and I'll draw up these arrows on a separate piece of paper, I'll be ready to get scanned in. 4. Scanning and Digitizing: I have my final ink drawing and I feel pretty confident that all the line wave is even and the ink drawing is nice and dark, and I'm ready to scan it in and see what this looks like digitized. I use the CanoScan LiDE 700F scanner from Canon. I like the scanner particularly because there's not a lip on the edge here. If I have a larger drawing, it falls flat off the edge of the scanner rather than a lip here which creates a shadow on your scan and can interfere with your drawing, and I also think the scanning bed is a little bit bigger than some of the others, maybe just by a half-inch. Either way, I think it's a good scanner. I've had it for awhile and I really like it. We can close that and you can open up your preview or scanner software. Okay. We're going to open up your preview or scanner software. I use preview to do all my scanning. You're going to go to file, import from whatever your scanner is called, and you're going to show details and get a preview of what your scanner looks like. The default setting on my scanner is text, which is only black and white. You need to make sure you change that. I scan everything in a grayscale. You can do color, but for some reason I just think black and white scans plainer and it doesn't pick up as many unneeded details. This is why having a really dark drawing is really important. I have it in grayscale, I have my image selected. I'm going to scan in at 600 DPI. You can scan it at 1200 DPI, it's probably unnecessary for most of your illustrations. If the illustration is really big, you should probably be working much larger than this. This is only like six by 10 or something. I'm going to scan at 600 and you can name your file so you can find it later, and you can scan it in as a TIFF, and that's pretty much it. Scan it in. Okay, now you have your scan. You can even just check right here if you think all the lines are looking right and if you have to darken anything before you get to digitizing, but everything looks pretty clean. I think the lines that makes them dark, and I feel pretty confident this is going to digitize pretty easily. I'm basically going to take this little thumbnail and preview and drag it into Illustrator. There's really no trick to placing a file in Illustrator. It's just going to place it as a image. So you can take your file from finder and open it that way, but this works equally well. This is when we get to the fun stuff. I'm going to go to Object, Live Trace, Tracing Options, and you say "Okay" that's fine. This is when your Tracing Options window shows up and you rarely, if not never, it should never be in the default option. The trace just doesn't look good. We're going to do it just to show you how it loses a lot of the details, because you don't want to spend all those hours coming up with this illustration only to have the result have a computer-generated look. You want to have that hand-drawn edge, and while this is okay, there are some lines that just look wobbly for no reason. So I'm going to jump back and try that again. Object, Live Trace, Tracing Options. What you need to really focus on is the path fitting. I'm just going to go ahead and make that zero, corner angle, I'll make that zero, and minimum area, I'll make that six, and you can click "Preview." It helps if your image is zoomed in like this too so you can really get a look at what your illustration looks like. You also want to make sure that you hit "Ignore White" because that is unnecessary points for your file. It's rarely useful. It basically just creates white shapes where there aren't black shapes. All the negative areas are now white shape. We don't really need that. We just want the outlines of our illustration live trace. I have everything in preview, I'm previewing these tracing options right now. As you can see, it's a big difference than the default option. Right now it's picking up on my original drawing and the way the line wave is much better, and it's not just making it all wobbly looking. But I do think it's a little, maybe even two, there's probably like a million points. There's over 50,000 anchors here, which is a lot. I'm just going to hit "Trace," and now all I have to do is go to my control bar up here and hit "Expand," and now you can see my illustration is now converted into paths. It is alive. I'm actually going to go back and redo that. The tracing settings you use for your illustration vary on what your illustration looks like. It is something that you're going to have to play with, depending on what your line weight is like, what kind of paper you used, intended roughness you're looking for on your illustration. Definitely, playing with the settings to match what you're looking for in your line weight is really important. If you're using Illustrator CS6, it seems like they don't have as many options as they did, this CS5. I really like the settings they have here. I don't know why they seem to have gotten rid of them. There are ways to play with the settings in CS6, but I think CS5 is really good, I'll show you why. They have these other default options, like if you're working with different drawings, and they actually have a lettering option. I'll show you. It actually works pretty well and I use it, time to time, in my illustrations. Right now, if you are on the control bar, again, there's a live trees drop down and you can choose lettering and see if that one will work for you. It's a little tighter, but it doesn't have as many anchors. The lines are a little bit more smooth, but it stays pretty true to my original drawing. I'm going to hit Expand and now I have a completely digitized illustration, and that's pretty fine. I can select everything. Now, I have to ungroup everything and see what colors I'm going to work with, what needs to be what. We're going to start by ungrouping everything, which is Command Shift G, that ungroups everything. Now, everything's completely, individually clickable. I'll show you how you make these shapes into complete shapes, rather than just the outline of letters. If you have a little bit of knowledge of illustrator, this should be pretty straight forward. But there's two different arrows in the illustrator, One is the black arrow, the selection tool; and the white arrow, the direct selection tool. The selection tool, that's what you're going to use to move around shapes. The direct selection tool, that's what you're going to use to select points. That's what we're going to use to delete the section. If you can see, I'm selecting the shape inside the letter and I'm going to delete it. I'm going to do that on all of these shapes. I'm clicking the inner shape. You can see, if I click on the outer shape, it selects the complete outline of the shape, rather than just this inside. I'm going to go ahead and delete these. Then I have these details under the W now. I'm going to make this the background color and bring those to front. You can do that by going to Object, Arrange, Bring to Front, or Command Shift Up. I use that a lot. I don't use layers in illustrator. You can use that as well, once you get everything separated. But I just don't, for some reason. I'm just going to go ahead and pass through this illustration, getting rid of all the plans, everything. I'll show you, again, why I mentioned before that if you have a letter that has a counter form like this, if we didn't have it connected here and here, I'm just erasing this to show you, it wouldn't be easy to delete. I have to fill that in. We will hide the counter form and then you have to select it and go like that. Then use the Pathfinder. Really, it's just easier because I did it with the e. Rather than doing all of that, I can do it in one little click. That makes your life just a little bit easier because this is a tedious part of the process, but actually like it. You can watch a TV show while you're doing this part. Wicked, now, it's in this shape, and there's these little doodads you can clean up by using the brush tool, which you can just go to by Shift B. That basically will hide all those little doodads, and you can see them disappear. Great technical part of the process, getting rid of doodads. If you did fill in your letters intentionally, like in this little peppermint, I filled in with my pen, so it left these little doodads here. That actually can be part of your texture, but since I'm going to be adding texture later, I want this illustration to be completely smooth, and I want to get rid of all those points that are just going to get in the way later. I'm going to do that again for Sweet. This is when you can finally see your illustration come together and look really bold. I go into Outline mode a lot, which is just Command Y, because then I can see what's under the layers. I can select the dotted line and bring that in front of the S. I'm going to select everything. I'm just grouping it, making it a background color so now they are all together. I'm just going to group all these together. One easy to select them all. Group. Bring them to front. Now, I do the same thing again for these because I want these to be a shape rather than an outline, and I want these details to stand out. I select this shape, hit Shift, and select the other shapes. Group that, bring those to front and make them black, and get rid of that background shape. I can just get everything in how I want them to be separated because I know these are going to be different colors than the other shapes. 5. Digitizing: Since I scanned everything in as grayscale, right now everything is still in grayscale. You want to make sure that you're in CMYK when you're picking your colors, unless it is only for web in which case you can use RGB. I'm just roughly seeing what colors could work and deleting when I see them. Here's the little swirl is attached to this tip. I'm going to use the eraser tool and that's just shift E and I just another ungroup. There's another one over here I need to do that as well. You can resize the eraser by heading the left and right parentheses. The right parentheses makes it bigger, the left makes it smaller. I'm going to go ahead and make this blue, sweet should probably be pink. I'm going to go to my color picker. Let me see, something like that. These might shift and they might change even a little bit more once I start adding texture, but I want to get an idea of what I'm going to be working with with color. I'll show you these lines real quick. This is the line that I did. Really light and as you can see they broke up here. That would be a pain if you were to be deleting the outlines into shapes. This line held up really well, so keep that in mind. My little tooth guy, put a little pink background behind him, and he is going to be white. I want him to be white but I want to keep this outline. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to copy and paste his little outlined shape, but I'm going to copy and paste in front. I'm going to do hit "Command C" to copy and then "Command F" to copy directly in place so I have two. I've just made a copy right on top of him and I'm going to delete the outline, so I'm left with just the background. I need to grab his eyes and teeth, group this and now he's all grouped. I can use a different background or coral. I need to start moving these little swirls. Or actually I'm going to do the drop shadow first. To do the drop shadow, I probably do it more backwards than most people do it. It's just the way that I found worked best but I like it. I'm going to do that now. We get all grouped together, and I'm going to do the same thing I did with the tooth. I'm going to make a copy, paste it directly in front. I'm going to lock this. We'll give illustration that's on top, so I'm going to hit "Command 2" so now only one is selected. I'm going to choose the drop shadow color and I'm going to make it a really light lavender. Now, I'm going to duplicate and I'm just hitting "Option" and dragging it. I'm just dragging it into the direction I want the drop shadow to be, and I'm going to duplicate that. You can duplicate a transformation by hitting "Command D", and that just does transform again, so it moves the exact same way. As you can see, it's just creating a drop shadow without really having to make lines or draw a drop shadow. It's a cheater way but you have to be really careful of that. First of all, you're saving your file because this method of creating a drop shadow has made my Illustrator quit and it's not fun. Before you do this, make sure that your file is saved. That's basically the angle line one, and now I'm going to group these altogether to make them one path. Like I said, it has made Illustrator force quits, so I'm going to do this in groups. What I want to do is join all of these shapes into one. I could just group it, but I want them to be one path. In pathfinder, there is this unite option. It basically looks like two squares joining together. I'm going to hit that. Oh, I didn't do it in groups but that's fine. I think I'm going to be fine. It's going to take a little time. But now it's one shape. The one thing about using this method, is it can create a jaggidy edge that looks like pixely. You go in with your eraser tool and just smooth out some of those jagged parts. But it doesn't take too long and it's pretty easy. But then I'm going to unlock wicked, and you unlock by hitting "Command Option 2". I want a little break in my drop shadow, so it stands out. I'm going to make this the background color, duplicate it. There's a little break here from the background or from the lettering to the drop shadow. It creates like a second line and just another extra detail that will make it more special. I'm going to do the same thing for sweet and tooth. I'm going to group that copy, paste on top, lock it, choose. I'm going to make it like a 10 drop shadow. Duplicate it, transform again, see if I like that angle. I'm going to just change the angle because it looks like it's too sloping down more than to the side. I'm going to keep that one and delete these other ones. Let me try that again. I'm just going to shift it a little bit more that it's going at a cornered angle and even on the side and the bottom. Duplicate it, and that looks better. Move more, save, and I'm going to save it. This one looks much tighter, so I'm going to definitely do this in two groups. I'm going to group these together using the pathfinder and the second group. Now the drop shadow is one shape. I'm going to unlock the top layer. I'm going to do that same thing creating a little break in the drop shadow. These need to be nudged just a little bit because I moved this layer a tiny little bit. Then what you can do is then knock this shape out of the drop shadow and we'll do that later. Just do tooth and then we'll be ready. Group, copy, paste in front, lock. Now, because I have these lines I want the drop shadow to be at the same angle as these lines. I definitely have to be sure that it's going at the angle the shapes are in. Let me go back. Looks like it needs to be at a more downward angle. Reposition it. Like I said, it's a backwards way of doing this, but if you can experiment, find your own way of creating drop shadows that works for you. I could also move these lines to match up with the drop shadow I have here. That's something I can just noodle around with, make sure it's right. The angle looks pretty close, so I'm going to do this. I'm going to join these shapes together, and now we have drop shadow is one shape, and I just need to move these lines to match up with the drop shadow. If you're working right on top of a layer like this, you can lock it so that you're not selecting it every time you're trying to move one of these lines. It just makes it easier to work like that, and you lock it by hitting command 2. While I'm doing this, I'm going to group these and change the color. I want him to just be slightly darker shape than the drop shadow. Just as a little detail, by shading effect. We're able to nudge these around and get them just right later. At this point I have some of my drop shadows just about right, and the spacing is still looking correct. If it's not, you can always print this out while it's digitized and you can really see what is working, what's not working, and retrace it. But now I'm going to start moving around these swirls so that they're tucked behind the letters because I wanted it to be a background pattern, just something that's happening behind the words, so I'm just shifting them slightly and think I'm going to start choosing a color for these as well. These would be the goldish yellow, goldish green. Then I'm just tucking them behind. I'm cleaning up any areas that look like there's little extra things from the scan, you have to delete. Make sure everything is looking just right. Remember to save often. I'm basically just grouping everything that I know I want to be different colors and just making sure everything is in its own little section. While I have an idea of what I want to do for color, I'm still not sure exactly what colors I'm going to be using, and at this point, I want to go back to my reference and see what colors I can play with. 6. Color Part 1: So I'm going to show you another option of scanning in and digitizing an illustration. This is the illustration I did for my first class. This I did in two layers because a lot of these elements overlap. So I'm going to go ahead and scan this and digitize it and we'll play around with some color. I have my illustration in the scanner and I have a preview and have it selected using black and white gray scale, 600 dpi and I'm saving it as a tiff format. So I'm going to scan it. Then I'm going to scan the second layer using the same settings and bringing the in illustrator. So I have my image selected and I'm pretty confident that we'll get into the live trace. I'm going to just use the live trace lettering option in the control bar for this one and it expand. Open up the other one, drag it into illustrator from preview. Go to live trace and the control guard, the lettering. Expand and copy and paste it in this layer. Now one of the things you have to be considerate of is when you have your illustrations scanned and digitized, you may notice that the digitized version looks a lot different from your original drawing. It's lost its magic and just doesn't look like the hand-drawn illustration you'd envisioned. This could be because of two reasons or more, but these two reasons, I think of. One, you are using not great settings on your live trace, either the default setting or something that's too high and catching too many details or too low and it's going over some of these details and smoothing it up too much. If I were to show you what it could possibly look at, if you go to path, simplify, that's extreme. But if you use a live trace setting where it really simplifies your shapes, it's going to lose a lot of the detail and that's something that we don't want it. So if your illustration end up looking like this, then you have to go back and play with the options so that it's picking up on the line drawing that is in your illustration. Or your line-drawing wasn't dark enough and you didn't press hard enough with your pen or your line is broken up and it's not easy to work with. What you're going to do is just take your illustration, the digitized version and print it out. I print a lot of my illustrations and retrace them all the time in case, because you look at things differently when they're on the screen, especially when it's a loose sketch of the drawing is loose. When you see it on the screen, black and white and bold, a lot of your your mistakes are emphasized. So you'll take your printout and take your tracing paper or your light table and go over the drawing and using your live trace version, you can fix those issues, you can see what issues are happening on when it gets to digitization and you'll be able to fix those when you're re-inking it. Even if it's just one area, if this area here was broken up and the line was not very even, you could easily just do that one area, scan in that one piece of the drawing and replace it. That's something you have to work with and see how the illustration is working. So I have two layers here and the live trace actually worked out pretty well, so I don't need to redraw anything. But I have these areas like this border. This on the spine detail is two colors that overlaps. These should line up because they're based off the same the same scale. I'm just going to pick a color real quick just to see what it looks like as a two color. It's on gray scale, so make sure you change that to CMYK and you just go back and pick what you want to color, where you want one color. For this illustration, unlike the wicked sweet tooth illustration, I want this outline to be a part of the illustration. I'm going to copy this, paste on tab and I'm going to delete this outside shape. So I'm left with these inside shapes here and I'm going to make them orange. So it has a fun little black outline and little drop shadow. The same thing with electric. I want all of these shapes to be different colors. So I can select them all, copy-paste. Select the outside shape and delete it. So I'm left with just the inside shapes. The R is difficult because I have to go back and delete that counter form. There you go. Now I have these shapes that I can make a second color. You're going to want to send these two back. Command, Shift, left front for this or object arrange, send to back. Same this one, copy- paste, lock it, click the outside shape. But I don't want to work with orange and black. So I'm going to refer back to my mood board to get an idea for colors before I start selecting on my colors. I'm going to line everything up. That should be this little two dots. Then shifted when I scanned it in. So that's why I don't like working in two layers. We have to eyeball it and make this second color. This is the draft shadow I wanted to work with. That just makes it look like it's moving or zapping or some energetic lines. 7. Color Part 2: Now I'm going to bring in my mood board that I created for this project to start thinking about different color palettes to use. So I already know just from my mood board, I want to work with some purples and blues and see some greens and maybe pink and cream. So I'm just going to work in the background. I have a background, the size that needs to be and that I'm just going to pick right from my mood board and I'm just going to look at different cream colors. I'm going to work with something lighter and just something along those lines. I have these corner details that needs to be a different color and that might be a darker purple or dark gray navy. Let's see how that works and these corner details, I want to stand out. So I'm going to make those a color, maybe a yellow and the only thing is this will be yellow as well, something darker and we'll just put together that way. This is when you'll start to just get an idea for different colors you want to use. But they might not all be working together the way you're envisioning. So you're going to want to play with different options and maybe even duplicate a couple and just see different options. Like maybe this is more of a lighter, pale, blue-green background and these are darker navy. I can play around colors that way. So I have a few color options that I think are working. I use my mood board to get some color inspiration and I think I have, some are working some are not working. I'm going to see what will work best and when I take them to Photoshop to add texture. But I think these are in a pretty good spot. Let's go back to the, we could switch to the illustration and continue the color palette there. 8. Color Part 3: So I have some colors roughed in and these aren't really the colors that I want to use for the final. So I created this color palette that I think will work a little closer. I'm working with some of the similar color ideas, but I just wanted to tighten them up and maybe see what will work with this color palette. So I'm going to just start doing some of the colors. I want the drop shadow for tooth to be similar to the other drop shadows, and I want to knock out this top layer of the lion in-between the drop shadow and lettering. So I need to ungroup everything. What I'm going to do is use the Pathfinder. So I have this white layer selected. I'm going to select the drop shadow, and I'm going to use this minus from Pathfinder option. See that got rid of that, and now it's just it's own shape. I'm going to do that for the rest of them. I want to make sure everything is still grouped together so I don't lose anything later on in the process. Same with sweet. I want these details to be different colors than white. So I'm thinking probably, maybe the purple, and I want these details inside of that to be a different color as well. So I'm bringing us to the front, and right now we'll just make them this gold color, and I might change later. I need to group all these dotted in line detail. Because otherwise it's going to be a pain to select and re-select them. So I'm going to lock any of the layers that I'm going to get in the way of selecting these, so I can just quickly group them, and I can group them together. I select color, I'll group together the shape I want to be more of a shadow than a highlight. So I'm going to make that a darker green. [inaudible] Now I'm going to pick a color for these candies, I can do that really quickly. These apparently be pink. I'm going to start grouping these Sparkles together in these groups. So then I can easily grab them rather than selecting each one individually, that can take time. I might want them to be different colors so that they have like a shimmery effect, and that's something I might be able to accomplish with texture. I'm going to make them a little different color than the swirls. Just like a darker gold. Then these that are sparkly test [inaudible] whatever, I'm going to select all of those and make those colored. I'll make those pink as well. The last of the sparkles, these last little swirls, I give those color, and then these little other [inaudible]. Now, basically everything is grouped together, and has its own color, and so when I start to play around with different color options, it will be easy for me to make those changes. 9. Handmade Textures Part 1: Now that we have our illustration digitized and we have our color palette picked out, it's time to start thinking about texture. But before we jump right into the computer again, we're going to think about grading textures by hand and we're going to look at some inspiration and talk about how you can create your textures. One of the things I like to do is keep a lot of inspiration for textures around my studio. I'd like to collect a lot of old objects. Sometimes I'll look at them and think about how I can replicate the textures from these old objects into my illustrations. This is just a piece of wood from an old crate that I picked up at a flea market and it has this really cool, like it's stamped and it has this nice worn look to it and it's something that you can recreate. If you just have it nearby, you can really look at it and think about what is working best for the texture. We are going to try a few things like that. But the best thing to do when you are thinking about texture is to think about how it's actually created so that when you're on the computer or you're making it by hand, it's not going to look computer-generated or fake. If you want a really brushy look, look at paintings for inspiration, because that way you're going to be able to be creating those brushy strokes and they're going to be believable. We're going to try a few of those things and we're going to bring them into the computer and see how we can manipulate them and make your illustration very special. I did just a black and white print out of my illustration, so when I'm going to start doing textures, I'm going to have this underneath on my light table, so I can use it as a guide so I can make sure that the strokes I'm using in my texture and brush textures match up with my lettering, so it's more convincing. I'm going to start doing that now. These are some of the tools I use to create textures. I just have some brush pens, some different kinds of markers, I have ink for calligraphying and just indian ink, and I have some brushes and water. We're going to test out some different texture styles. Just to show you some mark-making, I have some brush pens that are really low on ink that I've purposely leave like that so that leaf is really rough textures. That's something I can use in my project. You can see it's really textured and it can get like some more expressive brush strokes. That was really dry too. This one I think has more ink. This one has more wet, chunky brush strokes that can be fine to use as well. I like playing with this cookbook wide marker, because it has these really fun lines in it and if you draw enough of them, we can find something that will work for your project. That's something that I can incorporate in my illustration. It looks like maybe a photocopy or something like that. I'll just make a lot of these marks, scan them in, and see how I can incorporate them. If you grab a wet brush, lay down some just like water. Grab a little bit of ink here. You can play with how these textures are created, something really watery, watercolor. You can create gradients this way as well. It's simply something you have to do a lot of practice strokes to get used to it, if you're not already a painter or watercolor artist. But it can be a lot of fun to incorporate these techniques into your illustration. Another thing you can do is just with your pencil, a softer pencil or a 2B pencil, or even like a 6B or 8B is best, so it has dark charcoal look to it. But I'm just going to use my black point pencil and you can just sketch out a texture like this and you can incorporate. Then that will give it just a drawn look. It could even give it like a worn look to it. You can use this pencil if you want to fake chalkboard lettering. If you were to draw something out just like this, bring it in Photoshop and invert it, it would have the look of a chalkboard lettering, because the way it just has that rough edge. These are some of the techniques I like to use when I'm using drawing tools. Sometimes I'll print out just on my laserjet printer,just print black shape and you can go and have some tape and you get really crafty and you can take some tape, lift some of the ink away. You can use this for a screen printed, letter press, just like a poorly printed look that actually look really cool. It's just like a worn look. You can see it, looks like those creases. You can scan this and they'll have a really cool look. This only works with the laser printers and not an inkjet, because an inkjet, the ink goes into the paper where the LaserJet, the ink stays on top. That's why we can do this. I'm just going to use the edge of this ruler. Doing this, doesn't work. I'll erase it. If you're looking for a stamp texture, you can take a stamp pad, this is a big one and you can probably just press right onto the paper and create textures that way. That's something you can scan in and incorporate in your illustration. But I'm also really obsessed with making stamps of my lettering. I use it on a lot of my FC order stuff. You can get a stamp made, something like this size for 20 bucks. If you want a stamp, texturing your illustration, you can just get a stamp order. It's if I have enough ink on this stamp pad, scan that in and use that as your textured illustration. You don't have to fake it. But let's start with the illustration. I have my print out. What I wanted to do is, I'm going to be working with some dry brush and just brushy textures. But I want to make sure that when the letter curves, the brush curves with it, so that it looks like it's actually been hand painted. You can actually hand paint it, but if you're in a time crunch, you can fake it. But at least we're working with actual hand painted textures. 10. Handmade Textures Part 2: Now, I have my light table and you can use tracing paper with this, but you have to make sure you're using a tracing paper that can handle ink and isn't going to just crumble up. Let's see which pen I want to use. We'll try this one and I might go back with a darker brush pen. I'm basically just going to follow along with the letters. You want to add bleed, which means you're going to go over where the edge of the letter stops just so when you scan it in, it'll be easy to line it up and you're not going to see any edges. Even with my brush pen, I might just add just a little bit of ink to the tip so it moves a little easier. You can imagine if this was actually painted, it would have these overlaps because this is one smooth stroke. The direction of the stroke goes this way, when you're going down, it's going to go that way, and it'll look like it was really hand-drawn or hand painted rather. If you want to add texture to your drop shadow, that's something I would probably do on another piece of paper just so that you're keeping all of your textured layers straight because it can get messy. At some point, you might not be able to really recognize the texture you were working with for specific words. Let me switch to a darker one. In my work, I have a lot of textury gradients so I could go like, that was a little dark. I like the bottom to be a little darker and then it gradually gets lighter in texture at the top. You will be able to redraw it. You'll draw it 100 times to see which one really works best. But it's something you have to experiment with because the way the brush is textured, it's unpredictable. So it's just about picking the right look for what you're going for. For sweet, I think I want to do something that's more of a smooth watercolor look to it. So I'm going take this brush and just lay down some water. Then I want to have a smooth stroke across. I'm not trying to make it look like each individual letter was hand painted. You just want to make sure that it's staying really even so you're getting an even gradient here if you are working with something like that, and just texture it at the top. It has a cool look to it. Then I want to add something like this in tooth. What I really like is for the O to have this look to it, but I want to replicate the shape. So it might be something where I draw it here and when I bring it into Photoshop, if I can scale it down and just make it fit to the O. We're just going to transfer them like that. It's about holding this pen at the right angle. That's close. We'll see what that looks like when I scan it in, but I'll do the T. It definitely gets really messy. I will just make a few. That's why it's good to work on top of your illustrations so at least you're working in order so I know the top one, that's wicked and you can even see it. That one's pretty easy and that one, I want to use for sweet and this one, I want to use for tooth. I'm going to play around with a couple of more textured options just so I have a lot to work with when I start scanning everything in. Something more like that works. I like how it's broken up there, the texture. As for the background, the swirls and the other shapes like that, I am not going to worry too much about adding texture to that because it's really not going to show up very much or it might just distort in a way that's not going to work very well. So I think some of these textures are working and some of them I think, like this is probably a little too dense. The W here is a little too dense. So it's one of these things where I'm going to be doing several illustrations, several textures, and putting them all together in Photoshop and just seeing what works best. I'm going to try another option for tooth. I'm going to be taking the black line pencil and just filling it in like this and just seeing, just maybe it's a little bit more subtle and just seeing what this rough texture will give, I might just make it a little darker at the bottom, just make it a little gradient. So we're going to be layering a lot of the textures on top of each other. It's not going too muddy the illustration up because we're going to be working with the color and toning it down certain parts of the texture, something that's too stark or too bold. But when you're layering different types of textures on top of each other, it'll give it a really authentic look because we're not spending all these hours working on an illustration and hand drawing it. For the final result to look computer-generated. That could be it. 11. Handmade Textures Part 3: I'm going to do another option where you going to take this big stamp pad, and I'm just going to stamp all over, and this could be a texture for the background or texture that I lay on top, texture that I invert and just work with the negative parts of the texture, and it could just be something that may give it a screen printed look to it. Different stamp pads have different textures. This can sounds like a woven texture, but there's a piece of cloth on top, some are more like foamy, which might work best. But what I really like is how the edges, the middle part is really dense and then just gradually gets softer in texture, so then that could be something fun to work into this illustration. It's also fun to get your hands a little dirty at this point. Then just so that I feel I have a lot to work with. I'm just going to start with some other texture options, so I can work it in later. Because it my work just for one individual letter. You can use the same techniques for actually creating custom Photoshop brushes and there's a lot of great tutorials that you can find online. I don't really make my own Photoshop brushes because I tend to just download people that do a lot better than me, or just using these hand made textures, and just taking that extra bit of time on each illustration. I think it's fun to work on like that, but it is fun to experiment trying new techniques for Photoshop brushes. I feel I have a lot of good textures to work on and I think I have a lot to work with for this illustration, and we'll start scanning them in and seeing how that works. 12. Incorporating Handmade Textures Part 1: I have all my texture scanned in and saved. Now, I can go through and see what some of the things I created. I just want to show you a couple of things really quick. This is the stamp that I have and I still didn't get that good of a stamp, I probably need a denser stamp pad, but it's still pretty fun, so what you could do if you were to create something like this is just playing with the levels. To go to levels is just Image Adjustment levels or I just do Command L, and just play with that, and you have like a really good black and white scan. If I want to digitize this, I can just drag this file into Illustrator. I basically just took it from the Photoshop file and dragged it in Illustrator. Again, there's no real fancy way to place files in Illustrator that need to be live trace. I'm going to just go to the control bar, I'm going to choose Lettering and see if that option will work for this. It lost a little bit of detail, but that's probably better anyway. I'm just going to erase some of these, I'm going to do that. Now, I can change the color to whatever I want, now it looks like a stamp because it's an actual stamp. That's one of the fine things about creating, lettering with real texture. Again, I'll just quickly show you. I just drew Chalkboard, and I'm just going to invert it, and I'm just going to command I, I can just play with the levels a little bit. If I worked a little bit longer on it, I could make it look more believable. I'm just wrote it out. But you can see it has the chalk texture. What you can do is, you can get rid of just plain black background and you can scan any either a real chalkboard texture or you can create one with paper. I just played with making the white paper, showed the tooth a little bit more. Papers with little too smith. If you work with a darker paper, it can be full for this. You can see, it has more of a texture, it looks like it's on a slate or something, but for me something that you can play around with, and as you can see, I just have these other textures that I can probably pull and bring into my illustration. This was the photocopy or not the photocopy just print out of just black, where I to the tape and just started taking off some of the ink and these other texture. I want to go to my Illustrator file, and I'm going to start bringing this into Photoshop. But how I wan to do that is I want to work on layers because in Photoshop, layers is really important. I don't work with layers and Illustrator as much, but you don't want to have a flattened file in Photoshop because it makes it difficult to work with. I copy the background. This is 10 inches by 12.5 inches and I want to keep it that same size in Photoshop, and I say File, New and I copy that size on the clipboard. It's making a new file that's 10 inches by 12.5 inches. I'm going to change it to same way. I place the background in there, so I have the same background color I'm working with in Illustrator. Now, what I want to do is so that I place everything in the exact same spot. I'm going to copy and paste on top this background and lock it. Then with this second background, I'm going to select no background and no stroke, so that is just like a plain white box. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to start out selecting just the swirls, and I'm going to select that plane square background, copy that and paste. What that does, it placed exactly the same placement in my Illustrator file, as a Photoshop file, but it didn't place that background shape. I'm going to lock these swirls because I know there are now placed in their Photoshop file. I'm going to do the same thing with the sparkles. It's easy, I don't have all of these grouped, I'm saying Select, Same, Fill color because I know all of the sparkles are the same gold. Again, I'm going to select the shape, the blank shape, place them. As you can see, is placed exactly in the same spot. That will be easier. Lock it. Those are all grouped and I'm going to grab the candy. She kids candies or whatever, with these as well. Now, it's creating these textures and I can go ahead and start naming them so that when I need to refer back to it, it'll be easy for me to find that layer. Swirls, Sparkles, say Candy dats, and lock that layer. Then I'm going to grab the wicked drop shadow, and place that in their, name it Wicked drop shadow. It just takes a few more seconds to name your Photoshop files and it will make your life a lot easier. I definitely suggest doing that, especially when you're working, like this is going to end up being a whole lot of layers though. Sweet drop channel. I'm just hitting Paste, Control V. No fancy ways, play saying, Illustrator files into Photoshop. I'm going to grab the drop shadow details on top of that, and then I'm going to place all of them individually. It will be a lot easier. You can see if I were to show you if I just dragged it in here without using this background shape, it's going to be a pain. I'll take this and it drags in a false over here and I have to line it up. It took me just a little bit more time, but it's just a lot easier and you'll find that just do it this way and this way you know, it's exactly in the same spot, because we just spent all that time moving around our image to make sure everything was in the right spots though minus, well, continue that carefulness when you're putting in Photoshop. If you are working with a phrase that is longer than just three words, you can group them in the same layer. If your phrases like ten words long. If you have words like in the, to the, just place them in the same group like I did this swirls, it's not each individuals were only to get it's own layer. That's madness. Then there's Candies, it goes in there, paper-mints. I'm going to move those down. 13. Incorporating Handmade Textures Part 2: The details in the lettering, should be on its own layer. Finish naming all of the layers. Sweet Details, and Sweet Details number 2. It's fine if things are spelled wrong, it's just layers. Okay. So now I have everything in layers. I know exactly which one is which. I can go in and change, move around a whole layer if I needed to but I'm going to be doing that. So now I'm going to start bringing in the textures we created. We're going to be using clipping masks to create these textures. I'm going to start with this one. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to select Wicked. I'm using this selection tool to grab the outline of the shape. You drag it in and I have to resize it. That's fine if you need to line up, multiply it on top and you can seen how it's lining up with your file. Then to create a clipping mask it's pretty easy. Put the texture layer on top of the layer you want to have texture inside. Right now I have this texture layer on top of Wicked, and I'm going to right-click and select "Create clipping mask". In the control bar, I'm going to deselect Auto-select so I'm not grabbing other files. Now this texture file is inside the layer of Wicked. We can maintain the edge that we created in Illustrator. Because if we were to start adding texture by, selecting, and then we were using photoshop brush to add texture, it's going to look pixelated. The edges are not going to have the edge. If I zoom in, you can see the edge creates pixels rather than the smoother edge we were using in Illustrator. That's why it's good to use clipping mask when you're adding texture. I have this in here, and I can go in, change the levels so I can merge it closer to the color I'm working with. I'm going to be adding textures on top. But I like the splotchy paint texture we have going on here. I'm going to go on to hue and saturation. This will change the color dramatically. Let me [inaudible]. It's still in black and white. I'm going to go to Image Adjustment, color balance, and punch up the red and magenta. Now I'm starting to get more of a color I'm working with underneath. You can always unselect it to make sure you're on the right path. I'm going to go back to levels and make it all darker. Then you can change the hue, in hue and saturation, I'm using a lot of shortcuts. The shortcuts I'm using are all right here, so Control U. That's how you get to hue and saturation. Control B is color balance, levels Control L. Those are pretty much the ones I use to work with colors like this. I'm going to multiply edges for now. I can even go in with the Photoshop brush and smooth out any of those areas that look too contrasting. I'll show you that in a minute. We're going to leave it like that. I'm going to turn the opacity down. I'm going to select the texture we have for Sweet. Drag that in, re-size it, place them on top of the Sweet layer. Right-click, create clipping mask I moved to live for now. It's a very brushy texture. Then definitely interested in seeing how this texture we created using the soft pencil for Tooth. Resize it. This one is so lined up pretty well. I'm just going to try and shift the colors, and it takes a little maneuvering. I'll go in color balance, pump up the blue, cyan, just a little bit green, go back to levels. Then you want to even out those terms a little bit more. Pump up the saturation until you get the right hue of that blue and green, we have much more green. Go back to color balance. It's just going to take some maneuvering until you get the right color. So we're going a little closer now. You just have to keep playing with those levels and everything, and we'll start getting closer. I think right now I'm going to multiply it, and we'll just work with the colors that way. We have some of these textures in here and they're working, let's just see. Curious just to try out some of these other textures we created. I'm going to grab the L we created with the wide marker because I don't know how well this is going to really work. But I think it could be cool if it did work. Let's see. This is when you start multiplying textures on top and you're like, "I think that was really cool, hopefully they're like that." That's pretty close, but the texture is interfering with the detail we have on top of it. I'm going to hide it just for now so we can just start working with that, and then just duplicate it for the other L and turn it around. You can tell that they're from the same texture. But if I take the stamp tool, clone stamp, that's just I just hit S to get there, select part of the texture and just turn on the hardness, so it's not so obvious here, using a stamp, but you can just stamp out the sections that look like this one has a lot of very distinctive look to this. I'm going to get rid of it on this one, it sound so obvious. You click here. We'll try this H a little bit, it's a little bit too much of a difference size. Let's see if I can fix it in. If it's the T, I can just use these other marks that I made, drank those and just move it around until it works. It just has a cool soft brush look to it. I'm just going to group, merge those layers altogether so now it's in one layer, so when I make edits to the color, it's a lot easier and I'm not making them all different colors. Right now I'm just evening out the tone so it's not so contrasted. I turn off the multiplying so I can get it's feel for what it's looking like. Again, I'm going to punch up the blue cyan. Maybe I'll use more yellow. Get more of the green color, punch up the saturation. Now, we're getting all closer to the color. Before we continue playing with some of these other textures, if you want your texture to be created, to be vectorized, say you like the way this texture is working, but it needs to be an Illustrator, I'm just going to duplicate this, merge these together. I'm going to make it black and white so we can bring it in Illustrator and live trace it and see how it translates to Illustrator. It's going to lose some of the details. But as you can see, you can still pick up on some of the brush look to it. We're just going to select the lettering, see if that will work. Now you have an Illustrator file of that texture that's selectable and we can scale it without it getting pixelized. It's pretty easy, although if you work with a lot of these files and even bigger or more details in the texture, it's going to be a big file. So make sure you're saving often, but it is fine to work like that. Just wanted to show that real quickly. So now, let's take a look at this water colory gradient look, that I think I'm probably going to want to use for suite. So we're going to drag this in, and I put it in the clipping mask right under this other texture. So right now, the two textures are combined, which is something we could do. But for right now, I'm just going to hide that one. This needs to be scaled down just to 10, so I can get that darker texture at the bottom. So again, I'm going to start changing the colors, punch up the red, punch up the magenta, and it might be helpful to have a layer. I'll just move the color just right over here. You can even just make a little swatch above what you're doing, so you can see how close you're getting to the color that you're referencing. It might change a little bit. I like that coral color. But when I go back and jump some more of the red. Let's see how close we're getting. It's looking a little too orange still. Starting to look a little bit better. So this texture, well I think these watercolor marks up here could be something really cool to work in another Illustration. Whether landing in the lettering, for right now is just distracting. So I'm going to stamp out these white splotches, and you can do that just by selecting somewhere on the same tone that you have next to it. Using the clone stamp, you can just hit S, it will allow you to just hit "Option", select part of the texture that's close to where you're stamping out and just brush around that. So really, I just wanted it to be a little bit more smooth, but I do think the watercolor look could be really fun for someone else to use in their project, but I just want to work with a gradient on mine. That's looking pretty even. Now that's just made out of the watercolor we made earlier. It's just this. We can release the clipping mask to get a better idea of what the entire image looks like. Create clipping mask again. Now I move more of that water staff. These details down here are now disappearing, but I can always change the colors, shift those to how I want them to look. I'm going to now select this texture we did for wicked. It might be something that I combined with the other texture that I already have in place. Try that in, place it. Have to re-scale it. So I multiply it and see how it's lining up. This is why it's important to make the texture wider than the letters. So when you're lining it up, it's a little easier, especially if my file is 300 DPI. But I scan these in at 600 DPIs, so that's why they're so much larger. If you want this stark purple and black look, actually, looks cool for wicked. It make sense, but not really for the rest of illustration. I think I'm going to play around with colors, and just get some cool effects that way. Another one of the textures we were playing with was this stamp texture, and I'm going to crop out these other marks for now because I want to show you something. That if you invert it, this could be something good for the background texture. I need to search CMYK. I'm going to see if I can get a good tan color. This might be something we use for the background. Punch up the yellow. 14. Incorporating Handmade Textures Part 3: Now I'm going to start bringing in the textures we created. We're going to be using clipping masks to create these textures. I'm going to start with this one. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select wicked. I'm just using the selection tool to just grab the outline of the shape and drag it in, and I have to resize it. That's fine. If you need to line up, just multiply it on top and you can see how it's lining up with your file. Then to create a clipping mask, it's pretty easy. Put the texture layer on top of the layer you want to have texture inside. So write now I have this texture layer on top of wicked, and I'm just going to right-click and select "Create clipping mask." In the control bar, I'm going to deselect auto-select, so I'm not grabbing other files. So now this texture file is inside the layer of wicked. So now we can maintain the edge that we created in Illustrator. Because if we were to start adding texture by, let's say, just selecting, and then let's just say we were using Photoshop brush to add texture, it's going to look pixelated. The edges are not going to have the edge. So like if I zoom in, you can seen the edge creates pixels rather than the smooth or edge we were using in Illustrator. So that's why it's good to use clipping mask when you're adding texture. So now I have this in here, and I can now go in, change the levels, so I can match it closer to the color I'm working with, and I'm going to be adding textures on top, but I like the full splashy pink texture we have going on here. I'm going to go into hue and saturation, and this will change the color dramatically. Let me come back to normal, so it's still in black and white. I'm going to go to image adjustment, color balance, and punch up the red and magenta. Now I'm starting to get more of the color I'm working with underneath, and you can always just unselect it to make sure you're on the right path. We're going to go back to levels, and make it all darker, and then you can change the hue and hue and saturation. I'm using a lot of shortcuts, but the shortcuts I'm using are all right here. So Ctrl U, that's how you get to hue and saturation, Ctrl B is color balance, levels ctrl L, and those are pretty much the ones I use to work with colors like that. I'm going two multiply it just for now, and I can even go in with the Photoshop brush and smooth out any of those areas that look too contrasting. I'll show you that in a minute. So we're just going to leave it like that, and I'm just going to turn the opacity down, and I'm going to select the texture we have for sweep, drag that in, resize it, place that on top of the sweet layer, right-click, create clipping mask. I'll just multiply it for now. Yeah, it's a very brushy texture. Then definitely interesting seeing how this texture we created using the soft pencil to resize it. This one still line up pretty well. I'm going to just try and shift the colors, and it takes a little maneuvering, so I go and color balance, pump up the blue, cyan, is a little bit of green, go back to levels, then you want to even out those terms a little bit more, pump up the saturation, try and get the hue of that blew green. We have so much more green. Go back to color balance. Just take some maneuvering to get the right color, so we're getting a little closer now. You just have to keep playing with those levels and everything, and it will start getting closer. I think right now we're going to multiply it, and we'll just work with the colors that way. So we have some of these textures in here and they're working, and let's just say curious, just try out some of these other textures we created. I'm going to grab the L we created with the wide marker, because I don't known how well this is going to really work. But I think it could bee cool if it did work, to say. This is when you start multiplying textures on top and you're like, I think that was really cool, hopefully like that. That's pretty close, the texture is interfering with the detail we have on top of it. I'm going to hide it just for now so we can just start working with that. I'm going to just duplicate it for the other O and turn around, and you can tell that they're from the same texture. But if I take the stamp tool, clone stamp, I just hit S to get there, select part of the texture and just turn down the hardness. So it's not so obvious here using a stamp, but you can just stamp out the sections that look like this one has a lot of very distinctive look to it. So I'm going to get rid of it on this one. So it's not so obvious. Even like here. We'll try this H alone with a little bit too much of a different size. [inaudible] and with the TA, I can just use these other marks that I made, drag those in, I can just move it around and see what works. I'm just going to have a cool soft brush look to it and I'm just going to merge those layers altogether so now it's in one layer. When I make edits to the color, it's a lot easier and I'm not making them all different colors. Right now I'm just evening out the tone so it's not so contrasted. Turn off the multiply so I can get it's feel for what it's looking like. Again, I'm going to punch up the blue cyan, maybe I'll use more of yellow. Get more of the green color, punch up the saturation. Now we're getting a little closer to the color. Before we continue playing with some of these other textures, if you want your texture to be created, to be vectorized, say you like the way this texture is working but it needs to be in Illustrator. I'm just going to duplicate this, merge these together and I'm going to make it black and white so we can bring in an Illustrator and live trace it and see how it translates to Illustrator. It's going to lose some of the details but as you can see it has, you can still pick up on some of the brush look to it. We're just going to select lettering and see if that will work. Now you have an Illustrator file of that texture that's selectable and you can scale it without it getting pixelized. It's pretty easy although if you work with a lot of these kind of files and even bigger or more details in the texture, it's going to be a big file. Make sure you're saving often but it is fun to work like that, so I just wanted to show that real quickly. Now, let's take a look at this water colory gradient look that I think I'm probably going to want to use for sweep. We're going to drag this in and I put it in the clipping mask right under this other texture. Right now the two textures are combined which is something we could do but for right now I'm just going to hide that one and start. This needs needs to be scaled down just a tab, so I can get that darker texture at the bottom. Again, I'm going to start changing the colors. Punch up the red, punch up the magenta and it might be helpful to have a layer. I'll just move the color just right over here. You can even just make a little swatch above what you're doing so you can see how close you're getting to the color that you're referencing. You might change a little bit and I like that coral color but I'm going to go back, punch up some more of red. Let's see how close we're getting. It's looking a little to orange still. Now it's starting to look a little bit better. While I think these watercolor marks up here, could be something really cool to work in another illustration where the landing in the lettering for right now, it's just the distracting. I'm going to stamp out these white splotches and you can do that just by selecting somewhere on the same tone that you have next to it. Using the clone stamp, if you can just hit S, it'll allow you to just hit option select part of the texture that's close to where you're stamping out and just brush around that. So really, I just wanted it to be a little bit more smooth. But I do think the watercolor look could be really fun for someone else to use in their project. But I just want to work with a gradient online. That's looking pretty even and now that's just made out of the water color we made earlier. It's just this and you can release the clipping mass to get a better idea of what the entire image looks like. Create clipping mask again, then I'll move more of that water color stuff so I'm just going to step back. These details down here are now disappearing but I can always change the colors, shift those to how I want them to look. I'm going to now select this texture we did for wicked. It might be something that I combined with the other texture that I already have in place. Drag that in, place it. After re-scaling, that's pretty close. Let's multiply it and see how it's lining up. This is why it's important to make the text wider than the letters so when you're aligning it up it's a little easier. Especially if my file is 300 DPI but I scan these in a 600 DPIs, so that's why they are so much larger. If you want this like stuck like purple and black look, it actually looks cool for wicked. It makes sense but not really for the rest of illustration. I'm going to play around with the colors and just get some cool effects that way. Another one of the textures we were playing with was the stamp texture. I'm going to crop out these other marks for now because I want to show you something. That if you invert it, this could be something good for the background texture. I need to switch to CMYK and I'm going to seen if I can get a good tone color and this might be something we use for the background. Punch up the yellow. 15. Photoshop Brushes and Texture: This is something where we can grab some more of these subtle texture parts and use them where its a little too white, let's see that looks like back hear. It's a little too textured right now and it's going to interfere with some of these other details, but I think if I can just multiply it on top, bring the opacity down, merge these two together, play with the levels a little bit more. Now, it's subtle but it still has a texture and it's looking just a little bit more authentic, but it's something you just have to play with. Another thing, and I just want to show, for "wicked", before we finalize this texture, the texture we created with the LaserJet printout. I'm going to bring that in. Oh, that looks cooler with dark background. Put that in the "wicked", it has this worn look to it, I'm going to scale it down, see how that works when the details are a little bit smaller. Once I change the colors, it's going to give a different look and you're not going to see as like red gold worn paper. I have all my textures placed and I have them close to the colors I want to work with, but right now I need to manage the colors a little better and smooth out some of the gradients, and I'm going to do that using Photoshop brushes. I don't really make my own custom Photoshop brushes but I do purchase them and I like Kyle T. Webster's Photoshop brushes. He has a whole lot to play with, and basically, when you download them, in your Control bar there's a little drop-down menu and that's where all your current tools are, and there's a little arrow and that's when you go to Preset Manager and that's where you'll load all the new brushes you just downloaded. You can go through and just find something that will work for you. This is something you can fun layer stuff. I like this one that has lots of fun textures and you can customize them even more in the Brush tool section by playing with the density, the depth, and it just creates a fun little texture. I like just the subtle little hints of the paper showing through and other little China markers, China markers are like oil markers. They have a thick, gloppy texture to them. Grain, that's good for smoothing gradients, just subtle texture on top of other textures, you can layer them. It's good to play and get to known some of the textures you're working with. The textures that I downloaded here, I think they're, at the most, $10. They're pretty worth it, they're all really well made, but there are other places you can found Photoshop brushes for cheep. But you can also play around with the Photoshop brushes that you have just already installed in Photoshop. If you go to your brush palette, you can see there's different styles of brushes, some are more wispy, or brushy, or grainy, but what you have to do is, you can't just pick one of these and use it because you can see right away there's just this repeating pattern, unlike what Kyle's brushes look like. He made them work so that there isn't such an obvious repeating pattern, unlike these other brushes. All you have to do is add texture to them and make them your own. If you add texture, there's this palette of different textures you can use and you can get sum other fun texture styles here. Get rid of that, get rid of the opacity, get rid of the wet edges, smoothing, don't that, here we go. You can play around with the depth and the texture, and see what textures work best for you. If you don't want to download or buy a set of brushes, you can create your own in Photoshop with just a few tweaks. You can find a brush that looks like it's going to be close to what you want to accomplish, but you don't want something that is just the default option. You want to really work with it and see what works best for you. I like to go ahead and add texture to my brushes, this way it has the subtle changes I want to add. You can do that by changing the depth. You can make it really thick and clumpy. Something not so much or I usually like to keep it on something like this where it's just subtle and it just lays on top. You can work with the shape dynamics to just seen what changes for you. But what you want to avoid is something that's going to look like it's a repeating pattern. You can see it here and that's why I like to work in Photoshop brushes with the handmade textures I make because then it makes, when I do use Photoshop brushes, it looks much less obvious. But you can also do that just by layering different depths and different tones. If I have a thicker or more dense pattern and if I want to add some darker tones, I'll just lower the depth, add it on top. You can see that it's creating something that looks like a real painting. It's just all about adding texture, adding layers. Definitely, familiarize yourself with Photoshop brushes and how you can make them work for you and your piece and just navigate what you have here to work with. If maybe you feel like you want to found out more, you can definitely look and see how you can create your own Photoshop brushes or download a set or just work with what Photoshop offers and see what will work for that. We're going to jump back into our illustration hear and start seeing where I can incorporate the Photoshop brushes in with the handmade textures and what will work for that. I'm going to start with wicked where I have this, the texture that we're working with from the LaserJet print out. I just worked with the colors to shift it so it has this magenta but it's a little darker than the color I had picked in illustrator but I like the darker layer. What I want to do is basically add more of a gradient so that it matches the color that I was working with in illustrator and adds the effects that I was looking for and I'm going to do that using Photoshop brushes. I'm going to actually use one that I use pretty often, I just call it 100 because it's the 100. That's the size that is in the preset and it's write in the middle. I use that one and I keep the depth at around 11, the scale somewhere around 70, something like that. I created a clipping mask and I'm going to select the color that I had picked in the Illustrator file and I'm going to start working with that and I'll select the texture. I'm going to start working on top, adding this magenta and smoothing out the texture that I have working already. This will help just keep that handmade texture look but this way I can control the colors I'm using. As you can see, it's pretty subtle right now. I'm going to make the scale a little smaller and I'm going to just keep shifting the tone so I get this layered look and a smooth gradient but still looks like I'm creating it with a dry brush. Just to make it a little darker. Not like that, something like that. This way it's smoothing into the texture I was just working with getting rid of some of the highlights. I like some of the highlights that the texture is creating but I don't want them to be too distracting. I just want to smooth it out just a little bit and just continue with darker shades. I want it to have a really dramatic look. I want this bottom to be really deep purple. I'm just going to continue adding deeper tones, brighter tones for a smooth gradient. I think I'm going to add some highlights to make it look like there's maybe an underpinning and I'm going two do that by selecting a much brighter color, but I'm going to turn the depth down and it looks like this brighter pink is either a really dry brush right on top or maybe something that was a couple of layers under these other colors. If I want to make it a little bit more subtle, I'll go in with an eraser using the same textured Photoshop brush with a low depth, something around 10 percent and erase it so that those highlights are just a little more, just not back just a little bit. I'm going to just continue adding these gradients and smoothing it out and getting it to where I want it to be. 16. Final Details: Right now I just think that the texture looks a little blown out from one, I had to change the saturation and the hue to match the color that I had picked. The color that I have is that I picked an illustrator is a little red, but actually like the pinks that I was working with where it ended up in the gradient. I'm going to work with that, but I'm just going to smooth it out just a little bit so the texture doesn't look so blown out. I'm going to use "Create a layer with the clipping mask" and I'm going to walk right on top. Maybe I'll go back in and add some of those highlights because I do like the lighter pink, but I also don't want it to fall in a way into the background color, because I know the background is going to be a similar shade of this cream 10th color I have working. So already it's looking a little smoother, but it's still keeping the integrity of that hand painted texture. Just pick a slightly darker tan and work through the middle. Then again, even slightly darker, and work right on top of that. You can just barely seen how the texture is changing the look of the texture, but it's just not making it look so stack, so it just looks smoother, and not quite as distracting. I'm going to have to change the color of the details that I have working in slip because they're getting lost in the darker texture. I could just make that a little brighter, and I'll show you what it looks like. Without this texture, I'm still keeping the same exact look that I created, and a lot of it still showing through, but it's smoother and it's just going to work a lot better with the other textures I have working with. If you do feel like you ended up going a little too far with the Photoshop brush and you want to maybe keep more of the texture you had, you can easily go in, and I would duplicate that layer in case you decide that you do want to keep that. Duplicate that layer and hide it and erase using the same brush with the eraser tool on a low depth, and just go ahead and erase some of the Photoshop brush you have working. It'll let more of the handmade texture shine through, but still keeping the smoother Photoshop brush that you used, and that is giving it a really nice handmade feel. I definitely am liking the color a lot more than the color that I made in illustrator. When you do work with texture from Photoshop, from your Illustrator file, the colors are going to shift. But if you do need them to be textured, you can always vectorize your textured files. I think that's a good spot and I'm going to move on to tooth. Now I really like the texture we've created with the Copic marker, but I'm just not having a good time making it fit with the color, and the texture is a little too stark. It's too like there's not enough variation, it's very bold. I think I'm going to keep it really subtle, but I'm going to go ahead, select this color, create a new layer, and the clipping mask. I do like more of the saturated color. Do you think the color I chose and illustrators are a little too desaturated, especially compared with the other colors I'm working with? I'm going to work right on top of the texture, and I'm working with the Photoshop brush. I'm just going to keep it pretty basic. I'm going to make the depth a little more deeper, and just go ahead and keep adding different tones working directly on top of the texture file. I might get an opportunity to use that texture I made with the Copic marker and it might just work better for bigger letters that don't have as much detail, and it can really just be the focus because it just grabs too much attention, and it takes away from the readability. I'm going to add some highlights, I'm not really going to do a gradient in this word, but just work with how I created this dimensional look with these details on top of the tooth. I'm just going to add these highlights around. I'm going to go back in, make them a little bit more subtle, just really subtle shifts in color that make the texture really stand out. It's really just constantly adjusting the density, the brush, and the more variation you use, the more authentic the illustration is going to be. Because if you just use one Photoshop brush, and it has an obvious pattern to it, it's going to be really clear that, you're going to see the Photoshop in your work and that's not really what we're going for. After this 10th layer, I think I'm finally hitting a texture that I really like, and that is working much better. So I think wicked sweet and tooth are both in a really good spot, and I'm going to move on to creating textures in the drop shadow. I'm going to start with the wicked. Go through my layers, found out where that is, texture, create a new layer, convert to "Create clipping mask." I have this lavender drop shadow, but right now it's competing with the color of the background. So I'm going to make it a little darker, and just start adding some texture. What I'm going to do is make it have some actual dimension where it looks like there's a light sauce and it's creating a shadow on the bottom of the letters. That's going to create drama, and really make it extra special. You have to have some knowledge of how light reacts with dimension. It could be helpful to just create something just with paper, and just see for yourself how the light reacts to it, and see where the shadows belong, because the more believable that is it's going to look more authentic. Right now I'm adding shadows on the bottoms where the light is probably coming from the top. I'm keeping the sides pretty. I'm going to keep the sides lighter. So anything that looks like it's going to be casting a shadow, putting shadows there. Then I'll select different colors and smooth out these shavings, so I'm going to select a slightly lighter color. I'll smooth out where those gradients happened. Then I can also add some highlights and add some brighter parts where the light would hit. This is really a subtle and even though it's interacts with the background, your eyes finishes it, because it has this other drop shadows working. We're just going to add a few more darks so that it is really standing out. That's going to have a really beautiful, dramatic look to it. Now the drop shadow has some more dimension. It has volume to it. If I take it away, it just flatten. You can create flat textures, I think, flat drop shadows that can work for a lot of projects. But for this, I just wanted a lot of fun dimension. I'm going to do the same thing with the sweet drop shadow. This one has a more subtle color to the background. The drop shadow matches the background. Again, I'm working with these darker shades, and I'm going to build it up. Like this. I'm working on an angle. I'm moving my brush in this angle that goes with the drop shadow. If you see, because the texture has these lines to it so you can tell that it just goes. Because if I were to go up and down, you'd bee able to see these up and down streaks. Let me show in a darker color what I mean. If I were to create the texture like that, you can see that there's an up and down streak. But if I go like this, it looks a little bit more like it's going with the angle of the drop shadow. It's a pretty subtle detail, but when you do pick up on it, it just looks a lot better like that. I'll just add in some darker shades. Going with this stand out a little bit more. Just like that. That's definitely having more of the effect I want. Save again, and always remember to save. Now we're going to go tooth. Do that drop shadow. I'm going to work with the details on tooth, and I just want to add some variation in color. I create a new layer, create a clipping mask. I'm just going to work with a deeper tone than what's there. Change that pressure a little bit, depth a little bit. Because I'm not really looking so much for texture, as much as just a change in tone. I'm just adding some shading to where I think there would be a shadow created on this part of the letter, because I have this effect that I want it to look like it's curved out just a little bit. It's more of just an ornamental detail than I am trying to make it look realistic. But if I add a little bit of changes in the tone, it will look more believable. Now I'm just going to add some darkness. To make it a little darker over here. Then I might just see what it looks like with some highlights and a lighter depth. Even lighter. Just a little texture just to give these edges some highlights. I might go in, go over that. Make these highlights a little more subtle. I'm looking through seeing what I'm going to change. I think I might want to fix up the drop shadow on sweet. I think the size of the brush was a little to big, so I'll refine that a little bit soon. As for the arrows, I want to add a little bit of details to the arrows,. Mainly I'm going to make the areas where it's under the letter, are coming through the letter. I'm going to make them a little darker. These are all on one layer. I can just quickly go through all of them, and make all the same changes at the same time. There's just a little bit of depth. Now I just want to add some texture to the candy dots. Create clipping mask and just really subtle, just a little bit to add some dimension. For now I'm just going to add some highlights. Then I'm going to add just a little bit of shadow underneath of it. Again, even though these elements are small, I don't want them to stand out just because they're really flat. I'm going to run them out. Same with the little dots here. Not as much dimension, but just shifts in color that are pretty subtle. The way I'm going to refine the sweet drop shadow is, I think it just needs to be a little bit more refined. Like I said, I'm going to use a smaller brush, and I'm going to go back in using the same colors and the same technique. Maybe a little deeper. Like that. I'm just going to go in with the dark, and I think the brush I was using might've worked for something else, but on the drop shadow it looked too chunky. I'm going to just continue adding these colors, and just smoothing out that texture. But this thing was a little just too chunky. Again, I'm going to just smooth out the tones with this smaller brush. Now it's just looking a little smoother, because the texture doesn't need to stand out that much. That's an even lighter color and a little bit of a smaller depth, something around 12 percent. I'm going to go ahead and just smooth it all together so that it just seems more even. I think that's where it will be much better. Now we have our textures in place, our colors chosen, and your illustration is pretty much ready to go. We're going to be focusing on the final details and finishing your art work so that it's ready to send off to the client or the printer. Hopefully by now, you understand the benefit of using both handmade textures and Photoshop brushes. Meaning the more layers you use, the more authentic your illustration is going to be, and have that really handmade illustration that we were hoping for. Let's get started on the final details, and finish this illustration up. 17. Finalizing: So at this point, we really just have a few final details to look at in our illustration. This could be adding those final highlights in the illustration with some texture or any last things that you didn't really pay much attention to, the smaller details, and basically just making sure all the colors are working and anything else you wanted to add. So we're going to just do a few more things to my illustration, like adding a final texture on top that we're going to maybe play with, and just making sure the colors are working overall and making a few more adjustments to the background. So let's get started. So we're going to just do a few things to the background and a couple more adjustments to color and other things to make this illustration really stand out. One of the things I like to do in my background, while the texture in this background is pretty subtle. In fact, it was probably pretty hard for you to see. But I'm going to add just a border of darker color around the illustration, and really have it look like there's light coming from the middle. So I just took a slightly darker shade from the background and I'm just going to go around and add a darker edge to the background. I don't want it to look so stark. So I'm going to just shade it with little bit of a lighter color, and it just has a worn look. But it's subtle, it's not too obvious that I'm trying to create like a old paper texture, but just a little bit of a gradient. Then I'm going to add a much lighter color coming from the middle, and I think that will help make the illustration in the back stand out. I'm just taking a lighter color and just filling in the background. It's just like another added level of dimension, and it just looks like there's brightness coming from the background. It's helping this layout stand out and lets these sparkles make more sense in a way. It's pretty subtle, but I think something like that is working, and I'll show you just the differences. Here's the subtle background I had before, and here it is with the added texture, so it's subtle, but I think it really helps bring everything together. Another thing I want to do is, and it might not work on this illustration right now, but it's something that you could maybe even use in your project. So I'm referring back to this texture that I created with the laserjet pronoun. I'm going to select the white areas and make a copy. I'm going up the levels so it's completely white and drag it in here. I'm going to make sure it's completely white. There's still some gray parts. It looks like it's an old paper, an old poster that's has some worn edges. You can definitely start to tell that thing where there's crinkles in the papers. So I'm going to make the Kathie. So it fills the whole layout. But the scale is small enough that it makes sense. It just creates like an overall texture. I tend to like my textures a little bit more subtle, sometimes it really does work when you have a concept that is supposed to be like from an old book or something. So this is an idea that works for you, that's hard. It's harder to create with Photoshop brushes. So it's really helpful to have something that is more realistic, and you can make these things happen like this in the texture that we made before. Another thing that can be helpful when you're finalizing your work is if you have an illustration, especially something like this that's very warm in color, it could help to just create a new layer, and with just a really subtle shade of yellow, just a cream color. Fill the whole page and multiply it on tap. While this is a little too yellow, it definitely helps just unify everything just a little bit. I'm going to just bring the opacity down, maybe just by 50 percent, and you can even go in with the eraser at very low depth something like 9 percent. Anyway surround it and it could even help create an extra little bit of texture. So I'm just going around with the eraser, and if I were to turn off multiply like that, just end the opacity. You can see where I put the erasing away. This is a really good example of Photoshop brushes when they're not working. You can really tell that there's a pattern here, and when you work it in in a way that's really subtle, like how I'm working at now. It's really not an issue, but this is why it's important to use more realistic textures in your work, especially if you're doing an all over texture like this in a way that's really important to how your layout works. I'm just going to bring the opacity down just a little bit more. Now it's looking pretty good, but one of the things that's really helpful to do when you're finalizing your illustration is to look at it off the screen. Sometimes when you print it out, you'll notice things that you might not have even really noticed before when it's on the screen because you've just been staring at it for several hours. Let's see. I'm curious if I'm going to use this overlaying texture or not. I think some areas is just too much, but I do like some of the areas where it's a little bit more subtle, so I may just erase some of these parts and leave some of the texture, and that's something you can do if you feel like your textures overriding your whole illustration. Just take some of it away or lower the capacity or I may just take it out altogether. I'm going to save it like that. Right now it's in CMYK. You should always work in CMYK while you're doing your illustration if it's for print. When you do save it to web, and this is probably goes to when you save your work for Skillshare, you'll want to save it as RGB because that's how the web breeds color. I'm going to keep it as same like when I do this printout. I'm going to save it as a PDF because that's how I pronounce stuff, and go to print. So I just printed out my illustration and I think it looks pretty good right now. I think it lost a little bit of its detail because I put it out on an ink jet, and it's on mat paper. If I printed on glass it probably hold some more of the detail or if you printed it on the laser jet, it would pick up more of the detail, but you can still see a lot of the texture and the colors are a little bit more muted than they are on screen. But I'm pretty happy with how the colors printed, even if they are a little muted. Right now I'm just looking through the illustration and seeing if there's any other final details that I might have missed, like, here's one, this swirl is supposed to be tucked under that O and this swirl is suppose we talked under that E. So they just need to be scooted to the side is not a major change. I left some of the little dude ads in this peppermint and I might just get rid of those because right now it's just distracting. It doesn't look like it's part of the texture, it just looks like I messed up. I'm pretty happy with the textures, and I'm really psyched with how the colors came out. Overall, I think it's working pretty well. I think it would be fun to hang in your kitchen or somewhere, maybe even in the bathroom when you're brushing your teeth and need to be reminded that floor has something. But I think this turned out pretty well. So when you're reviewing your final illustration, just be as critical as possible. Just because you print it out and you feel like it's done doesn't necessarily mean like you can't revisit something or even redraw something because we see it printed out, and it's like suddenly you think, okay, this E is probably a little taller than it needs to be. You can easily get rid of him in your Photoshop because everything's in layers, and go back to your Illustrator or go back to the drawing board. Just draw the one E, bring it in Illustrator, digitize it. It's not something that's going to take a lot of extra time, but it'll help you sleep at night. It's not a detail anyone else is going to really notice. But it's important, it's important that it's important to you really. That's probably it. I think I might end up adding some more sparkles and some in the spaces that are empty. Seeing it now bigger than I've been looking at it on my screen. I'm seeing some other extra little details like that. Yes just a few finishing touches and I'm pretty much done. That pretty much wraps up the class. I hope everyone picked up a few pointers and tips and techniques that they can apply to their projects. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's projects in the project page. Be sure to post your entire process. Even though for the most part of the class we focused on color, texture, digitizing texture, and things of that nature. I still want you to think about your project, posts thumbnail, sketches, and really refine your sketch, and if you do feel like you need to refresh those ideas a little bit more, take my first class, the first steps of hand lettering, where I cover more of that on lettering and really refining your drawing. But I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone's projects in this class and seeing how you create your textures and how you incorporate your textures into your process and your project. In the end, I'm going to be picking three of the projects that I feel best used all of the techniques I talked about in class. Three people will have their project screen printed and an addition of 15, and possibly two color maybe one color, we'll see how it goes. I'm really excited for that to happen. Good job in class everyone, and let's see your projects in the future.