Hand Lettering for Illustrators: Creating Greeting Cards in Procreate

1. Introduction: I absolutely love hand lettering because it's essentially drawing letters. And it's bringing personality and style to your words. Hand lettering is a compelling way to communicate a message and to tell a story through illustration. Digital illustration has really opened up a world of opportunities for me and has greatly enhanced my work as a designer. Hi, I've just Miller. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator. I've been designing for the past 14 years and I just recently started illustrating on the iPad. I learned so much about lettering and illustration from taking Skillshare classes just like this. So I'm super excited to teach my very first Skillshare class today, all about hand lettering for illustrators. Creating custom greeting cards from procreate. As an illustrator greeting cards or one of my favorite things to create. And they make up the bulk of my work as an illustrator. Over the years, I've had the pleasure to work with companies such as American Greetings, minted paper culture, bicycle cards, and many more. I get excited about creating greeting cards because they're the perfect platform to showcase the fusion of lettering and illustration. Cards are also just as simple and inexpensive way to share a joke and to show a person how much you care about them. I also love injecting heroin to my work. I love a good pun. Like this card I designed for, minted. This creative wordplay and vintage style really makes it one of my best-selling cards. For this class, I'll be sharing my process including how to brainstorm a topic, sketch out ideas, ink, color, and decorate your final greeting card. By going through this process, you'll learn how to tell a story by combining different elements into a single integrated piece. This class is really perfect for anyone that is somewhat familiar with Procreate. But maybe you just want to add a little more hand lettering to your illustrations, greeting cards, or one of my favorite things to create. And I'm really excited to share my lettering and illustration techniques with you. So if you're ready, let's get started. 2. Class Project: For this class project, I'll be walking you through how to handle in Illustrator your own greeting card, specifically a birthday card. I chose this thing because everybody has a birthday and it makes up a large part of the greeting card business. But this is your project, so feel free to pick anything that you'd like, including loving anniversary Valentine's thank you card. There's so many greeting card themes that you can choose from. I chose this project because combining hand lettering and illustration really makes my style unique and memorable. It's also just a great way to share a joke or a special message with a loved one. It's also the perfect platform to showcase the fusion of lettering and illustration. For this class, you'll need blank paper and a pencil, a drawing tablet, and drawing utensils such as the iPad and Apple Pencil and the drawing app Procreate. In addition, for this class, I included procreate lettering brushes, a digital lettering guidebook, and color palettes found in the class resource section. If you're ready, let's get to LeBron. 3. Terminology & Inspiration: You might be asking yourself, what is hand lettering and how is it different from calligraphy and typography? Let's clear up that confusion. Hand lettering is an art form that focuses on drawing and illustrating the letters. Each letter and phrases hand-drawn and uniquely composed. Lettering is completely customizable and perfect for projects that require more illustrative work that you can't quite achieved with a typeface. Calligraphy is also hand-drawn, but focuses on the beautiful writing of letters. Calligraphers use single brush strokes to create the letters. Often with traditional tools including brush, pen, nib and ink, calligraphy requires little or no retouching. Topography is not hand-drawn, but rather an art form that arranges type or fonts in a clear, readable and visually appealing manner. Arranging type is done so by adjusting the size, letting, and kerning of a font. Obviously for this class I'll be focusing on hand lettering, but I wanted to shed some light and clarity on the three distinct art forms. Before I start brainstorming ideas, I like to gather inspiration and also consider what letter style I'd like to use for my piece. There are four main types of lettering styles that I'll be covering, including san-serif, serif, script and representational. And I really like showing those different styles through the hand-lettering ledger book by Mary Kate McDevitt. She's just the queen of hand lettering. And so she has a lot of just great lettering examples that I can reference through this book. This is also just a great resource to have on hand to if you just want to practice more hand lettering. The first style is san-serif, miss the most basic with no extra flourish or embellishment. But you can still tell how very hand-drawn it is by these added up illustrations that she does. She's still like you can definitely tell that this is hand-drawn. It's not just a font. Does a lot of different ways to embellish it and decorate it to make it just fun and add more character. The second style is Sarah. And Sarah's have extra strokes or feet on the ends of the letter forms. And there are so many different kinds of Sarah and that you can tell the little extra serifs that are added. It also has a very old, old-school vintage feel to it. It can also be very ornate. Can tell like these. These added ornaments on it is just very, very ornate and it takes on a totally different character. The third style is script, which is closely related to natural cursive handwriting. So the letter forms are connected to each other with fluid strokes. So you can tell it's just very more elegant. And you can see how all the letter forms are connected with a fluid stroke. It's just like your handwriting. It you see a lot of scripts and like wedding invitations is because it has this like very sophisticated romantic feel. The fourth style is representational, and this is the most illustrative. You can tell from her examples here that she drew out solid leaves, like lettuce leaves for a salad to represent the word salad. She has this ribbon hand lettered this ribbon to spell Walzer. Zap. That literally looks like electric electricity bolts. Also how she used hair to represent haircuts. It's actually this scissors are cutting into the letter form. That's really creative. And I love how she uses flowers. She illustrates flowers to represent each letter and fresh. So before I even start sketching out thumbnails, I really like to reference lettering books for inspiration. One of my favorites is the slab serif type book by Stephen Heller and Luis Valley. I love it so much that it hits falling apart. But inside, they give really great examples of advertisements. And how type is used, combined with illustration is beautiful labels. Also examples of signage. I think just drawing from the past is just really good. They just have great examples of vintage type faces, border treatments. I love these color combinations, very Americana. They also offer a lot of alphabet styles as well. For you to reference. Just super helpful, just a really great book to have on hand. Another one I like to reference is the script style by the same people. They give a lot of really good examples of scripts and how they're combined with sand Sara, Sara fonts. Very elegant calligraphy style of those bright colors so saturated, also give a lot of good border treatments and how to treat swashes. They also provide alphabets as well. Just a really beautiful book with lots of great examples. And as you can, if you see something that really sparks, sparks your mind and you're like how I loved that and I'd really like to adapt some of that in my design. Just take a quick snapshot with your phone and save it for later. I also really love to reference this letter styles library book by Liz Kohler Brown. She is a fellow Skillshare teacher and she's amazing. I've taken a lot of her classes. I've learned so much from her. She's also super nice person. And it's funny, she designed this book which basically has, I think over 25 different styles, lettering styles. And she breaks it down for you in a sketch and ink. And how to decorate each letter and style. And then she gives you an example of how it's used. And she even invited me to be a feature Illustrator. So I illustrated some of these as well. Which was a lot of fun, cute one I did a ton of different styles. She has a bunch of different scripts as well as some serifs. And she always shows you how to combine it and how to use it in an illustration, which is super helpful. I wish I had this book when I was first starting out because it's such a great reference because you're like, I don't know what style to use and you can just instantly reference an entire alphabet from start to finish. It's a great book, so you'll definitely want to check that out. I'm going to link all these books in the resource section so that you can see where to purchase them. Purchase them if you're interested. In addition to my lettering books, I also like to gather inspiration from Pinterest and I created this vintage packaging board and it has great examples. I put the link in the class resource section, but you can just see all these different labels. I love the different swash treatment and how they used it to fill up the negative space. They also give you a ton of examples to blow. This is really cute. How it's just line work of a glass. And then it's behind melody that cuts across in the middle. Luggage. It's kind of a nice canvas that holds the type in. This is really cute. We'll see Shell have just lots of like advertisements and labels. They use a lot of borders to hold the letter, the letter shapes in place with the illustration in the middle. And I kind of like echoes that shape on the bottom. This is a really lovely vintage script. I love how thick it is. It's very cute and pointy serifs. Love this peachy tobacco. A p is really pretty. And how has that slight drop shadow? Then the illustration in the middle. Just kinda get lost in Pinterest because they have such great examples. It's really vintage box of Crayola crayons. And how they have these ornate details. The kind of hug the letter forms. It's really beautiful. Border treatment. This is funny. I didn't even know that beer came packaged like this, but apparently, this beer, it kinda looks like a can of oil. It's crazy. But you can tell it's just like tons of examples of how they combined illustration with type. This is a beautiful example with a B curls in and then the C, it's really lovely. I also really liked this texture that they did with the stippled dots. Here's a good example of a mix of lots of different types. So they have less diagonal treatment. They have this really nice border that runs along it. They have some type straight across, little bit of illustration, lots of type to fit into that one little label. This is really beautiful, beautiful ribbon kinda goes up that has this type than a circle at the top. They also give some similar examples down below. It's pretty funny. I like how squirrels kind of flat at the top and then the letter forms kind of hug the shapes that fits that arch. Squirrel, peanut butter. That's how tasty too. You also really liked these vegetable labels. Can get a lot of inspiration from these border treatments and how they fit the type inside these banners. For this stage is definitely take your time and just kinda soak in all the different inspiration that you can gather from vintage packaging. If you feel particularly drawn to a piece, go ahead and take a screenshot of it and save it for later just so you can reference. This is kinda type treatment that was used. 4. Brainstorming: Okay, For this lesson, I'm going to cover how to brainstorm the messaging for my greeting card. I believe a good greeting card always has a great hook, a funny pun, create a board play that draws the viewer in and it really attracts the viewer. So I always try to brainstorm ideas just to know to write out in a list form before I even start sketching. So this is kinda like what I call a brain dump. And so I usually just do that on playing computer, printer paper with a pencil. I find that doing an analog version is just much easier for me, but that's a personal preference. If you want to do it digitally on your tablet, go ahead or maybe you want to write it in your sketch book. That's, that's up to you. So I usually start just writing a list. I'm going to write birthday at the top because we know that we want to make a birthday card. I'm going to write everything that I can think of about a birthday. Let's see. I hope there's cake at a birthday. Cupcake frosting. There's so many baking shows about cooking these days. Sprinkles, presence, I hope we received presence and gifts, decorations, streamers, confetti. I'm keeping it just very casual, just listing out birthday related things. Candles, individual candles are those little number candles, balloons. We can put that under decorations. Maybe it's an adult, birthdays, so you'll have drinks, cocktails. This is a celebration. This is a party. It's hopefully a gathering with your friends. You know. Unfortunately we're getting older. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe you look forward to getting older every year. But there's a lot of funny things you can do about getting older. So I'm gonna put that down. I also want to think about like typical birthday gradients. So of course, you know, happy birthday. So whole song about it. You know, we, we often wish people happy birthdays. So wishing you, wishing you dot-dot-dot a, wishing you a. And then I kinda want to think of adjectives that describe it. So spectacular could be one. Awesome, fabulous, Terrific, wonderful. You get the idea. I hope your birthday is another popular one. Okay, I think we got a pretty good list going. But everything we know about birthday. So now I'm going to write a separate list about things I like. This is totally unrelated to birthday. Maybe it's, you know, activities or things that you enjoy that you kind of then you just want to make a list for. So what we wanna do is eventually combine these two. So you kinda want to think like, Let's see, I really like coffee. I start every morning with an, a cold brew coffee. So I'm going to put coffee at the top of the list. You know, some people prefer T. So that's a good one. Hiking, nature outdoors. I live in So Cal and I go hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains all the time. I love it. Sunshine. I love the outdoors. Outside. The beach is wonderful. If you live near the beach. Tacos, things that you eat. I love tacos. I love hot sauce on my tacos. Some people don't like spicy food, but I'm obsessed. I also love like a good burger and fries. What are some some more foods that you like? Summer it's almost summertime. I love fresh peaches, strawberries, bananas, you name it. Go back, going back to drinks like good cocktail, love a good cocktail. Beer, wine. I also love to play games with my friends like card games. We've game nights, cards AND gates. There's a lot of fun things you could do. Or my own cards, like there's, you know, a deck of cards, there's a king and a queen. Ace jack. Also, you know, like a suit of cards, the hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs. You get the idea. Okay. Pets, people love their cats and dogs. Let's do pets. Cats and dogs. Okay, so I think we got some good things going on. So now what we want to try to do is combine these two and come up with like some funny puns and creative wordplay. So I'm just going to put any puns. Word play at the top. Let's see. So like combining maybe T, you can do a really easy one would be like, hope you have a terrific birthday. Let's see. Oh, for coffee. So thinking about all the different coffee drinks there are. If you like lattes, wishing you a lot of fun on your birthday. So funny. One dot, dot, dot. Yeah, so another thing I want to keep in mind, I always tried to incorporate a product as my canvas. So whether it's like a bottle of ketchup and it says, let's catch up soon. I feel like that's a really fun way to combine lettering, your messaging in with illustration. So I kinda want to think of that in the back of my head. So for example, like tacos, like, let's talk about your birthday. You could maybe have the product via taco and then letter like, let's talk about your birthday. You don't like hot sauce, thinking of like a bottle of hot sauce and then your messaging could be the label. Let's, you know, the classic Happy Birthday hot stuff. Let's see, you know, like hiking and nature. Like thinking of like life's, life's a journey. You could say something like enjoy the journey. Maybe you have a hiking boot is your canvas background and the lettering inside the boot, that'd be pretty cute. Peaches, like, hope your birthdays, peachy. Abbreviate, your BDS, BCCI, um, for, for maybe like Planet bar cocktail, beer and wine. You could always say like maybe a play on hip, hip hurray, It's your birthday, you say Sip, sip hurray. That rhymes too. So that's really cute. Over beer. You could, instead of saying happy, you could say Happy birthday, Happy Beardy, about that copy of your day. Because beer is made out of hops. It's good one. My husband loves old fashions, the cocktails. So you could say something like wishing you. And old-fashion birthday's pretty cute. There's a lot you could do with like a deck of cards. You could say like your straight up birthday queen and have illustrate a card with the queen on it. What else? Oh, hope your birthdays. Ace. Love that. Pets like for cats and dogs. You know, you could say like, have a hope your birthday is happy, wishing you a Pawsome birthday. How about that? Because cats and dogs have paused. Thinking about like burgers and fries. You can also think more about the condiments. I love like southern food and barbecue sauce. It's like what happens if you did like some kind of riff off of the word awesome and did something like wishing you a song, awesome, birthday. We're just having fun. We're making up words. So that's, I think I have quite a good list going on with a lot of different ideas. I think for my card, I want to go, this is pretty original. Haven't heard of this one too much. So I think I'm going to put a little star around the wishing us awesome birthday because I think that's the messaging that I want to illustrate for my, for my greeting card. Once we have our messaging selected from our list. In the next lesson, I'll go over how to sketch thumbnails so we can start sketching out our composition. 5. Sketching Thumbnails: Okay, so after we've created our brain dump of ideas and we've researched a lot in our books and on Pinterest, we kinda have a good idea of what style we want to use. Now it's time to start sketching out our thumbnails. Are thumbnails are good because it's just a really rough and dirty way to show how to quickly combine lettering into our composition. It also gives us some different options to, before we start to refine and get into the details. So I usually start and just an 8.5 by 11 document. So I'll press Plus. I like to work in inches just because it's a little easier for me. 8.5 by 11300 DPI. It gives me 75 maximum layers, which is plenty. I click Create. Okay, so now I know that I want my messaging to say wishing you a sauce and birthday. And I like to write that out at the top, the very beginning. I'm going to use my sketching pencil. It comes pre-loaded in procreate in the sketching section. I'm going to draw that at the top just as a quick reference. So it's good to write it out ahead of time at the top. So it's really good to write it out at the top as reference because I've just kinda, I always start just drawing in. And then I've many times I have forgotten a word or spell misspelled word. So it's really good just to reference it up at the top. And it's also really good to rank each phrase or word that you want to highlight. You want to put emphasis on. For me, I think so awesome is really important, so I'm going to rank that as number one. Birthday's pretty important because that is our main theme. So I'm going to mark it as number two. Then wishing you a is number three. Not as important as the rest of it. I'm going to scale this down just a tad. Okay. So for my thumbnails, I also want to divide it up into four equal sections because I think I want to draw out four different options I can choose from. So for that the easiest way is to click your gear. Click on the Guide, edit guide. And then you want to bump your grid size all the way to the top. And then procreate automatically divides your canvas into four sections. So all I will quickly do another layer. Just sketch out four squares. Holding my pencil down gives me a straight line. Okay? So I know for my composition, I want wishing you a saw some birthday to act as our label for the bottle. And they want that messaging to fit inside of the barbecue sauce bottle. Easiest way I think is to just start drawing some bottles during some shapes. This is just really rough. I'm just going to start with a bottle cap first. Just start trying some bottles shapes. This is your cards. So if you are having trouble like referencing the shape, maybe go to the grocery store, checkout some different bottles shapes at the grocery store. And I know for this one, I think I want the label to just fit right inside. Okay. Now, I want, I think I once saw some kind of like to look like one of those flags and banners that we were looking at in the Pinterest board. I want that to stand out first. I'm just going to quickly sketch out a big flag banner. Okay, I think I wanna write saw some inside of their easiest way to get it to fit. Because it is kind of a big word, is to figure out what the middle is. The middle is about the EE. I'm going to draw that first. This isn't, this isn't precious. We haven't even, we're not even figuring out styles yet. We're just trying to figure out our composition. So it doesn't really matter what style. I'm just going to write it e and then kinda work backwards, right? See you. Okay. Then I think birthdays naturally going to have to fit down here. And this is kind of an awkward shape. So I think I want a script for this. So I'm just going to use my own handwriting first for the script just to lay it out. This has like an empty space here that I'd naturally want to fill. One of the ways to do that is to draw what you call swash. And I find that drawing swash is just naturally out of the ascenders and descenders of letters works best. That fills up that empty space right there. I like that. Okay. Now I got to fit, wishing you a. We got some space right here. I think we could probably fit an a in. Its kinda like those those packaging bottles, there's little Snipes and bursts that say like 10% fat or something. I don't know. That's what it reminds me of. Now I need to put wishing you a, I think I kinda made me wanna do an arc shape. Just going to lightly draw that in. I'm just going to write wishing you, which she knew. Okay. I think that's looking pretty good. There's a little empty space right here, so I might come back to it. I don't know. I haven't figured quite figured that out yet. That's why we're doing thumbnails is just to kinda figure out the spacing of where we want our words to go. And since this is a birthday, maybe I want to put a star in here just to kind of act like a logo. Some kind of shape. Maybe I want to draw some decorative raise to give it some background. Can have like some stars. Maybe some confetti too. Just to make it more festive but party-like. Okay, So I'm really liking that one a lot, but I think I want to try maybe a different bottle shape and a different composition that's a little too wide. Maybe. Maybe I want to tell iodide or no. Maybe I'll do a different, like a rounded cap shape for this one. I think I want the label to kind of be in this half circle shape. Okay, so this is kind of an interesting, interesting shape. I think I could maybe try a different flag shape for this one. Does something a little different. I'm going to put saw some again in the middle. So it's really big and bold and highlighted similar to how we treated this one. Again, I think the E is probably the middle letter. That is easiest to figure out. Okay, so we've got some awesome to kind of fit in there like that. Just going to trim up my borders, just a hair just to kind of clean up a little bit. And then I think I want wishing you a way to kind of mimic the same shape. I think I'll just roughly draw an arch for that. I think a good fit, really good right in there. Maybe we'll draw some amorphous shapes. And then birthday can fit right in here. Oh, it looks like I forgot my h. That's why you always write it up at the top, right. That's an easy fix though. Procreate can just clip it and add your h. Okay, so I kinda, you know, I used dru, birthday just to kinda mimic that shape. And so there's no like negative space. It just kinda fits really nicely inside. Like that. Although I'm not sure if it really reminds me of barbecue sauce, but Council salad dressing. That's okay. Maybe we can have like, uh, oh, I know. Maybe maybe the cap can be off of it. So it's just like a lid. The caps the cap came off of it. And then barbecue sauce is just like spilling out. Okay. I like that. All right, let's keep going. Let's do a third option. Let's see, for this one, I wanna do just a completely different bottle shape. Again, you can go to your local grocery store market or even do like a quick Google search and see what kind of bottle shapes come up. I think I want it to be just a little bit bigger. I can use my selection tool, select it and just make it picker. We wouldn't want to do that with our final piece, but we can totally do that with your sketches because no one's going to see our sketches except for you. Let's say you want to share your sketches. It's nice to kind of show your process. I'm just drawing some bottle details, maybe some like some reflections and indentions ingredient in the bottle. Okay, So this is gonna be my label and I think I want it to wrap around this time. It'll kind of hug the bottle. And I'm not sure if that might be a little too narrow, so maybe I'll have to widen, end up with it. Okay. So again, I wanted to start with sauce them just because that's our number one word. I'm going to try just a straight diagonal line. Then I'm going to write awesome. Again, starting with our E, finding the middle of the word. I'm working backwards. That fits nicely. Then I think I want birthday to kind of fit in this triangle shape. And I also want to put at the top, wishing you a maybe kinda small. Maybe I want to put it. Maybe we can do some kind of decoration or maybe better yet, like a flourish of some kind. We'll figure that out later. But I do want to put something in there just to fill up that space. Always bothers me when there's like negative space in my composition. So we'll just make a note. Fill in with a curly key right here. And for this one, maybe we can just do like some amorphous kind of lines. Come, mimic barbecue sauce flowing from the bottle. Some fun dots. Just some kind of different decoration. Okay, and for my fourth one, I think I'm gonna go with the traditional like squeeze bottle shape. Make this fit right inside. Okay. I'm going to maybe just write wishing you straight across at the top. Then we want. So awesome. I think I'm gonna have it since this is a really long Canvas. I think I'm going to need some kind of like diagonal to kind of go up at the top. That really cuts it in half. So we have a lot of room in here. So who knows, we can do some cool design. We've got to put wishing you a in here. Maybe I want to fit it in right there. Maybe wishing you really tiny. Showing you a. Then I want to turn up the birthday in here. We can do some kind of shape, just a slight arc. Okay. I think age is probably in the middle of birthday. I think we've got a lot of good rough composition is going on. We got four different bottle shapes. I think this one's looking a little play in the background. So what can I add? Even what kind of mimic? It gets? Written out some, some sauce. You can add, some stars and maybe it will add confetti. Let's try that. Maybe some like curlicues, like streamers. What makes you think of birth their right? And we can reference our brainstorming. I think we have four really distinct layouts and we have four very different bottle shapes. So I think these are all really good options. I think. I think I actually like I like all the decoration that's going on. This seems like really festive. I also really like this. What we have going on with this layout, this type treatment. I'm not really a fan of those bottle shape though. Kinda reminds me of like a glue bottle. I don't know. I'm not feeling it, but I actually, I like this shape. I might combine this shape with this decoration. What do you think? I'm going to put a star next to both? You can pick and choose what, what elements you like best. But I think I'm going to move forward with this kind of treatment in this bottle shape. Okay, so now that we have our for our thumbnail selected, we're going to move on to refining our sketches in the next lesson. 6. Refining Sketches Part I: Okay, so for this next step, we want to really refine our sketch. We want to get it into a nice, tight, clean shape. So I think I actually like elements from these two the best. So I'm going to do a Frankenstein and cut them. So let me use my selection tool. This rectangle. Just drag across. Let me use a three-finger swipe to copy. Then I'm going to make a new document. We're going to make a new document the size of our greeting card. Most greeting cards come five by seven inches, just like a rough standards. So gonna do new canvas size in inches. I like to give myself a little bit of breathing room, make it a little bit bigger to account for bleed and crop. So giving myself just a little bit extra always helps. I'm gonna do 5.25 by 7.253100 DPI and a maximum of 191 layers. And that's plenty. I'm going to press Create. Okay, so now we're going to paste our thumbnails into our document. I'm gonna go ahead and erase the stuff I don't need. I'm just going to use a thick monoline brush. Just erase the elements that I know I don't need. Okay? I actually like this lockup better. So I'm gonna go ahead and erase this one as well. So we just are left with this lovely bottle shape. I like a lot. Okay. So now I want to cut out this lockup shape. Use three fingers to copy. Three fingers to paste. Just going to move it over here. Okay? So the proportions are a little off. I'm actually going to adjust my bottle shape a little bit. When you use the free form. Just kinda warp it to fit a little bit better. In this shape. It's okay like we should never warp our final in any way. But for legibility, but for our sketch, it's totally fine to warp it. Because no one's going to see it for you, right? Lets you share your sketch. And then I kinda just want to tweak it a little bit just so that it fits perfectly within. There. Must have been in my w. So every sketch it. I also really like these decorative elements in the background. So I kinda want to pull those. So I'm going to just delete. I'm going to actually use the free form selection freehand. Just going to delete this whole bottle design. We don't need it. Cut. Lots of Frankenstein. I do that a lot. Because I like certain elements from one piece. I like to combine it with another. So I'll very often times do that. Okay. So now we can merge our layers. I'm just going to, you know, I think I actually liked the cap off from one of our options and our thumbnail. So I think I'm going to clip the cap. Cut it off. It will paste. Okay. It's almost like it just popped right off the bottle. I'm gonna make some room for it. Just kind of delete these decorations. Make room for the cap. Draw the lip of our barbecue sauce. Okay. Then I look kinda like how it was spilling out before. So I might just kinda, I kinda want to size it to the shape of our canvas. I'm going to merge that bottle cap down. So it's all on one layer. I'm gonna select uniform and then just drag it, make it the size where Canvas and look. It's pretty perfectly within that space. Just fill in some of that empty space there. Okay. Now this is getting better, it's getting there. So we want to turn down the opacity. I like to turn it down to maybe 2524. Okay? This is just a reference point so we can start refining our sketch. We want to definitely make a new layer. We want to continue using or six, be sketching pencil or whatever sketching pencil you prefer. And I want to draw, I think my ball first, I want to draw this canvas. I'm going to select my drawing guide, edit guide, and I want it to be perfectly symmetrical, so I'm going to hit symmetry. You have some options down here, vertical, horizontal, quadrant, radial. But for this one, I want to keep it vertical. I'm going to collect, select, Done. Okay? What's cool about the symmetry tool is that when you start to sketch it out, procreate automatically starts drawing the other side. So that's perfectly symmetrical and it saves you time. You don't have to draw the other side, which is great. I love it. I use this tool all the time. I'm gonna go ahead and draw my ball. So next we want to start blocking out our letter forms. We want to draw these, these ribbon shapes first. So I want to go to a new layer because I don't want it to be symmetrical. And I'm just going to lightly, lightly trace over it. I'm actually not start from here. I'm really glad that we started with thumbnail sketches because it's not as intimidating when you have something to trace. Because often when you just start sketching on a blank canvas, it can be very intimidating. Just going to adjust a little bit. Okay, Then we want to kind of block out a shape for birthday. I think I want to give it a little arc. This a little shapes. It's not totally straight. Fits the shape of the bottle better. Alright, and now we want to establish some guides for our letters. And to do so, I'm gonna go ahead and make a new layer. You want to hit the gear, you're using your drawing guide again. I'm going to edit. We want to use the 2D guide. So for this, I want to draw a straight line across so that all of these letter forms and wishing you a lineup, their baseline lines up. So we want a smallish grid, maybe about 40 pixels, a little smaller, 25. Okay, that looks good. Hit Done. Okay, now I want to pick a new color. Let's pick blue for our guide color. Okay. I just want to draw in my baseline, this is where all of the letters are going to line up. Alright? And then you also want to draw in the cap height. And the cap height is just indicates where the height of your towels capital letters are gonna go. And we also want to establish where our midline is. Or x-height, which is the height of a lowercase x. So this is super rough. I just loosely blocked in. We're wishing you a is going to go. I'm going to select my black again. Okay? I'm gonna be a little more careful this time. I'm just I still don't have an established my letter style yet, but I know that it's going to be all caps. I'd like it to be all caps. So kinda mimics a label of barbecue sauce. I just want to write it all out a little more carefully in little neater. My thumbnail was pretty rough. I can also use these guides to line up my letter forms. So you can see this eye is a little wonky, so I'm going to redraw it. I don't want it to be pretty perfect Up and Down. Want to account for this spacing a little bit better. Next is my g. Okay, that worked out fairly well. The crossbar for the a actually is below the x-height because if it was up here, it'd be really tight and it would be really hard to read that ASU actually adjust it and you make it a little lower than the x-height owner. Oh, optically makes it look smaller. Then we want to start sketching out our sausage. We want to follow the shape of this banner, but we want our letter forms to be up and down, follow the grid socially when i mean, I want to draw all my E Street, then I want this part to follow the shape of the banner. Does that make sense? Birthday, we want to find the midpoint, and I would say it's right in-between this H and the t. So this is roughly the middle of our canvas. I'm going to start drying or H. I like working this way just because I can fit the words a lot better when I find the midpoint first. Just kinda learned that from my own by doing my own mistakes. And actually toggle back between the thumbnail sketch. Okay, so that's how our banners this it's kind of it's not fitting so good. So I think I kind of wanted to just do some self adjustments with my eye over, just tweak the spacing a little bit. Okay. Now we can, Let's draw in some of the decorations so we know where where it is on the page. We can turn our guide off. It's a little distracting. Just going to sketch out the bottle cap. Okay, now, I don't want to block in these decorations in here that we have to fill up that negative space. And it mimics the shape of the barbecue sauce, those flashing out at the top. All right, so I think that that is looking pretty good. It's definitely tighter than our thumbnail. I can kinda do a little before and after. So here is our rough thumbnail sketch that we just used as a guide. And then we have a much tighter refined sketch. So we have, we know now where, how we should start building our letter forms when it's much cleaner. 7. Refining Sketches Part II: Okay, this is getting an, a pretty good shape. One thing I definitely want to add our guidelines for both saw some and birthdays. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. The easiest way to do that is to actually take it from this banner shape. Figure out which layer it's on. Here it is. Okay. Excuse my clipping tool, freehand. Use three fingers to swipe down, copy, paste. It perfectly lines up. We want to use that as our cap height. And I'm going to go ahead and use Alpha Lock and color it blue or a color of our guides. And it's actually, I'm just going to duplicate it again and use it as our baseline. Because I feel like it should all align perfectly. Okay. And I kinda don't really like how that banner shape is off. I just kind of free handed it. But I want it to perfectly aligned with our lettering so I erase it. Just pull it down. So that way it's the same line that we just pulled down and everything lines up. It looks much better. Switch this back to black. Go ahead and merge that down our sketch layer. You can see it kinda where I was off on my letters. So that's why we want to use guides, right? They just line everything up. So I'm gonna go ahead and fix those letters. I'm going to turn my guide back on, guide on, so I can adjust them accordingly. And C, This C is a little off. It's the same as the O and I'm going to want to adjust it. It's an optical illusion because it's so round and there's a lot of negative space. So I wanted to actually extend over my guides. Use a little off. S is another one that you can adjust the overshoot for. Just slightly. This is a little exaggerated. Okay. Oh, the little off. It's just a bigger letter in general. Actually use my free formed kinda tweak these guys. It's just a lot of refining, refining or finding or finding. I do sketch over, sketch, a rough sketch sometimes. And I'm going to redraw this because I don't really like it. To draw a better oh, I'm actually going to draw half circle first. And then the straight part. That's a lot easier. Now I'm just going to continue just to kinda tweak my letters. So they fit within my guides. Looks pretty good, that looks much better. So this is a little a little off. My spacing is because I don't have a cap height established or a baseline. So I want to go ahead and do that. I'm going to use my banner shape again. Then I drew just going to erase the bottom part. Three fingers copy. Paste. Okay. I'll be color that in my blue color. Duplicate it. Bottom of our guide. Your baseline. Okay. Duplicate. That one will be the bottom, bottom of our banner. So we want to color it. Like, Okay. I can kinda see where my letters were a little bit off. The BI probably the most new merged together my guides so that they're all on the same layer. Okay, got almost all of them on the same layer. Okay, so that's my guide layer. Now I want to adjust birthday. Okay. I'm again just kind of refining. Okay, this looks a little tight. Everything else is kinda aired out, so okay, so now we have a really tight skeleton. Turn my grid off so we can see it a little bit better. This is it's still super rough, but it's much cleaner. And I'll even show you our thumbnail that we had as a reference so you can see how rough it was. Super rough, right? But that was just because we're sketching over it. And we really just wanted to tighten it up and get our letters in a really good, legible place. And so for our next lesson, we're going to continue to refine. We're going to add more body and weight to our letters and flush those out a bit more on top of our skeleton. 8. Refining Sketches Part III: Now we want to add more body and weight to our letters. We also want to establish more of a lettering style. I want to make it look a lot like a barbecue sauce bottles. I think I want to keep these in all caps but I think I want to add a little more style and flair to them. Since this is not super important messaging, I think I want to keep it pretty basic, probably a sans serif font. It's just easy to read. Paired with maybe a slab serif or like a little bit of a flare. I think that would be really nice. A good rule of thumb, you don't want to mix more than three lettering styles, especially for a greeting card just because it is a small canvas and you want it to be pretty legible and easy to read. You don't want a mix of too many styles because then it can just be too busy and too hard to read. Simple is always better. You can tweak it as you go. From my skeleton, I can actually merge it down. I'm going to keep my guides on a separate layer at the top. Maybe just name it guides. Rename, guides. What's my lettering? Now I can just merge down. Maybe even delete my thumbnail. I don't need it anymore. I'm going to turn the assisted layer off too. Now we have our skeleton sketch and our guides. I like to keep those two separate. Now we want to add some body to our letter forms. I'm going to continue with the 6B Pencil. I'm going to turn my guides back on. I'm just going to add a little more weight. I want it to be bold. This is one of my favorite lettering styles. I think I use it the most, it's just this really pretty vintage flare. You know what I could do instead of drawing that S again? I think I'm actually just going to cut and paste it. That is a hack that I do all the time, just so that it's the same shape every time. That looks much better because we add a lot more meat to our letters. We added more body and we're going to do the same for birthday and just follow our rough skeleton or bones. I adopted that terminology from Jessica Hische, she's the queen of lettering. I think she has a few Skillshare classes too. But she's pretty amazing. She's got a lot of pen lettering pieces. I think that's looking really good. I like that style and I like how it fits within these ribbon shapes that we have. Now I just want to flush out wishing you a. It's nice too to just periodically zoom in and zoom out and take a look at how it looks altogether. Because sometimes we zoom in, you're in the zone and you're like, that letter is off, so you can take some time to just zoom in and zoom out. This is in a pretty good spot, but I just want to continue to refine and get it pretty close to how I want it to be. We want our sketch to be really tight before we ink it because that'll be our next stage. I'm just going to continue to refine some of my letters and fix up some of the spacing that's going on. Here's a bit of an empty space right here. I think I might add a little swash, just coming up with the a, just to give it a little character too, a personality. These are nice touches to add. Whenever there's an empty space in my composition, I always try to add some element to fill it up, whether it's a part of the letter form or maybe it's just a shape. Our letters are getting pretty good. I really added a lot and I tweaked a lot of just the little inconsistencies. I think I want to fix up my bottle here, these lines that look a little wonky. Let's see. I'm actually going to go back into my guides, edit guide, and I'm going to use the symmetry tool. Click "Done". Now my symmetry tool on, I can adjust the shape. Our sketch is looking pretty good. We've filled in a lot of the letter forms and we straightened out a lot of things. We made a lot of little minor tweaks, but that all is really just setting us up for our next phase, which is the inking phase. Because we want our sketch to be a really solid foundation. If you're ready, we'll just proceed with the inking 9. Inking: Okay, so now that we've hopefully gotten your sketch in a really good type place, and we're, now we're ready for the inking section. Inky naturally stems from the traditional way letter forms were refined by using traditional pen and ink. So of course, I'll be demonstrating using digital brushes in black and white. I personally like to ink my lettering in black first and then add color later. Drawing in black and white just really adds high contrast and focuses more on the lettering and legit legibility. So you're not too distracted by color. And for inking, I like to make a new layer. Then I prefer a monoline brush. I use a smooth monoline brush to draw over my sketch so that the finished piece is really clean and legible. And mono line, basically, it just means that the light, the weight does not vary so it contains no taper and it creates a really smooth brush line. Okay, so when I ink, I'll use my sketch. I'll reference my sketch. I'll just turn it down to probably like 20% opacity because I just want to reference it. And then on my new layer, I'm ready to ink with my mono line. I want to get it fairly small, test it out first. That's probably good. The finer line you have, the more detail you can get. I also want to turn my guides back on my 2D guides, just so I can have a good sense of of where my line should line up, ship turn on my guides. And once again, just really, really lightly. Okay. So now I'm ready to ink. Just slightly tracing over my sketch. I know the sketchy and probably seemed really tedious and you wanted to just kinda jump into the inking phase, but it's really important that you just take your time with the sketching because the tighter your sketches, the easier it will be to ink it. Trust me, okay. I will also want a monoline brush for my eraser. Go just so it's really clean. The thing I like about hand lettering is that tan letter. Do you know? It's it's really personable. It shows your touch where you can't really get that with the font. I feel like a font. It's very can be a little black, a little personality. It's very formal. So if you want perfection, I say, go ahead and use a font. But if you want to show some character and mistakes and flaws, use hand lettering. In procreate when you hold down your lines, you can get it snaps to straight, which is super helpful when you're making straight lines and letter forms. It accommodates for a shaky hand. Like this. I can just snap it into place. It's great. Okay to save time, I use it a cheaters hack. Instead of drawing my S again. Instead of drawing my S Again, I kind of liked to clip and paste, copy and paste. I can just use the same S. I don't have to redraw it as it's just a little convenient. Then I want to merge that down. Okay, I think I drew those on the same layer, but I think I actually want to separate it just because it'll be easier to colors. So cut and paste, and now it's on its own layer. Now I want to make a new layer for birthday. Just follow the same process. It's also easier to ink when you can just rotate your canvas. So much easier than a traditional inking. You can undo. Because in digital illustration It's really easy if you make a mistake and is quickly undo. Whereas the traditional medium, it's a little less forgiving. I'm just using the drag-and-drop because it's I find it's pretty easiest to do that instead of traditionally filling in every letter. Just to make an outline. I find it's much easier. I'll often use that method to drag and drop. We did the hard part of the lettering. Now I think it's safe to say we can move on to inking our bottle. For the bottle inking, I want to turn on my symmetry guide again. That snaps to the center. And I want to make a new layer for my bottle and turn on the Drawing Assist can turn it off for birthday. That was a mistake. Okay. Using my same monoline brush, I'm going to draw out my bottle. I'm just using my snap in place lines to get a nice perfect arc shape. I do that just by holding down my pen to the iPad screen and then it snaps into place. It's just really easy and convenient. Because sometimes my hands pretty shaky. Okay, so now we have our bottle shape. I can turn off my drawing assist. I'm actually going to make another layer and start drawing in the sauce. Inking in the sauce, I should say. I'm actually going to drag and drop and fill that just so it's nice and solid. Okay. I'm just going to make another layer for my, all my confetti elements. Use my eraser tool and just trim up, get a really sharp Our Stars to excusing her lines to snap, make perfect straight lines. Or star. I just drag and drop in each negative space to fill it. And to make my circles, I just circle and hold down on the screen to get a perfect ellipse shape. For my curly cues streamers, I think I want to use a thicker mono line. Test it out a little bit, maybe a little thicker. Okay, for this one, I'll just draw it in a fast and quick. That might be a little too thick. Then I don't really like that ends. I'm just going to make it a blunt edge. Use my eraser tool to trim it. Okay. I want to draw in my bottle cap another layer. I just like to make layers for everything that is going to be probably a different color. I can always merge them later, but I like to keep everything pretty separate. Fill that in. Okay. And now I also want to draw ink in my banner shapes. So I can go ahead and make another layer. Use my mono line brush and make it fairly small. And just free hand trace over it as best as I can. It's pretty good. This brush is pretty forgiving. It looks a little tight. I might have to adjust my banner to allow more room for. It's awesome. I was getting a little tight. Okay, that's better. Now, my birthday banner can also edit your, your arc lines, gives you a little nodes so you can kind of adjust it. That looks pretty good. That looks actually a little funny. I think since this is symmetrical, I think I'm going to actually erase it and use the symmetry tool to guide us. When in doubt, fall back on your symmetry tool, will make a new layer and turn on my drawing assist. It's already set up. So this way, when I start on one side, it draws for me there, that's better. Great. And I can also use that drawing assist to finish up my bottle. I think that's getting it looks pretty good. I think we're almost ready for color. Just want to put all my inking layers. I want to group them together. Kinda show you the difference between our sketch. So this was our sketch and this is our inking. So you can see it's much, much cleaner and darker and a little more refined. So we're ready for coloring. 10. Adding Color : Okay, so now I have inked eyepiece and black and white. I went ahead and even made some further tweaks and changes. I adjusted the size and shape of my little curly cues. They were a little too chunky before, so I refine them using my studio pen brush, which is found in the inking section that's preloaded in Procreate. I also kinda thickened up some of these little curlicue shapes there we're looking at just a little too thin before. So I just wanted to make it all balanced in my composition. And I also just made this label a little bit smaller, our messaging smaller. And then I added this label just because it's a barbecue sauce bottles. So I feel like it should have this really clear, distinct label form. And it just kinda really locks in our messaging and makes it stand out. Because mean, that's why we ink it right, so that we can just really see our composition in high contrast in black and white. Okay, So now we're ready for color. And I'll give you a few tips and tricks that I use when choosing color. For me, I like to use a limited color palette, four to eight colors while illustrating greeting cards. I like to keep the color palettes simple yet really bold and impactful. So not too busy and overwhelming with too many colors. I find from personal experience, it's easier to add more colors and to take them away. So you definitely want your messaging to stand out and draw attention to the viewer. To make your messaging and graphics data, it's actually easier to use fewer colors. So I know for my card, for my card, I'm going to use this predetermined color palette because I know that I really want to use this bold red color and this dark reddish color to represent my barbecue sauce. And I kinda wanna keep it in this really Americano like red, white, and blue theme. I've figured out these colors ahead of time. But I want to show you a tip that I use to figure out colors. That's super helpful. I actually use the harmony tool. So I'm going to just show you really quick. Using this bold red color as an example, works really well with bold colors. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you. When I select red, I'm using harmony. And select colors appear, you get a few options. So complimentary basically means it's the opposite hues on the color wheel. So think opposites attract, they create the highest possible contrast compared to any other parents on the wheel. And I very often will use complimentary colors in my own work for just a very high contrast and bold Read, the complementary color to red is blue. So even though this shade and this hue of blue is much different, I'm using a darker shade of blue. It's still very much complimentary to our reds in this color palette. And a second option that you have is split complementary. And the split basically finds the colors in-between that blue color. So it procreate, kinda figures out mathematically which colors are the split complimentary between those two. Then there is analogous, which are colors that are very similar to each other on the color wheel, they're just right next to each other. For example, this red, red, orange, and purple all are very analogous in nature. It's essentially sampling colors that are just very similar to that red color. That's kinda nice. It's a very sweet color palette, but it's not very bold and impactful for mine, I definitely want to use something complimentary, but I just want to show you these different options just to help you build your color pallets in the future. Next one is triadic, and that's basically three colors that are evenly spaced out on the color wheel. So the most basic triadic palettes are primary colors like red, blue and yellow, and secondary hues orange, purple, and green, kinda like what we have here. Then lastly, we have the triadic, which is four colors that are evenly spaced out on the color wheel. So again, this is just harmony is just like a quick tool to figure out some colors as you're building color palettes. I provided some options in case you're really stuck, but I just wanted to share that tip because I often use the harmony tool to figure out colors when I'm building my palettes. For this project, I already have my palette built out, so I'm just going to kind of work backwards now at this stage, I want to figure out what my background color will be and then build up from there. I'm thinking this peachy is neutral, peachy color would be nice, so I'm just going to drag and drop and fill. And then I also want to fill all these labels and banners. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that right now. I'm just going to fill them in black. Just sampling this black color. Okay. I'm just going to drag and drop and fill. I'm just going to turn it off right now for the time mean. So you can still see the messaging. I'm going to color in that big label. Okay. Also want to fill in our bottle shape. I don't think I closed it at the top. That's probably why it is filling the whole page. You definitely want to make sure all your shapes are are filled so that when you drag and drop colors, the color doesn't spill out over the shape. That happens to me all the time. Okay. So my next color that I want to figure out is this this bottle color. And I think most barbecue sauce bottles are, are like a reddish color. So I'm the easiest way for me to recolor when it's black that I've found is to use the Alpha Lock. Then, just referencing my colors, I'm going to choose this little darker, darker red color. I'm just going to go ahead and fill layer. I can drag and drop to. But I also just like to use fill because that is it'll fill every element. So I'll kind of show you as an another example what I mean. Oh, I forgot to fill that in black. Just going to quickly fill in my little indentions, my declaration of my bottle. Good. Turn Alpha alpha lock on. And if I just dragged and dropped, it would just do like one shape at a time. But if I want to do this whole layer, I can just easily go fill layer and it will fill the whole layer. Now we want to figure out what are labeled color will be. I want the messaging to really stand out. So I'm going to make it a white color like a cream. I think they'll look really nice. And I noticed that my banner shape, it's, it's a little, it's a little glitchy. I kinda want to fix it, so I want to turn my alpha lock on in order to fix it. I have to turn it off just using my studio pen. I kinda just want to clean up those edges real quick. Because you can't make edits to it when you're alpha lock is on. I've learned. Okay. Okay. That's looking very bold. For my barbecue sauce that's spilling out. I think I want to use that same, maybe a darker color, maybe this dark color. Again, we wanna do our alpha lock on each layer. Actually wanted to go behind my bottle shape. So a tiny little dot I want to clean up. Okay, that looks better. Okay, Now that I want to start coloring in my banners. So let's try. I think I want to try this bold red color for that really pops out. What color my birthday banner in alpha lock fill. Then I think I want these curly cues to be a gold color. I think that's looking pretty nice. I think I want my cap to be gold as well. And let's see, wishing you a would be nice in bulk, in blue. Just so kind of alternates, like blue, gold, red, gold, blue. And I definitely want my messaging to pop out. So I think I'm gonna make my messaging that cream color. Okay, I think that's looking really good. And I definitely want to color in my confetti. You can do alpha lock. Then. You can just do like a fill color of everything. If you just want it to be a little more muted behind it, you could leave it like that. But I actually, I can, I want it to be more festive and decorative. So I think I'm going to alternate different colors. And a really easy way to do that is to just pick a color and just drag and drop. And just hover over the shape to fill. Just have fun filling in colors. I also want to bring in some of that gold. Go ahead and just drag and drop. Okay, I think that is looking pretty close thing I want to make that one goal. Yeah, I like that. Great. So now we've just did a really quick and easy way to color our art. And now it's really coming along and you can tell how the background, it's like light, neutral, peachy color in contrast to this really dark red of our barbecue sauce bottle. And then the messaging with a white-label really pops off. So these colors are just like really bold and impactful. So I can see this like really just like sitting and popping off the shelves. Now, in the next lesson, after we've finished coloring, I'm going to show you how to add texture and details. 11. Texture & Details: Okay, so now that we have colored or peace, it's time to add texture and details. And this is actually my favorite part of the whole process just because I think adding texture and detail, even when it's just super subtle, it just adds so much more depth and feel too in personality to your finished piece. And it's really just is the final finishing touches that brings the whole piece together. Let's work on Our bottle first. I'm going to add a little texture to this bottle, little shading. I'm going to add a new layer and just create a clipping mask so that whatever I draw will fill in the shape of the bottle. I'm actually going to use this dark color. And I'm going to use this noisy light brush that I made. It's available for you to use in the class resource section, so you can just download that if you'd like to use it. I really like to use noise brushes. They're just, they just add a little, a little fun grainy texture, too, flat artwork. So I'm gonna go ahead and just start shading it in. I'm going to actually use the noisy brush. Turn it up all the way. To start over again. Actually like the light brush. So I'm going to use the noisy light. Just kind of start shading n. As you can see, this is kinda disappearing are little detail here. So I might use my adjustments and use brightness. Maybe I'll darken it up with that. Can also adjust the color of our bottle. Maybe I'll bump it up, brighten it a bit better. Okay. I think that looks pretty good. And I'm going to use my eraser tool to just clean it up my bottles. Actually. I'm noticing some level in consistencies in it. So I can just use my eraser tool just to trim it up a bit. I don't want to switch back to my studio pen and just add just a little more adjustments just to even it out. Okay, I think that looks better. Now. Details are getting a little dark. I just want to fill up and again, just play around with the hue and the saturation. That actually looks good. And I might shade them. Let's shade them with our critic clipping mask. And I want to sample this dark color. My noisy brush again. I also like to use my opacity just to kind of maybe it looks just a tad. That's the hair. I think I also want to add just a little definition on the bottom. Some shading. This like noisy texture brush it just adds, adds a lot of just finishing touches and definition to your bottle to really bring the shape together. I'm going to use my studio pen. And on that same shadow layer, I'm just going to Erase align. I think I actually want to use a bigger just want to indicate a little bottom of the bottle right there. And my sauce, I think it's looking a little dark. I just kinda want to adjust the hue and saturation. And I want to add maybe some shine and little more texture to the sauce. What I do for that is because it's a liquid. You want to add like maybe a shine, shine highlight. I'll just use my disk layer and just find a color that's a little lighter. Let me use my studio pen brush. Just kinda draw. A little shine. Maybe you want to add a little shadow on the sauce. Can create a clipping mask. I'm going to use my noisy brush. Sample that dark color. Another cool way that I like to add some kind of distress texture is to erase parts of the shape and then fill it in again. And I'll show you what I mean. So I'm going to turn the assisted layer off for our label. I'm going to choose the cream color. I'm actually going to use my eraser brush and I'm going to use my noisy light. I'm just kinda just going to go in and erase some parts. Okay. And you might be thinking like that looks bad. I can't even read that. Don't worry. We're going to fill it in again using the same brush. We're just going to fill it in. And it just gives it this like distressed look. I use this all the time in my my work. It's just kind of gives it this like vintage feel, like it's put on the shelf for a little while. And I just really liked this. Texture brings a lot of personality and uniqueness to my work. And it seems really subtle, but it gives your work just a little, a little something extra. You know, it might seem kinda time-consuming. But I like this part. I like kinda just Sony now and adding texture and details to my work. Yeah, I mean it's so subtle, but when you zoom in, you can really see it. It's kinda nice. I think I'm next, I want to maybe add some definition to this bottle cap because just kinda looks like this rectangle that's floating off and we don't really know what it is, so I kinda want to shade it. I'm just sampling the same color and sampling a darker color and using a different layer, I created a clipping mask. And now I'm just kind of shading the edges. Might even use my dry ink brush, which can be found pre-loaded in Procreate. It's in the inking section. And on the same layer I'm just going to draw little like ridge lines, I guess. For the cap. I'm just eyeballing it. You know, it's not perfect. And let's see. I think I actually want to add a little texture to the background. Make a new layer. I'm going to use this cream color, my noisy brush. Just kind of color in lightly the corners, corners of the canvas. And then I'm going to use my eraser tool, the noisy light brush selected. And just erase just so that there's a really faint distress texture left behind. Okay, I think this is looking really good. I want to maybe add some highlights and definition for our bottle. Just so that it has more of like a really feels like a bottle. So it's not so flat. When to use our bright red color. Studio pen. Fairly large. Just draw like a little highlight. Okay. I think I want to add some distress detail to these banners as well. Again, I'm going to use the same technique. Turn this alpha lock layer off my eraser tool for the noisy light and just erase. The middle part can actually see that the bottle is poking through. I might want to turn that off for a second. And just fell in our label. Because if you remember before we erase parts of it, it was covered by that banner. I'm just going to fill it in. Okay. I like that better now. Going to use our blue to fill it in. And this is just a texture technique that I use. You know, there's a million ways that you can add texture to a piece. But I'm just showing you one technique that I often use in my own work. I think our, our bottles looking pretty good. And we've added a lot of different texture and details to the surrounding elements, but maybe you want to add a little decoration into the letter forms. So let's see. One way we can do that is add some decorative details inside the letters. I'll show you one way that I like to decorate my letter forms. I create just a new layer over birthday. I think I actually, I want to try using the gold color as a decorative detail and using my, I'm gonna try using my studio pen. I'm just going to draw some dots and lines. Inside the letters. You can draw whatever like decorative detail you want. This is, these are your letters, this is your design. So it's really up to you. I'm just showing you just, just a fun way to decorate your piece. That's one way you could decorate your letters. Another way. Maybe if you wanted to add like a drop shadow, so you really wanted it to pop out. I can show you that's really easy. You can make, let's say I wanted to add a drop shadow behind. So awesome. I could just duplicate that letter, that layer. And then I want it to maybe be like a darker red sample, that color fill layer. I'm going to actually use my hue and saturation to make it darker. Then I'm going to just move it down. Okay, now there's one more piece that I like to do just to kinda finish it off because as you can see our shadow, it isn't connected to the letter forms. And I often see this where designers and illustrators, they just, they make a shadow and then they just leave it. But I actually like to complete my shadows and I'll show you what I mean. You want to turn your alpha layer off, your alpha lock off. And then using your pen on that shadow layer, just connect, connect where it would meet the letter forms. It just gives you a much polished, finished look. It looks a lot better than just kinda leaving it. We've been your shadows hanging. You even want to connect that top layer on the curve. It doesn't look like it would connect, but it doesn't, it really finishes off your piece. Okay, I look, I think that's looking pretty good. I think the only other thing that I want to add is maybe a little distressed texture on our little curly cues. So I'm gonna go ahead and use my noisy light brush. Just erase parts of it to make it look distressed. I don't even think I'm going to fill it in because I really like how much it erased it. I think this is looking pretty good. We added a lot of texture and details to both our letter forms as well as our supporting elements. And I think it's just looking like a really fun, festive, decorative birthday card. 12. Conclusion: Congrats on completing this class. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and feel a bit more comfortable combining lettering and illustration. The two skills are valuable and go hand in hand. And they extend to products beyond just greeting cards, including advertising, packaging, surfaces on, on products and many, many more. We've covered a lot in this class, including how to brainstorm creative wordplay, how to sketch out your letter forms, layout and composition. How to ink, color, and add detail to your final piece. Now that you've completed your birthday card, feel free to share it digitally or print it out and give to a friend. A hand lettered and illustrated card is such a great gift to share with their loved one. If you have a question or comment, feel free to reach out in the class comments section. Don't forget to add your finished piece for the class project gallery. I'd love to see what you create.