Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Anne and I'm an illustrator. I design all sorts of different kinds of products, but one of the main things that I design is greeting cards. In the last five years, I've had hundreds of greeting cards sold in stores worldwide. In my class, Become A Greeting Card Designer, I share the steps I take to get my greeting cards into stores, which is more focused on the business side of greeting card design. In this class, I go in-depth into my entire artistic process for creating a hand painted greeting card design. I'll cover everything including concepting, sketching, painting, scanning, digitizing in Photoshop, printing out for personal use, or mocking up and presentation for commercial use. In the end, you'll be able to use these steps to design your own hand painted greeting card. The supplies you'll need for this class are sketching pencils, plain paper, paint brushes, hot pressed watercolor paper, gouache or watercolor paints, a computer with Adobe Photoshop, and a scanner. Another tool that's not required, but a handy option, is to have a light box. If you plan to print and create your own cards using your design, you'll also need a color printer, card stock, a cutting board, and X-Acto knife, and a metal ruler. I hope you'll join me on this in-depth journey through my creative process. Let's get started.
2. Concepting: The first step that I take to create a hand painted grieving card, is to brainstorm ideas within a single theme. Here is a list of top selling greeting card themes for you to choose from. In the everyday category, there's birthday, wedding and anniversary, get well and sympathy, hello, thank you, congrats or celebration, and baby. In the seasonal category we have Christmas or holidays, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and graduation. For this class, I'm going to choose birthday as my theme. Once I have my theme selected, I like to do what I call a brain dump. I just start writing down anything that comes to mind for that theme in this case birthday. While you can definitely get creative with imagery on your card, there should be some obvious imagery that ties it back to the birthday theme or whatever your theme is, and that is the imagery we are coming up with for the brain dump. Let's try it. Cakes, candles, balloons, party hats, confetti, age and oldness, presents, streamers, banners, bows, ice cream, cupcakes, candy, noise makers, drinks, bright colors, dancing, smiling, laughing, flowers, pinata. Now let's do some quick research to see what other icons are sold on birthday cards. I highly recommend going into stores that sell greeting cards to do this exercise. But for the purposes of this class, I'm just going to look online, which is something that you can do too. Here I am at one of my favorite greeting card websites, Paper Source. I'm going to go to the birthday card section and just look at what they have. No, I'm not looking to copy any of these cards. I'm just looking for popular themes just to get ideas of what's selling right now. We see dogs, bears, bunnies, llamas, people, typography, birthday candles, birthday balloons, cake, more balloons, more dogs. You can start seeing trends coming up. A floral with typography. Several of those more dogs, more bears, a mermaid. I would just go through your favorite sites and jot down some of this imagery. Here's a unique one with beers, more topography, a birthday drink. Just scroll through and take note of the different themes. I would go to several different websites. You could go to this one, Papyrus, Hallmark, American Greetings. Here's a unicorn, more typography, another unicorn, an octopus, presents, cats, a polar bear. There's good old Donald Trump, a troll, another balloon. Just write down as you're scrolling through these websites and you'll start to see common popular, there's a sloth, those are popular right now. You'll see some unique stuff too, but you'll notice that the unique cards always tie back to a birthday theme somehow, whether it's through the text or through some adjacent imagery. Once you do this with several websites, you should have a good idea of what's selling in the market right now. You don't have to do exactly those same imagery, but it should give you an idea of what you can do that will sell. Another thing that you can do is look on Pinterest and Instagram. If you follow other illustrators and creatives, you can see what imagery and icons are trending. For example, if you see images of badgers over and over, it might be fun to come up with an idea for a badger themed birthday card. Though badgers don't scream birthday, if you combine a badger With a common birthday imagery like balloons, cake, or birthday hat, you'll have a combo of something that is trending, but it also safely within the birthday raul. Once you've completed all of your online and in-store research, create a handwritten list or type in and print one out, so that you have it in front of you to reference easily. If you want more in depth info on how I research to create greeting cards that can be sold or licensed to greeting card companies, check out my other class, become a greeting card designer. In this class here, we're just going to focus on the creative and artistic side of making greeting cards. Now that we have our two lists of imagery and icons from our brain dump and from our research. Put them side-by-side so that you can easily look them over, go through and highlight any imagery that jumps out at you as fun or interesting to illustrate. In a notebook or on another piece of paper, start combining different imagery to come up with three ideas for a greeting card. Remember to make sure at least one of the imagery will tie the card back to your theme. The first one that jumps out to me is pets because I love illustrating cats and dogs. From my other list, I'm going to pick balloons, because that will tie back to my birthday theme. Cats have sharp claws. For this idea, the cat would be popping the birthday balloons. For my second idea, I'm going to pick fantastic creatures and do a unicorn. For the birthday imagery, I'll pick ice cream and have the unicorn eating an ice cream corn. Finally, for the third idea, cute animal sounds fun. I'll do a hippo and pick puns for my second imagery idea, and have the card saying, Hippo-Hippo-Hooray. Because neither of those things necessarily screen birthday, I'm going to throw a party hat in there to make the connection. Once I have my three ideas, I do rough thumbnail sketches of each. Make sure to include a place for text when you do this. Doing these sketches will help you flush out each idea and should also make it more clear to you, which is your best idea. For thumbnail sketches, I start with a blank sheet of paper and draw a three rough card shaped rectangles on it, and label each one with the idea. Next, I start doing a rough sketch of each idea to figure out layout and how my imagery will be used. From my first idea with the cat popping the balloon, I'm going to have a dog holding the balloons, so the cat can be disappointing someone. I think I'll have one of the balloons already popped, you can see why the dog is disappointed. Here's my feline perpetrator reaching out and popping the balloon with her clause. For the text, I'm going to do something that works in birthday and the animal theme and have it say, Hope your birthday is positively great. My second idea was a pretty simple one with a unicorn eating ice cream. Just going to sketch exactly that and see how I like the layout. In this case, I don't really like it. I think I want to do the unicorn more close up, more just of his bust eating the ice cream cones, I'm redrawing that. This is where doing thumbnail sketches is really helpful so you can get a layout that you really like. I'm going to have the unicorns tongue licking as ice cream cone and he's holding it with one of his hooves. I'll just have this card say, Have a sweet birthday. For the third idea was the Hippo-Hippo-Hooray, hippo wearing a party hat. I think I want this hippo being thrown up in the air. Like when people say Hip, Hip, Hooray and throw a person up in the air, congratulating them. I'm going to put a party hat on him and have some people throwing him up in the air. I think I just want their hands though, so I'm going to readjust the frame of this card so it cuts off just so their hands are showing. At the top it will say, Hippo-Hippo-Hooray! It's your birthday. Now, I've got my three rough thumbnail sketches done, and I'm going to look at them all and really think about which one really seems the most fun and interesting to me to continue on to turn into a greeting card. I think for me, the one that seems the most fun here is the hippo card. I'm going to pick that one. After you've selected your favorite thumbnail sketch, next we'll take it and turn it into a detailed sketch.
3. Sketching: The next step is to do a more detailed sketch of your greeting card design. To make sure that the layout of your design will work for a greeting card, create a template for yourself to sketch in based on the size that the final greeting card will be. I like to design in 5 by 7 inches, because this is typically the largest size greeting card. I can always scale it down for smaller sizes if I need to. If sketching on paper, measure out and draw a rectangle or a square if you're designing a square card to the dimensions of your final card. Now that you have your frame, you can start sketching. If you're like me, you might hate the first few tries, so it's good to have a couple sheets of paper with the card dimensions outlines, that you can scrap the early iterations and start over. Make sure that you are using thin and cheap paper to sketch. I like using cheap computer paper. If you don't have a light box, the thinner the paper, the better. For the detailed sketch, you should include as much detail as you can so that you can use it as a guide for your final illustration. Try to iron out any kinks now so that when you get to the painting phase, you can focus on painting and not working out details. It's a lot easier to erase pencil than paint. Here I have my thumbnail sketch and my iPad for photographic reference. If you are using photographic reference to avoid copying, try to reference multiple photos and not just one. I like pulling up a page of thumbnail images from Google search like you see here, and sketching from all of the images, my hippo is being thrown up in the air anyway, so I'm not going to be able to find a photograph of a hippo in that position. I'm starting out by sketching the hands that are throwing the hippo up in the air. Once I like the way my sketch is going, I darken the line so I can see it better. Next up is the hippo. I just look back and forth from my reference material and may zoom in on one that will help me draw a particular feature. I'm using this one to help me sketch the hippo's face and my hippo will be more stylized than realistic. Again, my goal is not to copy, but to use the photograph for inspiration and research. What to hippos nostrils look like? What about their ears? This photo answers those questions for me. Now I'm sketching the hippo's body and looking at my reference to get the general idea of how his likes are shaped. I'll zoom in on this one to look at the nails on his feet or is it hooves? Making my hippo nice and round and fat as they are. I'm looking for an image of what hippos tails look like, and I don't see one here. So I'll Google more specifically to see what they look like and I'll add a tail on this guy. He's looking good. I'm just going to add a party hat, so that everyone will know what he's celebrating and that this is a birthday card. Once again, I'm darkening the lines once I know I like the way he's shaped up. I want to finish up his mouth. I'm going to look at hippo mouths and teeth to see how I want to draw his teeth in. He's not looking fat enough so I'm just going to add some rolls here and there too. Quickly going to add some clothes to these arms that are throwing him in the air, and then some stripes on his hat. Finally, I'm going to rough out where the text will go and how I want it to look. I'm going to use a mix of handwritten block letters and cursive. You can also use a font, but handwritten text is great to use if you have that skill. I think I'm happy with this detailed sketch. Once you have a sketch that you're happy with, it's time to create a cleaned up and simplified version. With a black pen, trace the main forms and shapes of your sketch. I like to leave out the fine details because I will add those back in during the painting phase. I'm also going to write out the text larger to make it easier for me to paint and outline that as well. Don't worry about it being in the right place as we can adjust that in Photoshop. Now we need to transfer the sketch to your painting paper. I recommend using hot pressed watercolor paper. Hot pressed paper is smooth and cold pressed has that beautiful watercolor paper texture. That texture is great for original paintings, but not so great if you plan to scan your artwork and digitize it for reprinting. Your scanner will pick up the shadows of the texture and it's a pain to get rid of them out of the background in Photoshop. Using a smooth paper eliminates this problem. If you have a light box, transferring your sketch to the watercolor paper is very easy. If not, we just need to add a few extra steps. First, let me show you how you can do it with a light box. I highly recommend getting a light box if you plan to do a lot of painted illustrations and like to work from sketches. The one I have is a daylight wafer light box and it has a super thin profile, so it doesn't take up a lot of space like traditional light boxes do. Place your sketch on your light box and tape it down so it doesn't move. Place your watercolor paper over the sketch and tape it down as well. Then turn on the light box. Because we outlined the simplified forms in the sketched in black pen, you should be able to see those most clearly now. With a very light sketching pencil, lightly trace the simplified sketch forms onto your watercolor paper. You don't want to do it too dark I will show through the painting. Now, for people who have a light box, you are done with the sketching phase and can skip to the next video. If you don't have a light box here are the extra steps you'll need to take to transfer your simplified sketch to the watercolor paper. Take your original sketch with the black pen outlines and flip it over. Hopefully you've used thin enough paper that you can see the black outlines through the back. Take a softer pencil and generously trace the black outlines onto the back of the paper. Don't worry about this trace looking good. The most important thing for this step is to use thick and generous lines. Flip the paper back over so that the black outlines are facing up and lightly tape this sketch onto your watercolor paper. Now take a sharp pencil or even a pen, and trace over the black outlines again, this time on the front side and pressing firmly as you trace. Once you've traced all the black outlines, untape just the bottom of the sketch and take a peek at your watercolor paper to make sure all of the outlines have transferred. If not, tape it back down and trace the outlines again, this time with a little bit more pressure. One thing that I'd like to note here is that you can also use carbon paper to similarly transfer your sketch to the watercolor paper. Just skipping the part where you trace the back of the paper and pencil. But I wanted to show you this way of doing it because many people won't have carbon paper on hand. Another option you could try if this method is not working well for you, is to use a window as a light box. You will need to be working during the day when the sun is shining, but you can tape your sketch to the window and tape your watercolor paper over it and then trace the outlines that way too. Once we have our outlines traced onto the watercolor paper, we are on to my favorite part, painting.
4. Painting: You can use whatever paint medium that you prefer. But for greeting cards, I like to use watercolor or gouache. For this class, I'll be using gouache. These are Winsor & Newton designers gouache. Gouache is sort of in-between watercolors and acrylics. I like it because it's fast drying, plays down thick and saturated, but is also water-soluble. It's also a very popular medium for greeting cards. I love gouache because it's hard to waste. When it dries out on your palette, all you need to do is add some water to get the same rich colors again. You may want to fly by the seat of your pants for colors, or you may want to start with a color palette to work from. You can find amazing color inspiration all around you, or you can also look online. I have a Pinterest board where I save imagery with color palettes that I like. Some are photographs, some are illustrations, some are fine art, some are pre-made color palettes. In order to be as original as possible, in this case, I would avoid using a color palette from another illustration or greeting card design. Instead, choose a photograph or a piece of abstract art, something that's non-competing with your category. There's also a website called Design Seeds that has thousands of gorgeous color palettes to choose from. I think this one is really nice, and I think I'll use it as inspiration for my hippo card. Once you've selected your piece of inspiration or pre-made color palette, print it out and start mixing your paints to create a paint palette for your greeting card. I'm mixing fresh paint with dried paint to achieve the colors I want. First, I'll squeeze out some of the new paint on top of the old paint that I think will mix well. I like to paint my newly mixed colors right onto my printout of the color palette to see how well they match. I'm also going to add some colors to my color palette for the skin tones of the hands throwing the hippo into the air. I'm happy with the paint palette I've set up for myself here. It's not a perfect match, but I like the way it looks and I think it will work well for my card. Now I'm ready to paint. I've got my lightly outlined sketch on watercolor paper, my mixed color palette, and my original sketch to reference for the finer details I want to include. I start by painting in the largest areas of color first. For this, I use one of my medium sized brushes. With gouache, you'll need to keep adding water to your brush to get the paint to slide onto the paper nicely. You'll notice that depending on how much water has been added, the saturation of the color lightens or darkens. I think this is a nice feature of gouache and will add character to your hand painted card. Now I'm just going to continue filling in the rest of my large spaces of color on the card, before I get to the details. Once I'm done filling in the large areas of color, I layer in details on top using smaller and finer brushes. One thing you'll notice is that because gouache is water-soluble, if you use too much water on your brush, it will reactivate the dry painted layer beneath and your colors can mix. If you are applying a white on top of a darker color, for example, you'll want to keep the white paint in your brush relatively dry to keep it from mixing with the color beneath. Don't worry too much about any mistakes you make, like getting paint on the white of the paper or colors mixing and bleeding where you don't want them to, because we are creating a greeting card design that we are going to digitize and not creating an original piece of art. We can fix these problems later in Photoshop. In order to blend some of these darker lines that I've added, all I need to do is add some water to my brush and mix the top paint with the paint behind it. Just getting your brush wet and going over the area with the darker paint on top of the lighter paint, it will blend them with the water. Now I'm just going to continue adding details with paint to my design until I'm happy with how it looks. Again, I can add some finer details in Photoshop if necessary. So I'm not too worried about it being perfect at this point. All that's left is just adding this final lettering to it. If you'd like to have a background color other than white for your card, I recommend painting that on a separate piece of watercolor paper and combining the two paintings in Photoshop. This will make it easier to move things around if you need to resize certain icons or reformat your card design for a different sized card. To do this, I just take a second piece of watercolor paper and paint a large portion of it with the background color I want. Slight variations in the color and tone are nice because in printed versions of the card, it will highlight that the design was hand painted. Next up, we'll be going over how to scan and digitize your painting in Photoshop.
5. Digitizing: Hopefully your scanner is big enough to scan your painting all in one piece. But if it's not, don't worry, Photoshop has a trick we can use to stitch multiple scans together into one seamless image. Make sure to adjust your scanner settings to scan the painting at the highest possible resolution. Mine is 600 DPI and I scan it as a jpeg. Once you have your images scanned, open them up in Photoshop. If an image had to be scanned in two or more pieces, let me show you how you can open it as one cohesive image. In Photoshop, go to "File", "Automate", "Photo-merge". Once the Photo-merge box pops up, you will see the layout set to Auto, which is fine. Blend Images should also be checked at the bottom. Click on the Browse button and go to wherever you have your scanned images saved. Mine are on a USB drive. Select all of the separate scans you did of one image. I'm going to start with the scans I did of the hands, hippo and text. Once you have the scanned file selected, click, "Okay", and click "Okay" again in the Photo-merge box. Now is the part where you just wait a few minutes while Photoshop magically stitches your separate scans into one image. There we have it. Now, I've sped mine up, but when you actually do this, it will take a little bit longer. I just didn't want you to have to watch my pinwheel spin. Now you'll notice that in your layers palette, there are two layers. One for each scan you did. You don't need the images separate like this anymore, so you can just merge those layers by going to "Layer" at the top of your screen and either Merge Layers, if they are both selected or Flatten Image. Next I'm going to rotate the image to the correct orientation by going to Image at the top panel then Image Rotation and selecting 90 degrees. You may or may not have to rotate your image depending on how your scans were oriented. Now I'm going to crop tight to this image by using my "Crop tool" over on the left and dragging a box around the area I want to crop to and clicking return or enter on a PC. Now I just want to clean up the background of the scan by painting white over any dust or unintended paint marks. I'll select the "Brush tool" because it doesn't really matter which brush at this point, as long as it doesn't have transparency, and make sure that my color is set to white. You can toggle between the foreground and background color on your tools pellet by hitting the X key. Now I'm just going to paint with a brush over any blemishes I see. You can select the 'Zoom tool" on your tools palette to zoom in and out or by pressing command, and the plus or minus key. That would be Control if you are on a PC. To make my brush smaller, to get in some of the tighter areas, I'm just pressing the left square bracket key on my keyboard. To make it larger again, you press the right square bracket key. You can also do this at the top brush panel, but I find this shortcut saves a lot of time. Now I'm just continuing to scroll through my illustration to see any other blemishes that I want to clean up with a white. Once you have the background cleaned up fairly well, it's time to cut the artwork out of the background. There are several ways you can do this, and often all vary which method I use to achieve the best result. The first way is by using the Magic Wand tool. With a Magic Wand tool, you just click any part of the background and it selects any adjacent pixels of similar color and tonal values. Now this tool needs to be adjusted to make sure it selects what you want it to. At the top panel, when you are using this tool, you will see a value box for tolerance. Mine is currently set at 40. If it's not selecting enough of the background, you'd want the tolerance to be higher, if it's selecting too much, meaning some of the foreground imagery, then you'd want to set the tolerance lower. The little dancing lines indicate the boundaries of what has been selected. It's hard to see on this video, but you will see them clearly on your screen. When I zoom in on these hands, for example, you will see that when I tried to select the background with the tolerant set at 40, it also selected the pale peach hands as part of the background. I need to set the tolerance lower so that it selects less. Next I'm trying setting it to 25, and it's selecting less of the hands, but still some of the pixels. Now I'll try setting it to 10. It does a much better job on the pale hands. But you'll see that the darker hands now have some white background undetected around them. I'm looking at how well it selected the background in the other parts of my design, and I think I'm going to need to break down the background selection process into three separate parts. The text, the hippo, and the hands. This way I can use the best selection method for each. First I'm going to make three copies of the artwork in my layers palette by dragging the background layer to the New Layer button at the bottom of the layers panel three times. Then I'm going to delete the background layer by dragging it to the trash button. Now I'm going to isolate each section of the artwork onto its own layer by selecting and deleting everything else from that layer. For this top layer, I'm going to delete everything but the text, so that will be my text only layer. You'll see when I turn off these other two layers, all you see is the text. Now I'm just going to keep this second layer on and the others off and I'm going to isolate the hippo by selecting the hippo and I'm using the Lasso selection tool here, and then I'm going to do Command, Shift, I, to select Inverse and delete everything around him. Now I've got my hippo on his own layer and the text on its own layer, let's just do the hands. Same thing, I'm going to select the hands and the little move marks and I'm going to delete everything else that's on that layer. Just to show you, I'm using Command, Shift, I, to select Inverse, but you can also go to Select at the top and Inverse to do the same, and then Command, X, to delete. Now that I've gotten the three components of my design, each on its own layer, I'm going to start working on each to cut out the imagery from the background. Let's start with the text. I'm going to use the Magic Wand tool again and set the tolerance to 100 to start and see how it goes. When I zoom in, you can see that it selected too much here on the H and all of the I, where the letters are lighter in color. Now I'm going to try setting the tolerance to 70. It's still grabbing a bit too much, so I'm going to set it to 60 and try again. I like how the 60 setting selected the background, so next I'm just going through holding down the "Option key" or Alt on a PC and adding the background parts that are on the insides of letters like O, Magic Wand tool only select and contiguous background that's connected. Anything that's separated, like on the insides of the letters you'll need to select separately. Once I have all of the background selected, I'm actually going to go to select at the top bar and click on Inverse. This way we have the text selected instead of in the background. Now we can focus on making sure that we are cutting the text out really cleanly. Next, I'm going to Select at the top bar again and then select and Mask. A new panel pops up, and the first thing I'm going to do is adjust the transparency to 100 percent, which basically takes the white background out of the image. This gray checkered background means that the background is transparent. But that makes it hard for me to see if I've cut the letters out cleanly with no white bits along the edges. I'm going to go into my Layers panel and add a temporary black background layer, just so I can see how clean my selection is. I'm doing that by going to that half-filled circle and then doing solid color and selecting black. I'm just making sure that that black solid color layer is at the bottom of my layer panel. With my text selected, I'm going back to Select at the top and then Select and Mask. The panel pops up. And once again, the first thing I'm going to do is adjust the transparency slider to 100 percent. This way I get a clear view of how clean my selection is, and I can see if there's any extra white bits at the edge of my letters. Next, I'm going to play with the smooth slider until I'm happy with the smoothness of the edges of my text. This helps if it's a little pixely at the edges. Lastly, I'll adjust the Shift Edge slider to make the selection of my text as tight as possible. Dragging the slider to the left makes the selection tighter or closer to the edge of the letters. Dragging it to the right makes the selection bigger and you'll start to see some of the white of the background if you go too far. I find a spot where my selection looks clean and leave it there. Once I'm happy with how my selection looks, I click "Okay". You'll see the white background is back, and that's because we weren't actually getting rid of it, just refining the selection. With your texts still selected, make sure you are on the text layer and click the "Add Mask" button at the bottom of your layer panel. It's the button that is a solid rectangle with a circle hole in the middle. That adds a mask to your layer. A mask doesn't actually delete the background either. It just hides it. The reason to use a mask instead of just deleting is so that you can go back and make adjustments as needed. If it cuts into one of your letters too much, you can paint that part of the mask away to fix the problem. You'll see the black and white mask thumbnail attached to your layer, in your layer panel. To adjust a mask, make sure you select the mask in the panel and not your layer. Then you can pick a brush and paint white to add to your selection and paint black to take away from it. There is one thing I need to fix in my mask and that's the bottom part of my "y" in the word "Your" that I missed. I'm going to first make sure that I select my art layer and not the mask by clicking on the layer. Then I'm just going to use the Selection Tool and click on the white area filling the bottom of the part of the "Y". Then I'm going to select the mask and my layer panel by clicking on it instead of the art layer. While on the mask layer and with the area I want removed selected, I then fill the selection with black by going to "Edit" at the top and "Fill". When the box pops up, makes sure contents is set to black and I click "Ok. " I'm all done with my text. Now, I'm going to move on to the hippo. I'll hide my text layer by clicking on the "I" to the left of the layer in the layers panel. I'll turn on my hippo layer by doing the same to that layer. I'm going to use my Magic Wand Tool again, to select the white background and play with the tolerance to get a clean selection. Once I have a selection I like, I'm going to select "Inverse, " so that my hippo is selected and not the background. You can do this by "Select" at the top panel and then "Inverse", or you can use the shortcut, which is Command+Shift+I. Next, I'm turning back on the black layer underneath that I use so I can make a clean selection. Then with my hippo selected, I'm going to go to "Select" and then "Select and mask". You'll see that the white background disappears and the "Select and Mask" panel pops up. Once again, you can play around with these settings until you get the clean edges you like for your selection. Once done, click "Ok" and then add a mask to that layer by clicking on the "Mask" button in the bottom of your layer panel. Now, I've got my hippo masked and cut out from the white background, but there are few chunky areas on the edges that I want to clean up. I'll just use the Brush tool and pick a brush that imitates gouache to paint the edges that I don't like. To do this, you have to have a mask selected in your layer panel and paint black to remove or white to add the art. This is why it's great to use masks instead of just deleting. When you delete, the background is gone for good. If you use a mask, you can just adjust it as much as you want. The brushes I use are Kyle Webster's Photoshop brushes. I especially like the gouache ones. These are now included in your Photoshop subscription if you have the latest version, and I believe they just needed to be installed. Now, I'm going to turn off my hippo layer and move on to the hands layer. Some of the hands are so light that it's hard to differentiate them from the background when selecting. This will be the most challenging part. I'm going to do a lot of painting areas back in that get removed in order to get the selection that I want. I'm just going through my selection and using white to paint back in areas that got taken out from the selection and using black to remove areas that I don't want included in the selection, and I'm doing all of this in the mask. You'll notice I have the mask selected and not the art layer selected in my layer panel. Now that I'm done with cleaning up my hands selection, I'm going to add the layer mask to that layer and then turn on all the parts of my card. This way I can look at it with the black background, so I can see how cleanly or not I've cut out the art. I think it looks good. So I'm going to set up the card art file next. To do this, I'm going to make a new custom Photoshop document. I'm making a five by seven inch card, so I'm going to set the width as 5.5 inches and the height is 7.5. That way I have some bleed or extra space all around the card area. Now, normally 300 PPI would be just fine. But I like to set the resolution to 600 PPI, so that if I ever want to use this art on a larger product, say a pillow, I won't have a resolution issue when I scale it up. Since this is for print, I have the color mode set to CMYK and I set the background to white. Since we made the document slightly larger than our card size, the first thing I'm going to do is add some guides to delineate exactly where the card artwork should go. You can set up guides that are at exact locations by going to "View" and "New Guide". The new guide box pops up and the orientation is set to vertical. That's okay because I'm going to need to vertical guides and two horizontal guides. Because I included a half inch extra width and height, this means the bleed around each side will need to be a quarter-inch. For my first vertical guide, I will set it at 0.25 inches and click "OK". Now, you can see that I have my first guide setup just a quarter-inch off the left side of my file. Now, I have my document set up to have the unit of measurement in inches. If you have that set up as pixels or millimeters, that is what your position number will default to. If you want to change your unit of measurement to inches from something else, all you have to do is go to "Photoshop" in the top panel then "Preferences", and finally "Units and Rulers". There you can set the unit of measurement to inches. To get my next guide, I need to do the same thing only this time I'm going to set the guide location to 5.25 inches so that it lands just a quarter inch from the right edge. Now, I'm going to change the setting on the new guide box to horizontal and add two more guides for the top and bottom at 0.25 and 7.25. [MUSIC] Now I have guides showing me the exact size of my five by seven card front. The next thing I do is select the rectangle selection tool from my tool palette, and make sure that Snap to guides is turned on by going to View at the top and turning snap on. You should also go to View and then snap too to make sure there is a check-mark next to guides. This will make sure that when I draw the selection rectangle around my guides for the five by seven card front, it'll select exactly where the guides are. Then with the five by seven area selected, I make a new group folder in my layer panel by clicking the New Group button at the bottom of the panel, it looks like a tiny folder. You'll see a folder added to your layer panel and then click on Add Mask button to add a mask to your folder. What this means is that any artwork on layers inside this group will only show within the five by seven rectangle. Now I'm going to name the group in my layer panel artwork. You can name a group by clicking on the name of the layer and typing the new name. Now it's time to bring the artwork in. Before I bring in the hippo art, I want to bring in that background that I painted separately. I'm going to open up the scanned image I have of the background. I went through the same photo merge process I did with the hippo art to get a single cohesive image from these two separate scans. Now I'm going to just use the rectangle selection tool to select the painted part of the scan and click command C to copy. Then I'm going to go back into the card file that I set up with guides, make sure I have the artwork group selected in my layer panel, and then hit Command V to paste the background in. You'll see that it fits perfectly within my guides because of the mask that I put on that group. Next I'm going to use the Command T shortcut to transform and scale the background art. If you hold down the Shift key while clicking and dragging a corner, it keeps the artwork proportional as you scale it to the size you want. I'm going to scale this down to fit my five by seven rectangle better, but still leave some room around the edges for bleed. Once it's scaled the way I want it, I just hit return or enter on a PC. Now I'm going to bring in my hippo artwork. I'm going to go to my open file with that cleaned up artwork and select all three layers in my layer panel, and click on the menu options at the top right of the layer panel, which looks like for little horizontal lines. You'll see a menu pop up and you want to select duplicate layers. A box pops up and under destination, you want to select the Open Document that you've set up for your card art, and then click Okay. Now when I go back to that file, you'll see that my hippo artwork has been dropped into the files for me. Before I scale this artwork down to fit, I'm going to get rid of the masks on them because I'm done adjusting them and don't need them anymore. To do this, you can just click on the mask part of the layer and drag it to the trash bin at the bottom right hand layer of your panel. When the box pops up, select Apply. [MUSIC] Now I'm going to scale down the text quickly to fit the five by seven space. By using the transform tool or Command T, holding shift, so it stays in proportion and clicking and dragging the corner down until it fits my space nicely. Now I'm going to do the same with the hippo, except this time I think I will leave him nice an large like he already is. I'll just move him over. [MUSIC] Then once more with the hands. [MUSIC] Now I'll just use the transform tool to move each of these components around until I'm happy with the layout. [MUSIC] Now I'm happy with the layout, but I'm noticing that my pinks are more dull than they should be. This can happen when you scan your artwork. First, I'm going to turn off the painted background in my layer panel so I can focus on my artwork colors only with a bright white background. Then while making sure I'm on one of the artwork layers in the layer panel, I'm going to adjust my pinks back to their original brightness by going to select at the top of Photoshop and then color range. In the color range box, make sure the selection preview at the bottom is set to black mat, and then click with the eyedropper anywhere on your art board to make a selection. Now you should be able to see a bit of your artwork. I want to click on one of the areas that is pink. I'll do that now. Once I have an area of pink selected, I'm going to adjust the fuzziness slider in the color range box until it shows in the preview all of my pink selected and everything else black. Then I'll click Okay. Now I have an active selection of all the pink areas of my art, and I'm going to add an adjustment layer. Make sure it doesn't bug all your art layers in the layer panel. You can add an adjustment layer by clicking on the half-filled circle at the bottom of your layer panel. A menu will pop up and I'm going to select Hue saturation. You'll see a hue saturation box appear. First, I'll slide the saturation all the way to plus 100. Then I'm going to play with the hue slider until I'm happy with the color of the pink. Finally, I'm going to slide the lightness down so that it's a darker shade of pink. Now, I want to make these changes permanent, so I'm going to make several copies of the hue saturation adjustment layer and clip it to each separate art layer. To clip the adjustment layer to the art layer beneath it, hold down the option key or Alt on a PC, and hover in between the two layers in your layer panel. When you see a little down arrow appear, click in between the layers while still holding down that option key, and you'll see the top layer is now clipped to the layer beneath it, indicated by a little down arrow to the left of the adjustment layer. Then I'll select the Adjustment Layer and the art layer and merge each one together by clicking Command E or Control E on a PC. This will merge the two selected layers. My layer names got messed up because it takes the name of the topmost layer when merging. I'm quickly going to rename my layers so it's easy to find what I'm looking for. [MUSIC] Now we'll turn the background group back on and I'm going to make some layer adjustments to my text. I'm going to add a brightness contrast adjustment layer, clip it to the art layer, and then bring the brightness down a bit. Now I'm adding a hue saturation adjustment layer below that and bringing the saturation a bit up, which makes my text more bold and saturated. I think the gray of my hippo scanned and a little to blue. I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer to my hippo layer and bringing the saturation down so that he has a nice neutral gray. Unfortunately, that brought a saturation of my pinks down too. I'm going to take the brush tool and make sure I'm on the mask part of my hue saturation layer. All I need to do is paint black where the pink parts are. That will mean that the hue saturation layer will not affect my hippo in those areas. My pinks will stay nice and saturated. Next up, I need to fix the hands so I'll zoom in on those. I'm going to add a brightness contrast adjustment layer and clip it to the hands art layer. I'm going to bring the brightness down until I can see the lighter skin tones against my peach background, but I don't like how it made everything else less bright. I'm going make sure that I'm on the mask part of the adjustment layer and I'm going to hit "Shift F5" to bring up the fill panel. You can also go to "Edit", "Fill" to get here. Under contents, make sure black is selected with a capacity at 100 and click "Okay". What this did is filled a mask of the adjustment layer with black, making it all invisible. Now I'm going to use a brush to paint white in the mask on the areas where I want the brightness adjustments to show. I'm just painting white, not on the art layer, but on the mask of the adjustment layer. As you can see, it's making those skin tones a bit darker and more visible. When I'm done, I'm just zooming out to see how everything looks from a bit more of a distance. I'm happy with those adjustments. I'm going to merge the adjustment layer and the art layer. I don't love how my movement lines look, I'm going to select those and delete them from the layer I can redraw them in Photoshop. I've zoomed in on the hands and selected a teal color that matches the art work I already have. I'm just going to use aquash brush that's available in Photoshop CC, so that the lines I'm adding digitally will look hand painted like the rest of my design. I'm just going to paint back in the lines. I think this will look cleaner than the hand painted lines because they got a bit choppy and pixelate during the selection process. Zooming out again to see how it looks and I like it. Next I'm going to touch up my hippo. I'm zooming in on his head and directly on the art layer. I'm going to use the same paintbrush to fix him up a bit. While using the brush tool, I'm holding the option key down to get the little eyedropper and selecting an area of color by clicking on it to change my pink color as I go. I'm just fixing any imperfections or making changes here in there. Denning out lines that are too thick like his mouth here, because I'm using aquash brush, my adjustments will look natural and not digital. Now I'm making his cheeks a bit more pink by painting them in with a pink color that I dropped from his hat and I want his teeth to be more visible. I'm taking a white and I'm painting them in a bit brighter. I'll continue to zoom in on the rest of the hippo and painting some fixes and adjustments as I go until he looks the way I want him to. It doesn't need to be perfect. In fact, its imperfections are what make it nice and hand painted looking. I can fix things that are too dark or too light without taking that away. Sometimes, I also take this opportunity to add fun details that I didn't do in the painting phase. It's easier to add really tiny details in Photoshop because you can make your brush size as tiny as you'd like. I'm going to add little lines to the ball on the top of his hat to make it look more like a palm palm. I'm also going to zoom in on the hands and add some outlines and fingernails and lines that will indicate knuckles. I'll also fix up some of the rougher areas using the paintbrush. Now that I have all of my adjustments and fixes done, I'm zooming out to look at my design to see if there's anything else I want to do. I think I want to see what my background would look like if it was a different color. I'm going into my background group in the layers panel and add a hue saturation adjustment layer, and just slide the hue slider back and forth to see what I like. I really like this pale blue teal better than the peach, so I'll leave it at that. Then I'm going and adjust the lightness a bit until I'm happy with it. I'm all done digitizing griding car design. In the next video I'm going to show you how you can set up the car to print it out for personal use.
6. Printing: There are two different ways you can create printed cards from home. The first is using Precut and Scored card stock designed specifically for printing cards. The second is using a Standard Sized card stock paper like this 8.5 by 11 sheet. First I'm going to show you how you can make your card from Precut and scored card stock. Here we are back at my Photoshop file of the card design. I like to have separate art files from print files. My art file like this one has all the layers, so it's editable and it's also the highest possible resolution, so I can use it for various products. Next I need to set up a print file for my card. I'm going to go now to File, and then, New and I'm going to set my units to inches and make the width and height match the dimensions of the Precut card stock that I have. Minus for a 4.5 by 6.25 inch card, which unfolded is 9 inches by 6.25 inches. I'll put nine for the width and 6.25 for the height. I'll set the resolution, the 300 PPI, which is printing resolution and click Create. Here we have our layout for the unfolded card, and the first thing I'm going to do is set up a guide for the center where the fold will go. So I just click command a to select the entire screen, and then, go to select at the top of the screen and pick transform selection to get a transform box around the entire canvas. The reason I do this is the transform box will give you a little bull's eye at the exact center of whatever you've selected. Since I have my snaps on, all I have to do is drag a guide from the rulers on the side to the middle and it will snap right to center. Then, I can just hit Escape and get rid of that transform box. Now I still have my art file open, so I'll switch to that, and I have everything in a folder called artwork. All I need to do, is make sure that I have that group selected, and go to the Layers panel menu, by clicking on the four little lines in the upper right corner, and then, choosing duplicate group. This panel pops up and under destination document, you want to select the printing file we just set up. Any documents you currently have open will be listed there. Once you have your printing file selected, click Okay, so now I'll go back to my print file and you can see the artwork has been dropped in and it shows up in your Layers panel as well. As you can see, it's much larger than it needs to be. The first thing I'm going to do is scale it down to fit my print file size. I'm zooming out and hitting command T to transform the entire group while holding Shift to keep it in proportion, and clicking on a corner and dragging it to scale everything down. Once it's roughly there, I'm zooming in to set my scale more precisely. I'll hit Return once I'm happy with it. The mask from my other file is still on this folder and I don't need it anymore. So I'll just click and drag it to the trash bin on my layer panel to get rid of it. When the box pops up select delete. Now I'm going to make a new mask for my artwork folder that fits the front of the card. So I'm going to pick the rectangle selection tool from my toolbar and draw a rectangle around the front of the card. Because I have my snaps on, it will snap right to my central guide. Then, with the artwork folder selected and my layer panel, I just click the Mask button at the bottom of the panel, and now my artwork is neatly displayed on only the front of the card. I'm naming that folder or group Front. Now to make the back of the card, I'm going to duplicate that folder by clicking on it and holding down the Option key while dragging it beneath and letting go. Because of the mask we created, it is only showing artwork on the front of our card. We need to switch that. I'm going to go into the mask by holding down option and clicking on the mask part of the layer in the layer panel. Now you can see my screen is black and white because it's representing the mask. Well, in the mask, I hit Command I or Control I on a PC, and that will invert your mask. What was black or hidden before is now white and visible. This folder or group will now show its contents on the back of the card only. Now to get out of the mask and back to the artwork, I just hold option again while clicking on the mask in the layer panel. I'll rename this group Back. I'm going into the folder and deleting all of the artwork I don't need for the Back. The only thing I'm keeping is that painted background. Now I just need to move the Background layer over to the left side of my Canvas. Now when I print my card, the painted background color will continue on to the back side. For the back of the card, I want to include my logo and my web address. Here I've opened up my logo file and I'm just going to make sure that I have my Art layer selected and go to the menu in the upper right of the layer panel, select Duplicate Layer, and for the destination document, select my print file, then click Okay. Now I'll go back to my print file, make sure that the logo is in the back group, and then, transform it to the size I want. Make sure it's centered on the back of the card. I'm going to select the back of the card by clicking on the mask on my group titled Back in the layer panel; while holding down the command key. You can select any mask this way. Then, again, I'm going to go to select at the top and transform selection to get that bull's eye in the center. I'll add a guide and center my logo on that guide. Next, I'm using the text tool to add my website beneath the logo and I'll center that on the guide as well, and change the color to something that suits the card. Now, I'm all done setting up my print file, so I'm just going to save it. Now it's time to print. Now, your printer settings will be different than mine, but I'll show you what I do for mine so you get the general idea. Let's go to File and Print and you'll see the Photoshop Print Settings box come up. Make sure you have the right printer selected , and then, click on print settings. This will pull up your print box. Under paper size, you need to select the size that matches your Precut card stock. If it doesn't exist as a default, you'll need to set up a custom print size. Mine is already saved here as a full bleed card, so that's what I'll select. I'm clicking Save, and that brings me back to the Photoshop Print Settings. You can see in the preview my card is oriented landscape and my printer wants to print it portrait. Under Layout I'm just going to switch the mode from portrait to landscape, and then, in the preview you can see now everything looks good. I'll make sure I have the paper loaded in the printer and click Print. The beauty of using pre-cut and scored card stock is that once it's printed all you need to do is just fold the card and you're done. Downside can be that depending on your printer, it may not handle full bleed files very well and you may not get the perfect printed to the edges card that you want. If that's the case, you're going to want to use the other printing method and print your cards on letter sized card stock, so that you can print with bleed and hand cut your cards. To do that we will need to set up our print file a bit differently. I'm going back to Photoshop and to file new again. This time I'm going to use one of the blank document presets by going to print at the top of the panel and selecting letter. The only settings I'll change is changing the orientation from portrait to landscape and then the color mode from RGB to CMYK and then I click create. Now, I need to set up my guides. To do that I need to know the document size which is 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high and my unfolded card size which for me will be the same as the pre-cut card at nine inches wide by 6.25 inches high. To determine the position of my guides, I'm going to subtract the card width from the document width which gives me two inches, and then do the same for the height which gives me 2.25 inches. Now that's the extra space I have horizontally and vertically on my file so I'll divide each by two and that will give me the location of the guides. My vertical guides will now be one inch off the edges of the document and my horizontal guides will be 1.125 inches off the edges. If you want to place guides at exact measurements, you go to view at the top bar of Photoshop and new guide. This way a box pops up which allows you to dictate where you want the guides to go either horizontally or vertically. For my first horizontal guide, I'll set the position to 1.125 inches and click Okay. Now, you see the guide at the top of my document, 1.125 inches off the edge. For the guide at the bottom, I need to do the same except I need to subtract 1.125 from 8.5 to get my position, which is 7.375 inches. Now I need to set up my vertical guides. I do the same thing except I have the orientation set to vertical instead of horizontal. The first guide will be on the left and I'll set the position to one inch, and then go back and do the right side guide and set the position to 10 inches, which is one inches off the 11 inch edge of the document. Now I have guides indicating the exact size of my unfolded cards centered on my document. I'm just going to add one more guide to show the fold by selecting the entire canvas, hitting command A and going to select at the top and transform selection to get my central bulls-eye. Now I'm just dragging a guide from the left ruler to the bulls-eye and it snaps right to it. Now you can use the same steps I used in the pre-cut card setup to bring in the artwork to this file. But because I already have the pre-cut artwork setup to my card size, I'm just going to go to that file and add some bleed to it. To do that, I just need to go to image at the top of Photoshop and select Canvas size. This box pops up and I'm just going to add a quarter inch to the width and the height to give me an eighth inch bleed all the way around. A nine inch width becomes 9.25 inches and a 6.25 inch height becomes 6.5 inches. I click Okay and the Canvas has expanded for me. I do see I need to adjust my mask on the front of the card so that it's not cutting off the artwork. I just need to unlink the mask from the layer so that I can modify it independently. To do this, you click on the little chain in between the layer and the mask. Then with the mask selected, I can transform command T, the mask and stretch it to fit the full Canvas. Now I've got all the bleed I need. Now, to bring this artwork into my other file, I'm going to select at the top bar and pick all. You can also do this by hitting command A. Then with my entire screen selected, I'm going to edit at the top and Copy Merged, copy merged copies all visible layers as a flattened copy. Next, I'm going to go back to my print file and hit command V to paste. You can also go to edit at the top and paste. When you paste it automatically it drops it right there in the center. You can see my card is perfectly aligned with my guides and has an eighth inch of bleed all the way around. Now, since we will be hand cutting out this printed card, I just want to add some trim marks. I'm going to add a new layer for this, and use the line tool which is hidden under the shape rectangle tool. At the top bar I'm making sure the line weight is set to something low and it is at two. Then because I have my snaps on, I can draw a cut lines at each corner, one for vertical and horizontal at each and it snaps right to the guides. Hold down shift to keep the lines straight. If I turn my guides off you can see my trim marks at each corner. Now, I'm going to just save this file and print. I'm going to file print and once again, clicking on print settings and the dialog box pops up. This time you should definitely have a preset for an 8.5 by 11 or letter size document. I'm selecting that and clicking Save. My layout is already set to landscape, as you can see in my preview, the orientation of the artwork on the page already looks okay. All that's left is to hit print and we're done. Here I have my printed out card on letter size paper. You can see the trim marks at each corner. I'll use these to make precise cuts. I'm just going to take a metal ruler and line it up to these vertical trim marks. Now you don't want to cut the entire edge of the paper off or you'll lose your horizontal trademarks. With an X-Acto knife, just cut slightly over the size of the card like this. Then do the same for the other set of vertical trademarks. Now for the horizontal cuts, I don't need the vertical trademarks anymore so I can cut the entire edge of the paper off this time. Here I have my card cut out perfectly to size. Now to fold, you could just fold the paper in half. But if you want to be more precise and get it cleaner fold, you can also use a ruler and a bone folder like I have here. You just use the bone folder similar to the way you would exact on it. Find you're halfway point and with pressure, it won't cut the paper but it will leave a nice indented line for you to fold like you can see here. Then simply fold the card in half along the line. If you want an even tighter crease, you can use a brayer to roll over the crease like this. That's how you can print your card design from home. Now you can either start giving these cards to loved ones, selling them in an online shop like Etsy or even to local gift shops and that craft fairs. If you want to sell or license your card design to a greeting card manufacturer instead of printing your own, the next video I'll show you how you can create a greeting card mockup and presentation for submitting designs.
7. Mocking Up: If your goal is to sell or license your cards to a greeting card manufacturer, you'll need to be able to present your card in a digital format for email. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can do that. You can purchase stock images to use for your mock-up or you can create your own. I'm going to show you how I do both. The most efficient way is to purchase a stock image of a blank card and envelope. You can find these on any number of sites including Shutterstock and istock. I just did a search for blank stationary and found this one here. To start, I'm going to go to File and New. The New Document box pops up, and I'm going to create a custom size document that is eight inches by 10 inches. Choosing this size, because if I e-mail it to an art director and they decide to print it, I know it will fit nicely on their letter sized paper. I'm going to keep the DPI to 300 in case I ever need a larger version of the mockup. Because my mock-ups are sent digitally I keep the color mode RGB and click Create. Then I'll just go back to my stock image and copy the envelope and paste it into my new file. I'll scale it to fit the page better and then do the same with the card. I'm going to rotate the car to its vertical orientation. But now the shadows are in the same direction. I'm going to make sure I have my envelope layer selected, and I'm going to flip it by going to Edit at the top Transform and then Flip Horizontal. There, now my shadows match up better. I've got my card overlapped on top of the envelope and the white border is covering part of my envelope. I need to cut out the card. I don't want to delete the white border though because I want to keep the shadows. I'll show you how you can preserve the shadow and lose the white border. We're going to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool, which is hidden under the regular Lasso Tool, and select the card by clicking on each corner. Now with my card front selected, I'm going to make a copy of that layer by clicking on the layer and dragging it to new layer in the bottom right of the layer panel. Then with the card front still selected and my top card layer selected, I click on the Mask button to add a mask to the copied layer. Now we have two layers with the card. One is cut out with no shadow or white border, and the other is the original. Click on the lower layer that still has the shadow and white border and in the layer panel change the layer blending mode found here towards the top, from normal to multiply. That will make the white area disappear and only the shadow will show, on top of the envelope. Now to keep things tidy, I'm just going to put these two card layers in a group together by selecting both layers and clicking on the New Group button that looks like a little folder. I'll name the group card and name the top layer card and the bottom layer shadow. I'm also going to name the envelope layer, envelope. Now by selecting the card group, I can move the card and it's shadow together wherever I want without messing up the alignment. Now I'm going to go back to my original card design and select the card front using the Rectangle Selection Tool. Then go to Edit, Copy Merged to get a flattened copy of the art. Go back to my new Mock file and hit Command V to paste it. I'm making sure that the layer is in my card folder and that the top of all the layers in the folder. Next, I'll scale the design down using the transform tool until it fits the size of the card front. Once it's just slightly larger than my card front, I'm going to copy the mask from the card layer onto my art layer by holding down option and clicking and dragging the mask up to the art layer. Make sure the mask is on both the art layer and the card layer. I'm naming the new layer art so things are easy to find. Once again, I'm going to set the blending mode on this layer to multiply. This is what makes the card look realistic. It picks up the slight variations in shadows on the card mock below. My card mock is done. Now I just want to scale the whole thing up a bit to fit my page better. I'm selecting the card group and my envelope layer and using the transform tool to scale it up together. Okay, that looks good. Next I want to work on the envelope, so I'm going to zoom in on that and turn off my card group for now by clicking on the little eyeball to the left of the card group in the layer panel. Then I'm going to use the Polygonal Lasso to select the envelope, clicking on each corner and closing it by clicking again on the first corner. Once it's selected, I'm going to make a gradient map layer right above my envelope layer by clicking on the Layer Adjustment button, which is the half-filled circle at the bottom of the Layer Panel, then selecting Gradient Map. The Gradient Map properties should appear and you'll see that your envelope has been turned to whatever color was last used in gradient maps. It may be black and white for you. If that's the case, your envelope may still look the same. Either way you can change it to whatever color you want by clicking on the Gradient Bar. A new box pops up which is the gradient editor. You want the left color to remain black or change it to black if it isn't. The right color should be the color you want your envelope to be. To change that, you just click on the tiny little color square beneath the gradient to select it. Then click on the Color box in the bottom left. The color picker appears and you can use the slider to pick whatever color you want. You can also pick from pan tone colors or saved swatches if you choose by clicking on Color Libraries. I'm just playing around with this until I pick a pink that I like and that matches the pink of my card. Then just click Okay and Okay. Don't worry, you can go back in and change the color at anytime. Now I'll take my gradient map layer and my envelope layer and put them in a group together and call that group envelope. I'm going to turn back on my card group so that I can see the card and the envelope together. I see one thing I'd like to fix. A little bit of the white envelope is showing beneath my colored gradient map. I just need to fix the mask on the gradient map. I'll turn back off my card and zoom into the area I want to fix. Then make sure I'm on the mask part of the gradient map layer. I'm going to select the bottom of the envelope to include that little bit of white. Go to Edit fill and choose White. Remember, white in a mask means visible, black means hidden. I want the gradient map visible over the entire envelope, and that fixed my problem. Now I'll turn my card back on and make sure I'm happy with how it looks with the envelope. I think I want to play around with the envelope color a bit to see if I like using the peach color from my card any better. So with my gradient map layers selected, I'm just going to click on the Gradient in the Properties Window to bring back up the gradient editor. Once that's up, I click on the little pink square to the bottom right of my gradient to select it. Then click on the Color box. Once the color picker pops up, I'm going to use the eyedropper to select the peach color from my card by clicking on one of the peach areas of the card. You'll see that my envelope changed to peach. It's not quite bright enough, so I'm going to play with the color picker to get a peach that I like. But I still don't think I like it as much as I liked the hot pink. I'm going to use the eyedropper to select the hot pink color from my hippos hat. Once again, I'll brighten that up a bit and I like that. I'll click Okay and Okay, and then I'm done with the envelope. Okay, that's how you can create mocks using stock photos. Now if you don't want to purchase stock photos, you can create your own mock. The benefit of this is that you don't have to buy anything. The downside is that it doesn't always look as real as using stock photos does. I'm just going to put this card and envelope into another folder together and name that folder stock photo. Then I'm going to hide that folder and make a new group called my mark. I'm going back to my art file and copying the card design again and then pasting it into my mock file. I'll scale it down to about the size I think it should be. Then rename the layer card. Next I just double-click on the layer to bring up the layer style box. I'll zoom in and move the box so I can see my card. The first layer style I'm going to add is a Bevel and Emboss by checking the box where it says Bevel and Emboss. As you can see the default settings automatically add some depth to the card. Now in the settings to the right,I will customize the Bevel and Emboss by adjusting the shading angle. You can do that by clicking on what direction you'd like the light to be coming from in this circle. I tend to like my light source coming from the top right of my images, so I click on the top right of that circle. The default was set to straight above. You can see how the shadows and highlights on my bubble have moved. I'm also going to bring down the size of my bevel and the depth because I think the card looks a little bit too thick. I also think the shadows are a bit too harsh, so I'm going to bring the shadow opacity down by sliding this to the left. I think that gives the card some realistic depth. Next I'm going to add a drop shadow by checking the box on the left next to where it says drop shadow. Once again the default settings have added a drop shadow for me. I usually customize the drop shadow by changing the opacity, distance and size. Also make sure that use global light is checked. This will make sure that your drop shadow is consistent with your bevel and embossed shadows and keep everything looking natural. Zooming back out you can see that my flat art now looks a bit dimensional as if it were a card. Next I want to add an envelope. To get the shape and size of the envelope I'm using the rectangle selection tool to draw a box around my card. Then with the selection I'm going to click on the adjustment layer button or the half-filled circle in a layer panel and pick solid color. The color picker pops up and I'm just going to go ahead and pick my pink color and click "Okay". I'm hiding my card layer for now so I can focus on the envelope. Then I'll hit Command T to transform it. Holding down Shift and dragging the corner I'm just going to rotate the solid color layer so that it's horizontal instead of vertical. Now I've just grabbed a low-res envelope image off Google to use for reference. I'm going to move it over to the corner so it's not in the way of my envelope. First I want to find the center of my envelope. With the solid color layer selected, I hit Command T to get the bulls-eye at the center. Drag a guide from my rulers on the left, right to the middle of the rectangle. Because my snaps are on it will snap right to the center. Then I can hit escape to get out of the transform mode. Looking at my reference envelope I'm going to add some guides for the different points of the flap to make sure I'm consistent. Now I have all my guide setup but I just want to make sure my snaps are on so I'm going to View at the top and then Snap To and making sure there's a check mark next to guides. This way when I'm using my polygonal lasso tool, I know that it will snap right to where I've set my guides up. Now I have my polygonal lasso tool and I'm outlining the envelope flap. Once I have a selection in the shape of the flap, I am going to go back to the adjustment layer button on my layer panel and add a second solid fill color. I'll eyedropper the rectangle below to get its pink color, but I'm going to change it slightly for now so that we can see the separate shapes clearly. Now I'm just going to make a copy of that flap layer by holding down Option and clicking and dragging the layer down. Then I'll hit Command T to transform and hold down the Shift to keep it straight and rotate it 180 degrees. That will be the bottom sealed flap. Next I'll click on the solid color in the layer panel of that layer so I can change the color slightly again, just so we can see it clearly. Now I've got three solid color layers that make up my envelope. I'm going to turn on the card layer and move it so that it's on top of the envelope. I'm going to turn off my envelope reference image. Then I'm going to copy the layer style from the card to my envelope layers by holding the Option key and clicking on the small FX you'll see that's on the right of my card layer, and dragging it down onto the envelope layers. This means I've copied the layer effects from the card layer onto my envelope layers. Now I'm turning the card layer back off again so we can see the envelope clearly. Next what I'm going to do is go in and customize the shadows to make them look more realistic. I think the shadow on the flap layer is fine, but the bottom sealed flap doesn't need to have such a big shadow since it's sealed. I'll click where it says drop shadow under that layer to bring backup the layer style box and bring the opacity and the distance down. Now that my envelope shadows are all set, I'm going to change the color of the flaps to match the base envelope so it's all the same color. All I have to do is double-click on the layer color swatch and it will bring up my color picker. Then I'll use the eyedropper and click on the envelope base to match the color and click "Okay". Now you'll see my envelope looks more realistic. Turn back on my card layer and I actually want to change the color of the pink to match the pink in the card better. I'm just going to go back in and use the eyedropper to adjust the color of the three pieces of my envelope. Now I'm just going to make a new group folder and put all of the envelope parts into it and name that group envelope. Now I have my card and my envelope mocked up. Now I will just play with the layout and move things around until I think it looks nicely presented. I'm clicking on the envelope group and hitting Command T to transform the envelope, and I'm just going to scale it down slightly and rotate it behind the card. My from scratch Mockup is done. Now we can compare the two so you can see the difference between my stock photo Mockup and my made from scratch Mockup. The next thing I want to do is finish the presentation bit of this Mockup so I can email it to clients in the hopes that they would want to include the card in their line. First I'm going to get rid of these guides that I don't need anymore by going to View and Clear Guides. Then I'm going to set up a new guide at the bottom for where I'll put my logo and other info. I'm going to go back to my logo file which I still have open and hit Command A to select all and Command C to copy. Going back to my Mockup file and hitting Command V to paste. Then I'll hit Command T to transform and hold down the Shift key while scaling the logo down so it keeps its proportions. Then enter when I'm done. Next I'm grabbing the text tool and I'm clicking in the lower left corner. The font I want is already selected but you can pick your font in the upper left top toolbar. I'm setting the size to 12 points. Your texts will be whatever color you have selected in your toolbar to the left. I'm typing a copyright symbol and then Anne was here, which is my business name and the year 2018. I'll also include my website and my email address. This is so if my presentation gets saved on someone's computer and separated from my email, an art director, art buyer will easily have my contact info. I'm moving this text layer so that it's aligned with my guide, as is my logo. Then I'm going to add another line of text above and make the font bigger. In this case I'll set it to 18 points. I'm including the name of my card which is hippo-hippo-hooray. I do this because I usually send several new card marks at once and I want my clients to be able to easily refer to the ones they are interested in. Just zooming out and turning off my guide so I can get a look at my presentation sheet. I like it. Just to be organized I'm going to grab all of the text and the logo and put them in a group and call it title info. Then I'm saving the file and that's it. All that's left is to save it as a low-res JPEG for email. I saved my images at 8 by 10 inches and 72 DPI. That way if I send a ton of images at once they're small enough that they don't make the email too large. If you want to know how you can start submitting your greeting card designs to manufacturers, you can watch my other class become a greeting card designer where I walk you through the entire process that I use. Next up we'll be going over the project for this class.
8. Project: The project for this class is to use the steps outlined to create a hand painted greeting card design that you can either use to print at home or send out to potential clients. In step one, you'll choose your theme and start concepting. Step two of this project is to create a detailed sketch of your design. In step three, you'll paint the design. Step four is digitizing the design by scanning your painting, bringing it into Photoshop, and editing it as needed. Step five is split into two options. 5a is printing out your card design, cutting it, and folding it into an actual card, and 5b is mocking up your card design in Photoshop so you can choose which you'd like to do. Finally, in step six, you'll share your work with the class. When you upload your project to the class gallery, I'd love to see your initial three concepts, thumbnail sketches, the detailed final sketch, your finished painting, and either your printed and cut card or your digital mockup and presentation format. Thanks so much for joining me and I can't wait to see what you make. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare so you can stay up to date on my latest classes.
Anne Bollman, Anne Was Here
