Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello there fellow creative. Welcome. I am so glad you chose to check out my class today. My name is Beth Buffington. I'm a licensed illustrator and product designer, as well as a college instructor working out of the Chicago area. Just like many of you, I've been an artist since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I went off to college to study art, and I began my professional career as a graphic designer working in a corporate cubicle. But the allure of creating my own illustrations and my product ideas called me to start my own design business. Fast forward to the present, and I am working out of my home studio as a licensed Illustrator and product designer, creating illustrations and products for the home decor and gift industry. I also teach digital illustration at a nearby college. All things creative and I love it. The teacher in me realized that there was a wealth of information about designing for the home decor industry that could benefit other creatives. In this class, you will learn how to create a product design collection, beginning with research to concepts to product design, and realistic mock-ups. When you are done with this class project, you will have created a four-piece plate setting consisting of dinner, salad, and dessert plates, plus a matching coffee mug. All designed with images that you have created and organized from an illustration library that you will build. As an extra benefit, when you've completed the entire class, you will also have gathered and organized visual research, a mood board, a color palette, as well as the knowledge that you've created about your trending theme and its target audience. We'll talk and discuss how to organize this valuable information together with your illustrations and your finished product design into a beautiful presentation that will be perfect for submission to potential buyers, collaborators, and licensing clients. If you're interested in discovering how to increase your visibility and possibly add some creative income with your illustrations and your product ideas, you're in the right place. I am glad you chose to spend some time with me today. Let's get started.
2. Our Class Project- Design a Place-Setting: Welcome back. Thanks again for joining me today. For our class project, I will be walking you through my creative process from research, to illustration, to product development. Together, we'll design a four-piece place setting that includes a dinner, salad, and dessert plate accompanied by a matching coffee mug. We'll start this project with a bit of Internet research to choose a theme, a color palette, and a target audience. Then next, you'll create a mood board filled with your collections of visual inspirations to help you stay focused as you build an illustration library around your chosen theme. Then together, we'll explore design of dishes. You'll consider the shape and the size of your plates and mugs, and also determine the color and the texture in your dishes. Then by mixing and matching the images and patterns from your illustration library, you will complete a beautiful place setting that targets your chosen theme or holiday and meets the needs of your target audience. Now I recommend that you follow along throughout the entire process of this class so that you can completely understand all the steps involved in initial research, in illustration development, and the design of your dishes. For this class, you will need to have a working knowledge of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I also reference Procreate on my iPad for illustration development. It is one of my favorite programs for rendering digital illustrations. But alternative options for photographing and scanning paper or canvas illustrations, that will be mentioned for creatives who are more traditional in their art development. When you've completed your class project, remember to upload it and share your designed place setting to the project gallery to showcase your work. I'm looking forward to seeing the subjects you've chosen to illustrate and the products you've designed. Posting your projects and your comments in the gallery. But that lets me know that you've enjoyed the class and will also help me consider what to focus on for additional classes. Also, feel free to reach out to let me know if you have any questions. Now, I cannot wait to see your results. It's time to roll up our creative sleeves and get started. I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Research: Choose a Subject & Audience: Hey, welcome back. During this lesson, we'll talk about how I start a new design collection. It's all about getting organized and doing some research. Now this is an important phase. It's like taping off the doors and the windows and light switches before you paint a room. Preparing in advance keeps you from getting sloppy and helps you stay efficient and focused throughout your entire project. Now while research is exciting, it can be overwhelming. It's often hard to decide on one subject because let's face it, the possibilities are truly endless. Take a moment and think, are you interested in a holiday? Christmas is always needed in the home decor industry, or is there a theme you'd like to develop? For example, coastal or maybe something seasonal? Is there a trend you'd like to focus on such as cottage core or mid-century modern, or possibly an animal that you know is trending that you'd like to illustrate. If you are uncertain where to begin, here's a few things I do when I am researching. First, I go to my phone, I collect pictures. I go through my photo feed to remind myself of the places, the things and materials and textures that I have found inspiring. Here's a few photos I snapped while walking my dog Betly. These flowers were just off the path and they were like walking through an outdoor art gallery. Of course, I run to the Internet to research ideas that are calling to me. One of my favorite internet sources is Pinterest. It's easy to search topics that have inspired me from say, a seasonal walk in the forest or an interesting twist on a holiday. The great thing about Pinterest, of course, are the pin boards you can create to organize the ideas that you're considering. I have pin boards for a ton of subjects or themes and holidays that I've either explored or want to explore. Once I've narrowed down an idea, for instance, the subject I've chosen to demonstrate for our class project is spring with a concentration on pressed flowers. This was an idea that was sparked by the photos taken during my walk with Betly. Here is the pin board I have made for my theme of pressed flowers. Now when researching, remember to collect visuals that inspire ideas for both illustration and product design. For my pressed flower idea, I thought of two approaches for my illustrations. One was flowers and silhouette, and the second one was flowers drawn as pen and ink with spot watercolor washes. Now I also collect ideas for materials to use for my product development, like textures and glazes as well as fonts. You may want to add word inspiration to your design. Of course, color, always super important. We're going to talk more about color pallets in the next lesson. Once you've chosen a subject, now it's time to think about your target audience. Who are they? What is their age? Where do they live? How will they use the products you're developing? How much can they spend? For instance, let's say your target audience is mothers with young families. Now, it would be wise to design dishes on unbreakable material. Then the dishes can be safely used by children both indoors and outdoors. This increases the dishes usage. Also wise to choose a cost-effective material. Young families have many things tugging at their purse strings. Keeping your collection beautiful and unbreakable at a lower cost will help you meet the needs of your target audience, mothers with young families. You can see using research tools is an important theme for both deciding on a subject and also for collecting visuals. These inspirations are useful as you reference your design over and over again. Now that you've chosen and researched your subject and its target audience. Let's move to Lesson 4. In this next lesson, we'll discuss sources for choosing a color palette. We'll also chat about initial steps towards your dish design. We'll discuss how to create a mood board. Let's keep this creative adventure going and I will see you in the next lesson.
4. Research & Decide Your Color Palette: Well, hello welcome back. In this lesson, we will research ideas for color palettes and dish design. Once we are done with all our research, we'll talk about organizing the most important visuals we've collected into a moodboard. But first, let's talk color. I love, love, love color. It can completely alter a product's entire look or emotion through the simplest change in a color palette. Choosing your color palette is important. This is where knowing your target audience is really helpful. Knowing the genre, their age, the region of your audience can help you determine the most successful colors to choose for your illustrations and also for the dishes you are going to design. Pinterest, again, is a good resource for color. Simply search color palette with the name of your subject or theme or another describing word like confetti or seashells or gemstone or something like that. It will bring up some fun ideas to consider for a color palette. There's a lot of sites too that give you some really great ideas about choosing a color palette. Now, let's go to my computer and look at some of those sites. Hey everyone, It's Beth at her computer. We're going to quickly look at three different websites where you can explore color. You can find existing color palettes or you can even create your own. Here we are first at Adobe.com. You need to have a subscription in order to play with Adobe's color pages. But if you have it, click on the "Explore the web app", and it will take you to this color wheel. Here Here have some toggles that you can play with to customize a color palette. If you come over here to this side, you can click and toggle around to see color options for complementary or triads or whatever. There're lot of things to play with over here, so have some fun with that. If you click on "Extract Theme", you can select a file from your computer and you can bring in a custom photo that you have. Here's one of my photos that Bentley and I took. Adobe will automatically set up color areas that they believe is contrasting. But you can come in here and adjust any of these colors too match something that you think is going to better work with the collection that you're designing. You can really customize your color palette using a photo from your own computer. Then over on this side, you can play with how those colors are adjusting themselves. Here is muted, you can have the colors go deep, here is dark. Have some fun playing with these options. I love the muted colors, those are my favorite. But if you come here and click on "Explore", this is going to show you options of existing color palettes that you can review and choose from. Lots to do. Make sure that when you're looking at these pages, you do go in and find all of the options that you could explore. There's so many options that we don't have time to do all of them. If you're on the page, have some fun just playing before you really get serious about getting your color cemented. Here is trends. These are super fun. They break down color into groups. Here we have fashion, graphic design, illustration, architecture. This is a really good thing to use if you know your target audience. It might be a way for you to research color that you believe will be targeting the needs and the interests your audience will have. If you wanted to save one of these, you can add it to the library, and that's what this option is on the menu. You can add it to the library or you can download the color palette into your computer as a JPEG. Lots of fun to be had on Adobe.com's color pages. Here is another website that's called Coolors, and it's pretty cool. This also has a color palette generators. If you click on this, it will take you to that generator page. It's fairly intuitive, so if you are here, just click on that and you can customize a color palette that fits your needs. Or if you're not sure what you want, you can come here and click on "Exploring trends". Again, it gives you a lot of options that you can come and explore for existing color palettes. That's Coolors.com. Here we have another website called Canva, and they have a color page as well. You can upload an image to bring in a photo that you have on your computer and set up custom colors that are based from the colors existing in your photograph. They also have color palettes that are existing and you can explore all the color combinations that they have categorized. There's a lot to explore here as well. Canva.com is a good resource, Coolors.com, or the color that you can find on Adobe.com. Those are three sites that I've just touched base on very, very quickly for you. If you haven't had a time to write down these URLs, don't worry, I'm going to have a list of all the websites that we've talked about and visited in the tutorials previous and anything that we might touch on later during our class. You'll be able to find that in the class notes. I hope you enjoy researching color. Have as much fun as I do. Color is fascinating. Now let's talk about the design of your dishes. When thinking about dish design, consider the shape, the texture, the size of your dishes to match your theme and the needs of your audience. There are several resources I like to use for dish design inspiration and also for rendering mockups so that they can look as realistic as possible. Royalty free photo sites are full of amazing treasures and some provide free downloads, and others have a subscription fee or a credit to purchase before downloading an image. My favorite free site is unsplash.com. A few other royalty free sites to consider are 123RF or Adobe Stock Images and Pixeden. But there are so many more that you can find through a quick Google search. Before you download an image, it is always important to take a moment to read the license that is available for any image that you download, one that's free or one that's purchased. It's important for you to know how you can legally use the images you've decided to use. When I find photos that will be useful for my design, I start an images folder on my computer to collect the files downloaded. This will help you stay organized as you work through your design and your product development. Now once all your research is complete, the next step is to narrow down to a fine focus, your core ideas about the illustrations and the dish design you plan to do. Select the most important images from your pin board and assemble them into a moodboard. I usually do this in Illustrator, but do what feels most natural for you. It's good to sort these chosen images into groups such as photography, illustration, product design, and color palettes. A moodboard provides a guidebook for you to reference and it'll help you stay focused and you'll be less likely to wander away from completing a really great idea. But now that we've collected and organized our mood board that includes our visual inspirations for theme, for audience, for color palette and dish design. It's time to start thinking about the images and patterns that will be part of your collection. In our next lesson, we'll start building an illustration library. I can't wait to see you there.
5. Building an Illustration Library: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about building an illustration library for use in developing your dish collection. First things first, let's consider the most important to images and we'll call them heroes. These illustrations will be eye-catching and possibly dramatic. They will bring that woo factor to your collection. This artwork will be strong and it will stand out like heroes. You get the idea. To decide what will be the hero for your collection, refer to your research visuals again and see what reoccurs in your references. What images begged to be the centerpiece of your work? Then what will be the best way to illustrate this main image or images? This will be a decision you will make based on how you want to render your artwork. Now let's discuss the sidekicks or the secondary supporting images. This artwork will bring a quite connection to your collection. These images are useful for detail or borders, and sometimes your secondary artwork will be pulled directly from parts of your hero and then sometimes they are going to be completely different pieces of artwork. It's a good idea to have a largish selection of secondary images and you may find at the end of your work that you haven't even used them all. But as you work through your product development, these secondary images help transition your design from dish to dish. Now let's talk a little bit about rough sketches. Now remember, as you work through your concepts, you will be adding your art to either round or square or possibly slightly organic shapes. But for the most part, keep in mind, the shapes for dishes are simple. Now, when I work on concepts, there are usually two ways I sketch. Sometimes I sketch with pencil on tracing paper and this allows me to easily work and revise by placing a new piece of tracing paper over my original drawing. I keep layering my revisions until I'm happy with my end result. My favorite way to sketch concepts, however, is working on my iPad using Procreate. Procreate allows me to work and revise by adding layers and playing with the transparency of the previous layer and this gives me the same effect as working on tracing paper. But the end results is a digital file that is super easy to upload into my computer. Let's now go to my iPad and talk a little about sketching. Hi everyone, it's Pat at her iPad. I have opened up a new Procreate page and I'm going to show you just really fast how I do my sketching concepting procedures when I'm working on a collection. I really do like working in Procreate and so I will be showing you these concepts, steps in Procreate. But if you're more of a paper person, pretend that this is a sheet of tracing paper and that all the layers I'm talking about in Procreate are just layers of tracing paper going on top of existing drawings and that will help you just keep that in mind if you're working on your table. Here I am in Procreate. This happens to be 8.5 by 11, 300dpi. Sometimes I'll work at 600dpi depending on how large a piece of artwork might need to be in its end result. But for today's purposes, 8.5 by 11, 300dpi, this already set up. I like to reference the mood board that I put together for illustration references when I'm in Procreate. You're able to do that by using Pinterest. I just wanted to show you how I go about doing that. I bring up my menu down below, and I bring up Pinterest and I pull together a split-screen in Procreate. Then I've already got this keyed up to my pins for my pressed flowers and I put my press flower mood board for illustration inspiration in there. Now I'm able to take a look at this and if I want to, I can enlarge this to really take a close look at a piece of artwork and I can slide around and see all the different parts of the illustrations that I eventually want to do. For right now, I'm just going to concentrate on this fern leaf and we're just going to really fast walk-through sketch procedures. In Procreate, layers are so key, I love them so much and so I've got here a rough sketch that I'm going to show you. This would be the first thing that I would sketch. That would just be okay, I'm looking at the leaf, I want to draw a leaf that's similar and it might look something like this. It's quickly sketched up, but now I want to tighten it up. In Procreate, I'll come to my layers and I will lighten that layer to a very light opacity and this is then very much like I have put this layer getting ready to lay another sheet of paper on top of it so that I can draw again, but still see that artwork underneath, very much like laying a piece of tracing paper over the top and then working on my drawing again. I've already done this. I'm going to show you my next sketch. This again is a little bit tighter sketch figuring out how I might want to make those leaves actually look and so at this point then, I'm happy with what I've sketched there. I'm going to get rid of my first rough sketch and I'm going to work on my tight rough. I am going to come into this run and get the opacity pulled down very low and then through the magic of pre-work, I will show you what my tight rough looks like then. Here is my tight rough. Again, I've come in here and I've worked up what I think my actual artwork might look like when I'm finished. This is how I keep working and I'm not going to show you this with all the pieces that I've done. Right now, I'm going to show you then just what my final art looked like. This is the art that I pulled together. I wanted to have some Queen Anne's lace and one of those Queen Anne's lace is closed up those look really pretty and silhouette, something that had some berries on it and sort grassy look and oppressed flower that was flattened so I could bring those in. This is the artwork that I've pulled together. Then what I'm going to need to consider next is just, okay, now I've got my drawings, how will I apply my color? We're going to be talking about that in the next section of this lesson. Now when you are happy with your concepts and with your rough or even tight sketches, you'll want to consider just how you're going to draw or paint and add color to your final art. For dish design, color can be added and prepared in many ways. You can render art that is one color, or you can apply spot color to outline art, say pen and ink with spot color or you can work up very detailed full-color illustrations, watercolor, acrylic oil. You may also decide to have your actual plates and cups hold the main color, and then your artwork will be added as an accent. The possibilities, they are endless. Luckily though dish manufacturers can do wonders adding illustrations to your actual dishes. Now that we've defined and organized the hero and the sidekick illustrations, it's time to move to the next lesson where we will start this super exciting part of the class, the design of your actual place. I will see you in the next lesson.
6. Researching Plate Shapes & Mockup Images: Hi again and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to dive into research or shopping for plate mockups. This will lead to the actual design of your unique plates. Now, when designing your place setting, really the only limitation you have is your imagination, reigned in, of course, by the theme and the target audience that you've chosen. Remember, you're designing products for a particular person and your goal is to design a product that will meet their needs, but at the same time also match their home decor tastes. Also remember that dishes need to hold food. Keep in mind that your dishes should function properly and safely. That means keeping food on the plate and hot liquids in the mug. Now, keeping that in mind, when you start a new design collection, consider first the basic shape. Would you like to work with squares? Would you prefer to work with circles? Those are the two basic shapes that you should consider before you begin your design process. From there, you can continue to make unique design decisions about should your circles be ovals? Should your squares be rectangles? How about changing any of those shapes into something organic or maybe make something geometric instead of just simply a square. Once you've made decisions about your simple shapes, it's time then to find a mockup to work with. Next, let's go to my computer and chat a bit about how and why and where and what to shop for when choosing plate mockup idea. I'll see you in my computer in just a second. Hey, here we are in best computer looking at Illustrator. What we're looking at right now is the pressed flower illustration library that I assembled, shows you the heroes I thought would be nice, and the secondary pieces that I thought could be good accompaniments to those heroes. Now for today's dish design collection, I decided it would be a good idea for me to narrow down my options a little bit just to make the design a little easier for me. I decided that these were the three pieces that I really wanted to see on my three plates. When you are deciding your design for your plates, you'll need to figure out where does that hero go. Quite often it'll go on the largest plate, but sometimes you'll think more about your stacking order. A stacking order would be dinner plate on bottom, salad plate in middle, dessert plate on top. If that is the most important part of your design, you may decide to put your hero on your dessert plate, since that would be sitting on the very top. Then your designs for the rest will accompany and compliment that hero that we'll be on your dessert plate. But for me today, I wanted to put my hero on my largest plates and then arrange my artworks so that my plates could stand alone and still look nice if they were stacked. But I wanted my hero piece to go on my largest plate, that will be my dinner plate. Knowing that, the next thing you need to think about is shape. To start real simple, circle a square. For today I decided that I wanted to work with this simple shape of a circle. The next step you want to do is think about where you're going to get that plate. Now, if you are new to designing plates or dishes in general, then you'll probably want to go and find yourself a mockup to start with. I suggest, I have three sites here that I find very helpful for designing dishes. We're going to start looking at TheHungryJPEG as one of them. TheHungryJPEG shows you a lot of ideas for mockups. I've already typed in mockup plates, so it's showing me some ideas that also shows you the prices that you're looking at. Some of these are ready-made mockups, so you'll be just dropping in your design. But if you're like me today, I really want to make that plate my own. I don't want to have something already set up with a bunch of layers that won't allow me to manipulate my design. I want to set up those layers myself. That decision is yours to make, whether you want to make your product design part of your design, or if you just want your illustrations to shine and let the manufacturer know that they can put your art on any plate that they might have. This is HungryJPEG, here is another site that I find very helpful, it's Creative Market. You can also see that I typed in mockup plates and you see a lot of ideas here for mockups on plates. The next place is Adobe Stock. I typed in white plate mockup and you can see here it tells me they have 19,000 plus ideas for me to review. Clearly I am not going to look at all of those. You need to really be mindful of the time you're spending. You can go down some deep rabbit holes looking for dish mockups. I knew for today I really just wanted a very simple, rounded shape, white plate to use for my art. I chose this one. It really worked out well. When you're deciding on your plates, after you've decided a shape, the next thing you want to think about is that shoulder. Here is a deeper shoulder and this plate here has no shoulder at all. It has a rim here that does stand up that will keep fluids from falling off the plate. That could be an important thing that you want to think about. This plate here looks more like a very shallow bowl. That plate might be able to double as a pasta bowl as well as a plate depending on how much that rim is angling up. This plate here has again, pretty much no shoulder, but that edge does pull up a little bit more than this one. You can just see some subtle design changes in that circle shape. From the plates I'm working on today, I really wanted to have a shoulder because I wanted my design to overlap onto that shoulder. I downloaded this plate to use. The next thing we're going to be doing is going into Photoshop to take a look at what we're going to do to set up our design of our plates and also the color. We're going to be making this plate our own product design creation. We made some great progress in this lesson by making three very important decisions. Number 1, from our Illustration library, we chose the hero and the sidekick images to use on our plate design. Number 2, we made this simple shape decision, round or square for our dishes. Number 3, we went shopping on the Internet and chose the basic plate mockup to use for our unique collection, excellent work. Now that we've chosen our illustrations and our plate mockup, we're ready to hop to the next lesson where we will actually design our dinner, salad, and desert plates. I will see you in the next lesson.
7. Designing Plates in Photoshop: Hi, again. We're back in that computer. Now, we're looking at Photoshop. I've started a document that includes the plate download from Adobe Stock. What you see right now is the plate. I've also brought in some color that I want to use for my color palette. I have a blue, I have a purple, I have a tan. Those are the colors I want to make my plates today; three colors, three plates. The first thing I'm going to want to do with this plate so that I can manipulate it for the design that I want to do, is get rid of the background. I want to make sure I'm on the plate layer, and I'm going to come over here and get my Magic Wand. I am going to hit that background. Make sure that the edges are nice and smooth so that the highlight is not eating into any of your plate. Make sure that if it is, that you play with the tolerances, I've got my tolerance down to five. The next thing that you're going to want to do, or I want to do, is make my plate a color. In order to do that, I'm going to come over here to color, or its Layer, down to Layer Style, over to Color Overlay. This is going to bring in a color. I've already set this up to a color that I know is going to match the blue in my color palette. I've got this set for 43 percent for opacity, and to multiply. That's going to allow some of those shadows to come in. As you're playing with this, play with those percentages of the opacity and the color to make sure that you are allowing for as much of that plate, the dimensions in your plate to show through. Now that I have a color set for my plate, the next thing I want to play with is I want to play with the shape of my plate. I'm going to go Edit, to Transform, to Warp. That's what I want to play with. This is going to bring it a warp box. I want to be able to see what I'm doing a little bit better. I want to play with the grid area. I'm going to make this five-by-five. You can change that by just clicking on this little down caret on the grid area. This is going to show me sections. I can now come in and just pull in areas and pull out other areas. These are small moves because it's still a plate, so you don't want it to be overly dramatic with the shape. Anyway, I don't for this design. I am not going to speak for your designs. You may have something that a really unique, fun shape needs to be part of your design. But for me, I just want this to have an artist in feel, like the plates were made by hand, so they're not completely circles. This is just going to be small moves that will be happening. I'm going to say that I am pretty happy with what's happening right now with this shape. The next thing I want to do is then, I want to play with the shoulder of my plate so that the shoulder area between the inside base and the shoulder is thicker for the shoulder. I'm going to play again with the warp area and I'm just going to tag in the edges of the shoulder so that they are getting a little bit wider, because I want to have more room for my design on the shoulder areas. I'm just going to pull this out. The Warp tool is very organic. If you've never used it before, it's like playing with a piece of slippery soap. You just want to make, like I said, little movements and be prepared to have to go back and sometimes, reposition something that goes, whoa, but here we go. I'm going to say that this is what is making me happy. Now I have my plate shape looking very organic and also a wider shoulder. Now you can see the difference between what I had, the original plate, and what I've done, I've made it my own. The next thing I'm going to want to do is, quite often, I play a little bit with the base of my plate and some highlights just to bring in a little bit of extra poses and drama to my layout. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer. With my Lasso tool, I'm going to do this quickly. If you're doing this, do a little bit nicer job of it to go around and find that base area. The base area is the part where the plate is at its lowest. We're going to say it's like that. Now, the next thing that we need to do is I'm going to fill that shape that I just made. I'm going to come over to Edit, down to Fill. I've already created a foreground color that is going to be my base. You can play with this to be whatever color you need it to be, but you can adjust that with your picker. I've got this. I'm going to take my highlight off. Now, I'm going to come here over to my Filter and down to Blur, over to Gaussian Blur. I want that to blur, so you can see that the edge is getting a little bit soft so that it will blend in with my plate. This will blue out even more if you want it to, but I want it to just have a gradual look to it. We're going to say we like it like that. Now, as you can tell, this color is way too severe. I'm going to come over here to opacity, and I'm going to play with the opacity. I'm going to take it down pretty far, so that it's just showing up slightly, that it's going to make my base look deeper but in a subtle way. Then I'm also going to hit "Multiply" on this as well. Now you can see the difference between the two. It's just making that base look a little deeper. I like the way that drama is showing up. The next thing I'm going to do is do a similar thing on the reverse. I'm going to make some highlights. I'm going to get my Lasso tool again, and I'm just going to very quickly come over here and grab some of the area on the edge like this. This again is just going to be a really free form shape. It's going to be small because it's just where the light is hitting the edge of the plate. I already have a little bit of that happening, but when I added my color overlay, I think that it took it down a little more than I wanted it to. Now, I'm going to click on my foreground color and I want to bring in a nice bright white. Now I'm going to again get to my fill. I'm going to fill this with a foreground color. Now you can tell, oh, it's there, but wow, is that harsh? We're going back up to Filter, down to Blur, over to Gaussian Blur, and we're going to play with that Gaussian Blur again. It's a little too blurred out now, so you don't want to play with that a tiny bit, right about, let's say there, whoops, down a little more. We're going to save, that makes me happy. Then again over here to the opacity and just bring that down tiny bit. It is just bringing in a little glint of extra light. This is also making my edges appear a tiny bit thicker, and that is also helping give that feeling of artisan handmade that parts of it are thicker than others. Then the next thing I want to do is just to make this really fast. I'm going to bring in another highlight. I'm going to copy that layer, then I'm going to bring it in and I'll add it to another part of the plate. Then if you're noticing that it maybe isn't assembling as correctly as possible to the edge, what you can do is come over to transform and back down to warp. I always like to work with the grid, I just really think the grid is helpful. Then you can play with that grid to customize that extra little piece that you just brought in so that it fits better. We're going to say we're happy with those highlights. If I were doing this myself, I would spend a little bit more time just really figuring out where are those highlights coming in. I might even bring in a few more over here on those edges where the base is making that drop. But for the sake of speed, this is what I'm going to do. Now the other thing you want to do is just clean up that edge because when you bring in those highlights and you add that Gaussian Blur, you can't see it, but that white has bled off the side of the plate, and when you make a PNG to bring into Illustrator later, it's going to look funny. What you want to do is click on your plate layer and highlight the outside of that plate again. Then come back into those layers that you've made as your highlights, double-check that that's a highlight and you're just going to delete and come into that second highlight that now is over in the bottom and delete again. That now has made that edge nice and crisp on the side. Now we have our dinner plate and that looks wonderful. Just to keep my housekeeping nice, I'm going to put a highlight for these layers. Let's spell that right. We have those setup. We don't forget what those are because they are pretty much invisible. Now I'm going to just make a group from this, so a new group from layers, and I'm going to call that dinner. Now we have our dinner plate. I'm going to duplicate this group, and I'm going to call this salad. Let's spell salad. What I can do now is I'm happy with the way my shape is looking. If I was going to do this on my own, I think I would spend a little time making sure that the salad plate was a little bit different a shape than the dinner plate, but for the sake of speed again, we're just going to say we're happy with the shape of our salad plate. If anything, we might just rotate it a little bit so that it's heading in a different direction, but we're going to turn off our dinner layer so it doesn't confuse us. Then I'm just going to merge the layers here, so we're going to hit Command E. What that did now is it got rid of the group. This is now just an image and not layers, and that is going to allow us to then play with the colorization of our plate. What I want to do then is change this plate color to be this purple. There's many ways you can change color in Photoshop. One of the ways that I like to play is come over here to adjustments and come down here to hue saturation. Always have something that you want to work towards, or you just want to play and find a color that you like, you can certainly do that as well. I'm going to keep moving this till I get to a purple. We got to find out where that purple is laying. There is our purple. This is maybe about the hue I want, but it's a little too bright. I'm going to bring down that saturation, so I'm going to pull some of that color out. We're going to try it right there. Then you need to just see, should it be darker? Should we take it down and make it darker? Then just make sure that it doesn't need to be a little bit more red purple or more of a blue purple, so you want to play with that hue part. For now let's just say we are happy with that purple and we can come over here and turn the dinner plate on and we'll be able to find out if that salad plate is going to work. But what we want to do is salad plates are smaller than dinner plates, so we're going to highlight. Command T is going to allow us to transform that size, and we just want to bring down the size of the salad plate and position it in the middle, so you want to just get a feel for how big your salad plate should be. When you're setting these up, you can set them up so that you're happy with how much of the shoulder is showing, and that will determine the size of your salad plate. When you get a little further along on your design, you probably are going to want to go out there and do a little research, figure out just what size is an average dinner plate and what size is an average salad and dessert plate, and have that setup so that when you talk to your possible licensor or a buyer that wants to take your plate ideas, you can tell them the size, the dimensions of each one of your dishes. I think I'm happy with the color of my salad plate against my dinner plate, so we're going to say cool with that. Now I'm going to duplicate my salad plate. I'm going to duplicate that layer. I'm going to call this desert, and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to take a look at this color and I'm going to come back here to adjustments and down to hue saturation. Tan is always an interesting color to get to, one to think that it's a yellow. We can get to a yellow, we'll figure out where that yellow is best. Come on. Let's keep up with me. There we go. We're going to say we're happy with that. Now we want to take out that saturation so that we can get closer to what we are seeing. Just double-check on the other side, if that's a better tan because tans can go yellow, tans can go red, so you want to just keep working with that a little bit. I'm going to say that we're pretty happy with what we see here. Take that saturation down just a tiny bit more, and I'm going to lighten it up a little bit too. Let's say we are tickled to death with what we see right here, and we're going to say okay to that. Again, we now we need to size our dessert plate. We're going to bring it down and have it nestle on our salad. You want to pull that down so that the shoulder of the salad plate is showing. This is giving you an idea of how those plates will stack once you've got them in stacking order. I'm going to say that we are really happy with what we're seeing here. The next step is we want to save these as PNG files so that we can pull these into Illustrator and add our artwork. I'm going to come over here to Export, Quick PNG. Just figure out where on your computer you're going to want to do these, and I'm just going to make a new folder that says examples, and I'm going to make this then be my dinner, and this is a PNG. Dinner.png. You're going to want to do the same thing with your salad and your dessert plate. Now we have pulled together our unique design for our plates. The next thing we're going to do is go back into Illustrator and place our plates and then play with the additions of our work. I'll see you in Illustrator in just a second.
8. Adding Artwork to Your Plate Designs: Hey everyone, back to Beth's computer. We're in Illustrator now, we are ready to place our designed plates into Illustrator so that we can add our illustrations. The first thing that we're going to want to do, of course, is to bring in those plates, are going to bring in those PNG files that we made. We're going to come up to File, down to Place. We're going to bring in the dinner plate first. I'm going to just give it a random size here and consider that is good. Here's our plate. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to do Command Option drag and that's going to duplicate our dinner plate. Then we're going to come over here to links tool and you see dinner plate is highlighted. We're going to re-link that and we're going to add the salad plate. It will bring in salad plate next. There you go. Then what happens here is, because we re-linked it, it's going to bring in the salad plate in the same proportion that we made it in Photoshop. We don't have to resize that plate once we bring it into Illustrator. We're going to do the same thing again. We're going to do Shift Option drag, copy the salad plate, and now we're going to place the dessert plate. There's a dessert plate. Now, you can see that there is a bounding box around the dessert plate that is absolutely gigantic because that's the size the document was in comparison to the plate in Photoshop. I'm going to do clipping path just to make this plate a little bit more manageable as we work with it. I'm just going to draw a box and then I'm going to highlight both of those, do a Command 7, that creates a clipping path. We're going to do that then again to the salad plates, draw a box, highlight both, Command 7, and do that again with this one as well just to make that bounding box a little bit less gigantic. There we go. Now, we have our three plates all lined up. I think I just want to make them all just a tiny bit bigger so I can see them a little bit better on my screen. I'm going to move this over, I'm going to highlight all three of them and then just increase the size a little bit and that looks good. Now, let's play with our illustrations. As we talked previously, these were the three illustrations that I wanted to play with, with this particular design. One of the things I wanted to point out was I have made some layers here. I want to put these plates on the plate layer and then I can lock this layer so that when I'm working with my illustrations and I've already put these on an artwork layer, everything will stay nice and tidy and won't get in the way of each other as I work. Again, back to our illustrations. These were the illustrations I wanted to use and I decided this was going to be my main hero and I wanted that to go on my largest plate, which is the dinner plate. I then want to figure out just what will be the best way for this to position on my plate and because it's more narrow than wide, I think this will be a nice application along the edge here. Just determining the size is most important now. Maybe a little bit smaller. I'm going to just angle this a little bit and I know it's on a circle and it can get rotated just as the plate is being spun on a table. But for the sake of just positioning right now, I think this is going to look pretty nice. Now, looking at color, that's super important as always. While this dark black gray color that I've got right now is okay, I think it can be much better. I've played with this a little bit and I know from my exploring that I liked it to have a white color and that gives it a nice pop against these smoky colors. I want you to see what this looks like. It looks good, but the color is a little too day glow so I am going to play a little bit with the transparency. When you're working with this really experiment where transparency has its all many subtle changes that can happen as you play with this. But for the sake of demonstration, I'm just going to show you what I ended up choosing. I really liked how this white is still a coldish blue color but it's got a nice snap against the smoky blue of this plate. I really like the way that works. Now, I've got a lot of my illustration bleeding off the edge here. I am going to want to do a clipping path that will allow that crop to happen nice and clean. Let's just get that going. I'm going to draw just really quickly along the edge of this plate. If you're doing this on your own, do it nice and carefully. For the sake of speed, I am doing this really fast. I'm just going to correct my a little problem here, just tiny bit. But basically, this shape doesn't really matter except for the area where the crop is happening and then you want to be a little bit more careful there. I'm just going to highlight all of that, hit "Command 7", and now I've got my clipping path made. I actually love what's happening here so I'm going to say we are pleased with how this is looking. Now, we're going to move to our next piece of artwork and I'm just going to bring that over here. Now, I want this to wrap as well along the side, but I think this is going to look better if it's reflected so it's curling in the other direction. I'm just going to right-click on my mouse pad here and come down here to transform, to reflect and I like the way that's looking much better. I'm going to say okay to that. But I need to adjust it so that it is going to curl nicely around that edge. Again, I think that it looks nice having that long stem. I don't need that whole stem. I don't mind that it's going to end up cropping off the side. But I like the way that is just wrapping itself around the shoulder of the plate and yet is still spilling into the base of the center. I like that. I'm going to come back over here now and change the color. I just had it as white, I'm going to come over here to the transparency and since this is a different color, but the hue is similar, I'm going to assume that having opacity at seven and hitting lighten as a filter is going to still be nice. But you can adjust that if you think it needs to be a little brighter or a little bit more subdued, feel free to adjust those so they look as unique or as uniform as you think. I'm going to enlarge this just a tiny bit. I think too, we are going to need to do a really quick clipping path so that that stem that is falling off the bottom is going to disappear. You can see my unhighlighted that it rather falls off because it's white on white, but if I'm going to ever move this to a colored background, it's going to be problematic. We might as well take care of it in the beginning. We're going to again, just do a really quick clipping path here and with clipping paths, you can always adjust them if you need to later. Zoom in a little bit and make this a tiny bit cleaner because I can. We are going to say, "Hey, that looks good." We're going to highlight both of these now; Command 7, make our clipping path, and there we have our salad plate. Next we're going to bring in this little grassy twig and it's little flower. I think for this one, if we're doing a stacking, we're going to see this on the very top. I am going to make this just position right in the center of my dish because I think that look really pretty when the dishes are stacked. Let's just organize it like so. Again, just come back up here to our color and our transparency. I'm going to take this down to lighten. Once again, make sure that you feel like you can play with this if you want to, if you think that needs to be adjusted a little bit. But here we have our three plates now, designed and added with illustration. When you're working with your illustrations, I know everyone's illustrations are going to be so very different, you're going to need to make your own creative decisions about how your illustrations are going to play against your plates. You may have a full-color illustration that needs more of a neutral background and your hero illustration is going to be the loudest part of your design. In my design, I really think that the color of the plates speak as loud or louder than the illustrations do. With that will vary depending on how you plan out your design. Feel free to be as creative as your imagination allows you to wander, keeping yourself reigned in enough that you're staying within your subject matter, and you're also still designing for that target audience that you're building your products for. With that in mind, the next thing you'd want to do is bring in that mug that you will be designing and arrange the plates so that they are sitting in a way that they look like they're interacting with each other. I've already done this through the magic of past me. Here is my three plates set up in a very nice arrangement. I added a tiny bit of a drop shadow just to bring in a little extra dimensionality and I've brought in a mug that I want to use for this one. We'll be talking about mugs in a future lesson coming up very soon so you will be able to figure out exactly how you should introduce design for mugs and art on mugs as well. This is giving you the idea of how those plates are designed, how your illustrations interact with the designed plates that you have created, and how you set up that entire collection as far as a plate sided of dessert, salad dinner plate. We will talk in the next lesson about working with mugs, I'll see you [inaudible]
9. Mug Mockups & Designing Your Own Mug: Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to discuss mugs, the design of mugs, and how to put your artwork on your mug. Right now, we're in Illustrator and we're looking at the place setting that we designed in the last couple lessons. At that time we just said, "Here's a mug. We're going to set it here Now we're really going to concentrate on that mug and just how to go about working on a design that could be unique to yourself or maybe just a quick way for you to put your own unique illustrations onto a mug to show an interested party that your work looks great on dishes. Before we get going on design, first of all, again, we need to do a little shopping. Let's go to the Internet and we're going to talk about a couple different types of mockups that you'd want to consider when it's time for you to think about a coffee mug. The first way I'm going to talk is the ready-made mockup. These are mockups that someone else has gone in and prepared to make it easy for the artist to show what their work would look like on a product. This particular mockup, you can buy it for $3 or $4 depending on the license you choose. It allows you to have six different options of mugs and handles that you can put your artwork on. This one only allows you to add artwork. It doesn't really give you any options to change a lot of colors on the mug itself, but it gives you six different mug shapes and handles to consider. This is on Creative Market. Also on Creative Market is a company called Creatsy. They have a lot of different mockups you can choose from. They do have a whole variety of interesting products. I've just done a search on Creatsy mug and this brings up the different mugs that they have available to review, and download, and use. This particular mug that we're going to look at here, it gives you some really fun options. You can change the background color, you can change the handle color, you can change the inside of the mug color, and you can change the rim color as well. In addition to all of that, of course, you can apply your own unique artwork to the mug. It gives you some options to run through just to see what is available for this particular download. That is another version of a ready-made mockup. This one gives you just a little bit more that you can play with to make it very unique to your own design. Here's another idea that you can think about. I do a lot of this for my own work, and that is looking for mockups that you can bring in and then make your own. This is on 123RF and this is giving you a whole bunch of different mugs with different handles to take a look at. They're all white mockups, so it would be really easy to go in and change the color on them or add some texture or maybe a glaze pattern or something like that, in addition to adding your own special artwork. I liked the idea that if I downloaded this, I would have all of these options to consider. We are going to be looking at all three of these different kinds of artwork today and discuss just how to go about using them to the best of their abilities. We are now in a Finder window in my computer. I just wanted to show you the three different mockup ideas that we downloaded from the Internet. This was that Creative Market, six mug mockup that we took a look at, and these are just a quick view of the different mockups that came with that file. Lots of fun; six different mugs with different handle ideas. The limitation here is that the only thing you can easily revise is just what you're going to do as far as adding artwork to the file. You can't change the background color, you can't change the handle of the mug. It does give you these six different mockups to choose from, so that gives you a lot of variety in that sense. Now, let's take a look at the Creatsy mug. This mug is a very standard shape, nothing super creative about the shape of the mug; we see this as a standard design out in the marketplace. But the nice thing about this is, in addition to adding your own artwork, you can also change the inside, the rim, and the handle. This file also allows you to change the background color. Those are all things that are really nice to be able to make unique to your design. This is the 123RF file that we downloaded. What I liked about this was it gave me nine different mugs with different handle shapes to choose from. This file, it's just a JPEG file, so everything is flat. But I can highlight one of these mugs, bring it into Photoshop and really play with the shape of the mug and design a unique mug that's custom to the place setting that I've designed, and then I can add my artwork to that as well. Now let's go into Photoshop and just take a look at the PSD files and the layers that are inside those mockups that we've downloaded. This is the second option of the six mug mockup that we downloaded from Creative file and here's what those file layers look like inside. This is the file layer where you can add your artwork and then this is the mug itself. Now, I'm going to show you what it looks like when I added art to this. If you double-click on the smart object, this is where your art will go. You'll just place artwork in here like you would for any Photoshop document, then when you save it, Command S. It brings in your artwork into the mug and it'll automatically arc and rotate and warp and do all the things to your artwork to make it fit as though it was realistically on a mug. I thought this was a real pretty way to bring in those grasses that were my secondary sidekick art from my illustration library. Again, the only thing I can do with this artwork is bring it into the mug, but I could also bring in a full-color illustration and it will bring in all of the colors and fill this entire mug area. But I can't change the color of the handle or the inside of the mug unless I do some really extra hard work on this file itself. But this is what it's set up for, is just bringing in artwork. Now let's take a look at this Creatsy mug. This is the mug that allows us to have some fun with additional color on the background, the handle, the inside of the mug, and the rim. You can see the layers over here, they have it set up so it's really easy for you to go in and make those custom decisions on your own. This is the color of the handle and I can easily just click here and change that color as I see fit. Here's the trim color, again, really easy to change that up. This is the inside of the mug. Again, just really easy to play with and get in whatever color that I feel I want to make for my mug. This is the design for the mug that is the smart object. If I click on this, then I can go in and bring in any artwork that I want, and again, it's set up so that it will automatically warp and shadow your art so that it will realistically wrap around the mug. It's always a really fast, easy way for you to show what your artwork would look like on a mug. Here's an example of adding color to the mug that I have done with my own artwork. Again, bringing these grasses in the sidekick secondary images from my illustration library. If I double-click on this, it shows you what the artwork look like when I brought it into the smart object file. I wanted my grasses to be white to follow the type of art application that I had on my place setting and so after saving that, then it brings it in as such. Really fun way to play with customizing your artwork onto a mug and making it look custom, even though you haven't changed the shape of the mug. Now let's take a look if we want to make our own custom mug, as well as add our custom artwork to the mug. This is the 123 RF JPEG file that I've brought into Photoshop. Looking around on this, you can make a decision about which mug has a good start to what you might want to do as far as making a custom-shaped mug. When I was looking at this, I chose this middle mug here I just did a copy and place and I brought it into Photoshop and the next thing I wanted to do then is to drop that background and so I did that. Now the mug is just the mug itself. Now, the next thing I wanted to do was play with how I was going to work on shape and bring in some color. I divided the handle from the mud base and then I've brought in a color. Here is the color that I decided to bring in. This is that tan color that is allowing me to match to the place setting that I've designed and that you saw from Illustrator. This is that Mike here. The next thing we want to do then is if I'm just going to keep the mug looking the same as the mug that came from 123 RF, I can add artwork to that. Here's the artwork I brought and I just quickly placed it here in Photoshop to show you what that would look like. I can do that in Photoshop or I can do it in Illustrator like we did in the last lesson so that's an option. Now, if I wanted to play with this a little bit more, here's what I did to change the shape. Here is a shape change that I made from this mug and basically what I did was I started with the mug body and I just took the handle off so I could concentrate only on the mug. Then I just work with going in and playing with that mug shape very much like I did when I was working on the plates. I like to work with warp so come down here in Free Transform to warp. Then you can just start playing with that shape by adjusting with the handles what's going on. You can bring things in, you can pull things in, you can make some pretty wild shapes. But again, keep in mind that you want your dishes to function, you want them to match to the target audience that you're building for. Think about what kind of mug that might they want. What are they going to be using it for? How are they going to be using it for? Is it for entertaining? Is it for self-reflection? Are they going to be using this mug when they're reading? Are they going to be using this mug on a picnic or in the patio? Will children be using the mug? Will it be for a dinner party? Should it be upscale, more elegant? Those are the things you're going to want to think about as you plan the shape of your mug. Again, here is one mug shape that I came up with. Then if we're going to add color or our artwork to that, here's an example of what that might look like if I added the Queen Anne's lace illustration that I had. That's a fun mug. I think this would be great for nice and cozy. Your hands fit in here and wrap around that bulge shape really nicely. Now let's say maybe I wanted to do something that was a little bit more elegant and so think about that shape being something that might be more for entertaining for after dinner or coffee, that kind of thing. Here's another mug shape that I played with. Again, did this with warping and then bringing that mug, just working on the body first and then making the handle work with the body that you've built. When you're playing with that handle, you can, while you're working with that free transform, sometimes you use the distort tool, sometimes you using the Warp Tool. Figure out what tool works best there, like Illustrator Photoshop. There are such powerful programs, there's never just one way to do something correctly. In your world, you're going to just think about what works for you. Use the tools you love to use best, and then go about working in a way that matches your style of managing the software that gets you that final result that works best for you. This gives you just some ideas about different mugs that I designed that could work with my place setting and gives you some options for setting up a mug that matches your idea, your artwork and we'll work with the plates that you're designing. This gives you options for your mugs, please have a really good time figuring out where you're going to find the mockups you want to use and then bringing those mockups and making them your own. They look unique, they match your plates, and that you'll be a super proud to show your place setting with matching mug. I hope you've had a good time learning about mugs. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about taking that placing as a whole and getting it set up for presentations. Stay tuned for that, I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
10. Preparing a Presentation & Final Thoughts: Welcome to our last lesson. You have accomplished so much throughout this class. You have researched your theme, you've decided who your target audience should be, you've chosen and composed a beautiful color palette, you've built an organized your illustration library, and you have researched and gone shopping for the perfect mockup. Then, of course, you've designed your unique place setting. Now, in this last lesson, we'll wrap up all your hard work with a few suggestions about what to do next. First, I suggest looking through your reference inspirations and think about some possible additional concepts that are begging to be brought to life. For instance, I come through my visual inspirations and my illustration library, and I designed these additional concepts that provided a few more creative possibilities to my theme of pressed flowers. These additional ideas can be very helpful when presenting a collection to an interested company. Having more than one concept gives your buyer additional ideas to connect with. They may love your theme, but only be lukewarm about the one concept you provided. If you have several concept designs to review, this might be the ticket to finding a new client or interested buyer for your collection. Also, I find sometimes, my best ideas come to me after I've designed that first concept. Once you are feeling confident about your collection, it is time to package your design and inspiration ideas into a presentation. This is like gift wrapping a beautiful present. To heighten the anticipation of the gift, you choose a corresponding wrapping paper and ribbon that makes the presentation of the gift all that much better. You probably wouldn't rap a birthday present with wrapping paper for a wedding or a baby shower. Design the best way to present your collection that will announce and explain and define your subject matter and designs. Think about how you're organizing your presentation. Will you be presenting at a face-to-face or a virtual Zoom meeting, or will your presentation need to be submitted for review through the Internet, or possibly mail to your recipient? Think also about how you need to caption and provide text. Now, a face-to-face meeting does not require as much text in your presentation because you will be there to verbally provide your reviewer all your thoughts about your inspirations and concepts in person. But, if you cannot personally accompany your presentation, your pages need to speak for themselves. You need to provide the viewer with the necessary information to understand your thoughts and explain your research about why and how your concept will be profitable, and a good addition to their catalog and/or showroom. Now, I usually save my presentations in PDF format. This allows me to show my work on my iPad or through a shared screen during a face-to-face meeting. It also allows me to submit my work through, maybe email or web transfer, if I cannot be present when my designs are reviewed. Once your presentation is complete, you are ready to research the companies that could be interested in your designs. Remember to submit your work to companies that will be looking for your subject material. For example, you wouldn't find much interest from a company that caters mostly to sportsmen with a dish collection designed to target mothers with young children and babies. Also, submitting a dish collection to a company that maybe only produces wall art, will not be a perfect fit for your dish concepts. Consider the best fit for the hard work you've just completed. Now that you've designed these beautiful dishes, please remember to share your creativity with me by uploading your concept or concepts to the class gallery. I am looking forward to seeing the subjects you chose to illustrate and the dishes you designed. Thank you so much for joining me in this design adventure. I look forward to virtually, seeing you in my future classes here on Skillshare.
Beth Buffington, Illustrator, designer, creative wanderer
