Transcripts
1. Introduction and Class Project: Hi, I'm Nicky. I'm an artist and educator. And in this class I'm
going to show you how to digitize your
watercolor artwork. This is near and dear
to my heart because when I first started
my business, this was something
that really kept me away from getting
to the next level. I was terrified of
digitizing my artwork. I remember Googling
it and there was no information on how to
digitize your artwork. This is probably four
or five years ago. Once I learned how to do it, I was able to upload
all my business a lot because I was able to offer
a lot of different products. I'll show you guys a
couple of examples. My art prints are a
huge thing for me. I sell them in my Etsy
shop and I digitize my watercolor artwork
and then I put them on these and print them. Something else is my
stationary lines. So all of my cards, I would not be able to sell these unless I knew
how to digitize my artwork. And then lastly is something
I'm really excited about. And these aren't the
only things that you'll do with your artwork. But just a couple of
examples is pattern design. I just got this printed. It looks upside down. But pattern design is
another thing that you can do when you're able
to your artwork. Super, super important
skill to have. And I'm going to show you
guys how to do that today. This is a simple class,
really straightforward. I'm going to start off by
showing you how to digitize something that is really simple to digitize
with high contrast. Then a landscape piece
where you've painted everything on the paper and you don't really need
to remove the background. And then lastly, I'm going
to show you a little more complicated when there's really
light colors being used. How to remove the
background for that, the class project is going to be you're digitizing
watercolor artwork. I highly, highly, highly
recommend that you digitize along with me or
you do practice afterwards, because if you don't, that knowledge will
just slip away. The best way to really embed it into your brain is
to practice it. I've provided a couple
of scans if you guys want to use those to digitize. But I recommend using
your own artwork, but if you don't
have that on hand, you can totally use the
scans that I provide. The only thing that I want
to mention is that artwork is my artwork that
is copyrighted. So you can't sell it at all, but you can totally use it for personal use and for the
project for this class. Alright, let's get started.
2. Digitizing Full Bleed Artwork: In our first lesson, I'm going to show
you how to digitize something that is full bleed, meaning you painted
the entire piece. There's paint all
over it and you don't necessarily need to
remove the background, but you do need to digitize
it so that you're able to sell it as an art
print or on stationary. The first thing you're
going to need to do is to scan your items. Now, sometimes it'll fit completely in the scanner
bed and sometimes it won't. Obviously, it's easy if it
fits in the scanner bed, you just easily scan it. But I want to show you what
to do in case your piece is larger than your scanner bed if you're not taking
a photo of it. So what I've done is I
have put my artwork, half of it on the scanner bed. And I'm going to scan
this one and make sure you're following along with the guidelines that I explained
in the previous video, you want to make sure that
your scan is at least 300 DPI, That's dots per inch. And then if you, if your scanner allows, you can adjust the brightness or the contrast, contrast gamma. So we've got our first scan, and that is wonderful. I'm just going to drag
it to my desktop. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to be very carefully moving my
artwork on my scanner. So what I'm doing is
just gliding it over. So I'm getting the exact It's in the same spot but I'm just moving it over so you can
get the rest of the artwork, so make sure it's perfectly
lined up and your scanner. This ensures that
it'll be easy for Photoshop to automatically
combine the images. This looks great. I'm going to scan it. It doesn't matter if
there's some overlap in your painting photoshop will
be able to detect that. You just want to
make sure that you, that both of the images have completely incorporated
everything in the painting. Now what we're going to do is we are going to open Photoshop. Andrew going to go up to
File Automate Photo Merge. And I'm going to go to Browse. And I'm going to get
those two images. Now what I'm doing is
I'm holding down Shift. Again, I'm on a Mac holding down Shift so I can
click both of them, select them, hit Open. Photoshop is going to do, is it's going to combine these two images and
line them up perfectly. And it's able to
do this because we perfectly had them lined
up in the scanner. So it's not like I turned one of them or
anything like that. I just simply dragged the other half through
so it could be scanned. This looks fantastic. Photoshop has done the
work to put this together. And now what I need to do
is I'm just going to go ahead and merge these two
layers because they look gray. I'm going to relabel
this artwork. You don't have to
relabel things, but I do find it to be a little bit helpful and
it just looks better. Now I'm going to take this layer and I'm going to
hover over the plus sign. So it's duplicating the artwork. And then I'm just going to
label this original artwork. The reason I do this is
if for some reason I really messed this up with color correction or
cropping it funky. I still have my original down here so I don't have
to worry about it. I'm going to unclick
it so we don't see it. It's just there as a precaution. And now we have the artwork. One thing I want to mention
when you're painting, make sure you're painting at the dimensions that you want
the final product to be. This is actually something
I messed up on when I did that because I wanted this
to fit on an eight by ten, but I painted it at a nine by 12 and those dimensions
don't match. So what happened was I
had to come in here, and this is actually a
product in my Etsy shop, but I had to
basically like refill this area by cutting and
pasting and it was a half job. So just a word to the wise. Makes sure your painting
at the dimensions that you're going to have
the final products via. Alright, here's our artwork. It's scanned in. Now is the time if you see
any little funky things, you can change them. I'm actually super happy
with the color here. Don't worry, I'm
going to show you in the next lesson how
to color, correct, if you need to do that, but
the color looks amazing, so I'm really happy with it. It looks just like the original, but I do see some pencil marks in here and a couple little
things that I want to change, making sure that your
layer is selected. Come over here to
the healing tool. Click it. And then I'm just going to
literally click and drag. And it gets rid of these things. There's any spots on your
artwork like this down here. Sometimes things just drip
and get a little messy. I recommend cleaning them up. You will see stuff like
this when you print them. If you are printing them
out like an eight by ten, I can see a lot of
pencil marks in here. Again, this is the spot
healing tool and I'm just clicking and dragging. And it's just cleaning
them up a bit. Doesn't have to be perfect. Like this line right here. Isn't it nice when it does? But you have to be careful
because if you get too close to this other line, it's going to erase it, or it can bring
this line over here because basically what this tool does is or not basically, what this tool does is it
detects the pixels around the area that you
click in and just replaces that with those pixels. Really great tool, I love it. That's your spot healing tool. And that's the only
one I really used for something like this unless
I need to adjust the color. Now what I'm going to do
is grab my Marquee tool. And I am clicking
and holding down. And just all the artwork. I want it to be inside of this. I don't want to get this. You can tell the paper is
down here on the bottom. I don't want that. I just want my artwork. Then I'm going to release
right-click layer via cut. And as you can see, it has cut my artwork away from that original scan paper and I can just delete that
because I don't need it. There. You have it. You have your art work already to I mean, it's digitized, it's full bleed. You don't really need
to edit anymore. Come up here to File Export. I export as a PNG. If you export, since this
is a full bleed piece, you could export as a JPEG. But I liked doing a PNG because then you don't get
any background at all if it decides that you should have white back
here or something like that. So PNG is my favorite
way to export, and that's how you digitize
a full bleed piece.
3. Digitizing High Contrast Artwork: Alright, next on our list is digitizing something
that is high contrast. Now this is going to
be, in my opinion, I mean, it was pretty easy
to do the full bleed one. But in my opinion, this is one of the easiest ways, are easiest things to
digitize because the paper is so white compared to the
green of the palm leaves. A lot of artists prefer to paint in high contrast like this because they don't
want to go through the hard work of digitizing
when things are lighter. I actually took a class
recently on pattern design and the artists told us that she recommends painting
in high contrast. I just thought
that's so limiting and I don't want to
limit myself like that. I like to use all the colors, all the saturations
I do paint in a lifestyle sometimes,
so have no fear. In the next lesson, I
will show you how to, how to digitize your artwork if you have those lighter areas. But this is, this little thing right
here is gonna be a lot easier because we are
working with high contrast. So what I've done is I've just dropped my artwork
into Photoshop and I wanted to show you real quick if you need to
adjust your artwork, come over here to
your adjustments tab. If you don't see this, go up to Window and hit
adjustments and it'll show up. Otherwise, if you
still don't see it, I would go to Workspace
and reset your essentials. Alright, the adjustments tab. I'm just going to give you
a really quick overview. I don't use a lot of these. You can explore them, but I'm going to show
you the ones I use. Brightness and contrast is
definitely want to use. You're just gonna take
this little carrot here and toggle it. And as you can see,
it can get really dark or it can get
really, really light. Be careful with this one. Sometimes my scanner will, or if I take a photo, I'll make my artwork
look a little bland. So just adding a little bit
of brightness can be helpful. But if you go too far, your artworks going
to look overexposed. And unless that's
the style you're looking for, it
doesn't look good. Contrasts same thing. It's either going to
darken it or lighten it. And this looks pretty
good to me right now. Another adjustment I use
is hue and saturation. You can change the hue. This is making it a
little more brown. This is going to
make it more blue. I'm pretty happy with the color. So I'm just going
to leave it there. Saturation. You can do heavier,
less saturation. And then sometimes I like to add a little lightness if I want to soften it up a little bit. And lastly, you can use
the selective color. Since this is just green. Not going to do too much, but you just play with these little toggles and you can make it lighter or darker. Some of these toggles are
not going to respond. E.g. cayenne, it
responds pretty much. But some e.g. if you had something
that was read and you wanted to do green
and toggle these, it's not really going to make
that big of a difference. So these are just, you have to play with them to get the color or
the way you want. And lastly is exposure I. It's similar to brightness
but a little bit different. You can play with this as well. If you feel like you need that, then what you're gonna do is
just merge these all down. And that way all of your adjustments have been
added to your artwork. I'm just going to
relabel this artwork. Okay, let's get started with
removing and background. I'm we're not gonna do all of these because I don't
want to waste your time. You just need to know
how to do one of these. I'm going to use my Lasso Tool
and I'm just holding down my mouse and trailing around this and then
connecting them. And same thing layer via cut. I'm going to delete
that bottom artwork. Just label this. Monstera. Probably spell this wrong. As you can see, there's this
checkered background. And this checkered
background means that the background
of our artwork has been removed
and it hasn't been removed here obviously because we're gonna do that right now. But one thing that I find super, super-helpful is to set up another layer back here
because sometimes it's hard to see little
gray marks are little white marks on this
checkered background. Add a layer, put that layer underneath
your artwork layer, and then come over here
and select a color that is very different from what
you're working with. I would say like a dark or bright orange is really different from
what we're working with. Then grab your paint
bucket and just click and it will fill that in. Now make sure you go back
to your artwork layer. Otherwise, you're
going to start using the eraser tool and you're just going to erase
that paint layer. So there's a few different ways. Actually, I'm just going to
show you the one way that I use because for something
that's high contrast, it makes sense to
do it this way. You're going to
grab your eraser, Magic Eraser, and come up
here to your tolerance. Since this is such
high contrast, we can put our tolerance up
pretty high. I would say 65. It's probably not going to get
rid of any of our artwork, but it's just going to make a really clean cut
removal of the paper. And all I'm doing, I'm sorry, make sure you have these two clicked, contiguous
and anti-alias. Just click on the watercolor
paper and it removes. It. Isn't that amazing. Click here, click here. All of the paper that
you want to get rid of. It is literally that easy when it comes to
high contrast artwork. So now you have this
little leaf that the background has
been removed and you can put it on
wedding invitations, you can put it on
t-shirts, stickers. You could do so much with it. You can come in here if you really want to clean
things up better just with your eraser tool and you can remove this little area. I am a stickler about having
a really clean artwork. But you don't have to get super crazy because this is
watercolor papers. So you are going to
have bumps here. Unless you're the kind
of artist who can paint just super smooth
with watercolor. I actually do know one and it's crazy how smooth she paints, but this is, I use cold press watercolor paper
and it's really bumpy. So there's gonna be some
texture in your artwork that's just normal. Here. I want to show you guys this. It's very important
that you zoom into your artwork and make sure that you're not including because it looked really clean right
when we're zoomed out. But as you can see right now, there is a little
teeny dot right here. And this might not seem
like much right now. Like, Oh, who cares,
It's just a little dot. But if you print a wedding
invitation with it, your client will
see that tiny dots. So make sure you erase it and make sure there's
no other dots like that because they will show up when printed
on white paper. And I had this
happen with one of my art prints and I
had to reprint it, a reprint like 100 of them. So pay attention to that. Make sure you go round and
you zoom in and zoom out. Because you want to make sure, oops, I switched my layers. You want to make sure that
you got everything, okay, so that's how you digitize something that's
super high contrast. Again, I would just export
this as a PNG because you want to make sure that you're not adding
in the background again. So just hit PNG and it's
going to be transparent. Oops, I'm sorry. Make sure you unclick
that painted layer. Otherwise it's going
to bring it with you. Export as a PNG. Make sure it's a PNG
and you can export it. And then when you put it on your stationary or whatever
you're using it for, It's going to not
have a background. One thing I do want to
mention is you can, I would crop this in because you don't need all that extra
space in your file. So I would just crop it into the size of your art
work. There you go. That's how you digitize
high contrast. Next, we are going to be digitizing something a
little more difficult, which is artwork that
is really light.
4. Digitizing Light Artwork: Phase one of the more
challenging items to digitize. And that is something
that is light. The contrast isn't going
to be super high between the paper and the
actual painting. These are some flowers
that I painted. I also gave these to you guys if you want to digitize
them along with me or else choose some of your artwork that is
more light in nature, that seems more
difficult to digitize. What I'm gonna do is
I'm going to grab my Lasso tool again
because I just want to take out this piece because we're going to focus on
this piece right now. And again, I'm right-clicking
layer via cut. I'm just going to remove that. I'm going to bring this one up into the middle and
I'm going to zoom in. So if we went with our typical method of
grabbing our magic eraser, a tolerance at 55 and I click, I'm losing a lot of
my artwork here. And that's because the
contrast just really isn't that high between the
paper and the painting. So what Photoshop is doing is it's trying
to remove the white, but since it's so close, It's taking out some
of my artwork to now what you can do is you can
play with your tolerance. So you can go down to 35
and see if that helps. It helps a little
bit, but I'm still losing this piece over here. I can go down to 15
and see if that helps. That looks like it
did help a lot. I'm going to add in
that background layer. So I added a layer and then I am going to come over here
and grab my paint bucket. And I'm on purple. It's going to paint this purple. I'm going to go
back to my artwork. Now. I'm pretty happy with it, but actually it took out part of my artwork right here and
we don't want that, huh? Oh, that was part of the
artwork. Okay. Never mind. Let's go back. Let me undo that. And then I'm just
going to go back and make sure you have
that layer underneath because it's really
going to help you out there that it did
it pretty well. So you can, that's one way you
can do it is you can lower the tolerance low enough
that it does take out. So it doesn't take
out your artwork. But the only thing that
I don't like about that is it leaves it really jagged. Like all this stuff still
needs to be removed. Oops, I need to be
on my artwork layer. All this needs to be removed. You can come in here and you can see it's really not getting
it very clean cut here. For some people,
this is okay for me. Not, I don't really love that. So I want to show you two other
methods that you can use. I'm just going to go back to our original and I'm going to add that second
layer underneath, just so it's really
easy for me to see if there's any
of the white left. One method you could do is
you can come over here to your lasso tool and you can
grab them Magnetic Lasso. And how you're going to use this is you're just
going to click. And I'm not clicking
anything right now, I'm just dragging it and it magnetizes to the pixels
that are the same color. This is one method
you can use, is yes, a little time-consuming, but
you can use this method. I recommend going pretty slow. If you start going really fast, It's going to get out
of control and not hug the line like you want
it to go backwards. Just hit delete, delete, and it's going to delete
those anchor points. Then what you're gonna do is click and you want
to close the circle. So you're going to click again. You're going to see
the marching ants and you're just
going to hit Delete, and it will delete that for you. That's one method you can use. Another method you could use is you can come in here
with just a regular eraser. And you can either hold down the left-hand bracket
and make it really small or hold down the right-hand
bracket and make it bigger. You can just manually come
in here and I'm holding down my mouse this whole time
and erasing all of this, which honestly is a
pain in the butt. That is how digitizing is. It can be a lot of work. What I would do here, those are different methods
you can use personally. What I would do is I would come back up
to my magic eraser and I would use that
15 tolerance again. Then I would increase the tolerance for some of
these other parts because I know that they can handle
it a little bit more because the contrast is higher
up than not that piece. So you can do that. Another thing you can do is
I'll show you guys right now. If I erased this, okay, I have to go
backwards. Sorry. Okay. Let's say I move this up to 25. And that so 25 worked. See you guys. It's all Literally trial and
error, like 1,000 times. It took some of this away. One thing that you can
do if it took this away, but it's only this little part. In this little part,
what you can do is come up to your
stamp tool here, the clone stamp tool. And you're going to
hit Option and then click in the same color
that you want this to be. And then you can slowly, I'm holding down my mouse. You can slowly,
basically redo this. I prefer. I mean, I'll use this sometimes. It is pretty nice
if you need it. If it's something that I
really particular about, I just do the pain, staking Eraser tool
and erase everything so I can see over here
to remove some of this. And since it's watercolor, watercolor, you can see it's darker here,
it's lighter here. If I use a stamp tool, it's not gonna get that
variation that I want. So the best way to do this, in my personal opinion, is to come in here by hand and erase away the
stuff that you don't want.
5. You Did It!: Congratulations, You made it
to the end of this class. I would love to know what you guys thought
about this if you feel more at ease now that you know how to
digitize your artwork, please, please, please
leave me a review. If you have any
questions at all, feel free to reach out to me or you can post in the
discussion section. I love to hear from you guys. Also if you're on
social media and you digitize your artwork and you want to show the
world on Instagram, tag me at lavender and C. And I hope you have
a wonderful day.