How to Make a Travel Postcard of Your Favorite City

1. 1. Introduction: Hey guys, my name is Brad Woodard. I'm the co-founder and principal of Brave the Woods, a design and illustration studio based out of Boise, Idaho. In this class, we're going to be creating vintage inspired travel postcards of our favorite city and or hometown. This will be a short, fun project-driven class where you're going to follow along my entire creative process from start to finish as I do a postcard design of my hometown, Seattle, Washington. What I love about vintage travel postcards is the fact that they could fit so many beautiful illustrations of elements that remind you of that city into one beautiful piece of artwork. How are we going to do that? What are we going to cover in this class? We're going to go from the very beginning, sketching and laying out our composition. Then we're going to go into drawing custom type and also altering existing type in Adobe Illustrator, as well as doing three-dimensional text effects and other strokes and things to make it really sing. Then we're going to bring it into Adobe Photoshop, where we're going to learn some tips and tricks about illustrating in Photoshop with some masking tips. Also at the very end, if you want to add a paper texture or printed texture to make it feel a little bit more authentic or vintage, we'll do that as well. Think of all those amazing things that remind you of your favorite city or your own hometown, bring those to this class, and let's get started. 2. 2. Inspiration and Planning: Let's get started on our project. The first thing I like to do whenever I start a project, whether it's design or illustration, is to get on my sketchbook and make word lists. For Seattle, my city, you think of your city. Well, all the different things that I could think of, words that I can associate with Seattle and I started adding them to my sketchbook, just drew out as many as I could. The great thing about word list is that they're quick, they're easy. You don't really have to double guess yourself when you're sketching. I like drawing pictures there too. Obviously, I'm an illustrator, so I'll add a few different things in there. But to get my mass quantity of ideas out, I do word lists. That's me. Do whatever you'd like to do. I like to write downwards. But after I do that, I'll have something that pinpoints what I want to do helps you focus. But a lot of times there's too many of them. Then I'll go back, and I'll start nitpicking and pulling out which ones I want. The ones that I started to go through, I went through things like space needle, mountain, oceans, supersonics, mariners, ferry, pikes place market. These are all the ones that I really liked and these were made the final cut. You can pick out yours, remembering that your letters, because these are vintage traveled postcards, remember you're going to have the type go across the middle, they're going to be tall and skinny. Remember the illustrations that you're going to choose or whatever your object that you want to illustrate or landmark it's going to be tricky if you're going to do something that needs to be horizontal because it's not going to fit in that space. Keep that in mind, keep in colors in mind too. You don't want to overlap and do a ton of different everything be brown or everything be green, which was easy when I was doing Seattle. There is to be a lot of blues and a lot of greens. I had to make some things like the salmon and the apples and things like that that would pop a color in there. The next step for me is gathering visual inspiration. Just go online, grab a bunch of examples of vintage travel postcards, since that's what we're trying to mimic right now, pull them out. The best reason for doing this is that we have something to look back at to see how they've treated some type, but also what problems have they solved that we're going to run into later. A lot of that has to do with the type and fitting illustrations in it. So take a look at that. Pull all this together and then we're going to pull from that later. Don't worry too much about the type right now because that'll be something we do in the next video. The next thing we need to do is make thumbnails. Do as many as you need. This is just a portion of the ones that I did. But go through and make a bunch of boxes and start throwing out all your ideas. You now have a word list to work off of. You have some visual inspiration next to you. Start sketching and drawing out what you want to do. When making thumbnails, the easiest way I found and the quickest way I found to making more compositions and coming up with an awesome layout for these travel postcards was thinking about the type first. I would think about, is the type going to be wavy. Not necessarily the letter forms, just the shape of the type. The space it's going to fill, I should say. If I wanted it to go like this, then I know I can fit more of a mountain underneath it and I can do the greetings from over here and it would say Seattle, right across here or go across there. But then I can add my trees. If I wanted Washington, I want a more symmetrical look, I could do that. Or I could go and I wanted to do more of diagonal one that I'd see, I still have these two spots here, but I could do the greetings from up here, and I have a whole space to work with. So maybe I can do the skyline a little bit and things like that. Here are some clouds, down here I could do maybe heart apples. I could do some apples or something like that and then have Washington. What I ended up with after doing all this and going through those steps is I came up with the wavy banner because I wanted to fit a little bit of the skyline here. Here's the space needle. Some buildings, greetings, some is going to overlay over that. Here's the mountain, Mount Rainier and then I'm going to do like greetings from. Seattle's going to fit right here. Again, this is loose, not the way that you like your letter forms. This is just to figure out how we want things live, what what's going to live where. I want Washington here, maybe a little higher. We're going to do some trees. I wanted a little forest there because we half the show trees and Washington is literally chock full of trees. At least Western Washington. I just had to make that stipulation because my wife's from Central Washington and it's very, very different there, not a bad way, just different. Then I would lay up my composition. Be thinking of your type first and then start fitting all of the elements and then we'll go into the next one where we actually pick one of those thumbnails and start fleshing it out with the type. 3. 3. Cusom Type Part 1: Now we're going to go ahead and create some custom lettering. Now, if you don't feel very confident in your lettering skills, not a problem at all. These letter forms are meant to be simple, thick, chunky. You're suppose to fit illustrations in them, so we just want to make them have the most area in the letter forms so that we can fit those illustrations in there. To start, I want to make sure all my letter forms have the correct widths, their even widths, they're evenly dispersed throughout the shape, all those things. Easiest way I find to do it is by just gridding it out to start. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, which is seven. I made this one right here a little bit bigger, so I'm going to also make it a little bit taller. You can see it's a little bit wider than the rest of these. I want to make it a little bit taller as well because I want that S to be extra-large. Now I've created just a basic template and then under here, the whole thing is up and to the left of my art board up here and I want to do that because I'm just taking into account the space for the 3D text effect. Let's start with the S. Then once I have this I will knock back the opacity, I'm in Photoshop if you couldn't see up here. I guess I never mentioned that. You can do this on paper, you can do this on your iPad, you can do this on any other thing you want. This is just like the basic idea of laying out my text. Now that I have the grid for myself, I want to do one more thing on the grid while I'm at it. I want to add a little bit of a gap in between each one because I don't want them to be touching. They're going to have a 3D effect on it, so you're going to need a little bit of space. Now, I'm going to start with the S. Now, instead of trying to draw an S in here especially if you're not into lettering, that's very tricky to do without just working off of a typeface. What I would do is I would just start with what you have. Now you already have the shape here of that space. Now, I want to go ahead and round the corners where I know those bends on the S are, like that unless you erase everything else. Then I'll know that I need to get those. I want to make sure there's a ton of space in here to illustrate. I don't want to be doing big chunks out of here and then that wouldn't work for me because it won't look good with the illustrations, I won't be able to fit illustrations in it. We want to make sure that they're nice and small. Those little knockouts right there, you want to make sure that they're nice and small, just enough to give you the idea that that's the letter S. Then just erase around it and all of a sudden you have a letter S, probably the easiest S you ever drew. Now, for the rest of the letters you just do the same thing. You just block in what you've already mapped out, then you want to go and here's the, that's too much. Again, remember you want this to be real small and then you can erase those pieces. Maybe I want to do rounded here as well, I erase that. The idea is that we're just leaving enough space in there so that we can fit a full illustration. Some letters are harder than others but just remember when we get to the T you're going to see how that one is a little bit trickier in terms of how much space you have to work with. You're going to want to make it as thick as possible without making it look weird. The A and like all of these other letters, if you want to embellish them, you can do that afterwards. You can go in and like I said, you can give it a little bit of something extra but make sure it's tiny because you want to leave that space open. With like T for example and I was saying about some letters are harder than others, it's not hard to draw, it's just hard to fit illustrations in it so try to make it as thick as possible here. You have a lot of room to illustrate, erase around that. Then you do that for the rest of these letters over here. But once you knock out that background, all of a sudden you have some type. You have custom letter forms that you never thought you could do or you thought you could do and maybe this was just a way to simplify the process but create your letter forms in here, clean it up and then you can even go as far as once you've made these forms going in and start dropping in that 3D effect to keep it all at the same angle from all the points and you can start to see how this is going to look. Just to give you an idea. We're going to go into illustrator and clean this up but at least you'll have some idea of what the shape is and how clean these are and then when we go into illustrator, you can vectorize these and you can make those grids perfect so that these letter forms are the exact width that you need. But for now we just wanted to see if that was the style we wanted and I like this style, I like the shape, I like how big that S is and again, we can clean it up however we want once we get it into vector shapes. But here's the first step, go ahead, sketch it out. Now let's move into illustrator. 4. 4. Custom Type Part 2: I finished drawing my letter forms and now I want to bring it into Adobe Illustrator so that I can vectorize my letters. That'll help me so I can put strokes on it, I can clean it up, I can alter it a lot easier, I can add that 3D effect, all that stuff I can do an Adobe Illustrator. Now that I have this great blueprint for my sketch, I went ahead and added the rest of my little illustrations around it to fill in the background. I had an idea of where everything would be. I can already see some things that I want to alter and adjust, so let's get right into it. I'm going to click on the illustration itself, I'm going to go in, in my Transparency panel, and I'm going to knock back the opacity to about, let's say 17 percent. I want to lock this layer in the background so I can work over top of it, and then I'm going to add a new layer. The first thing you want to tackle is the shape of our city name. Mine is this flag like banner-shape. I don't know what yours is but I'm going to teach you two different tools that'll help you achieve pretty much any shape that you need. Let's start off by doing rectangle the same width of our city name, and roughly the height that we want our letter forms to be. They're going to be about that. I'm just guessing. I made it this obnoxious pink color so it stands out. Hit Shift X and you get back, you toggle between your fill in your stroke. I'm going to make the stroke about four points, that's good, thick enough to see it. Then when you highlight it, make sure it's selected. We're going to go to Effect, Warp, and Flag. Automatically, you see that it does a nice little mimics the exact shape that I need actually, not as drastic, I want to make sure that these angles aren't as curve isn't too extreme because I don't want it to be extreme appear. You can see that it's not quite lining up. That's okay. You have a million other things too, you have arc, if you want to do that with yours. If you want to do just like rise, there's lots of different ones that you can play with. I'm just going to stick with flag because it fits my needs, and then I'm going to click "Okay". Now, what I want to do is there's this tool over here, it's called the sheer tool. You may have it set to scale tool, so just click and hold on that and then go down to sheer. I'm going to hit Shift off to the side here and click and drag up straight up. You'll see it automatically starts to make that form. It starts to bend it up vertically, so that I can get that more drastic upwards flag shape. I think it's the best way I can describe that. If you need to make it a little bit taller, you just use hit A, so you get your white selection tool, it only picks up one anchor point. Actually go ahead and take this and highlight it. If you like it, hit "Object" and expand appearance, and then it goes to just your standard anchor points, and you can highlight it and do what you need. Hit A, you're just going to select those two anchor points at the bottom, and then drag down and hold Shift, and you can alter those a little bit if you need to make it a little bit taller or what have you. I think that is the shape I need now, I need to go in and drop some lines. We're going to need to just separate our letters here. I'm going to drop a line from the top to the bottom and then I'm going to guess how wide I want that, I could set it right now, how I don't want my gap between the letters. Let's say that. Now I'm going to hit Command G just to group it, and then I'm going to go ahead. Remember this S is going to be a little bit bigger than the rest of them. I'm going to hit Option Shift. When I click on this, I'm going to hit Option Shift and then I'm going to drag it all the way to the end here. I'm going to copy somewhere in here, and that not be exact so I'm going to use a tool that just straighten them out. Let's do this to even out the spacing. I'm hitting Alt Option Shift, dragging it over, and then I'm just going to hit Command D to copy that several times so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, that's not going to work, I need one more. Drop that in. Now I'm going to highlight all of these guys right here. Just those vertical lines. I'm going to go right up here, and the horizontal distribute. What does it say? Horizontal line, horizontal distribute, center. Perfect. Now you'll see they're all evenly distributed throughout this space. Perfect. Now I'm almost done, I'm still creating these guides just a little bit more. I'm going to take this form. I'm going to hit Alt option. You'll see this little double arrow cursor, and I'm going to click and drag up but I'm hold shift too to make sure it doesn't go everywhere. I'm going to lift that up because that's where the height of the S is going to be. I'm going to hit the Scissors tool just to clip the corners. Make sure that's clipped, I want to clip this corner because I don't need it on a double. Click on all of this. I don't need that bottom step. Now, I know that's going to be the height. I can even clip it over here, so it's not distracting. I'll take up that section as well. I have an idea. My S is going to be that tall. my E-A-T-T-L-E, perfect. I'm going to probably drop in my guide for the bottom here for how far I want my 3D text to go. We're going to worry about that later. Let's just drop this in now. Now I'm going to take everything we did and we're going to go to View. We're going to go down to Guides. We're going to make guides. Boom. You know you can make guides from just hitting the Command R there and you can just click and drag down from your rulers. Also you can make any lines you want into guides just by going down to the view guides and make guides. Pretty cool. Now if I go over here, I can click the sketch to go away. I can hide that. I can just see my guides visible and you can lock. Right now they are locked. You can unlock those guides manipulate them however you need to then put them back. Now you have it all gridded out and ready to start dropping in your letter forms. The fun part now is we're going to make vector shapes into letter forms. The one thing I did forget though, was I made the guides but I don't have any of the actual shapes. But no worries, you can actually take these guides that were shapes and we created them to guides, and I go ahead and I can just throw in a normal shape in there, highlighting both and just hit "Unite" and it brings it back into a normal shape. That's one way to do it. I'm sure there's better ways. That's the one way I've always done it. But then again, I want to divide this shape out by these rules. So I'm going to go by these columns, and I'm going to command C. I'm going to drop those back in later. Then I'm just going to make sure all those things are highlighted at once. Then we go down Path Finder again and hit "Divide". There we go. Now I hit Command F. I've already because I hit command C earlier when I copy these and I put those back. Now I can go down and lock my guides if I want. Which I'll probably do right now because we can always unlock them. Guides, Lock Guides. Now you'll see I can only work with my shapes, which is perfect. You can even toggle the guides on and off by hitting Command semicolon. I'm going to turn them off for a second. That way I can go in here with my white arrow tool and get rid of all of this stuff. Just click once on those little gaps there. I don't want any other filler stuff. Now I have all these shapes here. Now I'm ready to mess with them and shape them. It's going to be really easy. I'm going to go back to my sketch so I can see that. Get an idea of what my letter forms are going to be like. We're going to start with the S over here. I'm thinking I want to change the shape, so this is what I have. I'm bringing the sketch back up. I'm going to zoom in here. I feel like I want to change this shape a bit, so this is all together. You got to double-click on it. It's all grouped. I'll just delete it from there. I'm thinking I want to make this S just like a normal rectangle. I don't want it to fit with the rest of them. I want it to stand out a little bit more. It's going to be about that tall, that wide. Make that rectangle there. It's a little bit thinner. It's going to drive me crazy. It really doesn't matter right now. We'll fix that later. Let's make that shape. The easiest way to do it now that we have these blocks, we're just going to knock the shapes out of them, which is going to be a lot easier than trying to build the shapes just point by point. I'm going to knock out these little counter shapes out of the S by doing just a line. Just make a line here. Let's see. I don't want to go too far end. I'm going to make a line and I'm going to go to my stroke, and here's the cap. I want to round it off. I'm going to go to my stroke again and just knock that up to about there, 13 points. This is going to be the thickness I'm going to use for everything so I want to save that. That's pretty good. Then I want to drop it down. It's going to be a little bit further down this letter S. Then I'm going to copy it like I did before. Shift Option or Alt Option than dragging it over. I'm going to right-click it. I'm going to transform reflect vertical, and now I do it one more time. Transform reflect. I'm going to do a horizontal this time. There we go. I'm going to drop that down just a little bit. Cool. Maybe a little higher actually. I don't know. I could just get this straight across there, but regardless, you can figure out to do this. We going to drop it in there. Then I'm going to take both. You should actually want to take one of these. I'm going to save it for later so I remember exactly what my stroke width is. This is 13 point. I'm going to highlight these Object, Expand. Then I'm going to take these. Actually all three things. The main shape and these two, and I'm going to knock them out of it. I'm going to go over here hit Minus Front. Then automatically you see that I've got these. I probably want to bring these in a little bit further when I do the final, but right now, you can see that just like knocking those out, all of a sudden gives you that shape that you need. Then you'll be, well, I don't really like this little pointy corners rather be a little curved. Well, easy enough, use hit A go to your white arrow selection tool and then go ahead and click and pull. Take a mess of that arc there. That's how easy it is. I want to do the corners too. Just click, shift, click, and then pull. There we go. I have the S. I obviously out a little bit more embellishment there, but you don't need to see that part. You can apply this same idea to that because I'm going to go into the letter E, do the same thing. Pull that in. That looks nice. I'm going to see this angle here. I'm going to click on this little guy I saved, click on them, and then I'm just going to go back to my pen tool with a P and click and click again and drag that down. You can even those out. Well the better for yourself however you want to do it. Do the same thing. Object expand. Go to the letter form minus front. I'm not sure what happened. It's because it's all connected. Hit Command Shift G and that'll ungroup those. There we go. Now you're just working with this letter form. It was all grouped together so I hit Minus Front again. There you have it, you knocked it out, and you have two letters already vectorized. You can imagine how quick the rest of it will go, just going through clicking and dragging. In my case, it was this. Some of those angles are going to be a little bit different so you're going to have to eyeball it. That's the first step to vectorizing it. Then you go ahead clean them all up and you should be in pretty good shape here. Then I'll show you here what it'll look like at the end. There it is all finished. It's ready now to add your strokes and your 3D effects and all the other fun stuff that makes it jump off the page. We'll do that in the next video. 5. 5. 3D Effect and Strokes: The main trademark of those vintage postcards besides the illustrations, is the awesome 3D effect that they have going on in the lettering. For us, we have this base lettering that we just created it out of vectors. It's going to be pretty simple for us to add just a few more layers and create this amazing 3D effect and then we'll add some strokes and what not for embellishment. But it's really going to be competing with the illustration. We want to make that thing pop off the page and be really legible. Let me walk you through how to do that. If you haven't already. If you've never done this before, go to Command K, that'll open up your preferences. We need to change our units down here on the left, two pixels. I mean, you probably haven't set the inches I typically do as well. Just set at that the pixels for this and you'll understand why here in a second. But yeah and if you haven't, I'm going to go to the appearances panel first. To start we're going to do the 3D text effect first. I'll go to my appearance panel. If you don't have that, go to window and hit appearance down here and it will pop up for you. Let's add a new fill. I'm actually going to add two new fills because I want a top and a bottom layer. The top one, I don't want it to be black. I'm going to change that color to light gray, so it stands off from that sketch and then underneath that black layer, make sure this is still highlighted then click on your black layer and then go to your add new effect. I'm going go to Distort and Transform. Let me go to Transform. I would hit preview first because I like to see what I'm working on. I like to see the effects so I can tweak and everything while the box is still open for me and we're really just going to work within the move section and just edit these copies. What it's going do is it's going to make multiple copies of whatever this letter forms at a certain angle. There's only so many of those copies that you're not going to be able to see a difference. It'll just look like one extruded shape. For example, I've been playing around with this. I know 0.75 is going to work for what I need and you can change it to whatever needs that you have you can experiment with this and then I know copies. I probably want to do about a 100 copies and then I should be able to click off of it somewhere and you'll see it pop up. For me like I said, I can continue moving this and it'll drag that around. But 0.75 it's a little bit easier just to plug in the numbers and drag that slider sometimes because it goes pretty quick. Then I'm going to click "Okay" and let's zoom in here. Let's look at what it's doing. I mean, it's going to be so small that it really won't matter if you have this jagged edge but you can see here that it's stacking, maybe you can't, but it's jagged edge means its just stacking that bottom, those letters just on top of each other a 100 times, so you can hardly see it. It really won't matter once we get into adding the strokes on here. But if you really do worry about it, if you click on it and you have your appearance panel up, you can go to that one, click on your Transform again, and it will pull up your settings and then you can go ahead and tweak that and maybe you want it to be 150 or 120. You can do that but it'll add a little bit more, so then you can shrink that down a little bit, which maybe means you have to do 0.6,0.6. Just realize that that's going to continue to move if you add more copies is going get bigger. I would just keep plugging away in the move section, make that bigger or smaller. Play around with that, that's all up to you. It's super easy, but the best part about it is it is non-destructive. Click "Okay" and that looks right. Now we need to start adding the strokes. The first one's real easy and I'll show you how to do that quick. If you haven't saved a copy of the lettering and on a different layer, that's totally fine because you'll see that this is all connected. But we just need the letters, not the drop, the 3D extrude. Hit Command C to copy it and then Command F to copy it in place and then go back to your appearances panel. Then just for this top one, just delete the two fills and then you're back to where you started. There we are. If it's over here, there's one way to do it. You can change, you can knock. I don't want that to be a fill. I want it to be a stroke, so I can go over here and change it to white over here. Or you can just hit shift X and it'll toggle between fill and stroke. Just a little shortcut. For the stroke I think I'm going to do about five points. But the problem when I just do that is if you zoom in, you'll see that it doesn't line up with your 3D extrude this part right here. This part right here goes up over top of this. I wanted to align with it. Actually if I just go into stroke, there's one right in the middle, says Align Stroke to the inside. You just click on that and there it is, super-easy. But we have one last stroke and it's the one that's going to go around everything to pull this all together, to bring a black line around the whole thing. It sets it into it and it will help us set it off from your illustrations. Let's take actually the whole letter form. I'll zoom out a little bit for you and I'm just going to hit option or all. That gives you that double cursor and then I'll hit shift as I drag so that it copies it and I don't move it out of place too much. I will just slide it up vertically i don't have to go horizontal at all. Just highlight the whole thing and then let's do object, expand Appearance and i might take a little while because I have a million of these. But then we can go over to our Pathfinder again. You'll find all these under window. If you don't have it in your toolbar and then I'm going to go over here to the top left on under shaped modes and this is called the unite and I'll click on it and it's going to take a few seconds. Computer might be slow to its getting a little old. There we go. Now you can see here that exact shape If you just hit shift X, we have an outline. I'll drag it up just to actually fight. We'll just keep dragging it up here and else we can put at the top. I'm going to bring it to the top and if you want to bring anything to the top or bottom just hit all shift and then the brackets. You're right bracket, left bracket, right bracket goes with the top, left bracket goes to the bottom. There's another keyboard shortcuts and now that it's on the top, I just want to be able to see here, I'm going to switch my stroke to Command X and then I want to put it to a black, just so I can see I'm going to move it here in a second. I could do it this way where I add that stroke to. I can make that bigger and then I can add the stroke to the outside. That's one way to do it. I'm going to zoom in here and you're going to see that these are going to get bigger and smaller, but they leave. That's one way to do it. Another way you can do it is let's just leave it out. One, I'm going to bring it back to the bottom and then you can go to object. Now it's still on stroke. Go to object, go to path and then we're going to offset the path and if I preview, we can see how far off that path is going to be and maybe I'll just get at 44 pixels here. Hit OK. Now let's see. I like that. Then you can hit shift X and then you should see it outlined at all. If you want it to be so you can scoot back and you wanted to be a little bit bigger, you can do that. I'll go in there and do the same thing I did before, object path, offset path and we want to make it a little bit bigger. Let's see. Maybe six and I'll change that stroke. There you have it. Now you have a stroke that goes all the way around and makes it look all cleaned up and tidy. Then we have a stroke on the inside and we have the 3D extrude. Now all we have to do is, and I'm not going to bore you with this part, but I want to turn this off and show you what I have finished before the original and then you can see that I just dropped in the greetings from and the Washington and I'm going to save these all. I'm going to put them all in different layers here in illustrator and we're going to bring this into Photoshop to finish up our postcard. 6. 6. Prepping for Illustration: Before we jump right into Photoshop to do our illustration, we need to take what we've made hear in illustrator and bring it to Photoshop. Now we could do that in two ways, you can either just copy everything just highlight it all in Command C, and then open up and create a new file in Photoshop and then just paste it in there. But you going to want to paste in separate layers so you're going to have to do that multiple times, copy paste, copy paste, and then make sure they're all lined up or an easier way to do it and cleaner way is just to make sure that you have all of your layers. Here's my layered palette, make all the different layers of things like your strokes and whatnot. Put them on different layers and I just made a few different layers and that's as easy as just grabbing it, copying it, deleting it, opening a new layer, let's say lets start it down here, lets create a new layer and then hit Command F and it'll paste it in place. Then you will have to put the other stroke on top of it. But that's how you would do it, I would just go through one by one and make layers for all of these so they're all in separate layers. You could start it by building it that way, which will be the smarter way, I guess, but you can prep it like this, and then you can go File, Export, Export As and then just save that as a Photoshop file. Oops, where is it? Oh, yep, there it is, Photoshop. Then I would make sure to use art boards ions that way it doesn't take anything else out if you had some outside of those art boards. Just use the art boards, put it on the desktop and export. Just like you would when you went into Photoshop, you'd set up your file that'll set it up at the right size, whatever size you're, art board is here, which is ours is 12 by 18 or keep. But then we'll add CMYK and then 300 PPI is good and I want it to wright layers for me. Let's keep right layers and then we're good. Click Okay. It's going to go ahead and make that into a Photoshop file for us and then we're going to bring this into Photoshop. Let's open up Photoshop and let's open up our file that we have just saved from illustrator called vector as a Photoshop file. There we go. Now you can see that it has the different layers. They do weird things with the colors so like the black is now charcoal and then it does funkier things with the layers. What I like to do is as soon as they come in there and they group and put things in different folders. I just like to go under them and I tried to get rid of that. I'm going to ungroup these layers. I'm going to ungroup these once as well. I'm just right-clicking. I opened it up and then I'll right-click on that. Oops, right-click on the layer name and I'm going to ungroup the layers. That way I can manually put these in here for myself. I know that the top layer, that's good. But I want the Washington. I want all these things together. I want the Seattle texts altogether. Don't want that up there. We're going to move that out of the way. Let's see. I'm not sure what that one even is. Oh, now I know what that one is. There we are. I'll move that above there. We got all this type is, well right-click and you can go up to group from layers and then we'll just say that's Seattle. There we go. Then the greetings from, these are mixed in. There we go. The Washington one. We'll click on both. Hold Shift, click on both, then you right-click. Right-click on the name. Don't right-click on these, right-click on the name then group from layers. Then we'll just do and then there we go. Then the cool part is that this is still text so you can edit that, which is awesome. It takes that from illustrator so you could still edit it. If you have anything that you want to keep in there and keep editable, you don't need a flattening or anything to do to bring it in here, which is pretty neat. Let's see what's the last few things I want to do here. Maybe what you can do is just separate this background from it. I just delete that so I'll just leave that. I want that border and I'll drop it at the very top so I'll put that under the whole piece. Now I'm just going to drop and make a new layer here. For now we'll just put it gray for just a second. Oops. There we go. Now we have all these as separate layers and when you want to go in it, if you want to clean up there, you don't want it to be that charcoal color. Just go here and then hit that layer lock right there, the lock transparency and then you can just go and click on your rich black and then all dot or option, and then hold that and delete and it'll fill that space for you. You can do the same thing with Greetings from. For that one we don't even do the layer lock because it's text. You can just do the option delete and it'll take that color and put it in there. Now we can go through and let's add the colors and let's start showing you how I illustrated this. 7. 7. Illustrating in Photoshop: All right you guys. We aren't in Kansas anymore. We are working in full color. Thank you so much for being so patient and working with me through all these videos to set up our files so that it is ready to illustrate in here in Photoshop. Now this is my finalized Seattle postcard. Here's is going to look very different, obviously different places, different style. But I want to emphasize that it's going to be different style. Use your own illustration style to fit within here. I'm going to walk you through how I do mine. Just so you have an idea of the technique and you see my full process, the brushes that I use and so you can see that, but feel free to do this in whatever style you feel comfortable and want to experiment with, I'm really excited to see what you do. Let's get started and I'll show you what I did. To get to this point, we are going to have to go back to where we left off in the land of gray, sorry. But you're going to drop in colors and no worries. I like to start with the background. The background is where I start because if I can drop in that color, it'll help dictate what colors I use here in the worlds in which colors I can pop in the words. I picked my palette ahead of time. I knew I was going to use blues and greens and purples because that's what I think of. I think of all the green trees and all the blue and gray skies and things like that. But then there are some really vibrant colors that I wanted to pop out of this, like the red for the apples are that kayak and the fish. Anyway, I wanted to pop those colors not yellow. The background, I wanted to make more of the analogous colors. I wanted to use the purple, greens and blues. Then when I got to my letters, I wanted him to stand out and really shine, and so I started using those pops of color. Do it how you want. That's how I started and I started with a sketch. Obviously, I'm not going to actually sketch a ton of this for you on this video because you can sketch on your own and you don't have to really watch me schedule sketch similarly. But I did it on the different layer here just so you can see it. Then I want to show you now how I painted in some of this area and I'll show you what brushes I use. I want to move this down this sketch. To start things I want to move it behind the Seattle text so that it don't get in the way and it's next to what I'm going to be working on. I'm going to add another layer and I'm going to make it that green color because we have one on for our background, and then I want to go and take the sketch and knock back the opacity a little bit. I like to work with a sketch on top, just that's just my preference with the lower opacity. I can draw behind it and I can just toggle it on and off. Not sure what you like, but that's what I like to do. I'm going to add another layer here. I'll try these many layers as I possibly can. If we want just for this and my just snag colors, we get that blue and I'm going to just start by grabbing a brush tool preset that I actually made with the help of RetroSupply. We together made these brush sets. We have space ranger and the Woodland Wonderland say is the one that we made inspired by those old Golden Books. If you want to find some awesome brushes and other amazing tools working digitally, go on retrosupply.co.com. The Woodland are one I use when I worked with because I loved the gouache brushes that we have in here and some other pencils and textures that we have going on. I'm going to use the Classic Gouache. Let's do that. I have that up here. That's the brush I'm using, and let's start with this water down here. Then this one was real simple. I just want to add a little bit and a little brighter here. I just went ahead and it's really loose, play with the different sizes. I just wanted to come up with a really loose swash of color for the water. I didn't really need to give it much form. It's the technique I was going for the style I going for. Try to fill it in around the edges. I'd like to leave a little bit of little holes and things in it so you can see the background through it, which is of cool. Makes it look more authentic and painted and that's just pressing harder or not as hard on my tablet here. I'm using a webcam made by webcam. It's a ST-22 HD. It's just like a bagel screen that you can draw on and you can use any tablet or whatever stylists you want to use. That's the one that I use and if I move this sketch, so I have this here. Now one thing you can do, and I did this a lot with these because the way I got like the different fields inside of there. Right here, it's looks a little boring, but we can make this by two ways. There's a transparency lock that you can just click on that layer, and I'll just use the slider to change the color ever so slightly. Then I'll just play through here again, so adds a little bit more and maybe some shading or whatever. This is pretty much what I do through everything and make everything look a little bit more exciting and not so flat. Then I'll add maybe a little bit more blue, maybe a darker one in here, so you can play around with that. Already it starts feeling a lot less flat, a little bit more movement, a little bit more unique, and just play around with it. That's one way to do it. I still do that technique with a color, but that's one way to drop in the color. Now, I'm just going to hit alter option then delete, and whatever color you're on is just going to fill that. But let's say I wanted to do the same thing, but I didn't want to be destructive with the illustration I have, but I still want to work within this and I want to have it locked to just the artwork. The way you do that is you hold alter option and then you click that new layer, and then a pop up this little tool box and click on the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask. Now you've just made an awesome little clipping mask and you don't have to click or hold anything you just draw. It will only draw within the confines of that illustration you have it connected to that layer you have it connected to. It's pretty awesome. I find it pretty darn helpful as I'm working. Then you can go ahead and then once you've done that, you can toggle it on or off and see it has no effect to the original whatsoever, which is really handy. Now I want to draw the ferry to go on top of it. When I drop a new layer, actually, let's put that there we go. Drop ferries, so I'm going to go and do that. Now, sometimes when I want to draw shapes that had a little bit more [inaudible] , you can either just draw and do a lot of erasing, or you can build it with your lasso tool, or you can import vector shapes. There's a million ways to do this. Some of these have imported vector shapes built-in and dropped in and just color over them. But the polygon or lasso tool is pretty cool. It's a mouthful. If you hold Shift, it'll make you work straight lines for you, either 45 degree angles or it will be perfect straight lines, horizontal, vertical. I'm just going to click through here and you can do this. Sometimes I feel like it looks a little too perfect to get a sketch. To me it looks a little too perfect. I like the fuzzy edges. Maybe that's not the way I want to do it. The other way that I like to do is I'll just drawing my main mask and I'll use the same tool or you can swap in. I'll go to my brushes again and I'll just go to our standard, the complete solid opacity brush and just draw it in. Use that Shift again to get those perfect lines and I'll draw the main form first, then I add in all my other colors and things. Once I have that in, then I can go ahead and play with it a little bit more with my gouache brush, so let's see. Cool. Even then [inaudible] changed my flow on this brush, particularly to 28 you still see a little bit what's underneath it, and I don't know. For me I like the look of it and I can go back and put an eraser and clean up edges if I need, but I liked that look. I'm going to back to my Gouache II this time, go crazy. Then I can add another detail shots and you can quickly see how this starts to take shape. That going to be a little bit difficult with this brush. My editor didn't brush here. But for the purpose of this, we are just going to roll with it. I've done that and once I have, I forgot to do the little smokestacks. I'll do those real quick. So I can show you again. We can do that layer lock. So I'm going to take out that sketch layer so we can see it. Now I want to do a layer lock again, which is all option. Click on the new layer, use previous layers as the mask. Then I'm going to start using, let's do this. I'm going to do a little bit darker version of I think I used for here. Then I can just hold shift and draw on this bottom part right here. Then I got my the bottom layer, and then if you want to add other little like line work are things on the top. I do that on a separate layer. Like if I want to add a little bit of a line right here, and then if you want to, just keep adding all your details, and if you don't like for you to think it's skin to lost in there. I'll go back to this layer. Click on the color behind it. I want to make it a little darker so that white pops a little bit more, I need a brush a little bigger and then I'll do something like that. So it pops off a little more. Boy, it's already starting to look awesome. Go back, you can see it and once I have everything in there, it's going to a look a whole lot nicer, but that's generally how I painted. Now, let me show you how I do it within the letters. I want to show you that on the finished piece. I'll take you over to this file and I'm going to actually take up some of these effects. Though we're not dealing with any of that, I'm going to Zoom in a little bit, a little bit more. Let me just show you the layers that I went through to create these things. We can start with maybe the S. So if you want to turn off, this is another thing. If you want to turn off a bunch of layers, you want to go and click them all individually. You can just Click and Hold down, and when you drag down and while you're clicking and holding, it'll just turn them off for you. Or turn them on, which is pretty cool. There's the original sketch that I had done and after that, so the bottom layer I just, I usually fill in the background first. Just start doing a swash of color. Just drop it in there under that sketch. Then I'm going to move that cell moves sketch. Then I filled out the main part of that body there. Added some extra little splashes, some more textures you can see at a little sheen to the fish little dimension and there you go. Those are the steps. I'll walk you through those steps really quickly here on our new one, and I'll show you how to mask off the area so that you get your artwork in there. Okay, here we go and scope back. Let's say we want to draw that fish in the S. Let's go up here and I'm just going to draw it right there no matter where I draw right now. Lets do a layer here but the top. All right, so I'm going to do a white layer. It's what I did and then knocked back the opacity. I can just make out that S. Then we make one more layer, get a black color there. Then I started drawing my sketch right over there. So it's on its own layer. It's just basically like using tracing paper for me. Basically what I'm mimicking. So I'll draw that shape of the fish. Now the best part about this is I'm not going to worry about keeping it within the S shape. I don't really need to, which is what I was worried about before. It's just like how am I going to draw in such a weird space like common sense to figure out the shape. So you could look at reference images and things like that figure out which ones are in the best shape that you need. Then you can start drawing your full illustration outside of it. So let's say I have fish right there. I'll draw. That's not the prettiest tail I have ever drawn. I will do this, It doesn't matter because we're just sketching it out. Then I'm going to start drawing. I want to get those basic shapes in there to get the initial sketch. Now it's sitting outside of there and I don't and so this way I can move it around and play with it, see how I wanted to fit within that S. Maybe I needed to enlarge it or shrink it down a little bit, drop it in there. Now I can turn this layer off and what I can do is I am going to drop this down here it within the Seattle section. So we're going to put a null, I'll make a Subgroup in here, Sub folder, I should say. You can start sketching. You could draw right on top of this if you want, if you want to continue painting. I would probably just knock this down a little bit. Do the same thing I did earlier. Start painting underneath it will drop in that purple color. Let's just say that. Now it doesn't really matter. You don't have to be too precise. It'll drop in some other, that got too heavy handed. So other purples just for the sake of this, now I have my sketch. There's, well, I want to start doing my full illustration. You can do your whole paint, your whole thing in here. Then I'm actually going to take this layer, which is that top. I'm going to bring that up top here so I can see it in place. I'm going to highlight these layers I used to illustrate and I'm going to go ahead and group them. Rock shelters Right-click on them. Sorry on the word, on the layer name. Group from layers. So this is going to be salmon or S. I'll just do S. Now I'm going to go down here and I'm going to click on my S shape. So just use your wand tool is hit W and then I can Click on here, highlights that S area, and then I'm going to go up to my group. Then I'm going to go down here and just Hit the add layer mask and then just closes it off in there. I still have all my layers still in there and the best part is if I Click on here, if I want to move this, it'll move it as the mass which you don't want to do. But if I want to see what's underneath there, I can see, I can still move it within there. So I move if I drew a ton of stuff all around it, it'll actually give me some room to wiggle it around and move it. So I'll make it a slightly larger on purpose so that I can move that image around within there. That Layer Mask is going to be an awesome. [inaudible] am going to link that together it'll bring as a full chunk. Pretty cool, then you can Right-click it and you can disable the layer mask, just turn it off, or you can just Delete it altogether. That is the way I went ahead and used the masking tool to go through and illustrate through all of these, and that's how I did it. I went through in each layer individually mask them off to the background first and I ended up with this guy. If you're feeling lost or anything like that, I feel like this is, this is complicated illustration because that's the style that I choose for this and I wanted to do, again, take it with an add your own flair to do whatever style you want to do. Maybe you like a more vector look and you never brought it into Photoshop. But hopefully, if you did want to bring it into Photoshop, you now have an idea of how to do that and you know how to some tips on playing with the color and masking and now you just get to go have fun with it. In the next video, like I said, we're going to make this look a lot more vintage if you want to get that effect. So let's move on to the last video. 8. 8. Textures and Aging: In this final video, I want to show you how I made my postcard look a little bit more vintage. My intent wasn't to make it look like it was something right out of a junk drawer or anything like that. I wanted to make it feel like I had the qualities of those old prints. What I mean by that is if you zoom in, it's got that grainy quality to it for that cool print look. It's not perfect but what it does for me is it just makes it feel a little bit more approachable, a little bit softer on the edges, not so digital and that's what I was going for. The way I did that, I'm going to walk you through the different steps and you'll have access to this working file so you can take this apart and look at it and see exactly what I did. But I really just did a bunch of adjustment layers. Again, window up here at the top. You open that up. If you don't know where anything is, you're missing something or toolbar that I'm mentioning. Just go to Window and you'll have it in here. Adjustments, I happen to have it right over here. I played around with, it looks like the brightness and contrast. I did some levels, and then here I did the hue and saturation. Let me walk you through each of those. But what I applied them to was a noise layer. Let me show you how I did that. I'm going to just start a new layer up here. If I just did an adjustment layer right up here, it's going to apply it to the entire piece of art. Everything, all your colors, everything. What I want to do is I want to focus that a little bit more. Let's make a grainy layer, and I'm going to have everything affect that one layer, not all my layers together. I'll show you what that means. Here, let's just fill this in. No, yeah, option Delete, that was right. Option Delete, then I'm going to go up to Filter. Going down to Noise, add some noise. I'm going to make sure we have that box over here. We got this, I'm going to move that back. This is just showing how much speckles or noise that you're going to show and it's just a bunch of little dots. What I do is I keep it on Gaussian, and then I'm going to start adding effects. I'm going to turn off the effects that I have going on this already. I'm going to hit this changes to Overlay. I'm going to knock back the opacity quite a bit. I'm going to zoom in so you can see what I'm doing here. You can see it. Now, you see this if I turn it off, you don't see any graininess. There's a whole bunch of grain in there. That's what I'm looking for. I don't want it to change my colors drastically. There, that one didn't really change it a whole lot. I might even go to bring it down a little bit more. That's what it's doing. Then I'm going to go and add an adjustment layer to this. I wanted to go, maybe let's start with the brightness and contrast. Now what it does is this is still going to be applying to everything, not just this green layer. If I hold Alter option, when I'm highlighting on that one, I click, it shows a little arrow. If I click, then it only applies this adjustment layer. Although settings only apply to this one layer right here. You don't apply it to everything. If I turn this off, then it would turn everything off. For the brightness, we can just play around. This is up to you, whatever you feel. I'm going to go to about eight. It's what I think I did, and it's just trial and error. You just keep plugging away and trying different combinations until you get the look that you want. Sorry, I'm back on. Let's get back to levels. Again, I'm going to hold Option and then click down. Now I'm going to mess with my levels here. I believe I had it to somewhere around there. Then let's see. Let's keep moving around till it feels right. Then, let's see. Cool. Let's say I had it around there. Just so you're aware, in levels, you're basically moving, here's your darks, here's your whites, and here's your grays. That's what that is. I'm so sorry, I didn't explain that. That's what you're messing with. You can bring in more contrast, be a little bit brighter and blow out the dark colors. I like using levels for that. Brightness and contrast does that, but it doesn't have as much fine tuning as that. You don't have as much control. I'm going to add the last one which is the hue and saturation. Again, if I turn this off, you get to see what your original is. You can toggle on with the eyeball. I'm going to add another one, my hue and saturation. Again, knock that down to that layer. I'm going to go to probably just move the saturation up a little bit. What that does, saturation obviously saturates those colors and makes them brighter, and in doing that, it adds a little bit more contrast. I'm going to bring this up a little bit because, that feels a little bit older too, when they bump up that really high contrast. I like how it makes the colors pop a little bit more. There we go. I've got a bunch of those. What was this? That was the gritty noise of what I had there. That's basically what we made right there. But I also imported another grain effect that I really liked. You can see that one just knocks out a little bit of everything on top and just shows what's behind it. I really like adding little subtle things like this and you can download some of these. There's a ton of them on RetroSupply, tons of kits and things that you can find other places. But I know RetroSupply has a ton of really good ones. I believe this is from one of their packs. Yeah. You can add all little things, and again, you'll have access to these files so that you can go and do that. Then the last thing I did was just, I'm going to remove this, what I did before, I just added a yellow paper to the top. I'm going to do it. Here we go. I added a little yellowing effect to age it just a tiny bit, take away those bright whites. It's nice too because it makes the colors harmonize a little bit more. I just had an actual physical paper texture that you can see I multiplied over top. If you want, I can take that off. I can add my own yellow. You can just add a yellow layer. Again, option Delete, cover that. You're can do Multiply and do the same thing and mess with your opacity. I just happen to like the paper texture. It's really subtle. Or you can even do Color. Let me go back up to the Opacity. What color does is it takes that yellow color, the whatever color that you put over top, and when you do that it puts that yellow into every color. If you have a whole bunch of colors that you're using, sometimes it's really nice to bring them all together by using one solid color that'll run through them all, like that yellow or whatever color. Anyway, Multiply is probably what you want to do here and lower the opacity for whatever you want, and it feels a little bit older and there you have it. I'm going to go back to the original one. That's how you add some of those textures on there and play around with this. Like I said, play around with your adjustment layers, add some maybe color layer over top to harmonize all the colors and give it a little bit more of a vintage feel, if that's what you're going for. Look at the file that I have that you have access to and you can go through and you can even drag these into your own artwork and you can see them applied automatically to what you've already created. If you don't want to work on your own, you can just apply these and then double-click on the different adjustment layers and you can alter them yourself. Go ahead and enjoy texturing and making this look a little bit more vintage. I hope that helped.