Illustrating Flowers & Arranging Bouquets in Photoshop

1. Illustrating Flowers Introduction: Hey guys, I'm Dylan Mierzwinski an illustrator and sowing enthusiasts living in Phoenix, Arizona. In this skill share class, I'm going to show you how I go about illustrating flower bouquets. We'll talk about how to use the inspiration you find, I'll show you how I draw my flowers from pictures, then we'll bring it all into Photoshop to create floral bouquets illustrations that are bold and full of character. All right, my little daisies let's get started. 2. Class Project: For this class, I want you to create a finished illustration of a floral bouquet. Use the videos in the class to help you walk through finding and using your inspiration, drawing out your flowers, and digitizing them for a stunning final result. 3. Using this Class: Hi guys. I just wanted to take a minute to talk about the class before we actually start the class. It builds off of techniques and skills that I've taught in my past classes, including my very first class, digitizing hand-drawn sketches with character and my pattern play classes, which use both Photoshop and Illustrator. So this class, while something new is really building on old skills, and the reason I did it is so that I can take all of these skills and all of these different tools that I've shown you in past classes and put them together in a cohesive contexts. So you can actually see from beginning to end how I use these skills to work on the flower bouquet illustrations that you guys have shown so much love to. So all of that is to say, is that this is just my workflow. This is how I enjoy working and you'll hear me talk about it throughout the class, why I like working this way and all of that. But the whole point is that when you watch another artist's work, you get to take what you like and leave the rest. So if there's a part of my workflow that you don't like or a part that you would enjoy better by using a different program or technique or what have you. Then please do it, that's awesome. I draw my flowers on paper and then I bring them into Photoshop, and I take a lot of time to use those actual drawn lines to create the base of my illustration. But if you want to use Illustrator, go ahead, or if you don't like drawing on paper and you want to draw on your iPad or right onto a tablet, right into Photoshop, that's awesome. Do your thing. I just wanted to show you how I work so that you can pick up whatever you need to to help make your workflow easier. We all love flowers, so I want to do to make some flower bouquets too. Okay, let's get to class. 4. Inspiration: I want to talk a little bit about what it's like when you don't really know where to start. First of all, just as I started to record this video, our maintenance people for the apartment complex just showed up with all their leaf blowers, and it's going to pick up in the audio and I'm really sorry about it and our neighbor's dog is barking, so sorry for the extra noise. This will be a quick video anyway. When you don't really know what to do and you don't have access to fresh flowers, I would say the first thing is if you can go to the store or a flower shop and pick out a few stems. Flower shops are nice, they usually let you buy stems if you want and they'll just wrap them up or you can get a small bouquet from a grocery store. But anytime you have fresh flowers, I love to take pictures of them because you can take a picture of one flower in many different directions, and facing different ways, and from different angles. You can get a lot out of just one bouquet, and that's what I did for this. I actually didn't start with Pinterest, I went to a flower shop in Phoenix, picked out the prettiest flowers and interesting shapes I could find, brought them home and photograph them. But if that is not a round you can take right now or you don't want to, or you just want to get started. By all means I say use the Internet. It's not enough to just find a pretty bouquet, you can't find a picture like this and then just draw this because somebody else arranged this and took the picture and put it up. It's just like stealing, you're stealing their work even though they're flowers and no one owns Mother Nature and everything, it still respectful to try and not copy people. The way that you can use inspiration like this, is to pick out what it is about the picture that you like and apply it to your own work. If you can't pick out what it is you like then I like to use the trick of narrating what I'm seeing in the scene. In this case, I would say, multiple vases with only a few buds each, have no foliage, they're all roses. Already I'm getting some hints that it's like, oh, I like that this is a really sparse bouquet, there's not extra foliage, there is no filler, it's just the flower that you can see, the whole integrity of its stem and all of its leaves. So maybe that's something you like or maybe you like something really traditional like this. I like to look at the overall shape. For instance, this one is a sprawls horizontally and then it has some of this fillers sticking out, so maybe you could take that on. If you need a better way of breaking down the bouquets, you can think of it as roses, and peonies, and lilies, and all of those flowers that steal the show are around the focal point. You can think of them as form or mass flowers. Then the flowers that stick straight up or offer all of these guys in here. These can be considered line flowers or they can be fillers because you can see that they fill and they take up space, they break through the surface. You can also describe your inspiration in terms of that. I can open up this bouquet, which is very dramatic. It has some really dark flowers are foliage in there. That might be something I want to draw on to my bouquet or I like that it has all of these little sticky stems in there. It looks like it's got three really big form or mass flowers. We have a smaller, more interesting shape here. We've got a smaller rose here, so three big blooms, two smaller blooms, and then some foliage, and some filler, and some interesting shapes coming out of there. When you break it down like that, you can then take this inspiration and apply it to yours, again, without stealing someone's work. It really can just get you going. I love all types of bouquets. You can also look at this. This one uses one type of flower, those are peonies, and there's just a bunch of them whereas some of these bouquets have a real variety. You can see all of the different shapes in here. I would say my favorite bouquets really use a lot of different shapes. Sometimes it's pretty to see all of these peonies is all in one place, but what I love is a variety. Look at all of the movement that's in here. You have things looking in different directions. You have a lot of different shapes, a lot of different textures. Those are all things that you can look for when you are trying to find inspiration. When you do find something you like, let's say, you want to do something that's traditional like this, and you figured out, it looks like there's one or two really big flowers that are my focal points. I have a cluster of them that are medium sized and then everything else is a lot smaller and sticking out in different directions. Then I can pick out, what do I want my two big focal point flowers to be? Then when you figure those out, you can then use Google to start getting a sense of what flower is shaped like. For instance, I typed an English rose. Let's say that I wanted to mimic this bouquet and I want to have a big English rose here. I can look at all of these pictures. Again, I'm not going to draw a petal for petal one of these because this is somebody else's work. But in all of these pictures I get a sense that, from the center out, we have this inner circle area, and within there, there are all of these petal shapes that move outwards and they're all tight together. There's a lot of lips and then we have a few bigger petals around the sides. Those are all things that you can start to use to draw. I would say that in instances like this, when you're looking at Google, you can draw some of these petals. Maybe you start your flower looking at this picture just so that you can get an idea of how these petals work. Then maybe you pull up this picture to see how these outer petals work. As long as you're using inspiration from a lot of different sources, and you're not copying line for line, color for color, whatever it is, then you're going to be okay. You won't be infringing on anybody's rights. Take a look around if you don't have a flower shop or a place that you can go buy flowers at. Take a look online, Pinterest is full of gorgeous flower arrangements. You can start with something simple. You can start with something big. You can draw a vase. You can have it without a vase. You can have someone holding it. It doesn't even have to be a bouquet that's perfectly centered. You could do something like this where it's cut off and only part of it is showing in the illustration. Let all this work, all this beauty, make it usable to you. Don't just look at it and think, oh, I can't draw that because it's somebody else's. Well, pinpoint what you like about it. This one, I love these colors, I love the peach and then the dark purple flower that's in there and all of the foliage. Maybe that's what this picture lends itself to you. Now I have a color scheme that I can work with. All of these things are little details that as an artist, you can and should be picking up on in storing in your idea bank. 5. Drawing your Blooms: What I'm going to do here is, I have my computer pulled up auto-frame and I just have the pictures that I took from the book that I got. I'm just going to start drawing them. Now I'm going to draw mostly in Pen. I'm just using a basic pilot precise V5, I just like how the ink flows from it and then just I have a basic pencil nearby. I am going to make an outline of the flower with the pencil, but then I'm just going to draw in ink so that you can see it on camera. But if you're not comfortable drawing an ink yet, don't worry about it you can draw in pencil and then ink over it. I have the first flower pulled up in front of me and what I'm going to do is just lightly make a circle that goes around the outline of the shape. This just helps me when I'm drawing to know where my boundaries are. Then another thing I like to do is just make a little circle where the center, where the heart of the flower is, which in this picture it's up here. That gives me a nice place to start with figuring out what my flower is going to look like. Then I just jump in and get into it. The nice thing about taking my own pictures is I can draw them exactly like petal for petal if I wanted to because I took the picture, I don't have to worry about stealing from another artist. Don't worry about getting it too perfect. You just want to try and pay attention to like what the petals do, how they interact with each other. It's okay if it's messier than you want. This is my first time ever drawing on camera, and so we'll see how this turns out. But I'm really just following the shapes, seeing how they interact with each other. Some of the petals have little lips like this. This I'm drawing from a little peony that I got. When I think in my classes I try to make them really official for you. It feels like, you're paying for skill share and you want to get your money's worth. I try to make it like a real course. But I think that can also sometimes intimidate people. If you make things seem to official, then they're like, woo I can't get into this, and so don't worry about this. This is just fun. We're just drawing little flowers, your favorite flowers, and turning them into a bouquet that you can keep forever. That actually doesn't look too much like a peony, but that's okay because I like it. Sometimes what I do is I draw the flowers and then go back through and add any details I want. I personally part of my signature style is all of my line work and that's my favorite part, so I usually go through and do that. It also helps give context to the flower. It's easy to see where the center is. It's okay for your first few ones if you draw like mine, if you do little lines like this and everything, but I challenge you to look at other illustrators and other fine art that you love of [inaudible] to see that they can be done in so many ways into trying find your own flair within it. That's the whole point. I arrived at this style by drawing from old botanical drawings which have a lot of really beautiful crosshatching and dimension, and so this is my simplified version of that. Sometimes I do more full-on crosshatching, which I'll do that on some of the flowers or leaves. But this casual [inaudible] line style fits my retro style, so there's one flower and go ahead and move on. I like this one. I drew this flower with it. It's the same flower, but I drew it from, it was rotated around its back, so I'll just go ahead and draw the shape and see just how this little line, it just really helps you get just like that basic shape down. Then in this one, I'm not going to do the center because I'm looking at the back of it. I'm going to do like the center back so that I know where that is and just draw a little stem. Sometimes I draw the stems like this, sometimes I just do one line. There's not really a rhyme or reason to it. This is also why taking pictures of flowers from many angles is great because you can make a whole bouquet from one flower by taking it's picture in different angles and catching different ways, it's petals, move. Again, this isn't looking too peonyish, but like that. It doesn't have to look exactly like what you're drawing. You want it to look like a flower so that, that comes across but, and it gets fun when they're more ambiguous and you can't totally tell. That'll work. Then we'll need all the pencil lines erased for when we digitize, but this ink takes a little bit to dry so I don't erase it until I know it's dry. Got a picture of this really pretty green. I love green hydrangea, so get a shape of the hydrangea, and then some of these leaves and this just makes these little lines they're really simple, but they really help orient me when I'm drawing. I found that they help break down the process a lot. Then little flowers like hydrangea, I mean, it's up to you how detailed you want them to be, like, how true to life. These are the green hydrangea there. I think they might be like little babies because usually hydrangea are made up of little flowers that look like this. But the green hydrangea are so tight, it's like they're still in their little, they're still balled up. One thing that's helpful is looking at the direction that these shapes are moving in. These ones seem to be in like little clusters. There's not much rhyme or reason. By doing this, you know how to draw any flower. You don't have to be scared of even the complex ones. I know it can be, when I was first starting out, I'd get really down about how some of the drawings, like I've looked at this flower and be like that looks terrible, that doesn't look like a flower. It wasn't until I developed my workflow of bringing things into Photoshop to render them because I like having that digital part of it that they started to come to life. I realized that sometimes how things look on the page, you'll be surprised how they look when you start rendering them to fit your style and whatever your workflow is. I think it's easy to, at least for me, and not just with art, it's like with every thing in my life, it's easy to, you get started and I want to get done so badly that I just start like rushing through, so if you feel yourself doing that like with this hydrangea partway through, I was like, oh my gosh, I have a big area to fill, then I am like, am not going anywhere. Day before thanksgiving, got some family coming into town. I can just relax and draw hydrangea for as long as it takes. Again and be possible for someone to look at this and not see hydrangea, but that's not really my point. If it is your point, if that's part of it is you want your flowers to look as accurate as possible then, that can become your mission with finding your style is figuring out what does make these flowers look like them and trying to capture that. For me, I love when my bouquets images are done and you look at it and you know it's a bouquet of big beautiful flowers. But there's a little mystery there and I like that. Honestly it keeps my bouquets from all looking the same. I draw a lot of roses and peonies and I've used a lot of those same filler flowers, but I draw them a little bit differently each time, and that keeps things interesting. Now not all flowers I draw the leaves right attached to, you can see as we're doing things separately the whole point is that we can gather the bouquet as we want. But one of my favorite things about hydrangea are these huge leaves that just beef up the bouquet without any effort. Here. I am going to draw these, but the other ones I'll probably do a foliage separate so that I can have more control when I'm digitizing it. How it's going to be. Big meeting leaves. The nice thing is, when I was first making bouquets I noticed that I'd work on these really big beautiful flowers and then the bouquets would still looks sparse. I realized that the reason is because it's nice. In a real flower bouquet you have all this foliage that's filling everything in and taking up space in the background. Even if we don't see all of these leaves in the illustration, we know that they are there and filling it out in the background so it's good to have stuff like this. This one is folded in half. Let's see if I can fit one up here. I've tried to conserve space in my book, but I'm not always good at it. These are fun. I got these little Kermit mums. I believe they're called and they look like little green palms. They look like something that could be in a Dr. Seuss book. I took a picture of one up to the side and they have these fun curly leaves that are weird. Stem. Then do the same thing and I get that shape there, and then these are just little lines. That's all I'm going to do. Notice how already I've got some varying textures in my flowers. I have these big, pretty peonies that have less line work. I have this filler, Kermit mum that's going to take up a lot of real estate, but is only full of lines. It's very textured and less about the shape of it. The hydrangea has a lot of yummy texture in there. But you don't have to vary texture. That's the cool thing, that's what you get to decide, is do I want it to be full of texture or do I want it to be about showcasing beautiful pennies or what do you want your bouquet to be? I used to be scared when people would say, "Try it out on your own, just figure out what you like, " because I felt like it was a test, there was a right answer and a wrong answer. But it's literally all it means. It's just what do you like? When you look at bouquets, do you like really traditional ones that have a sprawling amount of flowers or do you like more minimal bouquets? Maybe you don't like bouquets at all. Maybe you like when people just pick out some foliage and put that in a vase. You can do that whenever you want. It's whatever you like. That's pretty good. I have a bigger eraser, but I didn't grab it before filming. Also, your flowers don't even have to be this detailed. You could have fun with it and make them more geometric, have a peony like this be made with hard lines instead of soft lines. How would that change the petals and change the shape? Or you could just use circles. You know what? It's really whatever you want. I am just my personal style, I'm inspired by botanicals and retro stuff and so this is just what works for me but, you can really experiment and play around. I do know that I want to add line work to these leaves. Sometimes my line work on foliage isn't very lifelike. It's just whatever lines I want to add in, but I'll probably do more traditional lines with these ones. I'm going to keep drawing my flowers, and I won't bore you through that whole process, but I do want to draw one more flower. While I do that I'm going to put a picture up on the screen that shows what I'm looking at. I'm going to try and break down to you what I'm doing internally as I'm drawing this flower because I realize not everybody can look at a picture and see the shapes that need to be drawn. This is something that I learned to do during my 100-day drawing challenge and it's helped me a lot. Just like before, I'm going to go ahead and draw a shape that goes around the shape of the flower. This one is more ovally than the others and the stem comes out this way. Again, this is my reference shape that I'm going to be working on. Now that I have this shape, every time I look at my reference picture I'm going to picture a grid going over, splitting this in half this right way and then splitting in half this way. Every item that I go to draw, I'm going to see how it refers back to those lines. The first pedal I'm going to draw is the one that shows up in the picture down here. I can see that it looks like the pedal goes a little bit past halfway, so it's going to be up here. Then from the middle, it goes a little bit past this middle line. Sorry that wasn't clear. Looking at this horizontal line here I can see that pedal starts above the halfway mark, and on the invisible line that divides it down the middle the pedal goes a little bit further than that. When I look at the shape I can see that it just flows that way a little bit. Then I have this other pedal that comes out here and they join in the middle. Already I have my first two lines made, and then now I can use that same technique to keep drawing. The next pedal that I see goes a little bit higher than both of these, but doesn't go really passed these areas. I'll just draw that in there and I'm going to keep going. Around here it looks like this juts up and we get some other shapes in here. You'll see that at some point I stopped drawing petal for petal. Once I seem to get the overall shape done then I'm usually pretty happy with what I have. I don't want to do too many petals up here, I don't want to get too noisy. Then I can see that at the top of that picture there's just a lot of petals sticking out. Just like that, I was able to take what I'm seeing in that picture and put it into this flower. Start with an overall shape that encompasses what you're drawing, and then you can use the boundaries of that shape and the boundaries of that shape in the picture to figure out where your items need to be. Then I can go down here. I want to give them a full stem. Do I want leaves? Yeah, I'll just do a little, and your leaves here. The leaves in the picture aren't very nice so I'm just going to go ahead and draw my own. That works. Go ahead, move forward with drawing all your flowers. If this is your first time doing something like this, just draw a few. You'll find that you don't really need a ton of flowers. In fact what I have here, I've got 1,2,3 flowers that are the main form flowers. I've got a big interesting flower here that's going to act as a filler and as a point of interest. I've got some texture here. Really I could probably get away with building a nice bouquet out of these. But draw however many or few flowers you want, get them all ready to go and we will bring them into the computer and start arranging them. 6. Digitizing your Drawings: I finished up my flower drawings and I took pictures of them with my phone. If you have the scanner, then I definitely recommend using your scanner because we're going to be editing these pictures, so that they look like a scan anyway, and so you'll just cut out the middleman if you use that. But if you don't have a scanner, then fear not, I'll show you how to adjust these photos that you take with your camera or phone to be ready to go. I have Photoshop open and I'm just going to go ahead and drag one of these two Photoshop to open it. This process we're about to do, we're about to use the quick mask mode to separate these black lines from the white paper background. This is a process that I cover in much more depth in my first skill share class, digitizing hand-drawn sketches with character, so I'll definitely link to that. I'm going to do a pretty quick overview of this and if you need more information or you want to see more about this process, definitely check out that class. It's not too long, so it won't take you too long to catch back up. Basically quick mask mode is going to use the values of black, white, and gray to figure out what pixels that should keep and which ones it should get rid of. We need to make sure that this is fully black and white and that the lines that we're keeping are full black and the background is full white. Right now, if I were to use quick mask mode even though we see this paper as white, the actual color of it is actually more of a gray. Quick mask mode is going to use this. It's not going to be an opaque or transparent pixel, it's going to be translucent. When we bring it over, it's still going to hold on to that which is what we don't want so we're going to perform some adjustments on it. Now, normally when you do adjustment layers in Photoshop, you want to work non-destructively, so you would want to go down here and add your adjustment layer that way but in this case, I'm not worried about ruining this picture, I know the adjustments I'm doing are going to stay and so I'm just going to go for it. The first thing I'm going to do is de-saturate my image by hitting command or control hue, and that's going to bring up the hue saturation dialog box and I'm going to drag the saturation slider all the way to the left. You see when I do that, that it takes my picture to black and white. Now, every single pixel that's in this picture is either black, white, or gray, which is what quick mask mode is going to want. The next thing I want to do is I want to roughly outline all the stuff that I'm going to be using and get rid of anything else. I don't want the edge of the page, I don't want my hand to be in there and I'm going to go over here and double-click on the background layer and hit okay, and so that makes it just a regular layer. Now, everything that I have selected is going to stay and I want to get rid of this stuff that's not selected. I'm going to inverse my selection by either hitting Shift Command or Control I, or you can go up to select and inverse. Now, I have these marching ants going around the perimeter, which means that all of these stuff is selected instead of my drawings. I'm just going to hit Command or Control X to cut that stuff out. Now, that I have only the stuff that I want, we need to adjust the level so that the black is true black and the white is full white. I'm going to hit Command or Control L on my keyboard to bring up my levels dialogue box. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this slider that's on the right, further to the left. Do you see what's happening? It's starting to take all of my lighter values and it's going to brighten them up. But what happens is as I drag too far to the right, you can see that it's starting to throw away our lines. We want to find a happy middle ground where all of this as white, but our lines are still black. I'm going to start by doing this much even though it's still gray down here, and then I'm going to drag this slider that's all the way to the left, over to the right. Do you see how that's starting to darken our lines again? I'll hit okay, I can see that this part of the image would work really well in quick mass mode, but down here we're going to have some issues. Since one adjustment isn't going to work for the whole image, now I'm just going to go ahead and go in here and select the area that I can still see as gray in the background. Oops, left a little guy. I'm going to hit Command L again and this time, it'll just adjust those areas and I'm able to get it to look like the rest of the drawing. Now those are full white and full black. I'm going to that for all of my drawings, but I'll start with this one just so that I can show you the quick mask mode process. I'm going to make a new document by hitting Command N on my keyboard, you can also go up to file new, and I already have these dimensions in here. I started working with this 3024 by 4032, I think it's the aspect ratio that my camera takes pictures in so I liked sticking with that and it's a portrait orientation. But just make sure that you set your document to be as big as you need it to be for your final piece. In this case, I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with mine, I might use it as a print but this seems to be big enough for me to at least play around with. I want my resolution to be 300 and then you can pick whether you want to work in RGB or CMYK. I usually work in RGB and then if I need to work for print, I'll switch it over to CMYK then but if you want to know more about this, I have a class that came out all about printing and I talk about color modes and stuff. I'm going to hit okay and this is how quick mask works. Like I said, if you need this broken down more, go head and check out my first skill share class but the steps are like this. I'm going to use my lasso tool, so that's this guy over here, you can also just hit L on your keyboard and I'm just going to loosely trace around the drawing that I want. I'll start with this high drain jar and it looks like I accidentally got a little bit of this, so I'm going to take that out. What I'm going to do is hit Command C on my keyboard, or Control C on a PC, or edit copy, and I'm going to go over to my new document and I'm going to do a few things. I'm going to make a new layer, I'm going to check to make sure that I have my default colors, so if you just hit D on your keyboard, it'll set the foreground to black and the background to white, and then I'm going tap Q on my keyboard. This icon just indented to let me know that this is quick mask mode and the layer I'm on turned red. That's how I know that I've got it activated. What I'm going to do is hit command V to paste my image in here. This is the exact selection that I took from over here and you'll see that it's red still because I'm still in quick mask mode. Now, that it's over here, I'm going to hit Q again. You can see that right now it has done the work already based on where those black pixels we're, figuring out where the selection needs to be. Our sketches all ready to go. The only caveat is it's reversed, so photoshop thought that we were trying to get rid of what was black and save what was white, which is the opposite of what we want. I know that because these marching ants of my selection are going around the boundary of my document box and my sketch. That's saying everything except my lines are selected. To correct that, we're going to do what we did earlier and in inverse the selection. You can hit shift command I or shift control I, or you can go up to select an inverse. Now, my lines in the middle are still selected but the marching ants no longer are. Now, I know my drawing is selected, the pixels are ready to go, and now all we need to do is fill them in. With black as my foreground color, I'm going to hit Option or Alt Delete on my keyboard, that's going to fill my selection with my foreground color, and I'll hit Command D to de-select it. Now, talking through all of that, I know it must seem overwhelming, but I told people in my first class and I'll tell you the same thing, once you get used to it, your fingers do it really quickly without even thinking about it. It was harder for me to talk through it than for me to just do it. You'll catch on pretty quickly. But let me run through that one more time to show you. If I'm ready to bring this flower over, I'll go ahead and grab my lasso tool and do a little selection, hit Command C, go to the document, make a new layer, hit Q to turn on quick mask mode, Command V to paste, and right now it's right on top of that hydrogen gel. I'll just turn that off. I'm going to hit Q again to exit quick mask mode, I'm going to hit Shift Command I to inverse the selection, option delete to fill it, and Command D to de-select. Now, I have these lines on their own layer. The nice thing about using quick mask mode is we get a really clean cut out. If I go ahead and fill the background with a color here, you can see there's not any white that has been hung onto. It's all just clean drawn lines like we are hoping for. That's why I like doing it that way, it's a really nice way to be able to keep using your hand-drawn lines, but bring them into a digital space for use. That's what we're going to do. We're going to bring all of our drawings into our document and you can do it one at a time and compose the bouquets you go, or you can bring them all over and move them around so that you have everything on one document ready to go for when we start composing. Totally up to you but that's the process of taking your sketches and bringing them into Photoshop, so that they're usable for our illustrations. 7. Separating and Filling: Now I'd like to show you the process of how we take these scanned lines, the ones that we've separated, now we just have plain lines. How do we turn them into a colored illustration? You can see that I started over here with one of my hydrangea drawings. I wanted to show you what I'm going to be doing. Right now, this hydrangea, the one on the left, all of these shapes are connected. It's one layer. If I want to color it different colors, I'm going to have to get in there and start separating things out. You can see that these lines right here, that outline the edges of the leaves, when they're colored, they no longer have that outline. It's just the fill shape now. Whereas some of the lines, like the lines on the leaves or the lines on the hydrangea, those lines are still intact. Essentially, what we are going to be doing is using the Lasso tool to select and separate all of the shapes into different groups by what color they are going to be. This is part of the process that I know is just something I really enjoy, but I think it might help you to know that when I'm sitting down to draw, although I try to be as peaceful and mindful of it as I can be, it's not always fun for me. I find it really stressful sometimes to sit down and make art, to come up against all those things in your head that are telling you you're not good at it and what if it doesn't turn out? For me, the first part of the process of the actual drawing, although I love it, it is kind of stressful. Whereas this part, once I get into this groove, I'm not really thinking anymore, I'm just executing. I think that's why I like this process so much. But I just wanted to give you a heads up. It can be kind of overwhelming when you're doing a whole bouquet. I moved this stuff around so it's not going to make sense anymore, but I'll just show you that I started separating all my lines out like I showed you in the last class. Then, I started, remove these, I started composing everything and figuring out how I wanted my bouquet to look, which is something like this. If you're overwhelmed by all the overlapping black lines right now, I get it. It took me a while to get used to seeing things like this. Instead of showing you on something big like this, let's do it with just a vase and two flowers that I have. I think that will be a nice way to break down what we're doing. I'm going to start with this vase. My final bouquet probably isn't going to have a vase in it, I just wanted to make one for this example. I am going to do the process that we already talked about. I'm going to bring this stuff over with Quick Mask Mode. I'm just going to do a really simple composition just so that we have something to work with. I'll start with these guys. I don't know what these are. These are filler flowers that I had in that bouquet that I bought, and they are super interesting looking. It's always fun when you buy or find a new shape to draw. Remember how I said your fingers will just do the walking at some point? Now you can see that I was telling the truth. That takes four seconds to get all this stuff over here. Where's my flower? I'll do this flower. I'm pretty certain, just with the shape, that I'm going to have to scale it down, and that's okay. I'm going to cut off this leaf. I've got a rough composition. This will work for this example. Now, I actually want to color it in and use these lines. This is one of those times where if this part is maddening to you or you don't want to do this, or you don't like drawing on paper, you can always just draw these shapes right inside of Photoshop. I have a small Wacom tablet, really small. The drawing area is four by six. I could just get my brushes out and draw right inside of Photoshop, but I just find that it's not very natural for me. I can never quite get the same result as I get when I'm drawing right on paper. If that's not the case for you, then do what is best for you. I'm going to stop giving disclaimers about that. You know that you can do things your own way. Once I have a rough composition down, I like to start with just one item. I'm going to turn off everything except for this vase, and I'm going to start thinking about how I want this to be colored. I know that I want the vase itself to be one solid color, so these lines are going to start meshing with the fill. But these lines down here, I want them to look like they're etched into the glass, so I'm going to separate them so that they can be a different color from this guy. To do that, I'm just going to make sure I'm on the layer. I'm going to grab my Lasso tool by hitting L on my keyboard, zoom in a little bit, and I'm just going to go ahead and select these lines. I'm going to go ahead and hit Command X to cut it out, and then Shift Command V to paste it right in place on its own layer. Now, if we look over in the Layers panel, you can see that my vase lines are separate from my vase. Now, what I'm going to do is group each of those, so I'm going to hit Command G, and that'll group this layer. I'm going to call it Vase Lines. Then I'm going to group the layer with the vase itself and call that Vase. Now, since I know the vase is going to be a fill, I need an additional layer to actually make a shape that fills that in. I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to grab my Lasso tool again, and I'm going to go ahead and start tracing around this to make a selection. Now, I'm using the Lasso tool because it's really quick for me. I know that wherever my mouse goes, it's going to follow along faithfully. Since I'm using a Wacom tablet, I have pretty good control over what I'm doing. You can use the Pen tool. Like I said, you can just color it in with a brush, if you have a big brush. If you'd rather do it coloring book style, you can just color it in and then be careful when you get to the edges. It's really however you want to do it. I'm using the Lasso tool because that's what I'm comfortable with. I'm noticing something though, and it's actually good that it happened because I know I got a lot of questions about it in my first class. Do you see, as I move this around, there's this little gray area right here that's following along with it? Those are leftover pixels. This is what I was talking about with Quick Mask Mode. If the background of your paper isn't full white, it's going to think that you want to keep some of the information from these pixels. You can see that if I turn on, I'm going to go over here to lock transparent pixels, and that makes it so I can only color on the pixels that are on this layer. You can see if I grab a red and grabbed my brush, it's going to lie because I'm not on the right layer. There we go. You can see that it's only coloring my lines red because it's only coloring what's on that layer. But if I go over here, that gray area is now turning pink because I'm coloring over it with a red brush. Even though it's really faint, it is something that could show up. If you notice that you've got stuff left over like that, I'll just grab my eraser and erase around it. If you're worried that something is there, you can also hit Command T on the layer in question, and the bounding box should stop at the bounds of the drawn lines, which it's doing over here. Do you see how it's extending past into the left and above up here? That means there's probably leftover pixels that I'm not fully able to see, so I'm just going to get in and make sure I erase all of those. Hit Command T again, and I'm getting closer. That's pretty good. I just wanted to show you that in case you run across it. I'm going to hit Command, or no. I guess I'll just paint it. I want to paint this back to black so that everything is uniform. Now, I'm going to go back to this extra layer that is just going to be my fill layer. The reason I'm doing it on a different layer instead of right on the vase is just so that I can keep things non-destructive. Right now, I think that I just want the vase to be a plain color fill, but later if I end up wanting to use the lines, by doing it this way and having the fill on a separate layer, I still have access to all of that. I've got all of that selected, and now I'm just going to go ahead and fill that shape in. I can see that I missed a few areas. I'll clean those up. I'm just using the space bar to pan around my document. You just hold it down and your tool will temporarily change to the hand tool, and then when you're done using it, you can let go of the space bar and it'll go back to the tool you were using beforehand. Clean all this up. The benefit of doing it this way, having all this stuff in a group called vase is now whenever I want to edit the colors, it's super easy. All I'm going to do is with the group selected and closed, I'm going to go down to my Adjustment Layer and I'm going to select Solid Color. I'll pick whatever color I want for now, I'll pick a blue. What I'm going to do is hold Option or Alt on my keyboard and hover in between this fill in this group to apply a clipping mask. Basically what we just did is we put a solid color that was taking up this whole area. By doing a clipping mask, we said, "We only want you to be visible when you're masked to the shape below you." So that's all of that stuff that we just filled in. You can see if I turn the fill layer off, then it's still going to apply it to the lines and vice versa. If I turn the lines off and only have the fill, it'll color those. This will make more sense when you have your full bouquet, but as you're finalizing your colors, if you decide to totally change your color scheme and you want to red vase, it's not you don't have to go in and repaint or do any of that stuff. You can just do it in one click. That's why I set it up that way. Now these baselines, I can either do the same thing and make it a quick. I can go to solid color. I'll pick a lighter color. I'm going to make sure right now the color solid is inside of this group and I want it on top of the group. So I'm going to click and drag it on top of the group and close it. Then same thing, hold down Option or Alt. Do you see how my cursor has changed from just the finger to that arrow with a box? I have this little arrow letting me know it's clipping right to the group below it. Sure enough, my line's changed colors. It might seem a little heavy-handed if you just have one item in a group to do it that way. I still do it, but if you want a quicker or if you want something less heavy, you can just turn on that lock transparent pixels again, and then just color over what you want. I've got my color, it can go in here and you can see that I get the same result. But then if I wanted to change those colors, I would have to go in and re-color over it. It wouldn't be just one-click. It's up to you how you want to do it. I really like using these clipping mask adjustment layers with color solids because it's so quick and it keeps everything organized. I'm going to keep going, finish this one up. Let's do this guy next. Remember, what we're doing here is we're separating the shapes that we want to all be one color and grouping them. I want this leaf to be separate from those dots. I go in and grab these leaves, separate from the stem. Command x, Shift Command V, and make a group. And I'm going to call this one Leaves. Then what I like to do is I like to turn off the group so that I can see what I've grabbed already and what I haven't. Now I'll go up here. I'm using the lasso tool to trim that dot away from the leaf. Around only take what I want. If you make a mistake, if you need to add or subtract from the selection, so you see how this line isn't really clean? Up here, the second one in where these two boxes are the same color is going to add to your selection. Right here, this is going to subtract from your selection. You can toggle those by hitting, do you see how there's a plus sign next to my laser right now? If I hit "Option" or "Alt", it changes to a minus sign. And so you can also toggle back and forth between your add to and subtract from. I think if you are just on regular, I think you can access the add to yeah, by hitting shift. Shift and option or Alt are how you get to your Add to and Subtract from. Right now, I'm going to go ahead and add to this selection to clean up that line and you can see that it adjusted that for me. "Command X", "Shift Command V" to paste and I'm going to drag it into that leaves group and I'm going to move on. If you come across when after you do your cutout, if you notice you missed some things, all you have to do is go in there and curve them out, "Shift Command X" or "Command Shift", "Command V" and then add it back to that layer or to that group. That's why having all like a group to throw all of these items then is really nice because it just keeps things organized and you know that everything that's in that group is going to be colored the same way so you don't really have to worry about, like, I don't have to go through and name all these layers now as long as I know that the group is named spiky, fill flower or something I'll know what it is. All the leaves are separate from the stems and these black guys and I just want to do one more separation. I want us to have this stem be separate from these little dots. I'll put it in a group called Stem and I'm going to put these dots in a group called Dots. Then to keep things ultra organized, because now you can see we're going to get a lot of groups and a lot of clipping masks. I'll start grouping all of this for the items that they are. All of this stuff, if I shift click and group, this is all part of the vase. All of these three that I just made are part of the fill flower. We've got everything separated now we need to go in and the only thing I need to fill for the fill shapes here are the leaves. So I'm going to go into the leaves folder. I'm going to make a new layer inside of there and this is where I'm going to draw and fill in all of those shapes. I'm going to keep going, but I'll show you once again. Do you see how my leaves group is closed? I'm adding a solid color right on top of it. I will change it to this. Then I'm going to hold down Option or Alt and hover ray between those two layers and click and now that color was applied to it. I'm going to turn those off for now and take care of the flower just so that I can finish up this demo and show you what's going on. But this is the whole process and when you do your whole big bouquet, actually, I will just finish this off. No point in rushing. When you do your big bouquet, it doesn't get any harder than this. It's just the same thing over and over. Like I said, it's just the tedious work. I've had students in the past ask why I work this way and like I said, I just like drawing on paper better. Even though there are so many excellent Photoshop brushes out there, like I love using Photoshop brushes for texture. I have no qualms about that, but there's just something with me that I like knowing that these lines were hand-drawn on paper and by my hands and you might not care about that. You might just want to draw in whatever ways most efficient. That's totally cool. That makes a lot of sense to be efficient. I think that's why I love Skillshare altogether is lots of people teach classes on the same topics, but you learn things in new ways because everybody does something differently. I think that's pretty cool. I went a little overboard here. Do you see how this selection is outside of that? So I'm going to subtract, hold down Option. I get that out of there and same here. I didn't finish my thought. But anyway, there are lots of great Photoshop brushes, but I just feel like none of them truly capture the character of a pen or the way my hand moves. Maybe I'll change my tune once I do have an iPad Pro because you can look at right what you're drawing at with my setup, with my WACOM. My hand, where it's drawing is not where I'm looking. I think that disconnection is really takes its toll on my work. Maybe I'll change my mind when I have better tools. But I think if you can do something with what you have, then you should. Getting a little sloppy here. Since this is just the practice, I'm not going to worry about being too perfect. I just want to show you I am doing this. Now lastly, for the flower, you see how nice it is to just be able to change things on the fly like that. Since I have overlapping lines here, I'm going to go ahead and turn this off just so that I can see what I'm doing and I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to separate the stuff into groups based on what color the final things will be or what things will be colored the same, I should say. See all these little imperfections, these little waves. I can't recreate those in a digital space really, which is why I value the hand-drawn line so much. At least for me making art, it's not about getting it done as efficiently as I can, it's about finding a little bit of joy and pride in what you're doing and finding a process that makes you feel good and and that's what this is for me. You see my solid was inside of my group instead of on top of it. There we go. That's what we're going to be doing. That is the whole process. Once you bring everything over and you've composed it, you just use the lasso tool or whatever selection tool you want to start separating things out into how you want them. Then putting them in groups based on what's going to all be colored the same. Then going through and doing it for each item. So I'm going to close out this video. In the next video, I'm going to be doing the same process, but I'm going to do it with my actual bouquet. You're going to see me working through composing it when I'm working with a lot of items like that and how I manage all of that. See you in the next class. 8. Making My Bouquet Demo Pt. 1: As I said in the last video, this video is fully dedicated to me doing the process I just showed you of separating the lines and how to do your color fills and composing your bouquet, but I'm going to do it for my full bouquet instead of just a few flowers. This video is going to be a bit longer and I'm going to be time-lapsing the parts that I'm not talking so that it's kind of speed up. You can view the video slower in the video player on skill share, there's a little button that has the speed. It says 1X by default, but you can slow that down if you need to. But I want to show you a few of the techniques I'm going to be using so that you're not confused during the video, if you're curious how I flipped something or how I rotate it or move it around. I want to show you all of that stuff upfront. I do want to let you know that I'm going to be changing the way I do things a little bit. Usually what I do is I start building my bouquet, with my form flowers or my focal points. So that's these bigger guys, whereas this one, this dianhtus is just kind of aside guy, so I wouldn't start with him. You know, these are sort of the stars of the show. I'll start bringing the stars of the show over in building my bouquet until I have something that looks like this. If this is hurting your brain to look at, I totally get it. When I first started doing this process, I could not deal with this. It was too much for me to see what I was looking at. But now I'm at the point where this is how I can build it out. And then I go in and color everything one by one. But I'm not going to do this to you. I'm not going to expect you to see what I'm looking at when you look at this jumble of lines. Instead, I'm going to bring over one flower at a time, separating the lines, setting up the color fills, and then building the composition that way so that as I build out my bouquet, you can actually see like what's in front of everything, but it's up to you how you want to do it. If you want to bring a flower over, separate it and color it and do that one at a time. Or if you just want to bring all of your lines over and get the composition done, and then go in there and start filling everything in and applying all of the colors where they belong and all of that stuff. It's totally up to you. When I was looking at my inspiration, I told you earlier I'm not really following any bouquet that I wasn't inspired by because I brought home a bouquet of flowers and the flowers alone, are enough for me to build off. Take a look at your inspiration and try to pinpoint how the form flowers are the ones that sort of take your focal point. Are they clustered together? Or are they spaced apart with lots of foliage in between? Or is there only one focal point and the rest is filler or are there lots of focal points? Take a look at that because that's what's going to help you compose what you're doing. When I started off, a lot of my bouquets were very tight. All the focal points were very tightly bloomed together and I had some fillers coming out. Lately I've been experimenting more with having space, having more foliage, having kind of creating eye-line with the focal points. So play around with that. Those are the things I'm going to be thinking about while I'm composing my bouquet, I'm looking at the space between my focal points. I'm looking for areas where foliage is needed or another line, and I'm just kind of letting my intuition guide me on where things need to be. Let me just grab something really quickly to bring over. Here are the commands that I want to show you. First of all when I zoom in and out of my canvas, I'm doing that by hitting Command or Control plus or minus on my keyboard. That enables me to zoom in and out in steps like that. If you ever see me smoothly zooming like this, I'm doing that by hitting Command and then the space bar and holding those down and then dragging my mouse left or right. If I do command space, you can see that's also the keyboard shortcut for the spotlight search on my computer, which I use sometimes, if you see that pop up, that's why as I click and drag to the right, it zooms in and you can see it's a very smooth zoom, and as I drag to the left, it's going to zoom out for me. that's how I do my smooth zoom. Then my brushes, if I'm ever using a brush and you see it get bigger or smaller on the screen. I'm using my left and right bracket keys on my keyboard to do that. The right bracket key is going to make it bigger. The left bracket key is going to make it smaller. Right now I have a fully hard brush. The edges are hard, but if I hold down Shift and then turn, hit the left bracket key, you can see that I'm able to also play around with the softness and the hardness by hitting Shift and then the bracket keys. Shifting to the right is going to harden and shifting to the left is going to soften a brush. That's how I'm doing that. I think the only other things you need to know is if I hit Command T on my keyboard, that puts this object into transform mode. That means I can rotate it, it means I can scale it and I'm going to scale it and keep its proportions intact by holding down Shift. While I do that, you can see that if I don't hold down Shift, then I can make it kind of wonky, which sometimes that's good if you need to adjust your drawing, but I like to keep my proportions intact, so I hold down Shift. Another thing that you can do while you're in transform mode is you can right-click. You see I have this flip horizontal and flip vertical. That's how I need to mirror things, that's how I do that. One thing you should know is that when you're in transform mode, you can't do anything else. you'll see that all of my stuff, I don't have access to it right now. The way that I exit transform mode when I'm done is I hit "enter" or "return" on my keyboard, and then I have access to everything again. That is what I'm going to be doing. Like I said, I'm going to be speeding through it, so it's not in real time because it would be very, slow. For parts when I am talking through what I'm doing, I'll be sure to stop and put a note in to let you know that I'm talking about something. I'm starting with my high drain job because it's one of the bigger flowers I drew. With all of these leaves in the background, I know that I'm going to have a lot of flowers on top of it. I think it makes sense to start here because I kind of want this hydrangea to be the center most flower and then I'm going to have my other ones around it. Since I use the black lines, I keep a lot of these lines to use as black accent lines. I often will start there because that's the easiest place for my eyes to see with separating this stuff. Since I have leaves attached to this flower, I think I want to actually separate the leaves from hydrangea the drawing at first. I think that's going to make my life easier. Now that I have the first flower in and I'm ready to bring in a second. I'm going to start composing. Do you see how right now I'm on this layer that has the flower on it but if I click over here and drag, it's going to make a liar out of me. Basically, right now I have auto select layer on which means if I click on a layer, it's going to jump right to that layer. I usually toggle that on and off because sometimes I want it to happen, but sometimes I just want it to stay on the layer that I just brought in. Little trick, but you're going to see that I'm going to start leaving some space. Obviously I can't know if this is the right place of this flower yet. Because I'm just starting the composition, but I just like to get things roughly in their position that I think would look nice and then flesh it out as I go. One thing I want to mention is I'm not really paying too much attention to color right now. These are probably the three colors I'm going to stick with for the rest of the illustration at this point just so that I can see something. Personally, if I start to get too hung up on color right now, then it's really hard to focus on just the composition, so I'm using colors that I can at least bear to look at right now, but I know that they probably aren't going to stick around like that. The nice thing about doing it this way of coloring the flowers in one at a time is by the time you're done composing it, you're have done pretty much all the work. Whereas here by the time I'm done composing it, I still have to then go in and do all of this work. Just depends on how you like to work, I guess. Sometimes in this instance, it's going to get confusing for me in there to know what I need from this flower. In those cases, I just temporarily turn everything off by hitting the visibility. I poking the eye out on these. 9. Making My Bouquet Demo Pt. 2: I want to reiterate that, although this is my style of how I do it, my signature style, if you look at all of my illustration work, I like these fills that have black lines on top of them, but that's just me. I want you to explore. I'm using black lines, but you could try colored lines. Even if I change these lines on this flower to pink, you can see that I'm getting a totally different and really cool result. Even cooler, I can change these lines to white, and then it looks like they're cut out of the flower. Just because you're seeing me do it this one way over and over, please don't get stuck into that and think that that's what you need to do. Because this is me, this is Dylan M style. But you need to do your style because only you can bring things out how you like them and how they're going to look. Keep moving along here. You can see that it's starting to come along. You can see that just slowly. But surely, I'm just trying to arrange these layers to be where they should be, and moving flowers around. Again, not paying too much attention to color, but just trying to see, am I going to want all of these flowers to be the same in contrast with the hydrangea, or as I start making it doesn't make sense for some of these flowers to be a different color? Those are the decisions I'm making. I'm really right now and just looking over all the composition of where these flowers are placed. Do you see how I'm creating this little eye line and that's what I like. I know that the rest of this is going to be filled out with other leaves, and then there's also going to be some of my filler flowers too. But there's a very good chance that that stuff is going to be moved around anyway. I'm just making guesses as I go. But that's also the best part of working, and exactly why I like having analog and digital part to my workflow. Because to me, nothing can substitute the look of drawing on actual paper and the joy of drawing on paper and everything. But at the same time, nothing really beats the flexibility of working digitally and getting to change your colors and your composition and your sizes and all of that. That's why I like to employ both. Like I said, this process to me that I'm doing right now, I just get in the zone with it. I find that when I'm doing this, I'm not really worrying about things. I'm not worrying about how this is going to turn out because I already know, I drew some really great flowers. I know I'm going to find a bouquet out of this. It's really just relieving to me to do things this way. I hope that as you make your floral illustration, whether it's a big full bouquet like this are just the few blooms. I hope that you're enjoying it too and that it's not a stressful thing. That it's just the same few commands over and over. Nothing too crazy. Then using your imagination to figure out where you want things to be. Now this one's a little different. I'm not cutting out any of the lines for this one. I just want the lines to be as they are, and then I just drew the shape of what the fill is going to be. I'll do different colors, as you can see. You can see I just use my Lasso Tool to draw how I want that fill shape to look. Another thing that's nice about drawing everything separately is that you're not locked into a single composition. If I had drawn all of this exactly like this on my paper, then the behind this flower wouldn't exist because I wouldn't have drawn these leaves behind here. My main point is just to say that since we drew these separately, I have endless bouquets I can make from these same drawings. Not that I reuse a lot of my drawings a lot, let's say I was working on a bouquet and realize that I needed, sorry, sometimes it is hard to talk while doing something else. If I was doing bouquet and realized that I needed a certain leaf shape and didn't want to draw it or found that I had the exact one I wanted in a past drawing, then I'm able to recycle that and use it again in a brand new contexts, so it gives you more flexibility. If you draw a composition that you hate, then it's a waste. Whereas if you just draw some flowers and some foliage that you like, like picking out stems of flowers at a flower shop, then you can keep using all of those pieces. Just one more time, just wanted to explain that this process that I'm doing right now of retracing some of these shapes to fill them in. If I weren't doing it this way, let's say I didn't care about the hand-drawn look and I weren't using my lines and all of that stuff, I would still have to take the time to do a process like this. Even if I weren't doing this, I would probably still have to use the Pen tool or use some type of drawing tool to get my shapes out. You still have to make the shapes no matter what. I just happen to like to use the hand-drawn line. So this happens to be the tool that I used. If you start to feel like, "Oh, this is taking a long time." That's because it takes a long time to create artwork. You may notice that even though both of these items that fill in the outline for these leaves are in the same folder, that means they're going to be colored the same, just like I was saying, I don't have any black accent lines that are going to be coming out of that. But you'll notice that I still did the fill on a separate layer from those outlines because I still want to work non-destructively in case I want to keep these outlines here. In fact, at the end of this class, just as a little bonus, I'm going to show you how you can, by working this way, then take this artwork and make a coloring sheet out of it, a black and white coloring sheet. That's an option too. Also, one thing I should mention that you will love to hear hopefully, is that, at the beginning of the class, when I show you finding inspiration and paying attention to form flowers and filler flowers and all of that, that's really just to give you an idea if you're completely clueless as to where to start. I didn't start really doing that until I started to run out of ideas for bouquets. I felt all my bouquets started to look the same. That's when I started looking at that. But really flowers, once you start gathering them together, they bring their own magic. We can talk about how, we have some form flowers here and some filler here. But really it's just like they're so gorgeous when they come together. It's hard to mess it up. Don't over-complicate or make it seem like there is this scientific method to making these because there isn't, it's just, you're bringing these beautiful things together, and they're going to do the work for you. Another keyboard shortcut that you might find helpful. I do not know if you noticed when I was first making this filler flower, it was the top group on top of everything.You can see the stem is on top of this high drain, joined on top of this leaf, which is not what I want. You can always click and drag to move things around but sometimes it can get tricky. If you are trying to move fast, you might accidentally drop something inside of another group instead of beneath or above it. If you hit Command or Control left and right back bracket, that is going to move your group or your layer up and down one. The only thing that you want to be weary of if you are using this is: let us say this main peony, I'm going to ungroup this for a second, If I were to move this filler one group down at one point it would get in-between this color solid and the group that it is clipped to. If I move down, it just broke that clipping mask. You just want to make sure that if you are doing this, that you are organized and that you have things in folders like this you can move them seamlessly up and down. I have done a big design that I just realized that I have not yet saved. I'm working on an untitled document, which is not what we want. Make sure you take the time to save your stuff okay, Demo [inaudible] Save early, save often. I'm now getting to a point where I need to start adding in the finishing touches with leaves that are going to fill out this area back here. The nice thing about leaf shapes like this is that I just drew one but I can reuse this multiple times because it is filling out the background, and you can already see that just by drawing, I have these leaves down here look similar. These ones are a little different in the way of the high drain to leaves, and the we have classic leaf shapes back here, and you can see that it really does a lot for the drawing. Just to fill it out. To copy that I just hit "Command J" and I duplicated the group Command T move the stuff around. If you are having a hard time bringing it all together, if something is not working, try a squint test. If you try squinting at work, your brain can pick up on things that you were not seeing if you are giving it your full attention, so I recommend that too. That is where I'm going to stop for now because I think I gave you a full-blown idea of what it takes to get here. At this point is when you can start having fun you now that everything is colored. You could go ahead and do a completely different bouquet. In fact if you want to do that, I will show you quickly. Let us say that this is one version of this bouquet but I want to test it out in other ways and I don't want to lead you all that work. I can start a new document and transfer this stuff to the new document, all you have to do is click and drag. Let us say I wanted to, I will bring everything over to show you, I just shift click, so I clicked on one hold down Shift and click on the bottom to select all of these. I'm going to click and drag and bring them to my new document and drop them in there. Sometimes it does not always place it in the right spot but now all of those working files is an exact copy of everything you did. If you wanted to try again that is how you can do that. Now that I'm here, I am going to start thinking about final color decisions. We are going to start adding texture and we are almost done. 10. Color & Texture: Now that we have our compositions figured out, we are almost done with our illustrations. The last step are picking our final colors and should you choose to adding some texture. The reason my drawing right now looks like a 1980's dream is because I'm actually going to temporarily move my work into Illustrator to use the Recolor Artwork tool. In order to do that, I'm going to have to image trace my artwork. Then in order for image trace to work correctly, I need all of these colors to be vastly different from each other so if these were all closely colored, like if I had three different shades of green and a yellow that was close to that green that I might find that when I go to image trace it, Illustrator has a hard time doing that. Since this is just a temporary moved to use the Recolor Artwork tool anyway, I really don't want to have any headaches when I'm doing that. I just wanted to be as quick as possible. As I said all of these two different colors so that image trace can see that this blue is very different from this green, so they must be different groups and then I just go ahead and save this as a JPEG. You go to save as a JPEG and can call this Color Testing or whatever I want and I'm going to hit "Save." Then I'm going to hop over to Illustrator. It doesn't matter what size document you have or any of that stuff because like I said, we're just temporarily using this. I'm going to go to File and Place. I'll find my color testing JPEG, and I'm going to click and drag and bring it in here. I'm not going to go too in depth with image tracing because again, we don't really care about the quality of the trace, we really just want to make sure that the colors come over well. I'm going to go up to Window and Image Trace. The first thing is if this preview box is checked, you want to uncheck it because we're going to be playing around with some of this stuff. If the preview box is checked, then it's going to try and update and live trace after every single change you make and it can be a little bit annoying. So for right now, turn that off. The first thing I'm going to do is check this, Ignore White box. Then I'm going to go up to Mode, change it to Color, and then I'm in the color box I'm going to change this to a much lower number. Now, without white, I have six colors here, five bright colors, and then the sixth one being black. But I'm not going to set this to six because experience shows me an Illustrator that it's better to start with a higher number and then reduce it down yourself. Let's do eight and see what that does for us. In order to do it, and I'll just go ahead and hit "Preview." This can take awhile. You might get a little dialogue box saying, "Warning large images may proceed slowly." You can just say "Okay", and there's a little checkbox to say, "don't warn me again" so that's why mine didn't pop up. But this is going to do its thing and we'll see how it looks when it's done. It looks like it did a pretty good job. Again, I don't care that some of these black lines are a lot thinner, it doesn't look that great. But again, I don't care about that, I'm just using it for the colors and it looks like it was able to keep all the colors in there. I'm going to go up here to Expand, so now it's a working group of vectors. I'm going to ungroup it by hitting Shift Command G or you can go up to Object and Ungroup. Now, what was once a flat JPEG are now editable pads in Illustrator. I want to do a quick test though to make sure that there aren't any extra colors in here. I only want the six that I'm trying to work with. A cool way to test how many colors are in your artwork is to select all of it. Open your Swatches Panel. If you don't have this, you can go up to Window and Swatches. Then down here, this little folder icon, the New Color Group button you can select that and you can ask it to create a new color group from the selected artwork. I'm going to hit "Okay." You can see that there's more than six colors here. It did a great job with the yellow, the pink, the green, the blue, and the light blue, but with the black and had a hard time differentiating between these two colors. We're going to use the Recolor Artwork tool to reduce the colors manually. With this selected, I'm going to go ahead and hit the Recolor Artwork tool button, which is it looks like a color palette up here. A quick note, make sure that your artwork is off to the side because once you're in this mode, you can't move around on your document anymore. So have it off to the side and click that and this is what the Recolor Artwork tool looks like. I've talked about this in some of my other classes in the pattern play class combining Illustrator and Photoshop. If you're a repeat student, I don't want to keep beating you over the head with the same information. You can either check out that class or Bonnie Christine has a class all about this tool. If you want more information, you can find it that way. But just a brief overview, essentially what's happening here is Illustrator saying, okay, these are all the colors that are in your document right now and this is the area where you can change those colors. I can change them by clicking and dragging, I can double-click on them and pick a whole new color from the color picker what have you. That's what is happening here. To reduce the colors, essentially what we're going to do is we're going to set the colors that need to be reduced to the same color. Right now, instead of being a black, it's a very dark green and instead of being a black, it's a very dark blue. It doesn't matter which one I pick, I just want them to be the same. What I'm going do is I'm going to click and drag from this left area where the current colors are and I'm going to drop it on top of where that blue is. Now both of those colors that were once separate are now set to the same thing in the new color palette. So I can hit "Okay." I'm going to do this again. I'm going to add a swatch group and hit "Okay" and now you can see that sure enough it reduced those colors, so now I'm only dealing with six. The last thing I wanna do is I want to set, I can tell that this color isn't actually black, it's a dark green and I want to set it fully to black and I'll show you why in a second. I have one of the items that's that dark color selected and I'm going to go up to Select, Same, Fill Color. Everything that is that dark color in the artwork is selected and I can choose my color picker and I'm going to set it to full black. I'm going to go ahead and grab my Rectangle tool over here and just click and drag out a little rectangle, set it to a color, send it to the back by hitting Shift Command left bracket and now I'm ready to play around with the recolor tools. I'm going to grab all of this, select everything, go back into my Recolor Artwork tool. Now you can see the reason I wanted to set that to pure black. In my settings which I can access right here, I have preserved white and black checked, which means anytime that something is full black or full white, it's not going to add it into this lineup to be shuffled around, which is good. I want my black lines to stay black. If you do have black or white artwork and you want it to be included in here, all you have to do is click in this area and it'll ask you if you want to add that color to the current color harmony, which you can say yes, I'm going to say no because I don't want that. Here is where the magic happens. This little button right here is going to randomly change the order of these colors. Which means it's going to start recoloring our artwork and give us some options at random. That's pretty cool, if you have a color palette that you really like, but you don't like the placement. This gives you a really nice way to just click and drag or cycle through some new options to see what you're going to like. But what's really awesome is with all of your color swatch groups over here, you can click on one of them and you can see that that was applied to this column. Now I can start cycling through whole different color palettes to see what I like. It's so much fun you guys, you really get some ideas for things that you may not have tried on your own. This is the reason I've been able to get better with color and start to make better color decisions because of this tool alone. A few things, if you are manually clicking and dragging your stuff around and you see that there are more colors in this palette over here that aren't showing up here, all you have to do is continue to click this new row button until all the colors from that palette are showing and then you have access to all of them. Let me grab one of my really big, like this palette right here has a ton of colors in it, but right now it's only showing six because that's how many I have in my illustration. But if I hit this plus button a number of times, you can see it'll add all of those colors in there until I'm out. Now as I'm clicking and dragging, I can switch these colors in if I want to. But when I'm actually using this, when I'm going through my workflow, what I'll do is if I come across something I like, I'll go ahead and take a screenshot of it on a Mac, you do that by hitting Shift Command 3. I am not sure of how to do it on a PC, but if you Google it, I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out and then I'll keep moving forward. Once I find another one I like, I'll take another screenshot and keep going. Keep in mind that as you're cycling through this, there's no back button. If you're Speedy Gonzales and you're clicking through these really quickly and you see when you like and think, oh, what was that? I want to go back to it, you can't. So you want to be a little bit careful when you're going through this and make sure that if you like something, you take a screenshot of it before moving on. This other button, which looks very similar to the one we are clicking, doesn't just change the color, it changes the saturation and the brightness of the colors two at random. So I don't ever use this because then you get really random stuff and it's really, really hard to control it. I like to have color swatch groups that I know I already liked together and then I just cycle through to find something that I like. Once you're done, you can hit "Cancel" or "Okay", whatever you want to recolor the artwork. For some reason I will ask if you want to update the swatches group and I don't actually know what it's going to update because we haven't changed any of the colors. But just to be safe, I say no. Then you can see that you've got your colors there. Once you have a palette you like, you can go ahead and just like for me, if I don't like this at all, don't worry, I don't have terrible taste. But if I did like this and I wanted to apply it to my Photoshop document, all I would do is select one color at a time. Go in here, copy the hexadecimal value, and then go back to my Photoshop document, find where all those areas are, and then enter that in. I have already done that. I found a color palette I really liked and I already applied it. By the way, if you want some tips for how to narrow down all your color choices, I'll make a folder called color options, and I'll put all my screenshots in there. Then I'll put a folder in there called Best. That's where all as I'm going through these, if I come across one, I really like, I'll click and drag it into my best folder. Then I'll continue to do that process until I haven't narrowed down to just a few. Then I'll bite the bullet and pick which one is my favorite. If you need help with narrowing down all those awesome color choices, there you have it. We're to the last step which is adding texture. I want to show you two ways that I add texture. One way is with brushes, and one way is with images that have texture on them. The brushes I am using are by Kyle T. Webster. These used to be something that you would just buy. You'd go to his site and pay $7 for a whole pack of them and then install them into Photoshop. But recently he was bought out by Adobe. Now, his brushes are just part of the Creative Cloud membership, which is excellent. If you already have a Creative Cloud membership, then you're already paying for the brushes and you can access those. The downside is if you don't have the Creative Cloud, you no longer have a way to purchase those brushes from him. But fear not, don't be sad, even though Kyle Webster's brushes are amazing. Lots of people make brushes and lots of people make amazing brushes. Do a quick Google search for Texture Photoshop brushes or artistic Photoshop brushes, and you'll find plenty of stuff that you're looking for. To use the brushes, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make a copy of all of this by shift clicking to select it all, hitting Command J to make a copy, and then grouping that by hitting command G. I'm going to call this group save this. I'm going to turn off the visibility by poking out the I and then I'm going to drag it beneath everything so that I just know that I've got a working file with all of my layers down there. I don't have to worry about destroying these. What we're going to do is we're going to take these groups. I'm going to start with these leaves down here, sorry, the hydrangea leaves. Instead of having a group with a bunch of layers in it and a color fill. We're going to condense this all and merge it into one single layer. This is why we have a copy down here, because if we didn't have this copy, we would effectively be destroying the working layer that we have. I'm going to hold down shift and click this. I've got both of them selected and I'm going to right-click and go to merge layers. Now, you can see this is all just one layer with artwork on it, and I'm ready to go. There are two ways you can paint it. You can either paint right on top of this layer. I'm going to go to where it says Lock, in where we see this checkerboard that's going to lock my transparent pixels. You can see that even though I'm coloring from left to right, it's only staying within the confines of where those pixels are on that layer. I could go ahead and just take a darker green. I could go around here and add some shading to that leaf. I don't have to worry about coloring on this other stuff or coloring outside of the bounds. I'm all set. The only downside of doing it this way is if you change your mind later or you don't like the brush, or you want to change the color, you have to go in and fully repaint this. I'd have to set this color back to green. I'd have to pick what shade color I want and then go in and do it all again because I was working destructively. Sometimes I work that way. If I know that what I'm doing is really quick and I don't mind repainting over it. If I don't like it, then I'll do it that way. But another way to do it that can save you some hassle is to make a new layer on top of the layer that you want to paint. Instead of locking the transparent pixels, I am going to hold down command or control. I am going to click on the thumbnail for the layer that has the artwork on it. When I do that, you can see that it automatically selects everything that is on that layer. On my new layer that's above it, I can do the same thing. I can go ahead and paint. It's going to stay within the confines of that selection. But now instead of painting right on top of that layer, you can see that it's separate. If I change my mind down the line, I didn't destroy that layer beneath it. What's even cooler is if I set this layer that has the brushstrokes on it to lock transparent pixels. Now, I can even change the color of the shading on the fly. I'm going to pick a really out there colors so that it's easy to see. Do you remember when we were in Quick Mask Mode, Option or Delete is the hotkey to fill the layer that you're on with the foreground. Since we have this lock on, it's only going to fill where there are pixels, so I'm going to hit option delete. All of that is to say that look, the color is applied only to where we have pixels on the layer. This is a really nice way to go in and get to play around with colors and change them on the fly. Those are your two options. You can either color right on the layer or on top of it. By making a selection from the layer that you are trying to stay within. You can paint some texture. Just like with the separating video, I'm going to show you how to do this. Then in a separate video, I'll have the time-lapse of me actually going in and adding the texture to this. But I just wanted to show you how I'm doing it first. Those are brushes, the other way that you can add texture. This is cool because you can create your own textures. I will link to a class in an Skillshare where I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but he has a really great class on making textures, but you can buy them too. I have this concrete Essentials Pack, which I'm pretty sure was just a free download from Creative Market or something like that. Essentially, I have this folder of rasters, which are just JPEGS that have all these really nice black and white textures on them. Since they're already perfectly in black and white, that means we can use Quick Mask Mode to quickly get these black speckles into Photoshop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click and drag to bring this into Photoshop. We are going to do our quick mask process. I'm going to hit Command A and that's going to select everything that's on the page. I don't know if you can see it because it's small, but I have marching ants going around the perimeter. We're going to hit Command C to copy. Go over to my working file. We're going to make a new layer. I'm going to set my foreground and background back to the defaults by hitting D, hit Q to enter Quick Mask Mode, paste, exit Quick Mask Mode, inverse the selection, fill the selection and deselect. Now, we have all these black speckles on there. That looks cool, but it's a little overdone. What we can do is a few things. First, I'm going to change the blend mode to be Overlay. That takes these black speckles and it changes them so that they're just being overlaid on top of our artwork. But that's still pretty intense. I don't want it all over the place. What I'm going to do is I am going to add a mask. What masks do in Photoshop is they either conceal or reveal pixels. Right now, I have this layer that has all these shapes on it. All of these pixels. I've added a mask to it, but that mask is essentially empty. It's painted with white, which means that it's revealing everything on that layer. But if I paint it black, so right now black is my foreground color with my mask selected, I'm going to hit option delete to fill it. You can see that all disappeared. I no longer have any texture. Well, the texture is still there, the layer is still protected. We pretty much just put a mask over it so it's not showing. What I can do is I can switch my foreground color back to white. Now, I can just use my paint brush to paint white in here to paint where I want that texture to be. Essentially what I'm doing is I'm not using a brush to paint the texture on here. I'm using a brush to tell this mask where we want pixels to be revealed. You can see where I painted white in this little layer preview over here is exactly where the texture from this layer is shining through. That's a fun way to add texture into. Let's say I want some more texture on these leaves back here. I can keep painting. Then if I accidentally do too much, let's say I paint off the side and I decide I don't want this texture to be here. All I have to do is switch my color back to black, make sure I'm on my mask and I can just paint over to reconcile those pixels. That's a really nice way to work too. Go ahead and play around with texture and guys, once you're done, that's it. You've got your beautiful flower bouquet, illustration all ready to go. You can have prints made, you can have cards made, you can do anything you want with it. Then the best part, once you're done with one, you can start another one. 11. Coloring My Bouquet Demo: Just like in my earlier demo video, there's not going to be a lot of talking in this, but when I do pause to talk about something in-between the time lapses, I'll be sure to put a note on the Skillshare video player so that you can see it, so that if you don't want to watch the whole demo or you're just going back to try and find something I said, it'll be easier for you to reference. I'm going to play around a little bit more than I usually do. I do a pretty basic shading each time, like my shading on my flowers is pretty consistent throughout my illustrations, so it's usually pretty quick. But since I want to show you how I'm using the brushes and different things you can do, I just want to try and experiment a little bit more. Just keep that in mind if you look at my finished project, if it looks different than what I'm doing here, it's because I just want to play around and really try some stuff out. One trick I want to make sure I show you right off the bat is that you can use these brushes as an eraser. You can see that right now I'm using this really disheveled a racer. If I shade too much and want to get rid of it, if I use just a regular eraser, you can see I'm going to get a hard line and that's not what I want. With my brush selected, you can see my cursor is a brush. I can go up to Mode and select "Clear." Now it's going to have the same characteristics as the brush, but it's going to erase the pixel, so that's good to know. What I just did was I painted, I was working on this flower and I have the shading on a separate layer. I changed the color of it, so I turned on the lock transparent pixels, and then I picked this darker cool color, and did the option Delete that I showed you from the last video. I filled those pixels on that layer with that color. I wanted to go back in and start painting again, but nothing was showing up. After you use the lock transparent pixels, if you need to then add additional pixels to the layer, you need to make sure you turn it off. If you run into that issue where you're switching back and forth between having this locked and unlocked, and you go to brush and it's not working, just check that out, that could be the culprit. I'm going to stop there, I've already gone past what I usually like. I do like some texture, but I don't like a bunch of grand genus, but I just wanted to show you that you can try some things out and if they don't work, you can get rid of them. But It's fun to just explore these different brushes. I don't know if I said this earlier, but they're all in a new place because I just reuploaded them recently, and so it's still taking me a while to find them, but I do like the Spatter 1 and Spatter Punk. I really like the Chalk Meister from his drawing box, that's a really nice one. I love all the runny and ready Inkers, they're really cool, and his Oil Rich, wherever those are. I saw those around here somewhere, his Oil Rich one and over here, Oil-Rich and Oil-Rich B, those are nice, but there's a lot of stuff. There is Add Grain, I did that, one of them I think was the add grain. You can see that just really lightly, I use the blend mode of darker color and it just made the background look a little bit, dingy or darker maybe. You can see that I added a layer on top of everything, where I just painted with the background color to make it look like, some of the ink didn't quite stick, it's a nice touch. I do like this dramatic shading on the flowers. I did also paint a border here, I used this texture above to with blend mode of overlay, and then a mask I painted in where I wanted it so you can see, if I zoom in this red color that's coming through, that's because the texture was painted on there. Then with the overlay, that's the color that it's getting with that overlaid on top, and that's what this texture is over here. Not my favorite, but it's cool that I know I can do that in a now. Then I think that is all I really did, I added some shading in here with the Chalk Meister brush, oh and then I use the Oil Rich brushes on these brown leaves to make them a little bit richer. If I wanted to continue that, I would probably do that to those back leaves too. It just adds some nice dimension. I find that if I am going to keep the work digital, like it's just going to stay in my digital portfolio or if I'm going to post it on Instagram. I like all of these textures in there because for looking at it on a screen, it can really add a lot to it. But if I were to send this to society six to be printed, I might dial this down a little bit, because I think at least for me what I really like in my printed work are these really juicy, inky, rich areas of flat color. I think that that looks just so cool in print. In that case, I would probably like this actually looks nice. I like how texture that is, but definitely these darker leaves, I might take those and make those flat, because I think that flat, beautiful, rich brown would look really nice and print. That's just my preference, but I did want to let you know that. But you can also think about where this is going to live. If it's going to be digital, if that's going to impact how you design it and how it looks. 12. Thank You!: Thank you guys so much for taking this course. I am just dying to see how you take what I've shown you and make it your own to create beautiful flower bouquets in any illustration, anything that you can draw, you can use this same workflow to create a finished illustration. If you're on Instagram, you should come find me. I love Instagram and I love connecting with you guys on there. If you post any of your projects from this class on Instagram, be sure to use the hashtag skill share by Dylan M so that I can find it. There might be prizes involved. You can also follow me right on Skillshare and be alerted anytime I post a new class or discussion. 13. Coloring Page Bonus: