Transcripts
1. Illustrating Vision Intro: The artists' work is to express a vision by creating a tangible opportunity for people to connect with it. My name is Dustin, I am an artist and I wrestled with how to be one my entire life. I love people and their stories, and I consider it an incredible privilege to listen to a persons vision or their story. To be commissioned to express it in ways that create opportunity for community is the work I live for. The project in this class is simple and it is practical. I am going to present us with a vision for a t-shirt design and will be creating vectorized graphics for use in screen printing. I will share with you my process and my framework for understanding the clients vision and expressing it in a way that resonates with them and also with their community. We will work through every step in the process and we will go over the different tools that I use. From browser-based tools like editor and Google Drive, sketching and inking on paper and digitally inking in Procreate and vectorizing in Adobe Illustrator. But the project itself isn't the end goal or the only value of this class. The project is a tangible way for us to interact and wrestle with our role as artists. This class is all about illustrating vision, creating graphics that build community.
2. Class Overview: Welcome to the class, session number 1.Really, this is just a quick overview. Really the reason I created this class, is I really really believe in these fundamental principles. They are what I've built my business on. I always love talking about them. I just love the opportunity that there could be a community that grows around this, and we could engage about it, and talk. So I really hope that you guys will engage in and have a good conversation and wrestle with these issues. I really look forward to what you guys create and what you guys share. I really look forward to learning from you. So please interact. So we're going to be creating a graphic, hand-drawn graphic, that we're going to vectorize. This graphic could be used in screen printing for a parallel, or it could even be used in a logo. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to present a vision for this graphic. We're going to discuss the concept of vision. Some good questions to ask to pull that vision out, and what it means to really understand it. Then we're going to focus on sketching out that vision, and finding that aha moment, that connecting point. Where does these drawings and these ideas, where do they come together, and really start to connect? Digital inking. So I do that in Procreate on my iPad, and so we're going to go over that process. Then the next class after that is vectorizing inside of Adobe Illustrator. Then we're going to go over presenting to the client, knowing how your illustration expresses their vision, and drawing their attention to that. Then listening to find out where you maybe missed it, or something that you forgot about, or something that needs to be adjusted. How to go about doing that back in Procreate, back in Illustrator. Then we'll go over how to deliver your finished product, how to prepare your files appropriately. The very last session is a review session, reviewing the project steps and reviewing our core values. Enjoy the project. Have fun with it. So I'm really excited and I can't wait to see what you guys create and what I can learn from you.
3. Session 01: Understanding Vision: The very first step in our project is to understand the vision. What is the story we're telling? That very first meeting when I first sit down with a client, I really want to come in with some good questions to understand their vision. I'm just going to present to you a few of those questions and I'm going to give you answers on behalf of the client, and from there you're going to start sketching. I use Pinterest and I also use Additor. I want to show you just how I use those and give you a visual idea of what that workflow looks like. This is an Additor, but I really enjoy it for collaborating with clients. I find it to be really helpful and a great place to develop the story-line of your project. This pretend company, Livingston Canvas Company, is our client and we are sitting down with them for our very first discovery meeting. I've created this board ahead of time and I prepared the questions. You can change the background and add any image you want here, change your colors, upload an image even if you want. Then you can create a series of sections, name them whatever you want, and you can add items. If there were documents or PDFs or things like that that were meaningful, then you could add those all here. You or your client can do that. Before the meeting, I would share this board with the client, and I would go ahead and put their email address in and invite them to be a collaborator on this board. What I've done is beforehand, I prepared all these questions pertaining to vision. I've put in here what their theoretical answers are. Our vision questions, there are six of them. Then we've got style questions. Our first vision question is, what are you wanting to communicate with this graphic, any words, phrases or a story? Their response to that is, they're wanting to communicate that their products are built for a life well lived, that they appreciate simple pleasures. They love mountain life. I'm jotting this stuff down as we're talking, try to pay attention and stay in the conversation. Usually they're just abbreviated, just little notes. Question two, what do you want people to feel when they see it? What are you wanting? What kind of words would you use to describe how someone feels when they see this product? They feel inspired. They're reminded to savor the simple. They like it, they connect with it, they relate to it. Then I ask if they have a structure in mind, what are the details? Maybe they have no idea. They just have these feelings or maybe it was just, we want to say something that communicates simple pleasures or mountain life. They have no idea, maybe that's what they would say. In this case, they've already thought ahead and they are thinking they want a cougar. They like flash tattoos style, more vintage style. They're thinking of a phrase to go with it. "This is nowhere they like," they use that in their business. They also like the phrase, "No better path." They know that they want it on a black t-shirt, maybe with cream or a cream t-shirt with gold. They're open to ideas. Why would someone buy this? Their response to that question was because they connect with a life lived outside with good friends. They're counting on people connecting with them as a company, through their websites, through their products. They get their aesthetic, the lifestyle that they're communicating with their products. What do you want people to think of your company when they see this t-shirt? That they're authentic, but they live that life of simple quality. It's important to them that the graphic is authentic, that it's not just trendy, but the thought through the details. Now, I want to know who's buying this shirt. What words would they use to describe them? They're saying men and women who are inspired by quality, the outdoors. These are people that work hard, play hard, maybe 25 to 45 age range. They saved their money for fewer better things. Those who connect with their vision, who maybe own their bags and bought some of their products before, believe in the lifestyle that they present. Then I go on to ask some style questions. What words would you use to describe the style you want? They use the words simple, vintage, loose, like not polished and perfect, sketched drawing style, flash tattoos style. Do you have examples of styles that really connect with you? So they named a couple of products, a couple of companies that they really like, they mentioned Deus and they mentioned Lucky Bastard. But they both have a similar kind of style. Again, playing to that vintage look, that flash tattoos style. Do you know why these styles resonate with you? They feel that those styles connect with the blue color, hardworking, salt of the earth type. Not too pretentious. Is there anything you want to avoid communicating, any styles or trends you don't want to associate with and why? They mentioned that classic phrase, the mountains are calling and I must go. For them, they don't want that. They don't want that look. They feel it's too trendy like stuff you'd find in a gift shop. They want something more authentic to their brand and to their customer. From our first meeting with the client, we were able to pull out all of this information. I'm going to then go to work and try and pull out the key words. To me, keywords would be things like simple pleasures. Okay. I can go in here and bold that, "Savor the Simple." They want a cougar. They like Flash tattoo style and vintage. This is Nowhere" or "No Better Path." I'm really digging this no better path. Black t-shirt with cream, cream t-shirt with gold. So it could be either. So we're going to play with that. Gold and black. I like that. Why would someone buy it? They're connecting with the life outside. Authentic is a big one. Quality. Men and women inspired by the outdoors, play hard. Okay. They connect with their vision. In that case, because this company is theoretical and imaginary, I don't have a vision of theirs to refer to. You could go to the website of the client you're working with, ask them vision of their company, make sure you have it. You can refer to it as well. I like this, fewer better things. Again, we already highlighted these. Loose, we didn't highlight, keep it loose. Deus and Lucky Bastard. We're going to look those up when we're looking for references for style. Highlight those. Blue color, salted of the earth. Mountains are calling, we do not want that. Trendy, no way. We want authentic again. Those are our highlights. I've put in bold, whatever seems to fit that. I'm going to take those core values, those highlights, and I'm going to make sure I jot them down in the sketchbook when we're sketching out the ideas. Let's jump over into Pinterest. And I've gone ahead and searched out Reference Style references. I searched up Deus, Lucky Bastard, and I followed the trail that when you click on something, you get some inspiration that lead you to other things. I go and build out this board. So as you can see, we've got some vintage looking styles. This one over here is some old packaging design reference. We've got some tattoo reference, woodcut. We've got some flash tattoo style. Then we've got some references to what an actual cougar looks like. As you can see in some of our tattoo examples, there are Panthers, which is not a cougar. We want to make sure that we make the panther look like a cougar. For example in here, these are all very traditional, panther tattoo styles, except for maybe Pink Panther. But we want to make sure that we're making it look like a cougar, that's important to the client. We've got a good selection of ideas and inspiration for what we want to do with our sketches. We can go ahead and pull out the sketchbook. Right down our core values from that client meeting and start sketching some of these ideas.
4. Session 02: Finding Connection_: In this session, we're going to be taking our notes and we're going to be starting the process of sketching. The emphasis of this sketching is to find a connecting point to zero in on the language that we're pulling out those highlights from the conversation that we had with our client. We're going to sketch based on that, and it's going to evolve. There's going to be a bit of a story that happens even as we draw, as we start to see what elements connect with those highlights. We're looking for all that moment or that connecting point, where it really feels authentic. Like the drawing, and the idea is starting to really click with those key elements of the vision that they've expressed to us. We want to be able to pull the highlights from the Vision Meeting and write them here on the paper, just as a reminder and a guide as we're sketching out our ideas. Some of the highlights that I see in those notes that we want to keep it simple. We wanted to be loose, flash tattoo style, vintage blue color, no better path and they mentioned cougar. So far, we've created four options and we've been able to see in sketching this out a little bit more of the meaning and how the visual will tie into the meaning. The statement of no better path has to do with confidence and the turning around doesn't communicate that confidence. We'd definitely like this posture much more competent and the braking arrows is the arrows come from some of that flash tattoos style. Sometimes there's a dagger in the head, so it be cool to do arrows braking like defying the odds, or a knife in the mouth, like held in the mouth. This is a little of sports team vibe that I'm not sure we're super into. Here, I'm really digging in this posture, it retains that vintage style, a little bit more Japanese influence. May or may not do the banner, but I like the posture definitely confident and I like the idea of it's stepping on an arrow. Maybe not one braking, but we'll see. I'm digging this and I'd like to see this one worked on a little bit more. To refer to our highlights, we want it to be simple. This banner might be making a little bit complicated. But again, with this line art, we could either do it as lines with no content or we could do it all in black. How the outlines cutout and then just have the lettering. I would keep it really nice and simple. Basically, it's got to stay one color. We need it loose, so we're going to sketch it out by hand and draw it out, so it's keeps that hand-drawn feel. We want to make sure we're keeping that tatoo style, tattoo look and then keeping it vintage. We got to make sure our references have that vintage feel, the blue color Salt of the Earth reference. We're wanting to make sure that what we're communicating with the image connects with that type of client. They've identified that their customer loves the tattoo style, the tattoo look. They've already referenced similar brands that they identify with and would see themselves being curated with. The tattoo style definitely falls into those categories, and we wanted to make sure we're using this phrase. We've got a cougars we want to make sure in our references that were actually nailing the look of a cougar. We're going to have to pull up reference for that and we want make sure Livingstone Canvas Co is on there. It could be in abbreviated form or it could be written above like this. What we could do is work on the illustration next and figure out a letter placement along with that. All right. We did a few sketches based on the highlights from our client meeting. We were able to play around with those words and find a visual language for them and decide on one direction that connects the most. We've taken that further.
5. Session 03: Digital Inking: In this session, we're going to take our sketch, our inked sketch on paper. We're going to take that, and we're going to get it into Procreate on the iPad, so that we can continue editing and refining our project further. All I'm going to do is get the ink in the frame and make sure it's close to level. I'm going to create a 4,000 by 4,000 pixels square and Procreate, and I'm going to import my photo. It can stay that big, to create a new layer. The pen I like to use when doing more flash to tattoo style is a monoline. We can edit it to be a little bit more rough. Let's just decrease the opacity just a little bit. Let's get started. I just check on our thickness here, oh, it's perfect. That's a double finger tap to erase or undo, sorry. Feeling like it's a little too rough. Let's drop that jitter down. We're going to do the lettering on different layers, and the arrow. Let's start with the arrow. If we want to do a straight line, we're just going to draw and hold, make it a little bit longer and to close. Actually, let's extend this line all the way through, like that. New layer. Now in the case of this square, what we can do them Procreate is cheat a little bit. Hold, that made for us, some were square which is all we are going for a squarish. We could copy that, see if we wanted, but I still want it to be pretty loose and have that vintage hand-drawn look. that not perfect. Now that being said, we can make this circle a little bit more perfect, using the same trick and then going over it just to vary the thickness a little bit as we go around. Now that's a bit bigger but we can fix that be bigger than the C. To fix that, is our Select tool and just going to bring down the scale a touch. It looks like we still could do a little bit more. I'll just leave that for now and move on. For this [inaudible] if I want to use a different pen, maybe I will. Let's try it. Let's use the toothy anchor. This is from MaxPacks. The comics pack. highly recommend those.. I'm going to make this a bit thicker. We need to work on the arrow. Let's bring it below the cougar. Very rough, as you can see our square isn't the square. But let's bring this from here into Illustrator.
6. Session 04: Vectorizing & Mockup_: In our last class we were able to refine our sketch inside of Procreate and now in this session, we're going to take that refinement even further inside of Adobe Illustrator. I've created a 11 by 11 document inside of Illustrator and I'm going to place the artwork. I've got my tracing options over here, I'm going to increase the threshold to about 180 or so, I'm going to have this all the way up to almost max, let's go 98. The noise all the way down, I'm going to ignore white, preview. Really what I'm after is I want to retain a little bit of the roughness of the line which I've got and I want to eliminate the white so that we're just left with the line art and that looks good to me. We're going to expand this, ungroup it, Shift Command G and let's just group our separate items here and just see if there's anything that we want to tweak. I'm really happy with this actually. If we remember from the highlights from our client meeting, there was talk of the graphic going on a black shirt or a cream shirt and the use of maybe gold or black or cream line art, so why don't we just go with gold? We've got some golds here that I really like and that copied my numbers here, there it is. We need to convert our colors, I always forget about this. Let's convert to CMYK, let's do this again, Shift Command left bracket for everything to get moved to the back. For this, we can just go, Eyedropper, copy the settings from there, I think that's a little brighter than we want, so let's do actually this dark golden rod, there we go. Yeah, I like that better. Let's copy that also looks great. Now, let's adjust this LCL base because that is a little bit whack with how out of whack it is. Here's what we're going to do, but you can see with the blue here that are gold square is dramatically out of square, so here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste that object, and then I'm going to just flip it. But let's just take both those shapes and let's unite them. Grab our node Selector tool and just go in here and grab a few of these, select this, delete, delete, to delete that to shape. What I'm going to do is delete those, join them back up, make sure they're curved. That square would have been much easier to make sure it was an actual rectangle in Procreate first, but we learned, I'm just going to tweak this [inaudible] little measuring square, this is just extremely accurate, isn't it? Let's bring that down a little bit and not bad. Our distances in between look good. I'm not a big fan of that lettering, so I'm going to go ahead and go back into Procreate and change that lettering. I'm just going to go and take a different approach here, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to use this Grid builder. Let's use this large arc, let's rotate it, create a new layer on top, make this a little bit more visible, and let's switch to pencil, mono line. I'm going to send that back to Illustrator, but I'm just going to send the text. Let's adjust this by bringing in our new lettering, let's vectorize this, looks good, expand and let's give it the gold treatment on like and not a lot better, just simple. Let's delete this, let's bring our guides in, I'm liking that, so definitely, I would be comfortable presenting this to the client in order to get their feedback on what they like and what they don't like, and then to be able to tweak it from here. The next step for me is I want to be able to see what this is going to look like on a T-shirt. You guys, I've brought the design into a mock-up in Photoshop and I'm using an amazing mock-up template by Graphic Hero. If you're interested in having a massive amount of resources, if you're having to do lots of mock-ups for clients, I really encourage you to support Graphic Hero and use their mock-ups, so helpful, so easy to use. You can edit everything on here, and we can very easily see different colors and tweak it. If we want to see just what some potential other colors might look like, we're going to export this just as a simple JPEG. We don't need to have it be such a massive file, so let's save it in this search. Awesome, we've got our illustration finished and we put it in through Procreate, we put it into Illustrator and Photoshop, we've got a mock-up. We wanted to keep the graphics simple and feeling loose, not too perfect. We wanted it to resemble a flash tattoo style, it needed to have a vintage feel to it and we wanted it to appeal to the ideal client. We wanted to make sure we have this slogan of no better path, include a cougar, making sure it looked like a cougar. The cougar's posture really communicates a attitude of confidence and that confidence is moving forward directly ahead, the attention of the cougar is straight ahead. The opposition coming against it has attacked it, shot arrows at it, and those arrows are crushed on the ground. We want to be able to present that to the client, to be able to show where we've connected with what they're core essentials to their vision word. We want to be able to upload our files to our shared Google Drive folder for our client, plus, we want to be able to put them on our shared Editor page so that our ongoing conversation can be seen and we can just continue that thread. Let's go ahead and let's do that.
7. Session 05: Presenting & Revisions: Now that our graphic is at a point where we are willing to share this with our client, we really want to have all the file types prepped that we could need. I want to send it from Illustrator up to a shared Google Drive folder. There's a bunch of different ways you can do that. You can save to your hard drive, drag and drop into the Google Drive folder. I really enjoy using an application called CloudMounter, which is here, right there. It has all my cloud storage drives mounted on my desktop. I can actually just export this just as I normally would, as if I were doing into my hard drive. I'm going to export this as Livingston Canvas Company. We're going to save it right in there. We want to make sure we've checked Use Artboards, so that we can save the PNG with the same spacing or on the graphic is we see here. The PNG is going to save it with the transparent background. We're going to do that. We also want to save it as a JPEG into the same spot. We Use Artboard. Export. Yeah, we don't need it to be that big of a file, so eight is good. Let's jump over to Google Drive just to make sure we have everything in there. Let's refresh the page, and there it is. So we have our mockup. We have a JPEG version of the graphic. We have the original Illustrator file and a PNG. I'd also like to place some of these images into our editor page. So here below our meeting notes, I'm going to create a new section. Let's call this Versions, let's add a note here, place an image, let's place the mockup. We can add a caption here. We can place another note. Let's add another image. Let's just add the JPEG of the graphic. So let's just give this a little reference name here, and just clarify that it's version one. So we've got the images here. We've got our notes. Everything's in a nice order. All in one spot, and they can make comments. I can make comments and I can see what they are. So let's add "Done", and let's add a comment on this one as well. You can reference them in your comment as well so that they see it, and they get a notification. So there are comments, we'll all stay in line. Our images are here. We have our notes, and if we have further meetings, we can add those here as well. Now that we've added our files here, I'm going to also send the client an email saying that the files are online, mention that I've placed the files here on our editor page, and arrange a time to meet in person. So there's a few changes that we need to make to our graphic. Overall, they loved it, but there's just a few subtle changes that we need to make from here. So exciting. We're on the right track. We just need to make a few changes. So how do we go back, make some changes simply and quickly and get those back to the customer. We need to jump back into Procreate and make a few changes. So those changes are on the graphic on the cougars throat. We need to make a couple changes there, to go away from that horizontal lines across to a vertical line, and they want to add another arrow that crosses across the other one. So we need to jump back into Procreate and make those changes. We need to do some cleanup work on the cougar. We need to add a second arrow, and we need to do some cleanup work here on the rectangle and lettering. So let's jump in, let's take care of the detail on the cougar first. Let's choose that layer, and grab our eraser. They wanted to get rid of these lines. Let's add the arrow, I like that, and let's adjust here. Let's actually add another layer here. The letters are good inside of Illustrator, so we just want to work on this rectangle. Let's just bringing the opacity down. In order to make sure we have ourselves a nice rectangle, let's bring in a nice reference. So again, we're going to use the grid builder brushes. So let's just grab the block, drop that in, and let's adjust the size, and there we go. So we can actually just bring that down a little bit. Let's create a new layer, and get our brush back monoline. All we're going to do is trace along our guide here. Now we've got ourselves a much better looking rectangle, and we can prep this file to be sent back into Illustrator. Let's just send back the elements that we need. We don't need the text, so we can keep that off. We'll keep the cougar, the arrows, and the rectangle, and we're going to send this off to the laptop. There it goes. Back in Illustrator, we can see our old version that we need to update. So let's bring in our new file. I got it here, in our downloads. We can just drag and drop. Now, let's head over to our tracing options. Again, we wanted our threshold up fairly high. Our path is almost at a 100 percent, but not quite 98 did it, and we want to make sure we grab all the detail we can, and we want to ignore white. See how that goes, and let's expand that. Let's bring it over. Let's just copy this and bring it over, so that we have a good reference for what it was. I actually find that the angle of this arrow isn't quite right. So I think I actually might do this. Angle this off, let's just bring our guide down. Soon as you're over, now, let's grab this the box, second click on the box. Center, both ways, this corner kicks up a little bit. But overall, I like that box better. So let's delete this. We want to make sure we export. The next step is to bring this over back into our mockup, and there we are, the updated mockup. So let's Save As. So here in Google Drive you can see we've got the updated files or mockup. You can see the two arrows versus the one, and all the appropriate Illustrator JPEG and PNG files. So let's jump over into editor and let's add these new ones.
8. Session 06: The Core Values: The emphasis of this class all along has been honoring. Honoring the client by asking really good questions, taking time to listen and listen well. Continue to ask questions until you understand, until they know that you understand their vision, and keeping good notes and recording it in a shared space where you can collaborate and refer back, so that's always open and always clear. Basically, the story line of your project is visible on that board. You and the client can go back, make notes, and refer back to it. Very clear communication, and it's that communication that really honors somebody. It's the communication that makes the expression possible. Through using Google Drive and an editor, not only are you able to communicate well, you're coming across as very professional, like you really care. I hope that you really benefited from this focus on illustrating vision. I hope that you clearly see what it actually looks like to honor the value of someone, and honor the value of their story and their vision. I really encourage you to engage this community on Skillshare. I'm really excited to see what you guys create. I really want to give you feedback, so please, make sure that you upload and you share so that we can see, we can interact, and we can share a feedback. If there's new tools that you know of, tools that you'd like to share, online software, new tweaks. Maybe along the way you saw me do something that you're like, "Wow, that is the slowest way to do it." You can do it a better way, share it. Let's all learn together. Thank you for coming along on this project with me. I really hope it's been a value to you. Thank you for investing your time and your creative energy. Thank you for your investment into a really meaningful learning community. I really appreciate it.
Dustin Heigh, I love people and their stories.
