Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hey, guys, I'm Dylan Mierzwinski, an artist, and illustrator living in Phoenix, Arizona. In most of my Skillshare classes, I'm trying to teach you something, a tool, a process, a whole workflow but in my experience, the best growth comes not from the initial learning, but from practice. In the class you are about to watch, instead of me trying to teach you something specific, we're going to work together to complete a project that flexes and strengthens all of the muscles we have acquired so far. Not only will it be a time of practice, but by the end, we'll both have new artwork to add to our growing portfolios. In this practice class, we're going to work on a letter design with surrounding flowers, all done on the iPad. I'll be using a new drawing and painting app called Adobe fresco but you can work in whatever way you're most excited to work. We will work together to brainstorm, sketch, letter, refine, and finish off our illustrations with yummy textures. Let's get to work.
2. Class Project: For this class project, we're going to be working on an illustration that includes a lettered quote with surrounding floral elements. This is your project though. If you want to swap flowers for bugs or cookies or animals, go for it, the general process will be the same. From a desktop if you go to the Community tab, and look at the right sidebar, you'll find resources that I've supplied to help you with your project. When you're ready to share, I hope you will upload your project to the class Project tab, taking care to Upload imagery, and text in the body of the project, and not just a class cover. I always love seeing what you come up with don't be shy.
3. Rough Start: All right. So let's kick off our project. When I'm starting a project, well actually, when I'm planning a Skillshare class, I usually off-camera have already worked through the project, at least a little bit. And this is because usually in my classes I'm demonstrating a specific process or a tool, and I really want to make sure that my own working through things doesn't distract from what I'm trying to teach. These classes are totally different, and these classes I'm referencing those other classes. Here the point isn't to have everything perfectly worked out before we come together. Instead, it's for me to show you what it's like to work through these. What happens when I sit down to work on a portfolio piece, and also it's a time for you to just be inspired and just have a friend pretty much to go through and work on a project together. As I said in the class project and in the intro, I'm going to be using the iPad for this class. Mostly I'm going to try and do most of the project on here, but if you want to paint or draw, or instead of flowers, draw dinosaurs, that's totally cool. The point is that we are going to sit down and we're going to work on a project together. The first thing that I do when I start any project, it doesn't matter if it's a personal portfolio piece or a client project is I do what I call my rough start. A rough start really just means anything I need to do to get started. It's sort of my gentle way of easing into the project. In this case, we're going to take a look at doing some research and brainstorming, we're going to find some references, we're going to talk about color palettes, since we're lettering, we need to pick our quote. I'm going to show you how I do some visual note-taking, and we're also going to consider things like composition. When I do my rough start, I usually like to start with what do I already know. In this case, I'm going to be using my sketchbook for this first part just to get all my rough ideas down. Open up. This is my trusty bag of most used tools that I take with me everywhere and get out. I've got a Palomino Blackwing pencil, one of their soft ones, pencil sharpener, and an eraser. And since I'm a barbarian, I'm just going to sharpen this and, well, actually there's a trash can close by. Sometimes if I'm not near a trash can, I'll just do it right onto the floor and then just vacuum when I'm done. Starting with what I know, I know that I'm doing a floral piece that's going to have lettering in the middle, and then there's going to be flowers going around it. Usually, and this is just kind of true to life, even though I sit down and do this rough start, I usually have something that I'm coming to the table with. Some notions that I've already got in my head. In this case, what I know is for the framing of the composition, I think instead of doing an oval or a circle, I want to do a rectangle frame. Also I've provided some quote ideas for you in the class resources, but I've actually already narrowed mine down to two. I either want to do, "This two shall pass", or earth laughs, and flowers. I like both of these because they both are just speaking to me. I like the language of them and "This two shall pass" is always a good reminder. But also they are both four words and so they're shorter quotes, which is very attractive to me. But also don't get too hung up on what quote you're going to use because sometimes in my pieces the lettering gets bought as is, but sometimes it's just a place holder. For instance, in this card right here, you can see I lettered the words "To my Ride or Die Galentine", and then Calypso cards pick that up and kept the lettering as is. Whereas this other greeting card I was working on, the original lettering just said, "Ball jar", but then the client asked me to change it to, "Thanks a bunch". That's why I want to have a quote that I like, I don't want it to be totally random, but I also know that for portfolio pieces that are going to be shown and perhaps licensed, this could change, and so that's not too bad. I think that's what I know already, that's what I know about this projects Some things that would be helpful to figure out is I need to pick out some lettering styles that I like. I want to start getting my flowers down and figuring out composition. I like to do a process that I call visual note-taking. And this is a way, when we're scrolling through Pinterest, it's really, really, really just so crucial that we aren't stealing other people's work. If I type in "flower frame", I get some really great ideas, but I don't want to look at these for too long. Like for instance, even though I really like how this layout looks, I wouldn't want to keep this up on my screen and draw my whole thing from this because I'm then taking too heavily from this one artist. Visual note-taking is a way for me to scroll through, and I quickly jot down in drawn form what I like from these inspirations. What I first see here is I see a lot of layouts. You can see we have some that are these diamonds, squares, we have some interesting geometric shapes there, these are pretty half circles. We have this one that actually the frame isn't shown, it's like an invisible frame, that's something we could consider. This one is a more traditional border that flies off the edge but comes in nicely, and we can see that frame in there. This one the flowers are interacting. I'm already getting some really good ideas here. One thing that I like on this one is, if you remember, I said I wanted a rectangle frame. And I like that this one has a few flowers on top and a few flowers behind. Just to make that clear and erase that. As you can see, I'm not drawing these flowers, I'm not looking too much at the composition. I just like how it's interacting with the frame. I'm going to jot that down so that I can remember that for later. And also this gives me a chance to see whether I want this to be an outline or if I want this to be filled. If this is just an outline, then the interaction isn't going to be as interesting, but maybe it will be. This is really nice. These ones, they're kind of that invisible frame. We get the feeling of there being sort of this oval here, but it's not actually there. It's an implied line, so that's something you could play with. This one has a really pretty background, but it left the middle out, so maybe that's something you would jot down. This is something that I'm going to go through and I'm going to look at flowers. I might open this and I might like how this has a peony and then a small bud jutting out, and so maybe I'm just going to jot that down. I'm not worried about getting perfect shapes here. Again, it's just about getting the idea. It's about getting my brain working. So that's all I'm going to take from this one because I don't want to keep stealing from this artist, but I'm allowed to look at things and take the little pieces that I really like and move on. The nice part about doing it this way as opposed to saving all of those images in a board and then looking later is; by the time I look back at all of my visual notes, I don't remember where everything came from. So I've translated, I've taken from here and it's one step removed and then I'm able to look back and see all of these things out of context. Which is, again, just helps me from stealing from these artists because they're the ones that have done this work already. Here's something that you might find interesting. Maybe you want to do more of a really geometric or intricate frame that the flowers are sitting on instead of something that's more basic. Maybe that's something you could write down. I'm looking to see how they're filling the space. I like do you see these little tiny guys, I like those little free floaters. So maybe I'll just draw a little daisy, just to jot that down. I like that it's floating without a stem, so maybe that's something a nice way later if I have some awkward spaces that I need to fill, maybe that's a good idea for how to solve that. Another thing to consider, so far we've been looking at compositions that are overlapping themselves and look really natural, but maybe you want to do something that's more graphic and perfectly placed like this, where the flowers are a little bit less representational and more geometric and things are more perfectly placed and not touching each other. All of these are really good examples of that, where everything is just so and not soon in there. You can see that there's a little bit of overlapping, but for the most part, these leaves all get to stand out on their own. So if that's a graphic look that you like, maybe that's something you can jot down.I prefer the more natural overlapping look. So I'm going to do a more organic thing and of course, consider symmetry, I love a symmetrical layouts like this. We have a focal point in one place and then the rest of the images balance that out, but maybe you want a perfectly symmetrical, especially if you were doing something that's more, see if I can find like a, if I type in folk if that will bring it up. Yes, so maybe you want to do something that's more folk already like this. You can see this one is perfectly symmetrical. So maybe that's something you're interested in. Those are the types of things I'm looking for when I'm visual note-taking so, i'm going to keep going through. I'm going to just be looking through Pinterest, but also just Google. Sometimes if you're only looking at Pinterest, then you can get in a spiral that you can't get out of and so it's nice to look in other places than Pinterest. You can look at references that you have.You can look at real flowers or whatever your subject matter is. I collect fox flowers that I find and I really like to use these as references for drawing and for getting my sketching out, because for instance, this guy right here, this is only one flower, but I can bend it in infinite ways to get different shapes and to get different views. Then I can draw six flowers from this one stem as I rotate and look at the different views.I also like to collect. These are pretty fake eucalyptus. They're not pretty fake. They are pretty, and they are fake. I guess they're pretty fake though, pretty fake eucalyptus leaves. I like to look at these for shape. So by doing a mix of these, by bringing in our sketching from all of these different places. It's just helping again to ensure that our work is our own and inspired by ourselves instead of just taking from one artist and changing a few colors. That's pretty, I like that a lot. That's a nice line. So that's something that I might jot down. I said I wanted to do a rectangle, but I like that S-shape, that S-curve that's happening, that's really pleasing to my eye. And so jot that down and move on,so go ahead and take some visual notes and we will check back in when we are done with that. So while I was speed lapsing through that, I was just going through in taking some more notes. You can see that on this page I was just jotting down some flower shapes that I liked and I wanted to point out that I was looking for a variety. I was looking at larger flower heads. So these are going to be like focal points where I'm going to have that asymmetric right where the eye goes, but then I also need these medium blooms which I drew from my fake flowers that I've got around me. Then I'm also going to need little tiny guys to fill in the spaces. I have some sprigs that I jotted down some really cute, just little pods on stems and some leaf shapes that I liked. So I was really liking the eucalyptus, but I also like these smaller pointer leaves that are a little bit more dense. That's kind of where I'm going to go when I actually start sketching for my wreath or my frame. Then I went through and I also took some notes on frames that I liked.. You can see that these aren't beautiful. They're not supposed to be the sketches, but I have some really great ideas now for how I can play with, whether I want things to fall off the page, whether they're coming in and interacting with, whether I'm going to have an actual background here. You can see, I have more of a starburst thing here. So I've got some ideas there. I also jotted down just some lettering styles that I liked and these aren't letters that aren't necessarily in the peace like both quotes that I picked don't have a capital R like that, I'm pretty sure, but it's not about stealing those letters from the artist. It's about getting the style down. I think what I'm being drawn to right now is this mix between scripty block letters that they have a single width throughout the whole style of the letter, but some of the ligatures are still intact and some of them have really fun flourishes and so I liked that. In one piece I saw the E had an extended whatever that's called, [LAUGHING] had an extended limb there. I liked that and just jotted down an R. So that's really the spirit of visual note-taking. Now I have all of these ideas that I was able to comb through, to take from other places. but now I get to put them together into what is going to be my art.
4. Adobe Fresco Overview: For this class, I am going to be using Adobe's new drawing and painting app, Fresco. And I am really excited about it because, first of all, I am usually 15 years behind on everything. And so the fact that I got to try out this app, while it was still in beta phase, makes me feel pretty cool and special. But I am going to be using Fresco. And I want to, at least, even though this is not a class about Fresco, this is not going to be a tutorial on how to use Fresco in all of its glory. But I still want to take some time just to kind of give you an overview. If you are not using your iPad, then you can skip this class or this video. If you are not interested in Fresco, then just go ahead and move forward. But for those who do want to see a little bit about the app, this is kind of the Intro. This is the screen that opens when you open it up. And it is just like any other drawing app. You have got an area to create new artwork and to import artwork. You can create documents sizes up here. I am going to go ahead and create a custom size. You can see what that is like. And I am going to do 3000 by 3700, which is a size I use a lot. It is close to eight by ten ratio, but larger than eight by ten. The important thing I want to drill down print size here and change it from 72 to 300 dpi, to make sure that we are full resolution there. And I am gonna go ahead and hit create document. So this is what the drawing interface looks like. Down the left-hand side, we have got a toolbar here. We have three types of brushes, eraser, move tool, selection tool, paint bucket, eyedropper, and then this area where you can add files or use your camera if you need to bring pictures in here. We have got a color selector here, which also holds our opacity settings. And then down here we have our brush controls. So I have got my brush size, I have got the flow of the brush. I have the smoothing, and then down here I actually have the brush settings. And this is really cool. If you go in and you start changing things, you can actually draw right in this area, to see and feel how that brush works, before having to actually draw any artwork over there. Obviously, this is our art board area. Up here we have an Undo. We have a Help area. We have got Export. If I go to Export, you can see that I have PNG, JPEG, PSD's and PDF's available. But I will say just as this app, one of the awesome things about it is it can do raster and vector graphics. And so if you export as a PDF, you can actually open that PDF in Illustrator. And if you were using the vector brushes, all of those anchor points and everything are there and fully editable. So we will get to that in a little bit. But that is where our export settings are. And then I have got more settings here. What I really like about Fresco, over something that I could not do and Procreate is, I can change the size of my document even after I have already started. I can also name the document, flip the canvas around. I can access the app settings, all of that stuff. I also have a full size or a full screen button up here. So if you like to work and you do not want that interface to be kind of intrusive, you can go ahead and go full screen. I have got my layers, down in this panel right here, and this button right here will show and hide those. I have a layer settings, or layer properties, [inaudible] out right here, and this lets me change the name of the layer. I can play with blend modes and opacity. But then if I tap the layer itself, or tap this three dot icon while I am on one of the layers, I get the menu that lets me add, hide and delete from here, duplicate, cut, copy. This is where I can create masks and do all of that good stuff. And so that is sort of the basic interface. When we start getting into the brushes, there are actually three kinds. So the first one, on the top left here, are my pixel brushes. And they come with a lot of them. You can see all of these areas, right here, are different pixel brushes that I can use. And this is what you see and Procreate. This is what the drawing apps that are not vector-based, This is what they are using. And so I can go in here and pick one of them and draw out. And if I zoom in, I am going to see that these are made up of tiny little pixels. They are pixel brushes. But I also have these really great live brushes. And right now there are only eleven. There are seven oil and four watercolor. But I imagine that Adobe is going to build this out more, because these brushes are crazy. So they really act. I mean, it is the best I have seen so far of brushes that acts like the media that they are trying to replicate. And you can see that, as I am drawing over this. It is acting as if this were really wet on wet. I can keep going in here and adding paint. And instead of just making weird streaks, it is slowly going to act like watercolor. And then I could go and tap on this layer. And there is this dry layer button here. And I could hit dry layer. And then, this time when I draw over it, it dried the paint beneath there, and now it is like I am doing wet on dry. And so now, when I add it in, it is only going to react to the paint that I just laid down, instead of what was laid down there before. So the Live brushes are really, really great. I do want to show you, I know a lot of you are watercolor fans, so you will probably dig those, but I want to show you the oil brushes because I was kind of blown away by these. The texture, let me change my color. The texture of them is just really realistic. It really does look like paint strokes that are interacting with each other. And you can see that as I started to color over into this black paint, I am getting mixing properties that are very much like using a real brush. And I can adjust that in my brushes panel. There is this paint mixed slider. And if I turn that up all the way, you can see that it is starting to mix with that paint immediately. I am not able to hold on to the yellow that much. But if I go ahead and turn the paint mix down, and go in here, you can see that the yellow is holding its own a little bit more. And so you can change that. But one of the other really cool things is, right now, I am going to turn reload color off. Right now I am going to go ahead and bring this yellow. I am going to turn my paint mixes up, and I am going to paint into this black area. And even though the color in my color picker is bright yellow, this is the last color that I was just mixing. And if I go over here and paint, you can see that I do not have that fresh yellow. I have whatever color I just left off with. So by mixing here, now if I go over here, I will have more yellow. And that is pretty cool because that is what we see when we really are painting. Your brush is not going to magically be able to just always be yellow. It is going to be whatever pigments you have picked up. However, if I turn on Reload Color, I am going ahead and mix some black in here. Go back to yellow. You can see that getting in here, back to yellow. Here we go. If I go in here, I'm making this last color I used is really muddy. But if I go over here, I have my fresh yellow. Reloading the color just means that I don't want you to sample this color that I've last used, even though that's the mess that I mix over here. I want to bring in that fresh yellow every time. Those brushes are just super cool. They're mind-blowing to play with. Since my work doesn't really call for these types of textures, I haven't dug too much deeper into them, but just that basic behavior I think is really awesome. Then last but not least, we have vector brushes. This is just so awesome that this app can handle both raster and vector at the same time. You can see I drew shape, it's very organic. If I were to export this as a PDF and then bring it into Illustrator, these lines would all have anchor points. They'd be ready to go and fully editable, and that's pretty awesome. I just want to point out that right now in the layers panel, I was just drawing with a vector brush and I have this little circle next to that layer. That is the icon telling me that this is a vector layer. If I switch over to a pixel brush, so I'm going to change the color so we can see a little bit more. I'll just pick a random pixel brush over here and I start drawing. Even though I didn't make a new layer, you can see that Fresco went ahead and made a layer because it just doesn't make sense to have pixels and vectors on the same layer. That just can't happen. It automatically will change that, and you can see that this one has a little pixelated icon, and that's kind of denoting that there. Those are different types of brushes. I have mostly been using the pixel ones. One of the best parts about this, in my opinion, is you can load your own brushes. Any brush files that you've bought in the past that end in.tpl or.abr, those can be imported and used here. You can load all of your favorite Kyle T. Webster brushes from Photoshop. I have, and that's what I've been using in here. I've got all of his drawings in here, drawing brushes in here, and I have access to all of those. Honestly, that's really huge for me. I enjoy using Procreate but the brushes that I had, they're not the same ones that I'm used to using in Photoshop. Fresco bridges that gap for me, which makes it just that much more seamless moving between the apps, and I think that is just a real game- changer. Also, I want to point out that you can favorite any of your brushes. While one is selected, if I fill in this little star, then it's going to be available over in My Favorites. That's really helpful for being able to quickly pick your favorite brushes. One last thing I want to point out is that whatever you set these settings to, so for instance, if I wanted to have a smooth brush, so right now, turn the size down. If I try to do some curlicues, they're at the mercy of the smoothness of my hand. But if I turn up smoothing, then Adobe, there's a little bit of a lag between where my pencil is and where the line is because it's helping me smooth that out. But anyway, what I wanted to point out is that if you adjust any of these on your brushes, if I turn the smoothing upper, turn the size down, it's going to remember those settings as I returned to that brush. That's really nice. Then as far as gestures go, they are basically the same if you're used to Procreate. I was really happy to see that there's not a big change in gestures. Double-tap is going to erase. I think a triple tap will bring your artwork back. You got pinching and rotating and all of that stuff. If I do a quick one, it'll resize to 100 percent. Then this little guy down here, I'm going to turn my size backup. This little button has different uses based on what tool you have and you can reference those in the help area. It'll tell you what each touch shortcut does. But what's really helpful is if you're using a brush and you want to erase, but you want to erase with the brush you're using, you can just hold that down. Now, the current brush that I was using will be used as an eraser. I can let go and it is back as a brush. Over in my layers, one awesome thing that I am I really like in Fresco is the masking makes a lot of sense to me. I can go ahead and create a layer mask. What happened is now, my layer has a little black dot next to it. What I can do, and what that means is I have a layer mask. If I swipe over, you can see the black dot moves to the other side and I can see the layer artwork. If I swipe back, that's where I can edit my mask and then make it really easy. There's just a reveal and a hide button down here. If I want to hide something on this layer, I can go ahead and color in here and it's going to update that mask for me. With your mask, you can do red overlays if you want to see where you're working. I like having it just so that I can see what's shown in what's hidden. You can copy and cut the mask. You can invert the mask, all of that stuff. Layer masks are really powerful in here and really easy to use. I think those are the basic tools I'm going to be using in Fresco. I really like this app, I used Procreate. Procreate was my kind of drawing app of choice, and I am really pleased to see that some of my favorite things about procreate are here. Since the brushes are what I use in Photoshop, and I have the vector capabilities and I just can feel that this is going to be the app that I probably reach for a little bit longer. I didn't get into the selection tools and the paint bucket and everything, but you'll see me use those as I actually go through the app. There's not much use for me running through a full tutorial, just wanted to go over the basic tools there, but Fresco is awesome. I'm really liking it. I'm excited for them to build out more features. When I was on the home screen, I think that they had an area where they were talking about what's coming. Some of the things that are currently missing are shapes and lines. There's not really a way to draw a straight line. They're going to bring in symmetry drawing, and perspective drawing, clipping masks, and color themes. The fact that this app is just starting out and already is so powerful, it's really exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing how they build it out in the future.
5. Lettering: So by now, you have done your rough start. If you haven't figured out everything at this point, that's totally okay. The rough start is just that, it's just something to get you started. I'm going to go ahead and get started on the lettering, and this is, as I do more of these classes, and as we work on more projects together, you'll see that the basic thing here is starting from general and refining down to the specific. It's all about refining. These first few drawings I'm going to do, I'm not worried about being perfect. I really just want to start playing and figuring out how the letters are going to work, focusing on lettering first because the lettering is going to dictate the balance of the composition and where I need to fill in the flowers. So I'd really like to just finish all the lettering work before I get into anything else. What I like to do first, is just write down the phrase, and start playing with how the words are going to work. So I decided I'm going to do,"This too shall pass". Lets see, let me pick a brush on that. I'm just going to write that out in my normal handwriting. This is a simple enough quote that I can just stack them, and that will work well with my vertical rectangular outline. But I just want to see if anything stands out. Normally, this part takes more work with me figuring out how the words that, is too going to be next to this, or is it going to be down here? But this one, pretty straightforward. I really just need to figure out how these letters are going to interact with each other. I'm not Mary Kate Mcdavies. She's a real hand letter. Like, she has practiced and studied and she understands letter forms. I am not, I would say I'm not a hand letter. So far for a long time, I just stayed away from it, but my agent encouraged me and I will encourage you now too. Even if you think you're not a hand letter, try and work some hand lettering into your pieces. Even if it's not perfect, it's better than a font sometimes. Fonts can be a little impersonal and a little too perfect. Just because you aren't a traditional hand letter, doesn't mean that you can't enjoy lettering and adding it to your pieces. One thing I knew when I was doing my rough start, was that I was really liking this mix of block letters and scripts. I liked that they were still connecting. So I'm just going to play with that and see if I find anything interesting. One of the ligatures I had written down in my notes, was kind of this T and H connecting together. I really like that. So you might want to find a way to make them connect as block letters. I used to be really, I don't even know the word for it. I just used to be scared of even doing this ugly part. I hated when my pen would first go down, and it wasn't immediately beautiful, I felt like I was already failing, and that's not it. You have to start somewhere before you can find where you're going. So that's why we do the rough start just to, it's like throwing a dart and at least you have something to begin with, to work with. The lettering pieces that I saw that inspired this type of writing, they didn't overdo it with the scripty parts. My tendency would be to like, "Let's connect this S and the H, and let's connect this I and the S. But then it's going be too scripty. I don't want that. I still want it to be mostly block letters, but just a few fun places where they interact. One thing that I do, so right now I'm just free drawing these, but like I said, I'm not a hand letter, and sometimes I can't even begin to draw the skeleton. There are some times when I'll use fonts. I always make sure that I buy it. It's a font that I own. Otherwise, just ripping it off. But I'll start with a font, and I'll lay the letters out in Photoshop or Illustrator. Then I'll bring it in here and use that as a skeleton, as a jumping off point. If you have like, for instance, there's a font on Creative Market called Heritage. It's an awesome font that has, it's like a mono-line script font. It has lots of different ligatures and flourishes. Sometimes I'll use that just as inspiration to learn how the letters can connect, and then I'll take it from there. The whole point is to just use whatever tools you need to get the job done. It'd be awesome if I could just whip these out of my head like Mary Kate Mcdavies does and have a whole library of styles in my head, but I'm just not there yet. Something just got delivered. You can use whatever you need. I don't like that this is looking like a cross right now. I don't want it to have a religious undertone or connotation. That's what's standing out to me here. So far this is the only place that is connecting and scripty, and so I want to try and work that in somewhere else. My best tip that I can give you with lettering, when you're refining your lettering projects, is to start with what is the most wrong. When I look at this, that crossed it out to me. This stood out to me. So those are the things I'm going to focus on next. There's a lot else going on that needs fixed, but right now, those are the things that are standing out. Sometimes, I started drawing the blocky letters right away, but sometimes I'll just draw, it's really helpful. Usually, this is the way work, is I'll start by doing the skeleton. So I'm not worried about making it block letters yet. Right now, I just wanted to be basic where the letters are going to go. One opportunity I see for more loops within these block letters is double looping the Ls. Might be a little bit too much, but that's what we're doing here. We're just trying to get out all the ideas. Let your brain just roam free with all the different ways it can use the stuff. I'm doing lettering that is going straight across, but I often do angled lettering. Make sure you draw guides for yourself. Again, I mentioned it earlier in the Fresco overview, but one of the things that is coming to Fresco, but is not there yet, is the ability to draw straight lines. If you are doing angled texts, then you may want to draw the lines with a ruler and then bring that image in here, and then you can rotate it and have it how you want. Just the guides to follow. Especially, if I were doing more scripty, say like, it's pretty terrible. But whenever I'm doing leaning texts that's scripty, I usually will make sure that I not only have a baseline that I'm following, but I'll set up a slanted grid to make sure that all the letters are following along that same form. But again, my agent really helped to beat into my head that it really isn't about buyer, like art buyers don't want the most perfect lettering. Lettering that shows the wonkiness of your hand and is still legible, is still really valuable, and it makes your art unique. That's something I've been trying to do, is embrace more of my messy hand. I'm not that neat of a person. So I've stopped trying to make my artwork overly neat. I just have embraced that. It's going to look how it's going to look. I think one thing I'm noticing as I'm drawing this is that the word shall, all the letters that are in it once made. Well, for one thing, I already have this scripty H and so I don't want to repeat that here. I want there to be contrast because I don't want every lowercase H to be scripty. I want to show some difference there. But all the other letters in this word S-A-L-L, they get a little too pretty when I turn them. What I like about what's happening here, especially here is that, yeah, we got this little loop but it doesn't make the letter too pretty. That's just the style that I'm trying to stay away from. I would probably abandon it like that. It becomes too pretty, too scripty. The double L, that's too pretty. I don't want to do the S, I think it's going to make it too heavy on this left-hand side especially if I decide to keep this here which I'm liking. I don't know what the solution is yet but I really want this ligature. Sorry about that. I want to hold on to this ligature. It's something that I got married to during the rough start and so I'm just going to hold on to it. If I do this, if I make this scripty or whatever, it just adds a lot of weight to this left half. I'm just trying to explain the kind of things I'm looking at when I'm doing this. What is ruling? What's making these decisions for me? I started to explore something here where the crossbar of the A comes up to form part of that S and maybe that's where the other scripty part will come through. Because that's interesting but it won't make the letter look too pretty. I think I'm getting closer. I'm literally just going to continue this process. This can take me a long time because like I said, it's not one of my strengths but I really enjoy sinking into it and refining and refining and refining. Go ahead, take a stab at your piece. Like I said, I think it's easiest to start off. Just write the letters in your handwriting and start moving them around. If you're using a very simple quote like this it'll be easier to find that layout but if you have more words you may have to do some crafty stuff to get it all to fit and to look balanced. Then from there, take a look, have some references of lettering styles that you like. If you didn't find them during your rough start, you can go look now for lettering styles. Maybe peruse through some fonts that you own, that you like or buy a few new ones. I love looking at fonts on Creative Market. You can type out your text and actually see what it's going to look like and just keep on refining. I have landed on at least the general place that I'm going with the lettering. It still needs a lot of refining, it's still wonky but I at least know these are going to be all caps, these are where the ligatures are going to happen, this is the general style and from here I'm just going to continue to refine. A few things, like I said, the best tip I can give for refining is to ask what looks most wrong. Sometimes I'll take notes right on here and I might just point out that that's too thick. That it's getting too thick. This whole S, just drew this whole thing. I need to work on what the skeleton of the S is going to look like in these pieces and then from there I can build it out. These need to be more uniform. Just starting in one spot, because sometimes it can feel overwhelming especially if you're not a great hand letterer. Like I still consider myself a beginner. It can seem almost impossible, like a never ending project. But if you just take it one piece at a time and continue to refine, it'll help. Also if you're using the iPad, I would recommend turning up the smoothing. Or honestly I can't remember what it's called on procreate but it's one of the brush settings. I truly can't remember but it does the same thing where if you're going to make curves, it helps you smooth those out so that they don't look too wonky. Just continue to refine until you feel like you've got the lettering as you wanted.
6. Drawing Flowers: I spent some more time refining my lettering and I know I put a time-lapse in there, but I just wanted to say that that time-lapse was maybe four minutes, but that was a whole extra hour of work that it took me to take my lettering to this point. You can see that I ended up getting rid of that ligature that I thought I was so married to. Sometimes I really like the idea of something, but then when I'm really looking at things with a critical eye, I feel like maybe I'm holding on to it for the wrong reasons and I like it much better without that. I just kept this single ligature in there because I liked that style. I also like that in the word pass, you're seeing this thing pass through these letters. That makes a lot of sense for the piece at least to me it does. I'm really happy with this lettering but for now as I get into sketching the flowers, I'm going to go ahead and turn these layers off. If you think about cooking, when you are cooking a meal or you're following a recipe, it's common to get the ingredients together first and then put it all together. That's how I tackled my illustrations. I like to get all the ingredients ready and then I like putting them together and finishing them off. I'm not going to be concerned about the lettering right now. I'm going to Zoom into my document a little bit and I'm going to start working on the flowers. For this class I'm going to be using these four flowers that I was using from the beginning for sketching because, for one thing, I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. It's annoying to have to switch back and forth between an app in this and I don't want to have my computer sitting here. I didn't print any images out to follow. I am just going to follow along with these but however you are working or whatever your subject matter is, is totally cool. If you still aren't working on an iPad and you're just doing everything in your sketch book or you're painting or whatever, that's cool too. Again, I just want you to get moving. I want you to have a portfolio piece at the end of this. I'm going to go ahead and pick the first color I'm going to work with. In the beginning, I really don't care about colors. I refer to this as my working pallet. For right now, it's just that. It's just colors to help me differentiate how many colors there will be or to differentiate shapes, but I'm really not thinking about my final palettes right now. The first thing you need to do is to find a brush that I like. I thought that I had a favorite one of the Kyle's brushes but I don't see it in there. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Sometimes this first round of sketching, I may end up drawing over it anyway. I'm going to start with this big bloom. In my illustration I want to have an asymmetrical design and I want these bigger flowers to anchor down the piece. I'm going to draw a few of these in a different way. The best thing with drawing flowers is to just pick a point that you're going to start with and then move from there. Once I drew this shape, it was easier to draw this second one. I knew where it would be because that first one was laid down. That is pretty. If you know my work, then you know that my style, I like doing bold color fills and then drawing the line work on top of that. I'm just going to make a separate layer, change my color and get in here and do some of these lines. At first, the only lines that I draw are the ones that I need to have in there. Some of these shapes, let me turn this layer off, if I were to just fill this in this line that separates these two shapes would be hidden. Those are the first ones that I'm working on, are the ones that I need in order to tell the form of the flower. This is a much more textured brush than I usually use for my line work. But I have been feeling that lately. I'm going to keep doing that. But the nice part about working on the iPad, it makes refining and drawing so much more efficient really. If I have to redraw this again, once I have got it down, that is okay. Right now I just want to try and get the shapes going. One thing that I really like about fresco is it just keeps a running log of your most recent used colors. So it's really easy to switch between, if you're using more than two colors, it is nice to be able to see all the ones that you have been using. I could use my paint bucket for some of these closed shapes, but as you can see when I am tapping on this I didn't actually close all of the shapes. I enjoy the process of coloring and I don't mind getting in here and coloring, like it is a coloring book. I find it pretty therapeutic. But if that is annoying to you, you can close your shapes and fill them all at once. Now I'm ready to add in my detail lines. These are the signature lines that make my work mine. Sometimes I'll just free handed so I can see that we have some lines in here when I am looking at my flower, but sometimes with the more complicated shadow areas, what I like to do is I'm going to make another layer. I'm going to pick a color that is different from everything. I'm going to color in the areas of shadow. For instance, down here, I see a big area that's in shadow. I'm just going to rough color it. This is just a guideline that is going to be thrown away. So I don't need to worry about it too much right now. Now that I have that, I'm going to turn the opacity way down just so that I can see it enough. Now, when I'm working on my accent lines, I'm going to use those as a guide for where my line should go. Then the line direction itself is whichever direction needs to be there to show the form of the flower. Now I can go ahead and throw that layer away and what I have left are just these areas that really nicely describe those shadow areas. Then there're some more lines in here, but these ones are easier for me to just curve out without that guideline. But some of those shadow areas, it can be hard for me to free format. By taking it one step at a time, by first just outlining where those dark areas are and then using lines to describe the form, it just looks a little easier. First flower is done. To group these in fresco, I just have to grab a layer and drops him over top of each other. That will create a group. Make a new layer. Now I'm ready to do the next one. This one I know just from the way that this layout's going to go, I'm going to want a few more that are this straight on view that give me a really nice rounded flowers. That's what I'm going to draw next. We are going to have to space. This is why you can see having a reference, a real-life reference to work off of is really nice because you're not limited to one view. You can really get an idea of how the light changes and how it's interacting. Really like how roughly and rough these petals are. I have a petal. This petal is, I don't know if you can see it, this petal's hidden behind there. Sometimes it can be hard to get the angle right. Sometimes in real life these petals are growing from the center of the flower which is right here. Sometimes I'll just trace my pencil along there to figure out where that would be and that helps me figure out how to place that line. That looks pretty good. I'll do one more just a bigger petal back here. That'll work. This flower one thing that I get to decide now, do you see how it has these four dark corners in there? I get to decide if I want to show those or not. Let's see. Let's start by, going to go ahead and draw these lines that help tell the shape of the flower. Then as I get into details we can tackle that. My favorite parts of the flowers are these little inside bits, stamens. If you know, plant anatomy kind of dirty, but well, I think they give the flowers really a lot of personality. Whenever I'm not sure, so I just made another new layer because I'm about to add lines that are going to interact and kind of touch these ones, and so since I'm not sure if I'm going to want to keep them, I just want to make sure that they're all on separate layers so that if I end up not liking them, I can get rid of them without issue. This flower is very ruffly and so as the artist, I get to decide how many of those ruffles I want to keep in place, and I find that I'm sometimes not great at drawing all the ruffles and so sometimes if it's going to hurt the integrity of the flower then I don't worry about it. And with this flower, I didn't feel the need to draw that guide layer to tell me where the dark areas are because the way that this flower is formed, the face on, I'm getting more of an even lighting anyway and there's so much that already tells the form of the flower that it's just not as particularly important, and since this one is mostly one big shape, I'm just going to trace back over it to make it a closed shape so that I can use the paint bucket and then I'll fill in whichever areas it doesn't grab. Whenever I use a fill or a paint bucket like that, I like to zoom in because, especially with these textured brushes, there's sometimes, I don't know if you can see it, there's sometimes this tiny little ridge where the fill and the outline meet, and I just want to make sure that that doesn't exist. I want it to be nice and solid, and I'm going keep going. So I'm going to move through again, I don't know if you remember from the rough start, but one thing I know is I want a variety of shapes. So I want a few of these big flowers that are going to be focal points but I also want to make sure I have some medium-size blooms, I'm going to do some fillers and I'm just going to continue to collect the ingredients that are going to go into the illustration. I'm ready now to move on to my next type of flower, and I just want to point out that I'm going to keep one of the large ones on the screen just so that I have it for size reference because I want to make sure that I draw these guys much smaller than those just to have some variety. And the reason I spend so much time on my line work is because I don't use different values to show these details. So for me, this is just my style, it's just how I really like things to look and, so I need to depend on those line work, on the line work, to show form and light and all of that and value. If you, on the other hand, are more of a digital painter, then you can really have fun getting in here and just exploring painting and painting with different colors and values and with so many brushes at your disposal, you really can just let your artistic self free. You don't feel like you have to be locked into work; how I'm working on the screen. This is just how I prefer to. This feels good to me and I like the results but if you don't, please work in another way. So I'm just going to keep on keeping on. I'm going to draw some more of these. I'm going to do some of these really pretty greenery. Looks like maybe a different form of eucalyptus. I also have these guys here, which gives a nice little fun texture and I'm just going to keep drawing. So go ahead and however you're creating your artwork, if you're doing florals, go ahead and start bringing your florals to life. Draw a lot of them. The more you draw, the more variety you'll have when we're building out our frames, and if you're drawing something else or if your pieces a little different, whatever you've got going on, just work on developing the main ingredients.
7. Putting it Together: I finished going through and drawing my ingredients for my illustration and these aren't necessarily the only things I'm going to use. When I was doing my rough start some of the visual notes I took were these little pods, these little guys that look like herbs, or lavender and these little wonky leaves. Not everything was drawn here, but I did draw out various versions of the main shapes. For me that's a focal point flowers, so whatever bloom is the biggest or draws your attention the most, maybe because a lot of these big flowers are like big round things. But you could also have like a Fuji mum that is not necessarily bigger, but the shape of it is so interesting that that's what your focal point is. A focal point flower, I'd like to have a secondary flower in there. I like to have filler, so for me I did berries. You can see I bring this stack up here. I did berries for my filler, and then I want some type of greenery, which in this case are these rounded eucalyptus shapes. Those are the four things I tried to draw first and then just to keep using the recipe metaphor, if sometimes when you're cooking, you get all these ingredients together, but then you realize it needs a pinch of this or a pinch of that. There's definitely things that I'll draw in later to help fill in the gaps. But for now these are at least the main building blocks for me to start building out my composition. One tip I want to give you is there have been so many times where I have created a piece on the iPad and the client buys it and they want to change something about it and then I get back in there and I can't remember what brushes I was using. So I'm trying to get in the habit of making a layer where I just write down what brushes I used and what size. This one so far I've only been using two brushes. For the main ingredients, I used Kyle's drawing box Conte crayon, so I would write that down. I'm going to go ahead and hide these other layers. Also, I don't know if you were noticing in the time-lapse, but I have so many layers here. I have many groups with multiple layers and Fresco has yet to tell me that I've hit a layer limit. Knock on wood, I'm hoping that it doesn't, but it's just incredible. That's something that really bothered me and hindered me in Procreate was I would always hit a layer limit and so I'd have to merge things. Anyway, I have a new layer, I'm just going to write down Kyle's drawing box Conte crayon and this is a size, 28, and smoothing is at zero. Then for the lettering, I had been using one of the Fresco pens, the Blake pen. It's one of the ink, so it's under ink so I want to write that and it's just called the Blake pen. You can see the difference, this Blake pen is a little bit smoother and the Conte crayon has a bit more texture to it. This is size 14 and smoothing at 67. I'm just going to turn that off and I'm going to go ahead and put it way down at the bottom just so that I don't even see it and I'm not tempted to throw it away. It's just a reference layer for me to check back on later. Now I'm going to go ahead and start working on the composition. Now one thing right away is, I feel like with my rectangle and just the shape of things, I think I want my document to be a little bit longer so I'm going to go ahead and tap this size and I'm going to change this. Let's start with 4,000 and see. There we go. I think that's just the little bit of extra width that I needed. Now, I'm going to start turning my layers back on. The first thing I want to start with is the lettering. I already know, if I turn these flowers on, I drew the flowers way too big, so I'm going to have to scale that stuff down. But for now I'm just going to do a rough job of starting to place things. Now I do have my notes here next to me from my rough start, where I took notes on various frames and compositions that I could play with and a few things stood out to me. In the ones that I like most at least in these three and then this one on the other side, these opposite corners are being used. I'm probably going to do that. I'm probably going to place things in opposite corners to help everything be balanced. But there's still things that I'm unsure of. For one thing, this frame, the actual frame itself, I'm I going to have it be invisible and just let the flowers tell the shape there? I'm I going to have an actual black outline or colored outline that makes that frame? Or is it going to be a solid fill? Then that will help me figure out the next part, which is, how are the flowers going to interact with that frame? Are they all going to be on top of it? Are some going to becoming from behind and some on top? Are they going to weave in between? Those are the things I'm going to be playing with as I'm placing things. For now, what I've done is using the background layer that Fresco provides us with, I just duplicated it and scaled it down to give myself that rectangle to work with. Even though Fresco doesn't have the ability to draw shapes yet, I can at least make it work that way. I think already that I don't like having this frame filled. I think I want it to be more of an outlined. So I'm just going to turn the opacity way down just so that I can just barely see it and then I'm going to do my best to rough an outline. For now it's okay that it's messy. I'm going to want to go back in and figure out how I'm going to make that look nicer eventually. But for now, at least I have a frame. You can see now why I prefer to do everything in steps where I'm drawing first and then composing because now it's just, I don't have to worry about drawing things that are missing, I can just pull from the pieces I've already made. Now, I want an asymmetrical composition and I want the bottom left hand to be heavier than the upper right corner because this is basically just going to be a counterbalance to whatever I put down here. All of it should feel, since this is centered, we basically want anything that's happening around it to just be balanced. It doesn't matter if down here is going to be heavier, as long as we have something to balance it out here so that the whole thing doesn't feel weighed too much to the bottom left. That's just something you feel out as you keep going. One thing I'm paying attention to when I'm rotating this is that the stems look nice together, sometimes these ones look like they're coming from a similar spot, these ones aren't getting tangled down here with the frame. Same here it's like even though these lines are crossing, it doesn't look messy, and so that's just what I'm paying attention to when I'm rotating. I'm trying to balance things and I'm also trying to make sure that the I isn't going to get stuck in a tangle anywhere, I want the I to be able to move all around while being able to stay comfortably centered there. This is where I need to start deciding, you can see that this eucalyptus over here gets really close but it doesn't actually fall off the edge, whereas this one, as I get it closer it's starting to fall off that right edge. There isn't a right or wrong answer, I just need to ask myself, do I want things to be falling off the page or do I want it to all be pretty contained? Just since I really like how this is nicely, it looks organic, it does look like a really fresh mix of bouquets, I like that it has that organic feel, but I do think I want it to all be contained within my page bounds and I don't want things falling off. That's going to be something that I'm going to start really paying close attention to, to make sure that I don't fall off the edge. Another thing is this leaf is starting to encroach on the writing here, this gives me an opportunity to have the flowers interact with the lettering, which is fine but for balance again, if I'm doing it down here, then I might want to have even just a small element that's able to balance that out up here. Now, I also want to make sure not everything has to be, if it's happening down here, it has to happen up here, but those are the things I'm thinking about. Does it make sense that this leaf is interacting? Does it threw off the balance? Right now it feels okay to have that down there. This is also where we get into the issue of perfectly centered versus visually centered. Before I felt like the text was more perfectly centered in the middle of the design, but as the weight starts to change as we work on this, sometimes you can cheat the text to be off to the side a little bit and visually it will feel more balanced than if it's perfectly centered. It's possible that just by cheating that to the right a little bit, I don't have those actually interacting, and so it's not something that will have to worry about as much on the other side, but just something to keep in mind. I really like this flower here, but I think having it tucked up in there isn't working as much, I think I can come in a little bit more. You can see that the berries on this side are larger than over here, and that's another way that I can play with balance. Even though in real life, berries would be all similar size, they don't have to be that way in my illustration. If it's going to help me to balance those out by having bigger ones or to help the movement of the I line, this creates an S curve that comes over here, those things mirror each other. I'm saying that because sometimes my brain, I get locked into the concrete way that things are in real life, and I have to constantly remind myself that I can do whatever I want in these illustrations as long as I feel like I'm balancing things and looking out for that stuff, then it doesn't matter if it doesn't align with reality. One thing I'm not liking is this area right here it's just still not quite working, and so I'm going to keep playing with that, maybe drawing a stem and another leaf in here will help. Sometimes when I'm trying to determine balance, I will squint my eyes, this is a tip that I've given in past pattern classes. When you squint your eyes, you get a more generalized view and things can stand out to you more. One thing that is standing out is this area of green, I feel like it would be more pleasant to create a triangle and do something pink right here instead of this yellow, I think it will help bring that out and especially because we already have a nice triangle of yellow happening. I might make that bud invisible and bring in another pink flower. I'm feeling pretty good about this. A few things I want to start grouping these main groups so that I can size them and rotate them altogether, but overall balance wise, I feel like I'm getting a nice counterbalance of flowers up here. You can see that we have 1, 2, 3, 4, four and a half flowers here and we have 1, 2, 3, four and a half up here too. Even though there's this exact same amount of flowers by spreading this out and letting this have more space and room to breathe, and buckling these two yellow ones together, it has more weight to counterbalance these smaller blooms up here. Now I'm going to try and find all of the things that belong in each group and group them together. I have to be careful because as I'm adding things in when I group them, some of the things jump automatically to the top of the group, and so I just need to make sure that I'm paying attention to the order that I had everything in. Also I'm going to take this opportunity to jump in to this flower group and add a little stem just to help with the I line there, it looks a little strange floating with that gap. Now if I move these, these are going to fall off, so I'm going to keep them for now because maybe I'll just scale everything down. The nice thing about Fresco is if stuff falls off the edge, it'll give you a warning that, hey, this is going to be cropped. At least the first few, I turned to that dialogue, that warning off because I remembered, but it is nice to have it on there if you tend to do that, it will warn you so you don't accidentally crop your artwork. Now let's go ahead and group all of this stuff. I'm actually going to temporarily group all of my artwork that's turned on just so that I can size it altogether. So we left off with me working out the composition and I still have a few compositional things to address, one is the frame. Since I'm challenging myself to work fully on the iPad, which I don't usually. I like switching things up. But I do like giving myself limits like this just to help the creative process, just to keep my brain working and solving problems. So since I'm working on the iPad and I'm working in fresco, I know that one of my limitations is I can't draw straight lines. So drawing a frame that's going to look nice is going to be difficult. So that's definitely something I want to keep in mind here. I'm also, as I turn it off and on, I'm trying to ask myself what does the frame add? Because right now when I turn it off and on I'm actually, I feel like it's just adding messiness. I don't think that it's actually adding anything that's helping the illustration. So I might do away with it completely. When I turn it off I like the balance that I have. One thing I'm noticing though is there needs to be something right here, either another leaf that's sticking out or maybe a smaller item. But it seems like no matter how I rotate this, I can't quite seem to get it to fill in that space that I'm looking for. I either create a gap right here. Actually, that looks pretty nice. But those are the types of things I'm looking for, I'm looking at the balance. I also, without that frame, might be able to make everything a little bit larger, might not be necessary. Another solution would be to draw in a partial frame. So maybe where the frame would be, I could draw a thicker, would be outlined. Let me go up here and get the corner. That just sort of helps complete the eye line. That way it's easier for me to draw these blocky sections, and it's okay with me if they look kind of wonky. Better so than the just single outline frame. I just don't have a steady enough hand. Of course I could try, there are different tricks. So like if I line up my hand along the edge of this and hold my pencil, what I can do is just use my hand to create a straight line and that actually works pretty well. So that could be a solution, I could create the frame that way. Yes. I just kind of have to feel out how I want to do that. In fact, let's go ahead, I'm going to delete this layer. Let's try that trick I was just doing. Let's use the edge of my iPad to help me create a straight line. I still subscribe to what I was saying that I think the frame is too much. I can actually use, I'm going to use the edge of my page over here to, as a straight edge to align this too. I'm going to need to zoom in. Come on, buddy. It's trying to snap. So that might be problematic. It might not be in the cards for me to have this frame. What I was going to say is I can use that straight edge and then I can just move this around to where I want it. But anyway, what I was saying is, I still subscribe to what I was saying that the frame kind of makes things messy. But I do like the idea of the partial frame just to complete the eye line. So maybe I'll set that up and then erase what I don't need. I also weirdly like what's happening here with these kind of crisscrossing, not falling off the page as nicely as they are. But anyway, I'm going to merge these down, so they're just on one layer. I'm going to go ahead and create an empty mask. So now you can see I have this black circle which is telling me that if I swipe, I can edit the layer artwork. If I swipe right now I'm editing the mask. So going to make sure Hide is selected and I'm just going to color out the areas that I don't want. Now since I tend to like black accents with my work, it makes sense that the frame would be black, but I might start playing around if I want to color the lettering. I'm soon going to move into the phase where I'm actually coloring the final artwork. When I do that, even though, like I talked about earlier with the working palette. Even though this isn't the palette I'm going to be working with, I do have the colors distributed in a way that I'll probably keep. So like all of these flowers that are pink, even if they are going to be pink in the end, they will still hold on to the same color. All these yellow flowers, even if they aren't going to be yellow, they'll all be the same color. So I just want to consider, are these frame, is the frame in text going to be black? Are they going to be the same color or is the text going to be one of these other colors that are in the palette? I'm going to go ahead and duplicate my frame layer and turn one of them off because I do want to play around with whether I like just the partial frame showing. I guess I do like it better than the full-frame. Again, that full-frame, what's happening is in these areas. It just kind of tangles things up a little bit, down here too. It's kind of nice. I'm going to move, first, I'm going to go ahead and flatten the mask, which is just going to accept it because I want to move this one piece. If I still had it masked, it might get a little wonky. Just going to move this in a little bit. I think I like that a lot. I'm going to extend it upwards just a little bit. So now you can see there's a little mistake there. I don't know what layer that ended up on, so I want to clean things like that up. I also have something showing through here, that's from leftover from the frame. So now I'm just going to go through and clean up my artwork. I've gone through here, I've clean things up. I have added in this new shape with this new color. I've added an additional color. In general, I feel really good about what I've got here. I think I'm ready to start flattening things out to color them and recolor before I add in all my details and my final texture. I changed my font, my lettering back to black from blue. I think that it works better. I think I like, let me get it out. So I like that, the black frame sort of calls back to the black line work I have in my work. I think that it's just a nice contrast to keep the heaviness of the black with the text as well. What I'm going to do though, instead of trying to make duplicate layers of all of this stuff, I'm going to just duplicate my whole document. So here's what I'm working on. I'm going to go ahead and select "Duplicate". While that's doing that, now I know that I've got a copy that has all of the working layers safe. Even the ingredients that I ended up not using, I can go ahead and work with those. For now, I'm going to go ahead and open up this duplicate. It might take a little bit. I was getting a little icon down here. It might take a while for it to duplicate all those layers. But once it opens, now I know that I've got my other stuff safe. Okay. So I'm in my duplicate and I'm just going to go ahead, this is a bunch of stuff that I didn't use, so I can just go ahead and delete those. I'm just going to go through and organize my files. I'm going to delete anything I'm not keeping and I'm going to start consolidating those layers down as much as I can. Okay. Everything has been condensed. I've got just a few groups here. If I open these up, you can see, I don't have to scroll to see all the layers. All the green, for instance, if I turn this off you can see all the green that fit on one layer is there and all the berries are on one layer. So that's going to make everything easier as we jump into talking about color.
8. Color & Texture: How I always love this part of the project because we've made it through the work part. I mean, not that I don't enjoy the other parts of the process but once I get here and I just get to focus on color and texture, it's like sliding after crawling to the top of the hill. Since I left to you, all I did was I played with the sizing of the text. I didn't do that to hide it from you, I just rambled for a long time in the last video about balance and everything and I didn't want to keep you longer than I needed to. The reason that video is so long and I go over this stuff for so long is that's where I can really spend a lot of time and it's just so easy to get in there and pick and pick and pick and rotate and move things. I continued after I stopped recording and the main thing is just making the text bigger. I really like that now it interacts with these flowers. It also draws your attention instead of feeling you have this small thing in the center and then these bigger things and then this frame. I felt it really upped the cohesion of the whole piece. Let's go ahead and start talking about color. Now my usual color workflow is very different than this. Usually, I love to use Adobe Illustrator's recolor tool. Here's what I can tell you about how I use color. The first tip I can give you is to start collecting a library of colors that you love. I do this in an Illustrator document. I have it in Its one document that I always reference. Anytime I use a new color or find a new color that I love, I sample it and I add it to the mix. The great thing about this is you can sample colors from all over the place, drop them into this big bucket, and you no longer have to worry about stealing from other artists or taking other people's color palettes. You can still take them, but they get added to this bigger thing. Its just that one step removal. You basically have a whole library of colors that are yours that you've already vetted. Well, I do love yellow. I don't love all shades of yellow but my color document shows the yellows that I tend to use and all the neutrals and all the greens. Once you have all of those, you can make one big master color palette and you can use the recolor artwork tool to find new ways and combinations to use those colors. I do that all the time almost all of my pieces. Like this piece actually has a really nice working palette but if I were not challenging myself to stand the iPad, there's a good chance I would export this, do a quick live trace in Adobe Illustrator or just something that captures the shapes and the colors, and would probably use the recolor artwork tool just to explore what else I have. However, I'm trying to challenge myself. Another tip that I can give you is you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time, especially if you have groups of colors that you really love. When I'm using the recolor artwork tool, I take screenshots of every combination that I love and then I narrow down those screenshots until I get to the final one, but I don't throw away those other ones. I hold on to them as color inspiration for the future, like now. That is what I did. I went through my inspiration files and I found a color palette that I think is going to work for this. Let's see. Here it is. Just a screenshot that I can use as a reference. Those are my best tips for you for color. If you have tricks that you like to use piece by piece, maybe you go in and find a palette at the beginning of a project and you already know that's where you're going to use. I just like to do it a different way. I like color to be this separate thing that I think about after all the rest of the work is done. In this case, I'm going to use a palette that I already really loved that I didn't get to use. Let me go through first and foremost and I'm just going to sample the colors that I'm going to use here. I sample those and now that I've done the work, I already know how these are going to be composed, I know how the colors are going to be distributed. It's pretty simple to go in here and start recoloring things, especially because I took all that time in that last video to consolidate. Remember, I duplicated the projects so that I still have the working one but now I have this condensed version where as many of the colors that I could consolidate down to one layer have been minimize and reduced. Now I can just go through here and start locking transparencies. Fresco makes it really easy just lock transparency, and then I can color over that or use the paint bucket tool to apply a new color. Even though I picked up my palette, I still don't know what's going to be what color. I'm just going to get in there and play around. Right now I'm just focusing on flat color. I'm going to handle texture in the next step. I just love when I add color to a piece that just really brings everything altogether. It's just really nice that it didn't take me 1,000 years to come up with a color palette. I was able to use something that I had already spent time on in the past but I was unable to utilize. Do you see there's still a little bit of messiness? I want to clean up and something showed up down here that I want to clean up. I still have some clean up to do in the refine once the color is applied but I won't bore you with showing you that. What I do want to do though, is show you how to add some texture. We have all of these brushes and fresco and they are so fun. There's these ones called the rakes. They are what they sound like. Let me make a blank layer here and you can see, let me size up, if I pull down it's literally just like texture rakes. I love using these. I have been really enjoying adding these in a printmaking texture. Let's see. What I can do is since we took the time, actually, you know what? It's just going to bother me. Give me a few minutes. Let me clean up and find out what's going on in these areas. That's better. Now this, where the color is showing through from before, I'm actually going to leave that in there. I like that it looks like an under painting and it adds a little bit of texture there. What I don't want is where the artifact from the frame was sticking out, that just looked messy. So I wanted to clean that up. But now we can go ahead and add texture. I'm going to start with these back leaves that are really dark. I want to add sort of a lighter texture on top. I'm going to duplicate the layer. You are totally welcome to keep the transparency locked into just drawn right on top of them. But sometimes I don't love how the texture is. So anyway, I just like to make a duplicate just to be safe. I'm going to sample this lighter green color. I'm going to go in and I'm just going to start lightly raking over. What's nice about these brushes too, is they sort of add to that plant line feel, the lines that would really be in these leaves. I'm going to go heavy on some of them and I'll show you why it's also a good idea to make a copy. Because now that we have these masks in Adobe Fresco, I can go ahead and create an empty layer mask. Now while I'm editing that mask, and I'm saying that I want to hide when I'm drawing, I can keep using this texture brush and just start to cross out some of that texture that I added in that was too much. It gives me a much more subtle look instead of a crazy amount of texture. Finding the right balance between too much texture and not enough is just a personal preference. There are sometimes when I go too far and there other times that I don't push it far enough. So it's just one of those learning curves. But now if I turn this layer on and off, you can see that that texture that we added is so effective. I like to think of it as grit that your eyes sort of lock onto. That's what it feels like to me. I'm going to go back in here. Oops, the wrong layer. I'm going to go back into my mask and I'm going to reveal little more. I want to bring some of this back in. I don't only have to use this brush, I can go in and use some of their other texture brushes too. Let's see what they have for effects. They have a nice noise one, let's get in and use that. Remember I'm working on the mask right now. So if I want to add more to the actual layer, I have to slide back. Another way to do it is I can use my selection tool. I'm going to go in here and just trace over where I want that brush to be confined to and I'm on a new layer now. I can go in, brush this texture on top. So that's another way to layer textures if it's getting confusing with all the masks. Yes, so in Kyle's brushes, in part of his ink box, he has these brayers and they are awesome. Let me show you. Just on a regular layer, they look like you're doing printmaking and using a brayer to put ink down. I'm going to go ahead and do that on these red pops that don't have any lines. We had a darker red that I sampled and I'm just going to trace over. In these flowers I've gone in using one of the markers. Right now I am in marker and it's marker chisel. I went through with a lighter color and then back to the original color. You can see I'm getting just some nice streakiness in there. Just something to take away from the flatness. This is a really intense texture, but this is a really small flower that doesn't have any line detail on it. It's sort of a perfect canvas for all that texture. But these flowers already have a lot of texture just from the line work, and so I just want something to make it not so flat. So that's a nice trick. Notice how I'm drawing in the direction that I would really be coloring this. I think if you just kind of randomly move in circles then the effect just isn't as strong. It's just one of those things. Just try to be mindful of that. I've got some updating to do on these leaves here. I'm going to add some lines to these leaves that were added later and then I think we will be just about done. All right, so I'm just about done with my illustration. I'm really happy with it. The one thing is I want to add some of that brayer texture to the text. I also want to add in just some black speckles around it. For my speckle, I'm just going to hand draw it. I'm just going to find some simple textured pen. That's too much. I'm just going to randomly kind of dot all over my piece like it's little misprint textures. All right, and there you have it. A new piece for my portfolio. Hopefully you've got one too with a lettered quote and custom florals going all the way around in a beautiful color palette with nice textures right on top, all done on the iPad using Adobe Fresco.
9. Thank You!: Thank you once again for spending time with me in this course. I'm really excited about this new type of class where instead of focusing on a specific learning objective, our objective is simply to work together to get some practice in and hopefully a new portfolio piece. If you want to stay in touch with me, you can follow me on Skillshare to know when new classes are out or you can follow me on Instagram, which is my favorite social media platform of choice where I share a regular updates. You can also join me on my newsletter, which is a quarterly newsletter. It only comes out four times a year by going to my website by DylanM.com.
10. Go Further with Fresco:
Dylan Mierzwinski, Illustrator & Lover of Flowers
