Transcripts
1. [Intro To] Watercolor Florals for Graphic Design course trailer: If you love watercolors, you've likely noticed how popular watercolor florals have become. They're bright, beautiful, and perfect for stationary, branding, social media, packaging, and more. Digitizing them, removing the white backgrounds behind them, enhancing their color, and getting them prepared for those designs can seem a little easier said than done. That's where watercolor florals for graphic design comes in. My name is Sheila, and I've been creating and designing digital products for over nine years. As a professional graphic designer, I also had experience in production design, preparing files for Fortune 500 companies. In this intro course, I share my experience for crafting a great digital product that you can use over and over again. We'll start with mixing and painting simple, large, medium, and small florals, and add in some foliage too. Next, we'll digitize those florals by going through scan settings, talk about resolution, then enhance the color and vibrancy of our foliage and florals. We'll remove the white backgrounds from our scans with a few easy tricks in Photoshop, then save out our files so they can be placed on any colored or a textured background in the future. With your enrollment, you'll also receive extra bonuses. Grab a clickable resources list with all the supplies from the course, and a scanning and resolution's cheat sheet so you'll always know your florals are sized and rest correctly for use. While we will paint florals together, the focus of this course will be in Photoshop. You'll need access to Photoshop CS3 or newer on a desktop or laptop computer to successfully complete this course. This course was created with beginners in mind. If you've never painted florals before or you're new to Photoshop, it may take a little extra time, but is completely doable. You'll have three floral painting methods to choose from, and all keystrokes are posted on-screen for Photoshop with step-by-step narration explaining both the why's and the how's. Grab your paints, brushes, and a strong cup of coffee, and let's create some watercolor florals for graphic design.
2. Class Overview: Bonuses + Supplies: Welcome to the intro course of Watercolor Florals for Graphic Design. I'm so glad that you're here. Before we kick things up, I just want to walk you quickly through the supplies that we're going to be using throughout this course, where to find the bonuses and everything to expect as we dig into the content of the course. You can see an image of all kinds of materials in front of you. All of the supplies for this course are included in the free resources PDF, so definitely make sure you pick that up. If you click on your project right below this video, you will see them on the right side of your screen, but you do need to be on a desktop or a laptop in order to download those. That's where all the bonuses are, including that resources list. Walking you through these super quick, I'm going to be using tube watercolors for the painting portion of this course. My favorite affordable tube watercolors are the coil watercolors. They're just super vibrant and really easy to use. You will need some paint pellets. These porcelain ones are my favorite because when you clean them out there's no staining, it's like they're brand new every single time you clean them. You will need a few brushes. My favorite round brushes are number 0,2,4,6, and 8. But if you don't want to pick all those up, then I would recommend getting at least a number 0 and number 2, and then a number 6. You'll need some watercolor paper. I use Canson cold presser, 140 pound watercolor paper. I also like using an eyedropper, because as I'm mixing up the two watercolors, I just speeds up the process a bit to dilute those two watercolors using an eyedropper versus transferring water from a brush into the pallet. Another optional supplies, the heat tool with creating these florals a lot of the times you need to let things fully dry before you can go back in and add color on top of them. If you're an impatient painter like I am, then a Heat tool really comes in handy because it speeds that drying process 1, but that's totally optional. What you don't see is a set of pencils. I like using the Staedtler drawing pencils and I like using a 3H and a 3B, but that is just if you prefer the trace or sketch method which I will show you how to do both of those a couple of videos from now. If you like planning out your florals and sketching them out before painting them, if you don't feel comfortable painting them freehand get, then I would recommend following either one of those methods, so you will need a pencil for those. Then the very last thing is you will need Photoshop, because although we do spend some time painting in this course, the majority of the time is going to be spent in Photoshop, because the main focus of this course is taking those watercolor florals that we paint and making them digital so you can reuse them on anything you'd like in the future. You could even sell them if you wanted. We are going to be spending the majority of time in Photoshop, so you will need this Photoshop CS_3 or newer in order to complete the course from start to finish. In the course, you'll learn the correct scanning and resolution settings to use for your florals or else you'll learn how to enhance those colors in Photoshop, how to recolor those elements and had to cut them out of their backgrounds. If you'd like to take things further later on, then make sure you watch all the way to the end of the course scientist, the special offer for you, if you'd like to learn how to also create bouquets, arrangements, raise seamless patterns, and how to sell your florals online later. With that said, let's jump in and get started with this intro course to watercolor florals for graphic design.
3. Using References: When you create watercolor florals for graphic design, you create them a little differently than traditional watercolor florals. You're not going to paint a bunch of florals and a bouquet all together. You're actually going to single out individual florals and you're going to paint them separately. It's really important to do your homework and find some great reference images that you can use. You want to look at these references in pull out large, medium and small size florals because as you're creating arrangements or bouquets later on, they'll really help to create these well-rounded, beautifully composed arrangements and bouquets. For this course, I've created a Pinterest board full of inspiration. You're welcome to pull some of the images off of there and use those as references or feel free to create your own Pinterest board full of inspiration. It really helps understand the different forms of your flowers and gets you really prepared for creating some nice texture. So you really want to look for variety. You don't want all of your large, medium, and small florals to just be round flowers, for example, When you have differences in petal shapes or characteristics of these florals, it really creates a more dynamic and a harmonious layout later on. You just want to give yourself a bunch of options of what you can choose. You don't need to create a ton of different florals, but you do need a good variety of shapes and sizes. I would say at least two or three large size florals. You want to create two maybe three medium size. Then you probably want about five smaller ones. Then when you get to your foliage, it's best to have as many as possible because you really use that to fill out your arrangements and bouquets. I would say to have a minimum of eight different foliage. So leave shapes and branches. Some that are long, some that are short, Some that have a lot of leaves, some that don't have a lot of leaves. Just look through all these references and really take a look at different arrangements of bouquets and see what you can pull from there as inspiration to inform the choices that you will make for your individual flowers. We're going to paint the individual flowers one at a time and then when we get into digitizing, we'll digitize them all separately. Then later on you can compose these arrangements and bouquets by putting them all together. In the next video, I'm going to walk you through two different ways to create florals. If you've never created florals before, you'll still be able to create beautiful florals following the methods in the next video.
4. Trace + Freehand Sketch Method: In this video, I'm going to walk you through two methods. If you've never created florals or really worked with watercolors before, and you're worried about not being able to create really aesthetically pleasing florals, these two methods were made for you. By the end of this video, you will know how to plan out your florals where you'll be guaranteed to have great outcomes. In a few videos, we're going to be creating those florals together in watercolor and we're going to follow the loose style method, which is basically free handing using the paintbrush. But if you're not comfortable moving there yet, this is a first step. So prepare this ahead of time and then move into those videos instead of just following me, loose styling knows, just use what you've created in this video for that part of the course. Okay, so got a picture of an anemone flower right here. So this first method is looking at it in sketching it. So it's basically the sketch method. So you're going to keep it in front of you. You're going to draw it out right here and then you can tweak it and erase any parts that you don't like that way it's pretty planned out before you start using watercolors on it. When you do the trace method, I'm using this set of Staedtler drawn pencils when you're looking at your pencils right here, HB is your neutral this is right in the middle. Anything FH and higher is harder. It increases in hardness as you go in this direction. It increases in softness when you go in this direction. So the softer the lead, the darker the lead will appear and a lot more lead will come out of the pencil when you draw with it because the lead is so soft, these pencils will last you a lot longer because the lead is so hard that when you draw with it, it's much lighter color. So I'm going to grab a 3H for this and we just wanna softly draw this in because once we apply the watercolor and it goes over the pencil lines, you can't erase them. You would have to clean them up in Photoshop. So the lighter we have, the less noticeable they'll be, but at least then we'll have a guide to go off of when we're painting everything. So we're just going to look at this flower and we're going to draw it right here. So I'm going to start right in the middle. Okay, so I just have the center part roughed in and now I wanna make sure I get these petals right because the petals are basically all the character of this flower. So I have this one coming up right here, and you can trace over it with your pencil to get a feeler, get your hand warmed up for drawing it. It doesn't have to be exact. You're just roughing out the general structure of the flower. I'm going to look at this one now. I got sticky racer right here, which is really handy because I use it like a pencil and I got this one came down a little further. I am not an illustrator by any means. So if I can do this, you can definitely do this. Okay, so this is method number one, just sketching it out just to look at it and sketch it the best that you can and now you've got guidelines for when you go in with your watercolors to paint and you have a lot less pressure when you go in and you've begin painting, wondering if your petals are too big or if they're not angled in the right way or you're missing apart or overlapping something that you shouldn't be overlapping. This gives you a nice structure to go off of and I'm just going to clean up some of these lines. Once again, you want these as light as possible. So if you have any dark areas, I just go over with my eraser really lightly and that will lighten up those pencil strokes or those pencil marks on the paper, and this is watercolor paper. This is the Canson cold press watercolor paper which you can see on the resources list, there's a link to that and put that resources cheat sheet right below this video so you can download it and have access to all those lengths of all the supplies that we use in this course. Okay. So I'm just lightening it up and now we're all set and this is prepared for painting later on. Okay, so I'm going to walk you through the second method, which if this seems too difficult, then the second method will definitely work for you. So I'm going to set this aside and for this one, what we want to do is actually transfer this image on to the paper. There's two ways you can do this. If you have a light box, that's ideal because if you have a light box, you can flip this over and then trace on the backside and then we can transferred onto the watercolor paper and it'll be the right way. But if you don't have a Light-box, you'll have to draw right on top of it if it's too hard to see. But you can also put this, you can tape it onto a window and you can trace it that way. If you don't have a light box, but if you don't want to do that, you can just trace over this, just know once you transfer it on here, it's going to be reflected. So it's going to face the opposite way. So I have a light box, so I'm going to grab that right now. Okay. So this is my light-box. I got it all set right here. I'm going to turn it on and I'm going to flip this over once again and mine has these little clips up here. I'll hold it and I'm going to grab a soft pencil this time. So we're going to grab my 3B pencil because I need these pencil marks to transfer onto the watercolor paper later, and if it's too hard, I won't be able to transfer those marks as easily. So what I'm going to do is just come in here and trace. You can see how much darker this lead is compared to the 3H pencil that we're just using. So I'm just going to trace over where these petals are and then I'll be right back. Now I'm just going to rough out the interior part right here. So I've got my flower all traced out and now we can remove this light box out of the way. All right I've got my watercolor paper right here and what you're going to do is just flip it over so you can rub this and it will transfer. But in my experience I've found it's better if you just trace, retrace and that will transfer the lines a little cleaner. So I'm going to grab my 3H again and just trace over these paddles like we did on the other side of it. If I move it over a little bit, you can see it's transferring it over. So I'm just going to go through the petals and do this, and then I'll be right back. You don't want to move this photograph at all as you're doing this, otherwise everything will get messed up. All right, so let's take a peek. I'm holding one side of the paper so it doesn't shift. Let's just take a peek at how things are looking, and I'm starting to get a nice rough outline of how everything works. So the center part you can see there's so many details right here. If you have a flower that's also like this, sometimes it's better to just draw right on top of it like this. Then it will transfer all of them over rather than having to draw all those tiny details. You could also do the entire flower this way if you wanted to. Let's see what that looks like. So the center is transferred and I have a few gaps down here, the bottom part of the petals. I think that's it, so I'm just going to do that down here that we don't have to fuss with trying to get the lines exactly right. Let's take a look, so that's transfer a lot better. I've got an area over here and an area of here. All right, so I'm going to remove this and we're all set. We've transferred it over in, these pencil marks are still a little too dark for my liking if we compare it to our trace method, obviously this one's going to be darker because we had to use softer lead in order to transfer it over. So this one will always be a bit darker if you feel comfortable with this method, I would choose this one over this one. But if you're just getting started, this one, it's absolutely okay to use and it's great practice once you start understanding how to draw these petals or how to paint them in, then you'll just naturally evolve to free handing once you start painting these often. So I'm just going to go in with my eraser, my sticky eraser again and just lightly erase over these pencil marks to lighten them up before we apply watercolor to it. So if lightened, this went up quite a bit. Make sure you can still see your edges of your petals if there's any that you erase it just a little too much and you feel like you're going to run into trouble later with watercolors. Feel free to grab a hard brush like the 3H, and you can just sketch those lines and so you have that later. Like I lost this edge right here, and I don't want to do that. This right here is a little too light. So these ones are all prepared now. So once we get to painting with watercolor, you're just going to use these instead of free handing the florals like I show. Just grab these and just follow along from there and you'll be all set. So that's two methods for preparing for your watercolor florals, whether you've ever painted these before or not, now you have an outline or a general structure of your flower. So you'll be all good to go from this point forward.
5. Choosing + Mixing Colors: In this video, I'm going to walk you through how I choose my colors and then how I mix my colors. What you see in front of you is exactly what I've pre-mixed, what I've decided on, and now I want to walk you through how I chose those colors, and then how I mixed those colors using just these colors. We are using the clay watercolors. They're super affordable, and you can obviously get a lot of variety with your colors with just using a few of them. I have scrap sheet of watercolor paper right here. These are my two ceramic palettes, which there's a link to, right on the resources list, so you can grab these exact ones.I recently started using these ceramic palettes and I don't think I'll ever go back to the plastic palettes. They are little pricier, but they don't stain at all, so you clean them out and they're just like brand new. I also like that I can mix my colors up here, and I used these wells to mix these colors together if I want more variety as I'm working. They're super handy and they work really well. First things first, when I am choosing what colors that I want to use, I will choose the colors, so I'll choose two colors. For example, with this one, I knew that I wanted my colors to be really vibrant, especially because on screen, I want you to be able to see everything that I'm doing. I don't want things too muted out, or too dark, or too light. I went into this ahead of time wanting a vibrant palettes, so I chose pink for my flowers, and then obviously, green for my leaves. But I can riff off of those colors to get other colors to add more variety and make some really harmonious blends out of it. Starting with my pink, I then went into the orange area just to add more variety because obviously, I don't want just pink flowers, I want some different colors in the same color family, that's the important thing. When they mix together, you still want it to look really pretty. If you have like a purple and green mixing together, or a blue and an orange, even though those are really beautiful, if they start touching you, you're going to get brown and it's going to get muddy. I decided to start with pink and then I went off of pink-orange, and then a light orange. Then with the green, I have some blues, and some lighter greens, and then some browns. All of them together look really nice together, so that's where I'm coming from. If you wanted to have purple flowers, and you would have some blue, and maybe some pink in there. Everything stays within the same family, but you still have that variety. Then obviously, decide how muted you want the colors, how vibrant you want the colors, and that can be accomplished by adding in a little white watercolor or brown watercolor to mute things down. I want to show you how just a little bit of watercolor goes a really long ways. You don't want to be squeezing your tubes into your little wells in your palette, because it's just going to be a waste of paint, when they dry up, they get really flaky. To stretch your watercolors as far as possible, I want to show you how I mix, just to give you a little bit of insight into my process. I'm just going to mix up these two colors again, since I'm going to be using them a lot, and I'll mix them right in these two wells just so you can see the process. Then I did the exact same thing for these ones, but I'm going to tell you what colors and how much of each color I used for these different versions right here. I'm using a number 4 round brush for this to just pull my watercolors and mix them on the trays.I like a little bit larger ever brush as I'm mixing, just so I can get a lot done at once. The colors I'm using over here are carmine for the red, pale orange, lemon yellow, Prussian blue, van dyke brown, and the green is radian. I'm grabbing my carmines for my red, my really dark red orange. I've got my red right here, so I'll open it up. What I do is I just squeeze it just until I can see the paint up at the top, and then I'll just grab a little bit on my brush right here, and I'll put it into the well right here, and then I can add some extra water. You can see how red this is right now. I sometimes also use an eyedropper for this, so I can just add a lot of water at once if it's taking a while with just bringing it in from the paintbrush, so that's also an option. Then I'll grab my pale orange because I don't want it to be true red, but I want a little bit of orange in there, even though I want it to be more red than orange, So I'll do the exact same thing.So I'll just squeeze until I see the paint and then I'll grab some on my brush. I'm grabbing much less this time, and then I'll mix it up right here. You can see how nice and rich that is looking. I can even bring some right here to see how it's looking, and then I can test it on a watercolor paper. You can see it's definitely more pink. I think I want a little bit more orange in here, so I'm just going to grab a little bit more orange and mix that up. It's a lot of just going back and forth of testing, adding some extra water. You don't want your water color to get too thick in the well, because you won't get the transparency of your watercolor as you're painting with it. This is a really nice transparency right here, I like this a lot. It's not to red and it's not too orange, but it's definitely more red than orange. This will work really well with my lighter shade. Let me grab some of this pre-mixed orange that I had, you can see it's a nice pale orange right here. If I wanted a pale orange like this, but I wanted it a little bit darker, I'm just going to put a lot of pale orange now in my other well, and mix that up. You can see if I just use this on its own, what this looks like. I really like this color just on its own, which is what I have right here in this one. Now, I'm just going to grab a little bit of red. A little bit of red goes a really long way. It's right here, so I'm just going to grab a very small amount on the tip of my brush, and mix that in just to change up the color from the base color, just a little bit to make it special. Now, we can see the paint right here, and we put our red next to it. You can see how nice those to look together, and even when they mix together, how nice that looks. That's my process for mixing of my colors. I just constantly go back and forth trying different mixtures, testing it on my scrap sheet of paper until I'm really happy with what I have. I basically got three varieties right here. I've got a dark red orange, and then I've got a medium red orange, and then I've got a light orange. The three of those together work really well, and then I can use these little wells right here to mix those together to get even more options. Over here, with my greens, let me show you, let me first cut these off. Let me show you what each one of these colors looks like. This first color has more blue than anything in it. I wanted some bluer types of leaves, like what you'd see with a eucalyptus. Then this one has more green in it, and then this one is more of an olive color, and then this one is an even lighter color. This one is more of like a brown that I would use for branches. You can see there's the brown right there. Then this one would be my super dark, almost grayish brown color for any dark accents that I need to make. These are the colors that I mixed up. For the first color, this blue one, I had more Prussian blue than anything else. I also mixed in my yellow, and that's how I got my green. I didn't put green in it by itself, I got my green from mixing some yellow with the Prussian blue. Then it just get it a little bit darker and muted down because I didn't want it super vibrant, like these two mixing together, I added some brown to it. This is the combination for this color. Then for this color, it's very similar, only I use a very small amount of Prussian blue and then I used a lot more yellow. Then for this one, I just used yellow and brown, and I actually brought in a little bit of green for the middle color right here, so tiny bit of green, lots of yellow, and lots of brown. Then for this one, I just used yellow and brown for this second to the last color. This is going to be like my branches. Then for the last color, it's just dark brown and Prussian blue for this one right here. That gives me a nice gray that's not totally gray, it's nice to have a little bit of blues, pulling in from this first color right here to make everything really harmonious. I just went back and forth until I got a healthy mix that I really liked. That's how I mixed up my color palette. Now that we have our color, we can start painting with our colors. If you run out of colors as you're working, you already know how to mix them. It's okay if they're a little bit different and just adds more variety to your bouquets later on. With that said, let's get started.
6. Small Flowers: Lavender + Angelicas: In this video, we're going to kick things off by creating some small supporting flowers to add that texture and shape variety to our future arrangements in bouquets, and then we'll move on to our larger flowers afterwards. We'll get a good handle on the process and make things more complex as we move forward. The small supporting flowers that we're going to be creating in this video are lavender and our angelica flower or any other flowers that you'd like to create. I'm just going to walk you through my process for creating these ones, and then we're also going to talk about just creating flowers from scratch, from memory. Because I personally preferred the whimsical, more loose style, there's a lot more give with what you can get away with and what you can experiment with. Unless you're planning to create a super realistic flower specific floral kit, you can really experimental a lot and have a lot of fun and really get creative with your own kit, if you stay in the more looser realm with your floral. This is the style that I personally like but by all means, if you prefer the trace method or the sketch method, you can definitely do that here. I'm just going to walk you through my process for creating the more loose style. This is our lavender and our angelica. Even though lavender is purple, I realized this, we are still going to apply our color palette to this flower, which is totally fine. This is your floral kit, you can do whatever you want with it. Definitely feel like you have a lot of creative freedom here because you really do. I'm going to move this aside for now. I also have my iPad right in front of me with a picture of real lavender right in front of me, and I am looking at that as I'm working and just borrowing from our color palettes as I work as well. We're just going to get started with this one, we're going to do our angelica and then we'll do some freehand flowers too. These ones are all smaller florals. For the lavender, I like using a slightly larger brush. I've got a number 6 right here. I'm going to start by grabbing my lighter color, you always want to start with your lighter color first because then you can build color and you can get darker on top, but you can't really get lighter on top, once you have your darker colors down, so that's my recommendation. I'm going to grab my really, light orange right here, and with the tip of my brush, my number 6 right here, we're just going to create a cluster. Adjust the paintbrush tip shape right here to create our lavender. You can move it around a little bit if you want thicker ones. I'm leaving space between them so I can add color on top of them later on. As you move upward, you want to get a little bit smaller as you go. I'm just going to drop these in and then do it like a small cluster right up here. I like putting my color in first and then we'll draw our stem afterwards, were not putting green with our orange. You don't want to get a really ugly color right there. We're going to let this dry slightly. We don't want it to dry all the way because once we put other color on top we really want those pretty blends. These ones are already starting to dry so I can drop color on these ones, but these one are little wetter. I'm going to wait until this one dries just a little bit more. I'm going to grab my medium red, orange right up here and just drop some extra color. Make sure I get enough color on the tip of my brush. I'm going to let this dry. It's a little dry so I can add some more color to it. I actually think I want to put a small cluster right up here just to make it a little bit longer. I'm going to grab my medium orange and just put a small one up here and maybe drop a little bit of color on it, extra dark. Now we can bring in our stem. So I'm going to grab my number zero brush for this and I'm going to use the second one right here. Grab some color on the tip of my brush. You can bring it over here just to see what it looks like before we put. Some extra color. I'm just going to draw a line all the way up but I'm going to break it where the color is. That way I'm not passing a green all the way through this pretty orange. I'm just going to start down here. That is our lavender and you can create a bunch of different ones, different shapes, different sizes just to add that variety so we have those options later on. That is our lavender. For our second flower, we're going to create this angelica flower. You can see we've got a bunch of flowers in the foreground and then they all branch together and come together as it meets the stem. We're going to paint our flowers first in our little cluster, and then we're going to start with light and build-up to the dark and then we'll draw on our stem and finish it all off. I'm going to grab my number 4 brush and we're starting one more time with our light orange. I'm just going to create those clusters randomly around. I'm just basically stippling with my brush and I'm changing the angle here and there just to create variety visual interests. I'm going to let that dry. Now I'm going to come in with the same brush, my number 4 and grab my medium color. I'm not going to cover my orange where it is right now entirely, but I'm going to grab corners and middle parts and edges and add some color there just to create some depth and more color variety. This will make your eye believe that there's tiny flowers instead of just dots. I'm going to let that dry again. Now we're going to go in with our smaller brush, so I've got my number 0 right here and we're going to grab the darkest color. We're going to drop a few more dots on there. I'm going to let that dry once again. Now we are going to create our stem and the branch to look off of these flower clusters. I've got my number 0 brush again, because we're going to create a nice delicate stem. I'm grabbing my middle green this time just to change it up a little bit from our lavender. Now I'm going to start the stem a little further down and then have everything connect. I'm going to bring it to like right here and make it a little darker, so you can see it. Then I'm just going to start bringing a stem from each flower cluster. If you like this flower cluster, if it can't reach this point right here without passing through another flower, you want to stop it short before it does that and your eyes will visually make up for the rest of the stem being there without making it ugly, bringing it through the flower. Then because these ones are more in the foreground, you can go over it one more time if you want to add a little extra depth, and that will just make your line a little bit darker if you do a second pass after it's already dry. That is our angelica flower and now we're going to move into some freehand flower, just some small supporting flowers that really make bouquets and arrangements really come to life. They are awesome because they don't have stems attached to them, you can kind of place them wherever you need. A little extra filler. I'm going to set this aside, I'm going to grab a smaller sheet of paper and we're going to walk through those. I've got my watercolor paper right here and we're just going to freehand some smaller flowers and I just want to walk you through my process for that. I'm going to start with my medium orange over here, and this is a number 4 brush. I'm just going to create like a five petaled flower. Looks like a star and you don't have to color it all the way and if you don't want to, that actually adds a little bit of extra texture to it. I can come back and grab my lighter orange if I want to add some extra or different colors to some of these petals, just off the back. You can see it's just super loose it's not really thinking about it at all. I'm just painting five petals and then you can come in before it dries and just add a little extra color to the edges. You want some additional blends. Then obviously, you want to change up the color a little bit. I'm going to grab my darker color right here. It's just nice the more options you have, it just gives you way more options later on. These ones are so easy to make, so don't feel like you need a reference for everything that you do here. It's totally okay to just work from memory or just experiment and be creative with it. You also want to consider when you look at a bouquet, now all the flowers when you look at them are facing forward. Some of them are facing off to the side, so make sure you include some of those too so you have those options later on. That would be like something like this. Definitely feel free to look at reference photos, if you want to get more specific on your shapes or the size of your petals here. May drop in some different color here. Let's do one more of these, a lighter color facing the other way. I'm going to let these dry and then we'll drop in the centers of these and then we will do one more style of small flowers. For these centers, I like using the really dark color that we have way over here in our palette, and I'm going to use a number 2 brush for this and you're just going to stipple those in and this will create a lot of extra contrast. If your colors feel a little bit muted after they dry, don't worry about that at all. Once we get into Photoshop, we can enhance the vibrancy, the contrasts, all of that. So we can always make changes later on. I'm just going to stipple these in the center so they look sweet and delicate. Then over here, you want to create a half circle with your stippling, so it looks like it's on the side are facing sideways. That will just help your eye to interpret that this is a sideways facing flower. I'm going to let these centers dry and then I'm going to go over them one more time just to add a little bit more jabs and add more contrast because it'll be a little bit darker when I go over it a second time. I'm going to grab my number 0 brush for this. As I get really dark on the top and more detailed, it's nice to move to a finer tip brush. Just so you can see all those small details and you can see how just adding some extra darker dots on top of our other ones really adds to the depth and just contrast of these flowers. We're going to do one more quick style and I've got my number 4 right here. We're just going to do like mini daisies basically. I'm going to grab my medium orange right here and pull out a lot of petals, like right here we have five petals, so these ones are going to, because they're similar to a daisy, we're just going to plot a whole bunch of them. Then drop in some extra color if you want to have variety around a center point, or if you want to add variety to the different petals. It's like if I can start with my super dark and move into my medium and grab some light along the way. Same thing for this one, you want to make sure you have those side facing flowers. It just really helps when you're creating those bouquets arrangements later on, so pull these out. I'm going to let these finish drying and then we'll drop those centers in one more time. Same thing we did before I got my number 2 brush, I'm going to grab this dark color here and just stipple in those centers. I'm going to let those dry and then I'm going to go in with my number 0 brush and make those finer details like we did before. So number 0 brush, grab your color and stipple right on top. Those are some whimsical flowers from memory that we created, some small supporting flowers, and then we also have our lavender, which definitely feel free to make a whole bunch of those and then you can just choose whichever ones you prefer the best and we also created that angelica flower. In the next video, we're going to move on to medium flowers and get a little more complex.
7. Medium Flowers: Daisies + Hollyhocks: In this video, we're going to walk through two types of medium-sized flowers. We're going to start with our daisy over here, and then we're going to work our way up to a hollyhock over here. I have an iPad right in front of me with photos of both of these, so I've got a reference as I'm working, I'm constantly looking at it and making adjustments. You definitely have the freedom to create these from memory, but a reference is usually really helpful just for getting those extra details in. We're going to start with the daisy and then we'll move on to the hollyhock. I'm going to set these ones aside. We're going to grab our Number 6 brush for this. I'm going to start with my light orange right here. For these daisies, I like starting with a ring and then pulling the petals off of that. I'm going to start with a circle right here, just to give myself my center point, and then I can pull those different petals. I'm going to grab the medium orange first. For these petals you just want to pull up, and then you want to pull up again right next to it. You kind of want them to be a little different right here with the heights of them, and that separation is really unique to daisies. You just want to make sure you're doing that as you pull these leaves out. I'm going to grab my darker color and put it right next to it. By having this ring we're pulling up the light orange into it, and then any leaves that touch it or any petals that touch each other, we are blending some colors there as well. It gets really pretty that way. If you have any gaps that feel a little awkward, like these two gaps feel awkward to me, it's totally fine to go in and just pull a petal, a singular petal or a skinnier double petal right here. Just to fill in those gaps. We're going to let that dry and then we will take care of our center part. I've got my Number 2 brush and I'm once again going to return to my darkest color right here to take care of my center, and I'm just going to staple in these dots again. Same way we did on the smaller daisies. I'm going to let that dry. I've got my Number 0 brush for my finer details and I'm just going to staple in the rest of my details right here. That takes care of our medium-sized daisy and definitely feel free to create it all in one color if you'd like, or use two colors, and don't forget to create that side profile of your daisy as well. We can create that together right now. We'll just keep this to the medium orange and the light orange for this one. I'm just going to start with my light orange and I'm going to create a half circle right here to work ovals. I'll grab my medium orange first and just drag out these petals that are off to the side facing sideways. I'm going to let that dry. We're going to take care of that center again, I get my Number 2 brush stapling that half circle. Mark that dry and the final details with my number 0 brush. Those are medium size daisies. I'm going to cut this paper down just so I don't have to worry about touching my wet area. I'm going to let that dry naturally and then we will create our hollyhock. For our hollyhock, this one's a little more complex. All the petals on the hollyhock look like they are forming one giant petal around our center point. We're going to pull that and then we've got this really nice gradient that comes from the center and pulls outward, towards the edges of our petals. You can create your base color, any color you like. I'm going to start with my light orange and then pull a really dark orange for the center part. The ring right here, that creates that gradient outwards. I'm going to set these right here and the way that I do this, I'm going to grab my Number 6 brush again and grab my light orange and create a circle. I'm going to water down my light orange, so it's basically a wash right here so there's a lot more water than there is paint. Then I'm just going to pull these petals outward and I'm going to keep the edges very irregular as they move around, and I want this pretty wet because we need a drop in that color in order for it to create that gradient. That spans outward. My edges right here are really irregular and I want to make sure that there's some water on them for the next step. Now what you're going to do is come into your second color, your darker color, or whatever color you choose right here and then you just want to spread this around the ring right there, so it starts moving outward. Then you want to grab your Number 0 brush, and you're just going to pull these tiny strokes outward, so it's a more natural gradient. If you get these blobs at the end like I do, you can just pull them back and that will clean them up. I'm going to let that dry just slightly, not all the way, but enough where I can drop color again and pull it just to make that center point even more rich than it already is. It's a little drier and I'm just going to drop in that dark color again around the center point, and then pull it out with my Number 0 again. We're going to get the stronger details now since it's dried beneath it. I'm going to let this dry and we're going to repeat that process one more time. I've got my Number 6 again, get my dark red or my dark orange. These strokes aren't going as far as the other ones, these ones are coming up about halfway on them. I'm going to dry that and then we're going to add in that center point. The centers of hollyhocks are pretty basic, we're actually just going to grab our Number 0 brush, and just put in this light orange right here, right in the center. There's usually a white ring around it, so you can leave that or you can fill it in. It's totally up to you. That is our hollyhock. In the next video we're going to walk through two large-size flowers and then we'll get ready to jump into Photoshop and edit these so we can use them indefinitely on any future projects.
8. Large Flowers: Roses + Anemones: In this video, we're going to create two large size flowers to finish up our flowers for our different arrangements and bouquets. We're going to start with loose style roses and then finish up with a detailed anemone. I'm going to move our anemones off to the side and I've got my roses right here and I have a reference photo right in front of me on an iPad, so I'm constantly looking at that image as I work because this is definitely one of our most detailed flowers yet. The important thing to remember when you're working on roses is the center part of the rose where it's opening up, the initial opening up is very tight, so all the petals are in there super tight together, so you're getting these really fine shadow lines and the petals themselves are much thinner looking because they haven't pushed out or started to fold out yet. Your lines in the center are going to be much thinner than they are once you get further out. You're still going to have leaves that I haven't fully folded out, so that's where your thinner lines come in on the outside, but for the most part, once you get to the outside, you're going to get some thicker strokes because your petals that are much wider once you get to that area. I've got that image right in front of me. I'm going to be using a number for our brush. Obviously you can use any size brush that you want if you want these to be extra large and your layouts just choose a larger brush and you'll be fine, because we know the inside is a little darker, I'm going to start with our dark orange or yellow or pink. The center part usually starts with either a line or a dot just to get things started. I've got that and then I'm constantly looking at that image right in front of me and just mimicking where those lines fall for the different petals that are in the inside. As I start moving out, I'm pressing harder on the brush, so I get those thicker strokes. That is a looser rose and I'm just going to come into my center and just add a little bit in darkness right here. If you want to add a little extra color to your others, if you prefer to keep them one color or two colors. That is our rose and obviously you're just going to use different reference images as you create a side profile or any other orientation as you work. We can create one side profile together really quick just so you can see what that process looks like versus straight on, so I'm going to switch my image and then I'll be right back. Have a new image in front of me now for a SipProfile rose, it's facing to the left. I'm going to once again start from the center and just drop in those details, so I have more of a semicircle right here to start things off. This is the side facing rose, you can see that the petals are much thinner or more condensed towards the way that it's facing, so up here in the upper left and then they get much larger as you go away from the direction that it's facing, so down here, we've got thicker in wider petals. That is our rose, if we want to drop in some extra color or some shading up here where things are a little darker because we get more shadows where things are a little tighter, we can do that, we can add in some extra color if we want, but other than that, this rose is done. I'm going to set this aside and we're going to move on to our anemone. Once again, I have a reference photo in front of me. For this anemone, I'm going to freehand it and I'm going to keep the petals that are closer right here, my darker color and then the petals that are a little behind or further away, I'm going to keep a lighter color just to create a little bit more depth with having lighter colors behind. We're going to start with the shapes of our leaves. I like starting off the back and working forward. Actually let's go with that medium for this one and I'm using a number 4 brush for this. As this is drying, I'm coming back in so just add a little bit of extra shading right here, so it'll darken up these areas. Now I'm going to paint in those extra petals, so I have one petal that's loose right here. I'm going to keep this one in the same color. While that's drying, I'm going to switch over to my light orange and paint in these extra petals between the ones I just painted. Now let that dry and then come back in to shade in some of the parts of this lighter orange but I just painted them. I'm going to add some extra pink to my darker petals just for the shading. Now we just need to paint in our center and then we will be all done. I'm going to grab my dark color once again and It's got this big ball right in the center, so I'm going to paint that first. Then it's got all these little seeds off of it so I'm going to draw these lines and for the seeds. I'm going to let that dry and go over everything again. We have our anemone and we have our roses. We are all set with all the flowers that we'll need to move forward with digitizing and using these for our new uses later on in the next video, we're going to create that supporting foliage to accompany all of our flowers.
9. Painting Leaves + Branches: In this video, we're going to finish everything off by creating our foliage to accompany the flowers that we've created. So for this, I recommend looking at different arrangements and bouquets for foliage inspiration. You can search through the Pinterest board that I mentioned earlier, or you can just collect your own foliage inspiration. Feel free to get as creative as you'd like. Add as much variety as you'd like here because these really help to create filler areas as you're creating your arrangements and bouquets and putting everything together. So I like creating a bunch of these just so I have a lot of variety, just different shaped leaves, different textures, shapes, sizes, all of that. We're just going to create a few together and then you can take it from there. To get started, you can see I just have my greens in front of me for this because that's all we're going to be using. So we're going create some eucalyptus, some branches with leaves, and then just some leaves on their own together. So we'll start with the eucalyptus. So a eucalyptus, I'm going to use my numbers express here, because it's more like a teal color, we're going to use this bluish color right here, and I'm going to water it down quite a bit. That will make that teal look a little more obvious. So I've got my teal right here. You're just going to create some little circles, basically, and they're going to go from small to large at the bottom, like what we did with the lavender, only these ones are going to be circles. So I'm just going to free-hand some circles in here. So these ones will be my smaller ones. Now, as this is drying, I'm going to create another one just so I have a little bit more variety. Maybe I'll have this one turned another direction. I'm going to let these dry and then we'll put in the branch element to connect them all. Okay, I'm revisiting my number zero brush and I'm going to grab this color right here, which is more of like my brown color for branches. It's got a little bit of green in it, and we're going to use this one, so let me water it down just a little bit. Because we want to keep the soft in the same way that we did with the leaves. So I'm going to come from the top one, bring it down and then we'll connect the rest of the leaves. You're going to bring the branch all the way into the leaf. Okay, same thing with our other one. Now we'll do a branch with some leaves on it. So I'm going to switch to my number two brush for this, we're going to use, let's use the same brown right here. What you're going to do is just draw your main branch right here, and then you're just going to create some branches off of it, and branches off of those just to add some character. It's very random. There's really no thinking behind this. Super organic. That's a good amount of branches, I'm going to add in a little bit more depth by darkening up some of these. I'm going to let that dry, and now, I'm just going to paint a few leaves on. So I have my number two brush again,and I'm just going to borrow between these two greens, right here, for the different leaves, and I can even mix the two together for a third color right here. All right. So you're just going to create basically, a half oval and then another half oval and you can leave some texture or some negative space in between them if you'd like, or you can close them all the way up. I like switching back and forth, and also change up the size of the leaves as you work too. So I'm going to now switch to my number zero brush to finish up the rest of them, and if you'd like, you can even add some additional leaves to the branch itself. That is a branch and now we can just create some free-floating leaves, which are really nice for fillers later on. So I'm just going to grab the number four brush for this and grab this color, and we'll just create, just a regular leaf, the half oval again. If you want to add some color to the base of it, you can do that too. It's probably a little too much. Once again, don't worry if it gets a little too soft because we can enhance that in Photoshop later on. So I'm just going to create some different colored leaves just so I have options later. I'll create some of these basic leaves that are common. You can make some smaller ones too, if you'd like, I'm going to grab my number zero. Then I also want to do a textured one so it's a little, it's not as filled in, like we did with the leaves of the anemone. Now, I want to do some different shaped leaves too, I'm just looking at a bunch of reference photos in front of me. We'll do like a leaf that comes up and then has another leaf connected to it, it's in another direction and they come together. We'll do another branch only it's going be like off of a plant versus a tree. So the stems will be green instead of brown. Then I like putting in a couple large leaves. That's our fully edge, all ready to go. So now, we are ready to move on to scanning in our florals and our leaves and bringing it into Photoshop for further enhancement, editing, and removing the white background off of all of them. So you can place them on anything you like as many times as you'd like.
10. Scan Settings: In this video, we're going to walk through the scan settings that I recommend for scanning in your florals, then we can bring them into Photo shop, prepare them, and if you want to sell them someday, they'll be the perfect resolution and the size that buyers expect. Jumping right in when you are on your scan screen, I've a printer scanner combo and that is perfectly fine. If you have that, it'll work perfectly. I do have a link to my printer and scanner on the resources list, so just download that and you will get the link to the exact printer scanner combo that I use. Once you get this dialog box for your scanner settings. Under Kind just make sure that color is selected. Obviously we need color, and if possible, under Resolution, my printer scanner combo only goes up to 600 dpi, which is awesome. If you have the ability to go to 600, definitely go there. If you can go even higher than that, go for it because the higher the resolution, the larger the image size will be able to obtain later in Photoshop which I will get to in just a minute. Resolution if you can only go up to 300, that's fine. If you can go up higher, go as high as possible, and then the format that you want to save it as a JPEG. Once you have those settings, just hit scan, scan it in, and then you can go into Photoshop and we'll pick up in the next video in Photoshop. But I do want to talk to you very briefly about resolution. You might be wondering why 600 dpi or why larger than 300 dpi. Quick guide to resolution, 300 dpi is the ideal resolution for print, so if buyers purchase your watercolor florals and they want to put them on an invitation that then gets printed. It has to be 300 dpi that will give you the best texture crispness of the image which obviously would be ideal if you're printing something out, you want it to look really good. You don't want someone to get this really small sized image and then have to stretch it out and then the pixels get stretched and then it gets blurry looking. That's a super terrible practice and you never want to do that. You want to scan the original image at at least 300 so at that size it's perfect. When you scan at 600, more information is stored, but when you print it out, there's no distinguishable difference in the appearance between 300 and 600. But if you double the resolution, you're actually able to double the size of your image by using Photoshop, which I'm going to show you exactly how to do that in the next few videos. You want to scan at that higher setting, so if you scan a four inch by two inch image at 600 dpi and Photoshop, you can reduce or have the resolution to 300, so it's that perfect print resolution. But because you had it at 600 originally, there's more information available which allows you to double the size to eight inches by four inches, so now you can offer your florals at a larger size than they were even created at, and they will look just as crisp when they're printed. Why does this matter? The larger you are able to offer your florals at, the more usable and versatile they become to yourself and potential buyers. They won't have to stretch out those images and find that reduction in quality. They can be used at larger sizes and look just as crisp and beautiful, and sure you could vectorize them. You might be thinking you can just vectorize it and then you can scale it up to whatever you want because once it's vector, it's infinitely rescalable. But if you use vector versions, when you go through that process of vectorizing, you get all points. If you've ever done that process yourself you know that it's made up of tons of anchor points, and the more points you have, the larger your file size becomes and if someone wants to use a bunch of your floral, suddenly the file size gets gigantic really quickly and if you have an older computer it can slow down your computer or it can crash the program, and obviously you don't want to deal with buyers that are upset about that. If you create your original florals at a larger size, they're able to be used as those image formats instead of vector formats, so it reduces the overall file size. Hopefully that all makes sense, but that's a quick overview of why resolution matters and if you're able to scan in at a higher resolution then definitely take advantage of that. To be extra helpful, I've actually included this as a bonus with this course, this resolution cheat sheet. Just a heads up depending on what you're able to scan your images at. First of all, if you don't have a scanner and you decide to follow this class and just take a photo and use that of your florals, I recommend not selling those florals. Don't sell your florals until you have a scanner. It'll just be better for buyers and yourself and your reputation with selling so definitely make sure that you have a scanner if you plan to do that. But if you're just going through the steps and following along with this class, if you decide to just take a photo for now, just to go through the motions, that photo when you take a photo using your phone or whatever, it automatically applies a resolution of 72 dpi. In order to get it up to 300, you have to actually reduce the size that it was taken at by four. Then it will be print ready. Just a heads up about that. You're going to get some pretty tiny florals if you take a photo, so ideally you'd want to take a photo of every single floral you make that way it's as large as possible because you're going to have to reduce the size by four. Hopefully that's not too confusing. These other points are super helpful if you do own a scanner and you're using a scanner, so if you scan it at 300, you just keep that original size that's as large as it can go to maintain that crispness and that appearance. If you scan at 600, like we talked about in Photoshop, you are able to reduce it to 300 and in doing so, you're allowed to double the size and still have that really great image quality. If you have a scanner that is able to scan it 1200 dpi, when you reduce it to 300, you're able to four times the size. Now you're getting these much larger images that can be placed on larger applications, and same with scanning at 2,400. When you reduce it to 300, you can eight times the size. It can get really powerful depending on what your resolution capabilities are. That's a quick overview of scan settings and resolution. In the next video we are going to hop in to Photoshop and see it all in action.
11. Enhancing Your Florals in Photoshop: In this video, we are going to edit and enhance our scans within Photoshop. We are finally into Photoshop. I've scanned all the florals and that we walked through together as well as the foliage and we are going to make those enhancements, we're really going to punch up the color and the vibrancy and the saturation and we're also going to increase that size based on our scan settings from the previous video. We're going to do that first and then we'll get to enhancing and editing. First and foremost, with each of these scans, you can see I've got each one opened up right here that we did together. I'm going to start with these ones right here. What you want to do is go to Image, Image size, and right here you can see my Resolution is 600 and we talked about in the previous video how we can double the size if we reduce the Resolution by half. When you go to do this, make a note of what your width is, makes sure these are linked together. When you change one, both of them will change. It'll just save you some time. Right here I can see that my Width is 4,095. If I have my calculator and I double that 4,095 times two, that gives me 8,190. Now, what I'm going to do is come to Resolution first. You have to do this part before you can adjust the size. First we're going to reduce this down to 300, and then up here we're going to change it to that number, the 8,190. Then come up here and put in 8,190. You can see the height changed at the same time. Then we can hit Okay. This will reduce that resolution and double the size, but the same quality will be kept because of that resolution rule that we spoke about in the scan settings video. This one is all set to go. We're going to do this for the remaining scans right here. I have my mini flowers just to reiterate what we just did go to Image, Image Size, make no up the width right here or one of these numbers. This one's 2,969 times two, 5,938. We're going to reduce this down to 300. Grab that number, the 5,938, and then hit Okay. It'll take a second and now we're good to go. You could see how the quality is still maintained with these florals. They're nice and crisp and now they're much larger than they were before. I'm just going to go through and do the same thing with these two. I've gone through the other ones and increased their sizes as well, so we're all good to go with our florals being at optimum size and resolution for print. We're going to start off with this one first just to talk about enhancing that vibrancy and the contrast and all the other good stuff. First I'm just going to rotate this around so it's oriented a little easier on our eyes. Just go to Image, Image Rotation and we're going to rotate this 90 degrees Clockwise and now we can see it. We want to enhance the color. We want to darken it up, so when people are using it on their invitations or printables or whatever it's used for that it's nice and vibrant, you can see it really well. If you like that muted color then you can totally leave it, but the important thing is we need to remove the slight texture that we're seeing in the scan. That will enable us to cut these out and remove the background completely. That is our main goal when we enhance our colors here, outside of just getting it to a place that you really like all the enhancements that we add to it. We want to make sure that this texture, this watercolor paper texture, is removed. I'm going to show you an easy trick to do that. First, I always come over to my levels, which is over here in your adjustments palette. If you don't see this, you can get to it by going Window Adjustments. This is non-destructive editing. Whatever you do right here, as long as you use these adjustments, you can always go back and change it later on. I never ever ever recommend going to Image Adjustments. If you do this right now, get out of this habit because this is permanently applied. You can't backtrack if you ever change your mind in the future. Always use your adjustments over here. We're going to start with levels. I'm just going to click on Levels right here, and when you use these sliders, the closer to the middle, this little gray node right here, the closer you slide your black to it, the darker colors will get, and the closer you slide your white note over here to the middle, the lighter or brighter your whites or lights will get. I always come to this one first because it creates such a substantial change compared to other adjustments that you can apply. This is my starting point and then I edit based on the enhancements that I make here. I'm going to darken it up first and you'll be able to see how much this really changes as we start sliding these. I'm going to slide the dark node first. Don't worry about sliding this one down here. Just leave this one as it is. You're sliding these nodes right here. I'm just going to start sliding. You can see they're starting to get nice and dark. That looks really good to me. You don't want to go too far, if I come here, it's really going to blow out those colors and we don't want that to happen. We still want it to be nice and pretty and realistic and vibrant. I think that's probably good. Now we're going to slide our white node closer to the center. This is what's going to remove that background texture. This is the little trick. The closer you slide it, you want to get it enough where the texture is basically gone. But now you can see we're starting to wash out some of the color right here. That's when we go and you can either slide your black a little bit more, but be very, very careful not to blow up some of these colors. If that starts happening, just reduce it a little bit and then we're going to move on to our brightness and contrast adjustment, which is this little sun icon right here. Just click on that. Now we can slide our Brightness and our Contrast. I like sliding my brightness actually down a bit to darken up the colors if you start getting some washed-out areas, this is a nice little helpful tool to bring some of them back without bringing that background texture back. You can see we've already brought some of these lighter colors back into the picture because we've darken them up. If you want to add some contrast, you can do that too. I don't really think this one needs too much more contrast since we did so much with levels. That's looking good to me. I feel really good about this. We've got that background texture gone. Everything's great. If you change your mind like now that we have this, if you want to come back to your levels later, since this is a non-destructive form of editing. All you have to do is click on this little icon in your layers palette and you can return to the level settings that you have right here. This is that non-destructive form of editing where you can come in and you can change things later on if you want. Once you get this to a really good place, you want to carry the same settings into your other scans, especially if you're using similar colors like we did with the different florals that we painted. Instead of having to go into every single one of these and apply the exact same settings over and over again, you can actually drag these settings into those scans. All you have to do is hold Shift and click on your second one and both of these will be selected and then you can just click anywhere on your document and drag them like I'm going to come over here to this one first, drag it and then release. I'll drag it right on top, and you can see these have been applied to this one. Obviously we need to make some further adjustments because we're still seeing the texture right here. But we can come back in and adjust those because it's non-destructive. I'm just going to drag the same settings into our other documents and then we'll adjust those as well. Make sure they're both selected in your layers palette, and then just click anywhere and drag into the next tab and drop it in. I am on Photoshop Creative Cloud 2018 for this. But this should still work for older versions of Photoshop, at least until probably CS3. I think might be the furthest you can go with this. Whatever I'm doing right here, you can definitely fall along as long as you're on CS3 or [inaudible]. Then I'm going to drag these one more time to the foliage. The foliage has different colors. We might need to make some further adjustments here, but this, upon first impression, it's looking pretty good. I think we're in good shape with the foliage. It looks like we've completely eliminated the background texture from what I can tell. There might be a few hit or miss areas. All right. Let's come to these ones and just make that adjustment so you can see what I decide to do if I'm getting this texture showing through. The first place I go is my levels because that gets rid of it pretty quickly. All have to do is double-click right here and this will bring it back up. I'm just going to drag my node just a little bit further, and you can see that eliminates those textures right there. I'm still getting a good amount of vibrancy with my florals. Let me drag this a little bit. I think I can stand to go little darker and that looks good. This one's all set. I'm going to come to my mini flowers. For this one you can see we got close, but you can still see the watercolor paper texture in it. We need to adjust that and we still need to be very conscious of these lighter areas where we don't want them to get too blown out or disappear completely. It's really a balancing act. You just need to go back to your adjustments and play around with them and see what a good happy balance is. We do want to get rid of more of this background, but we don't want to overly enhance too much of the color at the same time. I'm going to come back into our levels and we'll just play around with the adjustment a bit and see where we end up. I actually think we need to reduce the white right here, and let's see if we can make up for it with their brightness settings and I don't think we need a dark in this too much because we're darkening our background at the same time. I'm going to maybe just come down a bit and also reduce the contrast and see if that helps. I'm seeing that the background texture is starting to go away like this but I still think I have ways to go. Let me come back to Levels and see if I can darken up some of this now without bringing the background back. That's starting to look really good, and maybe I can even reduce this. You can see there's little bit of settings or if you just move a little bit suddenly everything changes a lot. I think I need to keep this one around here and that looks a lot better. It's more natural. I'm not blowing out the colors as much as I felt like I was before and I'm still retaining the softer areas there not too contrasty. That looks pretty good. Let's check our foliage really fast and I actually think I might just keep this the way it is. I like the vibrancy of all the colors right here. All right. From here, the next step that you're going to take is we're going to permanently apply these changes now, but we're going to keep a copy of this non-destructive version. First and foremost, double-click on your background layer and we're going to unlock it by doing that. Just hit Okay. Now it's unlocked. Then we're going to group all of these together. Hold Shift, click on your top layer, now these are all selected and you're just going to hit Command G or Control G on a PC to group them. Now they're their own group and we're going to duplicate this group. We're going to have one group that's editable, and one group that's not editable. In order to duplicate it, all you have to do is hold Alt or Option, click and drag on your group and now we have two groups. They're exactly the same. We're going to turn off our bottom group. This is for our reserves if we ever want to come back later on and fix anything, we have all of our layers right here all separated. For this one that we're going to work with from this point forward, we're going to merge everything together. Just right-click on this group and choose Merge Group. Once you do that, it'll be totally flatten and all those adjustments that we applied are permanently applied. But if we ever want to change our minds later on, we have all those adjustments right here. It's our insurance if we want to change anything. All right. We're just going to do the exact same thing for the other scans. Once again, double-click on your background layer to unlock it, hit Okay. Hold Shift, select the top layer to select all layers, command G or Control G to group them. Hold Alt, click and drag to make a copy of your group. Turn off the bottom Group, right-click on the top group and choose Merge Group. Then we're going to move on to the last two. I'm just going to repeat the exact same process so I will speed up the video. All right. We are all set to begin removing the background. In the next video, we are going to do exactly that.
12. Removing Backgrounds: In this video, we're going to walk through the steps of removing the white background from your florals. So what I like to do is grab each floral individually and work with it since our colors are opacities of our watercolor are different with each one applying it across the board will basically make the same amount of work. I like isolating the individual florals and it helps me to pay more attention to all the details by doing this. We're going to grab this one first just to give you an overall idea of the process of it, all the steps, and all the settings, and then we will talk about other situations that might come up. I'm going to grab this one first, and in order to do that, you want to make sure you're on this merged group layer. You're going to hit a manual keyboard for your selection tool and you're just going to draw a box that's pretty tight around it. Don't chop off any parts, but you want to make sure there's a decent space around it. Once we have it selected, you're just going to hit "Command C" or "Control C" to copy it. Now you're going to create a brand new document, so, go File New. We're keeping these RGB that way, they can be used for any buyers or yourself if you'd like to use these for online or social media purposes, they're all set. You'll get this nice vibrant color. But for people who want to print, they can change it to CMYK. You can go from RGB to CMYK. But if you go from CMYK to RGB, you won't be able to get the vibrancy back that you lose when you go from RGB to CMYK. All right. So luckily, once you make a selection, it's already sized correctly right here based on the rectangle that you just drew around it and we want to keep this at a resolution of 300 that way, if buyers choose to use it for print, it's still at the optimum resolution for them. With all of these selected, we're going to keep the background white, and I will show you why once we get into this, but for now you're just going to hit "Create". Now we have an artboard the size of our selection, so, we're just going to paste it in. So Command V or Control V on a PC. It looks great on white, but we need to see what it looks like on different colors. That's the whole point of us removing the background. In order to test this, I like putting it on a black background that way as we remove the white around it. We can see any areas that we still need to remove that way. We know once it's cut out that it will fit any type of colored or textured background. Over here we have the white background, so, we can test with white and we are also going to test with black. Select the white background right now, and then hit this little icon down here to create a new layer right above it. Then over here you want to make sure you have white and black, if you don't, just click right here and that'll give you white and black. We're going to switch this. You can use X on your keyboard to easily toggle between the foreground and the background, or you can just hit this little arrow to switch them. We want to make sure the black is in the background and then you can just hit "Command Delete" or "Control Backspace" on a PC, and you can see it's filled in this layer that's just a quick shortcut to fill a layer with a color. So if we turn off our floral layer right here, you can see that there is a black background. We're going to turn it on and as we remove the white out of this, the black will appear behind it. All right. So now we need to select all the way right here and get rid of it. Make sure your flower or your florals are selected on this top layer, and then you're going to go, Select Color Range. When this pops up, you want to make sure that down here where it says, Selection Preview, make sure Black Matte is selected. You want sampled colors selected right here. This one doesn't really matter, you can have selection or image whichever you prefer, but you do want to make sure that invert is selected right here, and you want to make sure this little eyedropper right here is selected. You're just going to click anywhere where there's white, and we know that there's white right here. So it's going to select everything in your document that's white. You can see that we've already taken away some of the white out of here, so, this will be more transparent. You can bring it back in later on if you'd like, I'm going to show you how to do that. But for now, this is a rough indication of what's going to happen once we remove the white. If you'd like to adjust it even further, that's where this fuzziness comes and you can use this slider to remove all the white. So you can see there's a lot of black poking through now or hardly any white, and that's what that would look like. You want to find a happy medium between the two. We want to make sure that none of the background is showing, so, you can see I've got some little dots here and there that we still need to remove. But overall, it's pretty good. I think I'm going to come down, let's see. I'm trying to get as much of this color in these flowers as I can without bringing too much of the background back. So that's too much background. I think we're probably going to stick around. Let's go to 80 for this one and then hit "Okay", and once you do that, it hasn't been permanently applied yet, it's just made a selection so far. But when it makes us selection, it hugs the outer edge. So you can see there's going to be a hairline of white along the edge because it tries to get as close as it can, but there's always a little bit of area right on the edge that will still appear. So in order to prevent that from happening, it's really easy to not include that from the get-go, so, in order to do that, you're just going to come up here and go Select, Modify, Contract, and I like contracting by two pixels. I usually always use this one. So just hit "Okay" and it moves. Let me undo that so you can see what happens when it does that. So it's right here on the outer edge, and once we go, Select, Modify, Contract, once I hit "Okay", watch where this line, this dancing outline go, It's going to be pushed inward, so, I'm going to hit "Okay", and you can see that now it's excluding that hair line of white that goes along the outer edge. Once you are all set with that, you're going to come over to your layers and make sure your flower layers still selected, and you're going to hit this little icon right here for a layer mask. Just click it, and now, it's going to remove all that white, just like that, and this is also a nondestructive form of editing. Now we are masking and Photoshop. With masking, you can see over here we've got an outline, you can see where the white is, in this little preview. That's where our color is showing. That's whatever is appearing is showing where there's white on our mask, wherever there is black, it's hiding it. So the key phrase to remember is that, white reveals and black conceals. Wherever there's black, items are going to be hidden, wherever there's white, they're going to be revealed. If we want to edit this further, like right here, we're hiding a lot of information for this flower. If we want it to be revealed, we can paint with white on this layer mask and it will bring it back, so, it's that nondestructive, not making any of those at its permanent, but making everything available for us to preview. I'm going to come in here. You can see when it does that selection, you kinda getting these little circles. This will show transparency if you put it on any other colored background. That color will be peeking through these areas but if you don't want that to happen, just select your layer mask over here. You're going to hit "B" on your keyboard for your brush tool, and you're going to select the brush that works best for this texture, this watercolor texture, and I really like this brush right here, it's a number 35 brush. If you come over to your brushes panel, over here, this brush settings, you want to make sure that it rotates whenever you use it. So these are the settings that I use. If you already have settings applied, just uncheck them and make sure Shape Dynamics is still checked. Your brush settings pellet can be accessed by going Window Brush Settings and I reduce my size shoot all the way to zero, my minimum diameter all the way to zero. If you want your brush to change size every time you click it, you would just change the size generate here, but I like keeping mine the same size. Then you want to up your angle Jitter all the way to a 100 and this will make it rotate every time you click it, and I just keep my roundness jitter all the way down to zero. If you have those settings, once you click, I'm going to make sure I have white and my foreground right here because I want to reveal these parts, so, white reveals, and if I click, you can see it changes direction every time. If I want to increase the size of my brush as I paint around, all you have to do is hit your Close Bracket key on your keyboard and that enlarges your brush manually, and the open bracket key on your keyboard reduces it manually. If I have some really tiny areas that I want to get into right on the edge. Let me zoom in here so you can see are really good. If I'm coming along the edge and I want a smaller brush, that's how to do it and if you click and drag, you're just painting. But if you want irregular edges or you want that more organic like, you can just click it a bunch of times and follow the edge. That will give you a more natural or organic look. Then you're just going to paint the inside and this is revealing what was already there before. It was just hidden by the mask, and you can paint it in just like that. Any areas that you don't like how the selection came out, you can still change it. You have tons of freedom in Photoshop to make it exactly how you'd like it. I'm going to make this a little larger so I can cover more space here, painting it in, and this spot was negative already. I didn't have any paint here, so I'm just going to be careful when I come around it to also leave that area open. If I need to get in really close to make sure I don't accidentally paint in there. I can go like that if I do accidentally paint here, if I want to get rid of it, I'm painting with white right now. I just need to switch to painting with black, so I need black in my foreground. Once again, that keyboard shortcut is X just to switch your foreground and background color. Now I'm painting with black, so I'm concealing it because black conceals. All right, so I'm just going to come through the rest of this farm, switching back to white because I'm going to reveal this part. I'm going to increase the size of my brush and just brush it in, so I have this color. Let me show you what it looks like from far away so you can see what we're doing here. I'm going to zoom out and you can see what a difference that makes. We really getting that color right there. But if you like the transparent look. Definitely feel free to leave it exactly the way that automated, but if you'd like to change anything, that's where you come in with your masking and your brush, just like this. I would finish this up. I'm going to go through, I'm going to speed up the video and adjust all this color right now and then I'll be right back. I have finished masking the rest of my floras. You can see I've got all those areas all filled in. Now, just switching between black and white. I did leave these back stems just as they work, as I like that. They've got some transparency and makes it feel like they're behind the ones that are in the front. I really like that. I also like how mine fades down as it gets closer to the end right here, I like that natural transparency, almost gradient. This one is all set and all good to go. What I typically do is I will save this as a PSD that way if I want to change it later on, I can always come back. If you save it as a Photoshop file, a PSD, you can always return and adjust anything that you've done because it's a Photoshop file. Once you save it as an image file like a JPEG or a PEG or TIFF, you can't come in and use these layers or make these adjustments in the same way you can with a Photoshop file. I always save each floral as its own Photoshop file and then I will export it as an image file, and the image file is what you're going to want to include in the download. If you plan to sell your floras, you're going to be giving buyers transparent PNGs, which are your image files. You're not going to be giving them your PSDs, your Photoshop files. Hopefully that's clear. I'm going to save this as a Photoshop file right now. I'm going to create two different folders. One is going to be for us as designers, those are your files that you keep. Those are what we refer to as raw files. We're going to put those in a folder and then we're going to export it as a transparent PNG, which is what you'd include in a download for buyers. First I'm going to save this is a PSD, so File, Save as. I've got a folder right here that I'm putting everything in. Within that folder I've got a PSD folder and a PNG folder. For this one, we're going to save it as a PSD first. I've got my PSD folder right here and I'm just going to name this flower one. Make sure that Photoshop is selected for format and just hit Save and hit Okay. Now we got this. All the work that we just did is now saved and completely editable, and the next thing we want to do is save it as a PNG file. We want it to be a transparent PNG because all the time we just spent cutting out the background, the PNG file allows you to place it in its as transparent background files so you can place it on any color or texture in the future. In order to do that, we need to make sure we have a transparent background to begin with. We just need to turn off our black background layer and our white background layer, and now that it's all transparent. Now we can save it as a PNG file. We're just going to go, File, Save as, and we're going to go back to the folder for PNGs and I'm going to save this under format. You're going to select PNG right here, and then hit, Save, and when this shows up, just make sure large file size is selected and hit, Okay and this will save it. Now you are all set. If we go into Illustrator and I just create, I want to get rid of my stroke right here. I'm just going to show you how this works with a PNG that we just had. Let me grab, dark green background, and I'm just going to put this right here, just drag equals square or rectangle. Then I'm going to go, file place and select that PNG that we just save, so place, and now I can just click, and here it is. It's nice and large and at this size it'll print nice and crisp and you can reduce it down obviously if you want it smaller, but you should never stretch it larger than it is. You can see we've got this transparency happening in the stem where we left them, and we can place it on any colored or texture background. You can see we don't have any weird white areas. It's all fully cut out from its background and it looks awesome. That is how to remove the backgrounds from your florals. From here you will just revisit those scans that we enhanced and you're just going to repeat that same process, you going to select a brand new floral. You're going to copy it, create a new document, paste it in, and then remove the background and do any masking that you need, and then just make sure to save it as both a PSD and a PNG and you'll be all set. I'm going to go ahead and do that with the rest of my floras. Then in the next video, we will talk about recoloring portions of your flowers. If you'd like to offer more than just one color scheme for your individual floras, I'll show you how to do that.
13. Recoloring Options: In this video, I'm going to walk you through two main options for recoloring your floral. Right now I have all these pink florals, and orange kind of floras that we walked through in the previous videos. You can see I have cut them all out of their backgrounds now, so I have them all finished. Now that they're basically like pinkish-orange-ish, if I want to offer them in another color scheme, I want to show you how to do that. We're just going to grab this first flower right here, this Angelica flour, and I'm just going to drag it into Photoshop and open it back up. You can see we've got our oranges and our pinks up here, and then we've got our green stem right here. The first way is probably the easiest way to recolor. You're just going to use your adjustments panel over here and you want to select hue and saturation from it. Once again, you can get to your adjustments panel by going window adjustments. I'm just going to click on Hue saturation right here, and when this pops up, you want to make sure that colorizes unchecked. If this is checked, it'll recolor the entire thing, and obviously we want a nice mixture of different colors right here. Make sure that's unchecked, and we're just going to be using our hue slider first and then we'll toggle our saturation a little bit. I'm going to just begin sliding and try and find a color palette that works really well, that isn't too blown out or to saturated. Let's go in this direction to, and that looks really nice. I like more orange than pink, and if you ever want to see what the before was, all you have to do is turn on the visibility of your hue saturation new layer, over here in your layers palette. Just click the eyeball on and off, so you can see the difference. I think there's a big enough difference between the two where this would be a really nice option to offer buyers or just to use for myself in different layouts. If you look at it and you feel like some of the colors are just a little too saturate or too unnatural. You can just toggle down the saturation. If you just drag this to the left a little bit, it will mute the colors a bit. Sometimes they get really blown out. Let's go all the way up here. You can see the green is definitely getting blown out and the orange is a little too vibrant and this will just mute it down. I think that looks really nice. You can see the before and the after, and now we can just save this as an orange version. I can go File Save As, right now I have a pink folder with all my flowers that are pink and I can just create a new folder. With flowers selected new folder, I'm going to create an orange folder, and then I can just save it as the same name or I can save it as flower one orange, I'm just going to leave it as the same name just to make things easy for myself, make sure you select PNG from this drop down and then just hit Save, and you're all set. Now, you have this one as an orange one and the background is already gone, so you don't have to go through any of those steps again. You're in really good shape. The other thing I want to share with you is how to automate this. Now, that we know that these are the settings that we like for this one, we can apply it to other florals that are pink and get all of our florals the same color palette without having to redo it every single time. We're going to utilize Photoshop actions. First you want to make note of these settings right here. I have plus 27 and negative 10 and zero for lightens. You just one, either write these down or just remember them. You're going to close out of this one. We're going to go back and we're going to open all of our pink flowers. From a flower Number 2 all the way down to 19. I'm just going to drag them all into Photoshop, and it'll take a second, but they'll all open up right here. Now we're going to create that action. The first thing you want to do is come up here to our actions. If you don't see it, you can get to it by going Window actions, and we're going to create a new action, so you're just going to click this little icon right here for a new action, and we're going to name this one orange automated, and hit Record. Now everything we do right now will be applied to all of our other florals later on. The first thing that we did before was we created a hue saturation adjustment layer. You're just going to click on this. We're going to put in those settings that we remembered from last time, which were plus 27 and negative 10, and you want to make sure that this looks pretty good for yours, if you don't feel comfortable automating this on all of your florals, because obviously some of them are different, some will feel a little more washed out or more vibrant. You can just stop your action right here and just have this be the action. But I'm going to take it a step further in totally finish this up. From here what we did is we went File Save As, and then we went into our orange folder and we just saved it without changing the file name. This part's important. If you leave the filename the same this will work fine, if you change the file name it won't work as well. Just leave the same filename. All you want to do is change the format and hit Save, hit Okay, and then you're just going to close it. We're not going to save this. Then you're going to come back to your actions and your going to stop your action. This is a bit more of an advanced method in Photoshop. If this is too confusing, definitely feel free to do it the manual way. I just wanted to show you a quicker way if you want to save time later on. I'm going to hit stop right here, and this will stop the action. This is our orange automated right here. Let me drag this down so you can see. This is our orange automated. These are all the steps that are associated with this orange automated. We added the adjustment layer. We adjusted the adjustment layer, we saved it as a PNG and then we close the file. Now, I can apply everything we did to that previous one, to all of my other floral, all I have to do is select the action right here, which is the one that we named orange automated. I'm just going to hit the play button. This will apply that orange adjustment layer and it will save the file and it will close the file. I'm just going to hit Play, and it already did it. Without us even realizing it, adjusted it. If I come back to my orange folder now, you can see it right here, here it is, all changed for us. I'm going to do the same thing again, just hit play, and it did it again. We can go and make sure that it did it. You can see right here, we've got our orange version. Now, I'm just going to play through the rest of these. All I have to do is hit that Play button and it applies all of those settings that we automated. Now I just played all of them. You can rename them if you'd like, if the copy part bothers you. But we come through now and we can see what all of these look like. You can also see it in the preview over here. Now we have all of these different colors of all the same flowers that we made, so we can add a lot of variety of you're making arrangements or bouquets later on, you have more to choose from now, and you can do this with other colors. You can change your pink to a purple or to a blue. You have way more options when you go to create those bouquets without having to remake a ton of different flowers. It's pretty cool. Once you start creating these, you'll notice how just having a few simple floral, you can really do a lot with them when it comes to bouquets and arrangements, or just using the florals in general, you have way more options, because once you start involving more color palettes, suddenly you have way more options for everything. That is Method 1 of recoloring and using an automated action. Once again, you can totally do this manually. You don't have to automate all the way to saving, if you want to make little tweaks depending on what your flowers look like. But for now, that's a really handy time-saver. The next tip is how to change different colors within the floral without changing the entire floral. Let me open this one up again. Before when we applied that adjustment it changed the color of the green and it changed the color of all of our pink areas. But say I like the green color and I just want to change the floral areas. I can do that and just change sections of my floral instead of the entire thing at once. I want to show you how to do that right now. The first thing you want to do is just create a brand new layer on top of yours. You want to change the blend mode for this layer to color. Right here you're going to toggle down and choose color. Then you're going to grab your brush, any kind of brush you like. I think I'm just going to use the same brush I was using for the masking because it's pretty nice and textured. I'm just going to zoom in right here, and say I wanted to change all of these as being purple. I'm going to grab my foreground color, click on it and then choose a purple that I like. Let's do this purple. Then what you want to do is right-click on your Layer and choose c]Create Clipping Mask, and this will just paint within this far area, it won't paint outside of it because we have applied that clipping mass. Now, I can just color without having to worry about being super precise, I can be a little messy with how I paint and this entire thing can turn purple. That's another really handy trick where you can just choose the areas that you'd like to color a different color. This does not work for White though, it'll turn gray if you use White. White is the special case when it comes to florals. If you wanted to do White, you would have to change your saturation, your lightness, your different blend modes, you're overlays. White is definitely a more complicated process. If you're just getting started with this, I would definitely stick to colored florals. You can even go super light like really light peach. If you wanted to get really close to White, and then it would be a little easier to convert it to white later on. All right. We're almost done here. All right. I've colored all of these purple, and then you would just save it the exact same way that we save before. You can not automate this with an action because obviously every floral is different, your painting different sections. You can't use actions with us, but you can definitely customize it exactly the way you'd like. If you want to give yourself even more options, like we chose the Color blend mode right here. You can change this to different blend modes and see the different effects that you get. Let's see what multiply looks like. That's not good. I can do Soft Light. I can do it before and after by just turning on the visibility on and off. Do difference, you can get all kinds of crazy things when you start messing around with your different blend modes. Those are two ways to change or recolor your florals to give you way more options.
14. Thank You + Next Steps: That is our course. Thanks so much for
being a part of this intro course to watercolor florals
for graphic design. Your project should be creating watercolor florals or
foliage of any kind, enhancing the color, then
removing the background, and then creating
different color palettes of your design. You want to take it all
the way from creation, all the way to a cut-out
digital image of your florals or foliage
that you can then reuse on anything
that you'd like. I'd love to see what you make, so be sure to post your project. Thanks again for being
a part of this class. I hope to see you next time.
Teela Cunningham, Hand Lettering + Graphic Design
