Transcripts
1. Layered Paper Collage in Photoshop - Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create a layered paper collage effect in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating a layered paper collage effect in Photoshop. We'll start by drawing the shapes, and then we'll create our own custom layer styles to create a layered dimensional effect. As you're watching these videos, you will most likely see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help other Skillshare students to find my classes, so they too can learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started creating a layered paper collage in Photoshop.
2. Dimensional Paper Collage - Part 1: To get started with our project, I'm going to choose File and New, I'm going to create a document that's 2, 000 pixels by 2, 000 pixels in size. It's going to be RGB color mode and a transparent background, I'll click "OK". Now I'm going to select a blue color to use for the fill, so I'm gonna click on the color picker and I'm going to just type in at least the beginnings of my number because as now I want it to be 999 and then it's ac , and I think it's probably around about AC3. I just like this bluey gray color. I don't usually give you colors to use and please feel free to use whatever color you like, I just haven't really like working with this particular color. To fill the "background layer with that color, I'll press "Alt," "Backspace option," "Delete" on the Mac. Let's just press control commands zero to see the entire image in the workspace. Here's my Layers Palette, I have one layer which is my color filled layer. I'm going to add a new layer because every single shape is going on to a different layer. Coming over here, I'm going to press the letter D or click this icon here to get the default colors, and I can press the letter X or click this icon here, so that white is my foreground color. I'm going to start with the cloud because that's a nice, easy element to create. I have the Elliptical Marquee Tool selected here, so I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a circle. Because I have this last selected and white as my foreground color, I can press "Alt" and "Backspace" on the PC option, delete on the Mac to fill my shape with the color. Next up, I'm going to duplicate this layer, which I can do by just dragging it onto the New Layer icon. I could also select Layer new Layer via Copy. You'll see also that we could press "Control or Command J" to duplicate the layer. I'm going to the Move Tool and I'm just going to reshape the shape for my second part of my cloud, because clouds are very easy to create from just a series of four successively smaller circles, so there's my next circle. I'm going to come to this layer, select it and press "Control or Command J" to duplicate it. But you can use any Duplication Tool of your choice. Just dragging this circle out of the way, holding shift as I make it a little bit smaller and put it into position. I'm going to duplicate this layer one more time, shrink my circle a little bit more, move it into position up here and click the check mark. I have a cloud which has now made out of four different size circles. I've also, because I've built at the way that I have, I've got the biggest circle on the bottom and eight successively smaller circle is further up the last stack. But that's going to help me in a minute when we create the embossed effect. For embossed effect, we're going to start with the big circle. So I'm going to click on that, and I'm going to the Fx Icon here and I'm going to click, and we're going to start with a gradient overlay. Now, the gradient overlay is already in place and you might have when you click to open this last style panel, a gradient overlay or some overlay that you've previously used here. Well, just click reset to default, and that just sets everything back to the defaults, so you can now set up the gradient that you want for this particular shape. I'm going to click in the gradient and I want the third one in, because the third one in is always a black to white gradient. Click "OK". Next up, I want to change the angle of the gradient because at the moment it's coming from the top to down. I wanted to be on an angle, so I'm just going to drag it around about something like about minus a 120, just so it's on an angle. I also want to make this gradient less intense, right now it's black to white. I want it to be a pale gray to white. Well, because I've got a white color underneath this shape, I can just drag down on the opacity here, and dragging down on the opacity, will just make the gradient a little bit more transparent, and since we've got white behind, it's just going to tend towards becoming a little whiter. There's the first of our lifestyles, we're going to come back in the next video and we're going to continue to build up these last styles to give us shapes a little more dimension.
3. Dimensional Paper Collage - Part 2: The next last hour we're going to use is going to be bevel and emboss so I'm going to click the check mark and then click on bevel and emboss so I can make my settings here and I'm going to click reset to default so we can start with the default settings. Now we want an inner bevel and we want it to be smooth but I think the depth is a little bit too deep so I'm just going to wind this back at the moment was started off [inaudible] being about a 100 percent. I think about 1 percent is going to be sufficient. It wants to be an up bevel rather than down bevel so we're going to make this up and the size is 7 so that's pretty good the default size. But its softness, I think I want it to be a little bit softer so wind this out to something around about 4 or 5 pixels just to soften it a little bit. Now this is a setting we need to be really careful with because the shading on this particular bevel and emboss by default uses what is called global light. Now, if you use global light and you create your shading using global light but if you come along later on anywhere in this document and you see a style that uses global light and if you adjust the angle, then you're going to adjust the angle for every single thing in this document which uses global light. So for safety you may want to disable this so that we can set the angle of the shading manually and if later on we want to tweak the angle of shading for a different object, we will disable global light for that one as well and so we'll be able to tweak the angle without affecting anything else so it's a little bit of safety there for you. I'm just going to wind this round so that the angle is a bit more like 60 or 70 degrees here. I'm going to wind up the highlight mode, I want it a little bit higher highlighting so I'm going to take the opacity of that all the way up to a 100 percent and then for the shadows, I want to take those down a little bit so I'm going to walk them in a downwards direction. Now with the angle of a shading here, you get two settings you get not only the angle but you also get altitude and the altitude is this little dot in here and the closer you bring it to the center of the circle, the higher the degree of altitude. I'm actually going to take it out to about somewhere between 20 and 30 degrees and that's giving me the look that I want for this particular shading. But again, because I haven't used global light it's independent of everything else so I can tweak it a bit later on without affecting anything. Next up I'm going to apply drop shadow. Click on drop shadow, click on the actual word drop shadow and here we get to create a drop shadow. I'm going to reset it to the default settings as well and here it is. We've got global light in use here. Well, if we don't want to use global light we can just disable that and we can create our own specific shadow. So I'm just going to drag this, you can always just drag a shadow in Photoshop so if you know where you want it, sometimes it's easier just to pull it out to where you want it to be. I'm going to just set up my settings, I have got an opacity here of about 35 percent so it looks pretty good here. I think the distance is too much, I think it's too far out from my circle and size is probably a little bit too much as well. Size is one of those funny things I think it's a misnomer because size really is fluffiness, it's almost like feather on the shadow not the actual size of the shadow so just think of it in those terms, distance is a little bit more size if you like. The last setting I'm going to make for this shape is going to be to add a stroke so I'm going to the stroke setting click on stroke, reset it to default so that we can see what you will probably see in terms of stroke and that's not a very nice stroke at all. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to make my stroke also a gradient but I'm going to tip my gradient the opposite way so by default this is pretty good. What I want is it to be darker where the gradient fill on the shape is lighter and I want it to be lighter with a gradient fill on the shape is darker but it is still a bit intense. Let's go and click gradient here and we've got a black to white gradient or some dark gray to white gradient. Well, I want my gradient to be lighter at this end so I'm just going to click on the stop here, double-click to open up this panel. Now if your color picker doesn't look like mine, here's how to make it look like mine. Whenever you click on one of these dots here, you see a color picker that is referenced by whatever it is that you've clicked on. So we're seeing green here, we're seeing blue here, this is red, here would be brightness, here would be saturation, and here would be hue. What I tend to use is hue so that we're seeing the hue down here and in here we're seeing saturation and brightness. If you want your color picker to look like mine, just click on this dot here and then we can go and get a light gray over here so I'm just going to click on the light gray and just click Okay and then Okay again. Let's go and adjust our gradient so this gradient I'm just this going to tip it so it's running in that direction. Obviously light at the top, darker at the bottom but I think the intensity is a little bit high and for that, I'm just going to decrease the actual stroke weight. So I'm going to take this down to about 2 and then I'll click Okay because I'm finished with setting up this shape. Now when I click away from it, if I decide I need to change anything I'm going to re-select my shape, double-click on the effects to re-open the dialogue and then I can go to any of these settings and just make adjustments. I'm just going to take this stroke weight down one and just click Okay. Now that I've got this shape setup, I can borrow these settings or I can copy them and paste them onto all these other shapes. That's one method of getting the exact same settings from one shape to the next so we're going to do that now with this shape that has all these effects associated with it selected, I'm gonna right-click in the layers palette and choose copy layer style. Then I'm going to select the first of the layers, which is going to take this new style, going to wind up to the top of my layers palette hold shift as I click on the top most. So all three of these shapes are selected, I'll right-click and choose paste layer style and that automatically paste that layer style into all three of the shapes. So everything has the exact same layer style applied to it.
4. Dimensional Paper Collage - Part 3: The next thing we need to do is to build up the other shapes for our illustrations. I'm going to create my tree. I'm going to start out with the tree using the Pen tool. So I'm going to click on the ''Pen tool,'' I'm going to need a new layer of it so I'm going to click the top most layer and click the ''New layer Icon'' to get allowed to work with. With the Pen tool selected it's going to be very simple to create our tree trunk. We're going to start at the bottom here and we're just going to click and then we're going to roughly where we want the tree trunk to tip out the very top part of it and I'm going to click and drag and this time I'm headed towards some of the top left of the document here. Now, this is the Pen tool, I've got the curve coming with me but this handle here is not rotating, so to bring this handle with me, I'm going to hover over the top of it and hold the Alt key on the pace say the Option key on the mark and I'm just going to pull this around. I want this handle to have this relationship to the previous handle, I want it to be slightly separated from it. I think it's a little bit too long here because I can't curve around so I'm just going to again hold the Alt or Option key and just shorten it.This is the shape I want to make it a really tall v-shaped so let's just click here once, this is exactly the shape I want. Now, that I've clicked to the bottom I'm just going to click again on the starting point to finish the shape off. Now I want to add little branch out here, so I'm going to do that again with the Pen tool as well. Let's just go back to this shape layer, let's add another new layer. I'm actually working with shapes, if you have a look at the Pen tool here, I've got the shape layer here. So I could use shape or paths, that doesn't really matter, but I'm using shape. The shape is always going to be filled with the current foreground color. Now, let's just click here, click once, go out here to where I want the branch to finish, click and drag to make the curvy line. Then I want to hold the Alt or Option key as I swing this handle around because I want to head back in the direction that I came in and then let's just test and see how this line looks, If it is perhaps too thick then we can come back here and just adjust this handle and we'll adjust it always by holding the Alt or Option key, as we adjust it. Let's just click back here and then click here again and this is the branch of my tree. If I need to having drawn it because it's a shape, we can just rotate it and position it exactly where we want it to be. Now that I've created it, I'm going back to the two top layers which are the two layers that have this tree shape on them. Going to right click and I'm going to merge them and also going to create them as a raster because everything else is raster so I'm going to right-click and just choose ''Rasterize layers'' so that's my tree trunk. For the bundles of layers I'm just going to repeat the circles that I created earlier so I'm just going to speed up the video as I create these circles. Then I'm going to draw in my background and again, once we've done all of that will come back and apply out layer styles to it. After I've finished creating my shapes and every single one of these shapes is on a different layer, now a couple of things that I want to just point out when I was creating those shapes to duplicate each of these leaf shapes, all I did was press ''Control'' or'' Command J'' to make a duplicate layer, I was very careful when I sized these shapes to hold the Shift key as I did so because that will make sure that the shapes are constrained to a perfect circle. Another thing that I did was when I drew my first circle, I found that it was in the wrong place, so what I did was hold the space bar as I move it because you're still drawing a shape, you can hold the space bar and put it wherever you like. Let go the space bar continue to draw it and only when you entirely finished, happy with the size that it is and the place that it's in should you let go the left mouse button and then it's in position we're just going to get rid of that. Another thing was when I was working with the Pen tool here, I clicked and I clicked, then I clicked and dragged to make this curve, click back down here at the base of the document and then click back on my starting point just to get an interesting curve. Now, right now these shapes are not exactly where I want them to be, but we could go ahead and apply a lifestyle to this and then move them later on. I'm just going to locate this big circle here, which there it is. I already have my last style in my windows clipboard so I'm just going to right-click and choose ''Paste layer style.'' Now I'm thinking that this is probably a little bit dark, so I'm going to double-click on the effects and I'm going to lighten the gradient just a little bit, so I'm going to gradient overlay and I'm going to bring down the opacity a little bit further. Now, last time when we wanted to give each of our elements the exact same layer style we copy and pasted the layers style, there's another way that you can do it so with this layer style dialogue open in front of me now, I'm going to click here on ''New style''. More I can do is I can call this tree leaves. Now, in most recent version of Photo shop, you can add this to a library. I'm not actually going to do that, but I am going to include any layer blending options. So I'm just going to click ''Okay''. What that does is it saves that look as a layer style so let's come up here and let's go to one of these shapes and just going to test which shape it is, it's this one over here. Let's apply our last style to this shape and we do that by choosing ''Window'' and then ''Styles'', because this is the last style's dialogue here. If I open up the last style's dialogue, the very last of these last styles is going to be called tree relays so I can click it and it will be applied to this particular layer. There's a different way of applying last styles to shapes, you can actually save the last style and then re-use it by simply selecting whatever layer you want to apply it to and then just click on that ''Last style'' to apply to that layer. If we said we really like this, perhaps even a little bit better than this last style here, let's go back to the clouds, let's go and get all the cloud layers. Here they are here, so I have all four of my cloud layers selected, let's go and apply the tree effect to them. You can see that they're much lighter so that's another way of working with last styles in Photo shop. I'm also going to apply that same layer style today's paces down here so let's go and grab these two paces at the bottom of our dialogue the landscape paces let's apply the last style to them, and we'll do that to the tree as well. Here's our tree. Now, at this point you may want to adjust the layering of these objects, I like it when this particular bunch of layers is behind this one up here, so what I'm going to do is go and find out where this bunch of leaves is. You can see here I've got auto select enabled so if I click on this ''Shape'', I should be able to pick it up in the last part which I've just done. Now I can just move it behind the one at the front.
5. Dimensional Paper Collage - Part 4: Now before we finish up with our illustration here, I'm just a little bit concerned as to how the tree trunk is looking here. I'm going to go to the tree trunk layer. It's up here. I'm going to select it and I'm going to double-click to open the effects panel for this. Now, applying a layer style like we did to this tree trunk is just applying a starting set of effects to it. If we want to adjust them, we can do so. We won't affect any of the other objects that actually have this layer style applied to them. I'm going here to the Gradient Overlay. Just wanted to look at this. I think it's a little bit too dark up here and perhaps not dark enough down here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the scale of this gradient overlay for this shape. I'm probably also going to increase the opacity a little bit just to try and get a slightly different effect here. Maybe adjust the angle. But you'll see that none of the other shapes have changed. The effect that we're creating for just this tree branch is independent of the effect applied to all of these other shapes. By using a style, all we've done is short-circuited the process of applying the initial settings to a shape. But we haven't bought into a situation where all of these shapes are going to change if we change the style for one of them in particular. Now I think I'm also going to just have a look at this. I think I don't probably want a stroke on the shape at all. I'm just going to leave that off and click "Okay". There's our finished paper cut illustration created in Photoshop. Your project for this class is going to be, to go and create your own mini illustration using these effects, practice creating your own layer style, and also copying and pasting layer styles into other objects. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about creating and reusing layer styles in Photoshop. As you're working through this class, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. This will help other Skillshare students to understand that this is a class that they too might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
