Transcripts
1. Introduction: Go ahead. Take your phone out right now and see how many photos you have in your photo album. I'm not a photographer, but I already have 18,000 photos on my phone sitting there unused. Maybe just because it's not Insta-worthy. Now what if we can take those old photos and turn them into beautiful graphics? Adding your own inspirational quotes and maybe an illustration or two. Yes, there are many apps that can help you do that, but you have Procreate, you have your creativity. Why not use them? In this class, I'm going to show you how to add quotes, texts, and illustrations into your own photo using Procreate. In this class, we're specifically going to practice using the layer mask. Now, what is the layer mask? If you've always wondered and feel intimidated by it, this is the perfect class for you. We're going to go through three to four different styles on what you can do with the layer mask. This class is a great exercise if you're stuck in a creative rut. But if you're not, let's have some fun drawing on photographs. Hi, my name is Voni, and I'm a self-taught artist at The Pupil of Stuff. Now I do not claim to be a professional creative, but I have a passion for learning and sharing the knowledge and skills that I've learned in a relatable manner. Let's get started.
2. Class Project: For your class project, you'll create an artwork using your own photo or a photo from Unsplash. Now, to create a successful project, you will need to include two things. One, use any of the styles that you will learn in class, whether it is hand lettering, geometric patterns, or adding texts. Use any of those styles in your artwork. Two, use the mask layer in your process. Please do not erase. This class is designed specifically for you to use the mask layer so that you can be comfortable using it in your own work in the future. So as you go through the class, keep in mind which your favorite style is so that you can use that in your class project in the end. If you have any work-in-progress shots or have any questions at all, please share it with us in the class project gallery. I would love to hear from you. Once you've completed your class project, please upload it on our class project gallery as well. Now, start the class.
3. Prepare Your Photos: To begin our class, let's prepare some photos to work with. I want to show you a really cool website where you can get free high-quality credited photos. This website is called Unsplash. Now, what is Unsplash? It is a website dedicated to providing really beautiful, high-quality photos that you can download, use for free for any of your projects. This website is supported by the community, contributed by hobbyists to professional photographers. I really love this website because it offers amazing photos and inspirations, but especially it gives credit to its rightful owner. Let's start preparing the photos that we need for class. Firstly, you need to get a scenic photo. Second, you need a photo of florals or botanicals. Third, you need a photo of you in it, but with ample background space. Fourth, you need a flat lay. Now, let's talk a little bit more on what you should look out for as you look for your photos. For the scenic photo, you want one of hills and mountains, something that looks over the horizon, you don't have to have a person in it, but something that is wide and in nature. For the leaves, the florals, and botanicals photo, find the one that has a lot of overlapping leaves and petals; small ones, something just like this as fine. I won't use this for my example, but something like that is fine. Now this is a personal photo of myself at a picnic. You can see how it has ample background space. That's what I want you to look out for. Find something that has ample background space. It doesn't have to see your entire full body length, but just a photo of you in it. For the last one, we want to look for a flat lay. Flat lay of any objects, any regular day-to-day objects or food or coffee. If you do not have any type of these photos in your photo album, just take all of them from Unsplash and we can work on it. In this class, I just want to show you how fun it is to draw on photographs.
4. What Is A Layer Mask?: Let's break down what masking is. In procreate, there is a clipping mask, and a layer mask. In this class, we're going to focus on what a layer mask is, and you're going to practice using the layer mask. A layer mask is a layer placed above your original layer, to hide a portion of your artwork. I'm sure you have come across many photographs with words incorporated into the photo. We have some parts of the text hidden behind, or some parts of the graphics arranged in front of the other objects. One way this is done is to create such a look as through the layer mask. The layer mask used to be such a foreign and difficult tool to me, something I was afraid to use, but after understanding what it is, I learned that it can be such a useful tool. Instead of erasing part of your artwork, you can basically add on a layer mask above your original artwork, so that you can erase and hide certain portions, and then you can turn it on and off to see how it looks. You can create multiple versions of that layer mask, just by duplicating the original layer, and creating a new layer mask. Now, to understand this even more, let's dive straight into our first example, so we can see how exactly to use the layer mask.
5. Style 1: Add Text: Now that you understand what the layer mask is, we're going to start off by practicing our first style. In this lesson, we're going to focus on adding text into a scenic photo. So if you do not have your scenic photo yet, go ahead, press "Pause", and look for your photo. You can get one from your photo album or take one from Unsplash. We're going to use an A4 canvas for this lesson. Procreate has one readily available, and their are a list of canvas selections in portrait mode. Now, add in the photo that you have selected. Depending on the photo that you chose, adjust the orientation of your canvas according to your photo. Now, you see, I have this white border on my canvas. I can either leave it like that if I want it to be framed up, or I can just fill the entire canvas with my photo. So I'm going to resize it to fill the entire canvas. The reason I chose the A4 size is because it's pretty universal. Not too large, not too small, and I know that if I ever want to print it out and get it framed, it will be fairly easy to do it at home and find a frame for it. Now, what do you see in this photo? I see someone standing on this side of the desert, looking beyond into the vastness, yet seeing hope. Hope is still out there. So that's the word I'm incorporating into this photo. I want you to look at your photo and tell me, what do you see? Could it be adventure, could it be nature, or even hustle? Whatever it is, choose a word that means something to you, something that will encourage you and inspire you because, when you're done with this photo, it could be your wallpaper. Now, add a new layer so we don't touch the original photo. There's your first spanner icon on the top left, hit "Add text", and type in your word. You can change the font and style of your text. Just double-tap on your text and select the entire word to change the font. Depending on the message that you want to send, you can play with the style, as well. For example, if you want something that is more bold, you can have bold fonts. If you want something that is more cartoonish or a bit lighter, it could be in italics, or it could be a comical font. So choose any style that fits your photograph. For me, I'm going with a bold type. You can also change the attributes of your font by making it outlined, but I will keep it filled and bolded. For my style, I only have four letters, and I want it to be bold and big because, in this photo, the hope that I see here is bold, and big, and so hopeful. So I'm just going to increase the size of the font, the letters, and also the kerning to increase the spacing in between each letter. So I can cut each of them out to individual layers. Once you're happy with the size, go ahead and rasterize your text so that it converts into an image where you can alpha lock and also cut out each letter. Now on your word layer, hit the third icon and cut out each letter using freehand, and hit "Copy & Paste". It will paste your selection into a new layer. Repeat this step until all your letters are on individual layers. Now there's another way you can achieve the same results. Instead of typing out the entire word on one layer, you can type one letter, edit the style to your preferred look, then duplicate it, and change the letter to the next one. So for this method, you just keep duplicating until you have all your letters on each layer. For me, personally, I prefer the first way because you get to see how the entire word looks on your photo. It's easier for you to see which style, which font type, suits your photo best. Once each letter is on its own layer, arrange your letters according to the elements of your photo. Your objective here is to incorporate the text into your photo, so it looks like it is part of the photo. Now I want the letters to look like it is layered between the mountains, some in the front, some in back, and I want parts of it hidden behind the slopes of the mountain. While you're doing that, keep in mind that you want to make sure you don't cover too much of your letter until it is eligible. You want to make sure it still looks like the alphabet, and don't cover important parts of the alphabet where it would change the entire alphabet. For example, if you have a "B", don't cover the entire lower curve part until it looks like a "P". Once you're satisfied, select your first letter, and open the Mask layer. We're going to use the Monoline brush under Calligraphy, and check your StreamLine. I like to play with my StreamLine, depending on what I use my brush for. For now, let's set it to around 30 percent. Make sure you are on the Mask layer. What you want to do is zoom into the parts where you want to hide your letter. So I just want the bottom of my "H" to be hidden behind this mountain. Make sure your color selection is on black. Usually, when you open a Mask layer, it would automatically change the color to black. Now, erase the other parts where you want it hidden. Zoom out and you can see that the "H" is looking pretty good. Like it's even hidden behind two different mountains. It's definitely an exaggeration, in terms of actual possibility. So go ahead and do the same for all your other letters. What you want to look out for is the attention to detail and the sharpness of your lines. This is important to create a believable incorporated look. So if you need a smaller, thinner, slimmer brush, make the size smaller. It can be really, really small until it is just one pixel. But if we need a bigger brush to just erase off a large part quicker, change the size, make it huge. You can actually duplicate the brushes that you have and change the brush settings according to your needs to make it easier for you, so you don't have to change up and down every time, but you can create a brush just specific to that size that you want. If you like to know more about basic brush settings and how to create your own brushes, Check out my class on creating botanical stem brushes. At the point where your letter and the photo meets, if the line is too clean, you can select a textured brush to add a little texture to the edges. I'm using the 6B pencil to replicate the sandy texture of the photo. Now, let's be creative and see what else we can do to beautify our text. Use two fingers to swipe right under letter layer to activate Alpha Lock. Let's switch up the colors to see if there are other colors that will be better. I'm going to try with one of the colors in the photo to try and maintain the color palette. Let's see how this yellow looks. I think it's too bright. What if we add a hint of texture to make the letters look more unpolished, so it doesn't look so digitalized? Now, I'm using the Artist's Crayon under sketching to give it a little texture. There are a lot of brushes in Procreate that gives a textured element. Go ahead and try out all the different brushes that suits your style. It can be under texture, it can be under painting. Go try them all out. Next, I want to make it more incorporated, so I'm going to add a little shadow at the bottom of the letters, just where the letters sit on the mountain. Using a 6B pencil while black is selected, I'll just shade across the edges and add a light color over the top. I'm going to blend it by smudging it a little, so that it's not so harsh. That's not like a hard line of black and a lighter color. A good smudge tool is a soft airbrush, which I love to soften hard lines. This may seem like a small and tiny detail, but it makes a lot of difference as a whole. What you want to try to achieve here is that you want to have a darker shadow between your letter and a mountain, so it feels like your letter is sitting just right behind where the mountain peeks out to block your letter. I'm just adding a little darker blue to blend the shadow together. Now, if you think that your texture on the fonts are too harsh, go ahead and smudge it a little to soften it just like what we did with the shadows, but increase the brush size so you get a bigger area and it's not so targeted. If it's a really tiny size, you're just going to be smudging it really small like a dot, and it becomes a pattern, a design. But what I want to do is just to make it really big and smudge it so that it's a little vague. It's just like a soft touch of smudge. Now, I'm going to merge all the mass layers because we don't need that anymore. Once you're satisfied with how you've masked your letters, just merge them into your original layers. Then duplicate each letter layer and arrange them so that you can merge one set together because we're going to use that layer to add more depth to your texts. What I want to show you now is how to add a shadow behind the text. On a merged layer, while the Alpha lock is still activated, you can fill in your layer color to a dark color by color dropping into each alphabet. Or you can also just Fill Layer when the Alpha lock is activated. Once you've done that, move that layer to the back of all your other individual layers and adjust the placement of the layers so that the one on the back peeks out just a little bit. It can be towards the left or right or slightly above. It is how you visualize the shadow, how the light is shining on, and where your shadow falls. Now, swipe left on your layer with two fingers to deactivate Alpha lock. Now, hit the second icon on the top left and click "Gaussian Blur". Now, you can slide left and right to adjust the strength of your blur with your pencil on the screen. This will easily help you create a shadow drop look. Doesn't this make the text pop in your photo? Now that you're done with your photo, I just want to give you a quick recap of what you learned in this lesson. The key takeaways here are, one, don't hide too large portions of your letter. Two, ensure readability of the most important part of the alphabet. Three, attention to detail and the line sharpness is important. Fourth, on a mask layer, the black color should be selected to erase.
6. Style 2: Hand Lettering: For this lesson, we're going to focus on using leaves to practice creating more layering effects while adding your own hand lettering. The reason why we're going to use leaves is because florals and botanicals have more options for you to create hidden petals and overlapping leaves. For this lesson, we're going to use an A4 canvas just like the last lesson and add in the botanical leaves photo you have prepared. As you can see, I'm moving the image around to see how I want to place my photo so that the leaf placements coincide with my lettering, so there will be enough leaves overlapping and hiding behind my lettering, because in my photo there is a darker spot in the middle without leaves which would be hidden in the back of my lettering and I do not want that part to be the main attention of the photo. We're going to use one of my favorite textured brushes to letter this piece, the chalk brush. Now, open a 2D grid, so we have guidelines to help us keep our lettering straight. On a new layer, start lettering a phrase of your choice. I have recently adopted a new interests being a plant mama, so many indoor plants have dominated our home, so that's what I want to letter in this piece today. If you are new to lettering, you can choose 1-3 words to begin with. If you're comfortable lettering and you have some experience with lettering, feel free to let a more words, you can choose a short quote or any quote of your choice. This will allow you to have more letters to play with and spaces too hide an overlap. Think of what you want to add to your own photo. A few ideas I have for you could be bloom where you're planted or growing your season, or summer vibes. All really fun ideas. I'm so excited to see what you come up with. Now, adjust your brush size according to the size you want to letter. This will vary for you if you have more words, but what you want to achieve is large letters, so you can see the leaves overlapping onto your letters. If your lettering is too small, your leaves may cover an entire alphabet which might be hard to read. For this chalk brush, I am pressing down on the pencil as I letter to get fixed strokes. For thinner strokes, just decrease your pressure so you get varying way on your strokes. What's good about having grid lines when your letter is you get consistency and the size of your alphabets. If these grids are too small for you and your letter have larger grids, just changed the size of it that suits you. For the boxes of my size, it could be three large boxes, so you don't have to lose count of your grid because for six of mine it could be three of yours. Once you're done lettering, open a new layer and decrease the opacity of your lettering layers. We're going to start planning where we want the leaves to overlap over your letters. Use a pencil to mark out which part you want peaking above your alphabets. Here's what you want to look out for. Number 1, don't cover major portions of an alphabet that will make or break the legibility of the alphabet. Number 2, having the leaves overlap even just a tiny bit makes a lot of difference. It will help the overall look. It may seem small, but it will help bring the entire look together. Now the sketch is just the first round. Once you're done, you can go back and add more if you feel something is lacking, but do not skip this part because it will smoothen the entire creative process and avoid wasting time when you work on a masking layer. Once you're done with the sketch, open a mask layer and start masking. I'm using a 6B pencil to mask to get some edgy texture on the sides but when it comes to the middle larger portions, I will switch to the monoline brush. Lowering the streamline on your brush will definitely help you mask quicker. After adjusting the opacity, I realized that my sketch was only half of the leaf and there's the other tip of the leaf that I can be masking as well because you want to make this look realistic, so you have to see if you are masking only half the leaf or the entire leaf. There are instances where the leaf appears above the letter, but it ends at the bottom underneath a letter, but you just got to see whether it makes sense. Try to think of it in reality. In reality, if I put a letter above or below this, will this work? Can this actually be possible? That's something you want to think about as you mask. Once you have done a couple of leaves zoom out, take a look and you can start seeing how the leaves in your lettering are slowly intertwining. Creating a really nice tight and photo artwork because the leaves in my photo have sharp, pointed edges I wanted to be sure that I mask exactly to the outline of the leaves to make it look realistic. Now the thing about masking versus completely erasing is that when you mask, there's always the chance to redo but once you erase it's completely gone. Unless you have duplicated layers. In this lesson, it will be quicker for me to erase beyond the outline of the leaf, so that I can go and again to draw it back with a thinner brush, so that I don't have to keep switching between brushes and its size and the color. Don't worry, don't worry if you go over the line, It's completely fine because that's the beauty of masking, you can just switch to white again and get the original strokes back. Zoom out periodically to see how it looks. Go ahead, mask away. Makes sure you pay attention to the fine details where the lettering and the outline of your leaves connect. This will really help the outcome of your photo and if you're not satisfied and wonder if it will make a difference if you mask different leaves instead of your first sketch, you can just duplicate the original lettering layers and try masking different leaves, then toggle on and off between the two versions to see which you prefer. If you want to do more versions, go ahead. This is where your creative process comes in and you cannot rush that process. What I really like about working with photos is that when I add in my own creativity, like hand-lettering and as I start masking, I start to see how both mediums, my own lettering and the photo starts to be incorporated. Like you can see in this photo, as I keep masking more and more leaves, I get to see how the leaves overlap onto my lettering, making it a seamless artwork is just one beautiful graphic instead of force fitting my work onto a photo, or trying to force fit two things that do not complement or are not meant to be together. Now here, I can see that I have one letter that has absolutely no leaves overlap. It's not necessary for all your letters to be overlap, but I would like to mask a portion of this as well even if it's just a tiny bit because I don't want it to look like it's just floating out of nowhere in the photo. I think it looks better and more balanced now. Now that you're done with this lesson, let's just recap what the key takeaways here are. Number 1, start out with 1-3 words to get a hang of incorporating hand-lettering into photos. Once you're comfortable, you can move on to longer phrases. Number 2, large letters are crucial to allow more options and space to be layered over. Number 3, mask the exact outline of your leaf to create a more realistic look. Number 4, use a textured brush to letter to give more depth to your entire photo.
7. Style 3: Geometric Patterns: In this lesson, we're going to add some liveliness into your photo by adding some geometric patterns to create movement. Geometric patterns can create an illusion of an object like an illustration of an object, a wave for example. This is an art work I've illustrated to create a pattern of waves. We're going to use the same principle to incorporate this look into your photo. For this lesson, I'm going to use a personal photo to show you how you can be creative with your own personal shots. I have here a photo of myself at a picnic and I'm going to add patterns across the entire photo from left to right while having the illusion of waves going through me. I'm working on a 3,000 x 3,000 pixel canvas, because I want this to be ready to post on Instagram without having me to crop any parts when I upload it later. If you haven't noticed it already, my favorite pencil brush is the 6B pencil to sketch and illustrate the final piece. Open a new layer and select your sketching pencil. We are going to roughly sketch out the lines where we want our patterns to go across the piece. What you want to do here is create wavy lines and connect some of them to create pockets or smaller sections. We can see here that I'm trying to draw a wavy line across my body, skipping my body and not drawing on it, but it's not creating a wave that I would like, like a really nice seamless wave. It's actually okay for you to draw across the entire photo to get what you want, to get an illustration or a pattern that you want if it helps you because in the end, we're going to use the mass layer to mass portions that we want to appear upfront. Now this portion where you're starting to create your pockets, you want to start envisioning which areas of your photo that you want to appear above your patterns. I'm thinking I want my head and my hat to appear above my patterns, that's why I want to draw my pocket just right where my head is because eventually, I want it to look like the lines are coming out of my head. You will later fill in those sections with more lines to create a pattern. I like to work on multiple layers because it will help me go back to my original artwork, so if I mess up, I won't need to redo a big chunk. Now here's where I show you my other favorite lettering and inking brush called the Tinderbox. This brush thickens as you put more pressure on your pencil and create thin strokes when you lighten up. Plus it has texture strokes which really gives it depth. You want to vary the pressure as you draw your strokes across the photo, so you create that illusion of movement, so it doesn't look too static. It's not too clean, not too static, not too hard, and not too meaningless. The thickness and the thinness of the strokes will really help create a movement and liveliness to your illustration. If you're not familiar with this brush, take your time to experience with the difference in pressure of the brush in creating thick and thin strokes. If you feel like it is hard to control the smoothness of the lines, just increase the streamline on your brush. If you've never used this brush before the streamline might be at zero, so just increase it in the brush setting. Here I'm going to start adding the pockets. You want to have some parts meeting each other and then expanding on the opposite sides, because then you can create an illusion of the lines coming together or going apart. On a new layer, I'm going to start adding in the lines within the sections. For each section, you want to add repeated lines until the entire space is filled. You can follow the way the outer line flows to fill the space within to create a wave. Have all the lines meet at one point where it ends. At this point, it will look like everything is flowing to one point. Continue doing this until you have filled alternating portions of the waves. Keep some white spaces between the waves so it doesn't look too crowded. Over here, of course, you have a photo at the back. There's not really white space per se. What I mean by whites paces here, it's just where you are not drawing, so that the photo behind is still revealed, it's still shown through your strokes. It's important to have all these whites spaces so you can balance between the actual photo and your drawings because you want to clearly distinguish between the waves. You can see how many times I'm redoing this line because I just need the gap between each line to be somehow equal, and if you see compared to the lines on the right side, if it's too thin together, it creates a different look but if the lines are equally balanced in between each other, then it creates a different movement. That's why you want to try and look out for. It may look simple like it's just a bunch of lines, but it makes a difference how the line looks and how it is drawn. Go ahead, try out different styles. You can see here when I just finished and I zoomed out, I didn't intentionally want to create a pocket here, but the way I curve the lines inside, it made it seem like there's a twist in this wave and now I'm trying to see if I thicken the line, will it create a different look. But I think I don't like it, so I'm just going to make it thin lines and converging it all to one point will make it look like it's flowing to that one point and the one above there is another pattern or wave. I just want to say that doing something like this on days where I feel really tired or when my creative juices are just depleted, doing this is actually quite therapeutic because I feel like there is no expectations out of me. Like I am just doing something and see where it goes. Once you're done, you can merge both layers and start masking. Open a mask layer and see which parts you want to hide. Which parts you want the waves to flow out. Right here where my hat is, I want my hat and my face to be in the front of the waves. So I'm going to bring those forward. If you notice, I reduced my streamline for my tinderbox brush all the way to zero because it will help me control the brush even more and not feel like there's a line that is pulling onto my strokes. It's easier for me to mask quickly. A large chunk, I just want to mask quickly. Something you want to take note when using this brush to mask is that it is a bit translucent in the sense where you need two layers when you mask, because it leaves behind some pixels and some layers, not like when you use a monoline brush. If you use a monoline brush, one time all the pixels will be taken out. But with tinderbox, you can see at the black parts of the ribbon of my hat, there are still some white pixels left. You might need to go over to take them out. If it's just a small part, you can just keep using your tinderbox. But for me right now, I'm just going to switch to monoline to get rid of a whole chunk of it. Moving on to the arm, I want the waves to flow through my body but allow my arms to pop up. It looks like the waves are flowing through me. This will create the illusion that there's actually some waves or a wind or some sort in this photo, which will make it lively. As you mask, sometimes you might wonder where to end your line. For this part, for instance, I could either end it at the straps of my dress or just move behind my entire back. You just want to see what makes sense. Try multiple versions of it. That's the beauty about masking. You can do, redo, undo without affecting the original layer. But if you actually erased it and you moved on, it's going to be really hard for you to come back and redo it again. Depending on where the lines cross over your photo, you do not have to erase all the ways that are covering that one element. For example, I am masking a big portion of my arm, but leaving the portion of my hand as it is. I will mask that so that it doesn't look too rigid. I'm also going to bring forward this platter here to create a balance of the illustrated wave and the actual photo so that both are incorporated. Even though these are small portions of the photo elements, it really makes a big difference when it is all combined. Even for the sandals at the corner, which is what I'm going to do. I'm going to mask to bring the sandals forward as well. You can see that, just like the previous lesson, it's easier for me to erase outside of the outline of the object so that I can just click on white and bring it back. But if you prefer to do it at one go right from the beginning and not have to come back like what I'm doing right now, then feel free to do that because if it works for you, it's fine. There's no right or wrong. Once again, pay attention to the details of your photo. Zoom in and out, however many times you need and you realize that there are actually things that you can do with your photo. Here's how it looks when it's done. Just for a bonus tip, you can even add little designs to make it cuter, like little stars to highlight the main focus of your photo. For example, in this photo the main focus would be me, so I'm just going to add little stars around my head. Now that you finished this lesson, let's just do a quick recap on your takeaways. Number 1, work on square canvases, if you know you want to upload them on Instagram. Number 2, alternating pressure on your tinderbox brush will create strokes that illustrate movement or flow. Number 3, keep some white spaces between your waves to clearly distinguish between the waves. Number 4, you can use any old photo and add life to it using geometric patterns.
8. Bonus Style: Hand Drawn Elements: I hope that you have picked up some different styles that may help you create and boost creativity in your own work. But that's not all. In this last bonus lesson, I want to share with you how by adding abstract outlines can help you create a hand-drawn look to your own photo. For this canvas, we're going to use a 4 by 5 ratio canvas, which is suitable for either portrait or landscape upload for Instagram. Open a new canvas of 1,350 times 1,080 pixels. Add in a flat lay photo of any regular day-to-day objects. Here I have a photo of tulips from Unsplash. Open a new layer and I'm going to use the same tinderbox brush to draw outlines of the petals of the tulips. What you want to do here is to create imperfect outlines of the tulip. It doesn't have to be straight, it doesn't have to connect, it's just a rough outline. This will add a new dimension to your photo. I'm going to outline the stems as well. For all these outlines, there's not going to be any masking involved. This lesson is a bonus practice lesson to show you how to incorporate abstract outlines, hand-drawn elements with lettering. What we will unmask later is a lettering of the word tulip in this photo. You can see that I am alternating my pressure of the brush. At the ends, some of them are sharper, some of them are blunt, and not all of them are even touching each other. If you do not have a tulip as your practice photo, whatever that you have, see if you can do any outlines on it. There's another way that you can do an outline is to not follow the edges of the photo. For example, if you have a circle, you can draw your outline of the circle to the left or to the right of the circle, so it looks like the outline is just shifted off side. I really like how this is turning out. How just by adding white outlines, it gives it a completely different look. Now let's open a new layer. Let's practice combining both illustrations and lettering into one artwork. I will letter tulip across the photo and mask the part so that the tulips will appear in front of the word or above the word. I'm using the same tinderbox brush to show you the diversitility of this brush. It really is my favorite go-to brush. I usually use this brush for modern calligraphy or full calligraphy because I like how when the streamline is up, you get a really nice curve and really nice thick strokes and thin strokes. But I discovered that this brush is great for regular lettering as well, just like this one. Just capital letters, just regular strokes, but it looks really nice. Now let's open the mask layer and start masking. As I said previously, I wanted the tulip bulbs to appear above the letters. The letters will go behind the tulips. After going through a few of these examples using the mask layer, do you feel more confident using it for your own work? Maybe by now it gives you some idea, what you can do with your own artwork. How you can use the mask layer to speed up your process or just change the way you usually create. To speed things up even more, what you can do is, if you already know which parts you want to mask, you can just focus on masking the outlines of it because the outlines are the ones where we need to pay really close attention to detail and wanting it to be really seamless. Once you're done with that, then just increase your brush size or change your brush to mask the rest of the insides. Lettering in abstract outlines do look pretty good together. What if your photo has a lot of empty white spaces like this? What you can do is draw small random shapes to fill those spaces. Abstract drawings or filled in shapes or just outlines of those drawings. I'm drawing shapes that looks like water droplets, small circles just to see how it looks. It may become too messy. But we're going to toggle the layers on and off to see how it looks when we're done. Remember to always work on a new layer. Now just because I'm always using white for my outlines and my drawings, my lettering, doesn't mean you have to as well. Feel free to play with the different colors that matches your photo. I just like how white looks in the photos that I've chosen. Now let's see what else can we try with this photo? We can also add outlines to this scarf below to highlight the back. Now that we have a few options, let's toggle the layers on and off to see what works best because all of it together might look like it's just too much. I want this lesson to help you boost your creativity. If you feel like you've always been doing the same illustrations or the same styles or the same lettering, maybe this would help you think outside the box a little bit and you might find a new style that you like to do. Play with all the different layers or different styles that you have and see which one works best. In the end, I still really like this outline of the tulip, so I'm going to keep that. Let's do a quick recap on what we learn in this lesson. Number 1, the tinderbox brush is versatile for both illustrations and lettering. Number 2, Instagram posts ratio is four by five or 1,350 times 1,080 pixels if you want it landscape or portrait mode. Number 3, you can use extra outlines to create hand-drawn elements to any flat lays and also cover imperfections of any photos.
9. Wrap Up & Takeaways: It's time for your class project. Now tell me which one is your favorite? If you can't pick one, you can use a mixture of styles for your class project. It can be a text with geometric patterns or it can be hand-lettering with abstract outlines. Now here's just a recap on our class takeaways. Number one make sure you are working on the mask layer. Select black to hide and white to unhide. Number two, duplicate original work layer to create another more style. So you can toggle on and off. Number three, ensure readability of words, don't hide too much of the letter until you can't read it, until you can't make up that letter. Number four, sharp lines and edges helps to create more seamless look for better incorporation of both media. Number five, use patterns or objects to fill up empty spaces on the photo. So go ahead, download your photos, prepare your photos and start sketching away. If you have any questions, if you have any working progress shots or if you've just completed your project please upload it on our class project gallery. I would love to see your work and if you're on Instagram feel free to tag me at THE PUPIL OF STUFF. If you like this class follow me on Skillshare to get updated on the next class. See you then.
Voni Lim, The Pupil of Stuff
