Live Encore: Illustrate Your Own Custom Thank You Card

1. Introduction: I have lots of experience with greeting cards. I had a greeting card line which was sold to stores around the country and internationally, something that I know very well. I also know that there's nothing better than gratitude. What better way to show you that attitude than with a handmade special thank you card. Hi everyone, my name is Gia Graham. I am an illustrator and lettering artist based in Atlanta, originally from my Barbados. You might have seen my work on greeting cards, art prints, home decor, which I license to places like Trader Joe's mentor, and are sold in stores like Target and other online outlets. In this class, we're going to be taking hand lettering and adding floral and leaf illustrations to create a personalized and custom thank you card. I'm going to be working digitally on the iPad Pro using the appropriate app, but you're more than welcome to follow along using whatever medium you choose, whether that's paper and pencil, marker, paints, it's totally your choice, the same principles will apply. For those of you working digitally, I've provided a couple of templates for you in the resources section below, so be sure to download those. I hope you leave the class with a few techniques on how to combine illustrations with your lettering, and the confidence to create beautiful compositions of your own. More importantly, I hope you have a little fun. Just so you know, this class was recorded live, and I had the opportunity to interact with the students as I was drawing. Let's start drawing. 2. Why Make Thank You Cards: Hi everyone. Welcome. Before we get going, my name is Casey, I'm a producer with SkillShare, and I'll be hosting today's live session with Gia Graham. Without further ado, Gia, welcome. Why do you think creating and sending a thank you card is really valuable? Well, especially now with our social interactions being limited, thank you cards are such a great way to let somebody know you're thinking of them, to keep in touch. I have a really good friend who is really incredible at snail mail. I'll just check my mailbox and she sent me some love in the mail, and it really does warm your heart. It's a great way to just stay connected while we can't physically be connected. It's a very lovely thing to receive something in that format. What can students expect to leave the session with today? Well, I'm hoping that everybody leaves the session with a few tips on composition. How to make illustration and lettering work well together and how to think through color placement, because it's a short class. We're not going to be doing lettering from scratch. I've provided the lettering in a template. This is more about how we take that lettering and add to it to create a beautiful piece. What materials will students need if they want to follow along? I'm using my iPad Pro and the Procreate app, but you can go analog, you can draw with pen and pencil, you can paint if you'd like, you can use markers, whatever you would choose. I will say that if you are not drawing digitally, my suggestion would be to use this session to create a really well thought out and completed sketch that you can then finish later. Otherwise, it might be a little too rushed to try to complete a full piece analog in just under an hour. Great. Fantastic. Well, let's get into it. 3. Drawing Warmup: We're going to be surrounding the words, thank you with some leaves and just really simple leaf illustrations. I figured we'd get started with a little warm-up exercise. Just to get ourselves kind of loose. There's no wrong way to do it, but we're going to just try creating several different styles of leaves and other awesome like illustrations. You can follow along with me or feel free to just have at it. We're just going to fill a page right now with some leaf shapes. Now by the way, this is the template that I provided, that's what I'm working on now just so I'm not hopping around from one file to the other. If you've already downloaded it, you'll see that it has three layers. The first layer is a San serif's style lettering, then there's a script version. You're free to choose either one or if you're proficient at lettering, by all means, you are welcome to create your own. I would suggest for the sake of time, use one of these options during this session and then you can always swap out this layer for something you create later on. The other thing I provided for you is my November palette. If you're already on my mailing list, you probably have this in your iPad already, but if you're not, you can use the colors that I'll be using in this session, or you can feel free to use any of your own colors. I am using this file that I created for you guys, and I'm just going to create a new layer. I'm going to use this 6B pencil and just play with some really rough shape ideas, from anything really simple, like a really easy, simple, almond shape, stick a line in the center. There's our leaf. We can create a little bit more movement by starting with a curved line and then follow that with another curved line to attach to it. Again, leaf down the center and magical, you've got another leaf. These curved leaves, you can really play with all kinds of curved shapes. You can just experiment with that a little bit. You can create clusters of leaves, like a few of the almond-shaped leaves together. You can make them super long and skinny or a little more squat. Actually here's a good tip for leaf drawing. Always start with a curve. If you start with a curve, you're already on the right direction. We can again start with a curve and do a branch which was just the curve and several of those almond-shaped leaves stemming from it, getting smaller as you go up. Angie, is there a particular pencil you've chosen for this one? Yeah. I'm using the 6B pencil mainly because I want it to be nice and dark for you guys to see. Typically, I would draw with the HB pencil. I'll show you the difference. The HB is a little finer, it's not as rough. But when I'm doing something really quick and rough, I like the 6B pencil because it's just easier to not be too precious with the 6B pencil because it's already so rough. Let's try a broad leaf. Again, start with a curve and this one will just have nice round shapes coming from it. Again, there's all different variations of that that you can do. You can make them a little bit more pointy. We can do something a little more loose like some pine needles. Again, start with a curve and with this one it's just some really loose strokes that you can do. There are some pine needles. Then as far as the autumn-like icons, we can try an acorn. Again, start with a curve. That's a pretty simple shape, curve at the top and a bowl shape at the bottom and a little point, stem and a little curve for the cat. You can add detail if you'd like. Seed pods are another good icon for fall. Starting with my curve, then you can do a pointed oval, same on this side. Little spikes at the top, nice. As you can see, they're all really basic shapes. There's nothing too complicated. But when we start combining them together, they're really going to start to come to life. I hope that you had a chance to work on some loose warm ups. 4. Planning Your Layout: Next, let me show you how to start planning your layout. What we're going to do next is choose whichever lettering style you want to use. I'm going to use this sans-serif version. When you are combining a piece to create an illustration, the first thing you want to do is, decide what shape you want to create around your lettering. I'm going to create a new layer here. With our leaves, we can create a rectangular shape to fill the space of the card surrounding the lettering, and fill in our leaves in such a way that it has some obvious corners so that you can tell it's a rectangle. I have an example here to show you. See in this example, I started out with a leaf in each corner or a group of leaves in each corner, and then just filled in making sure that it created a rectangular shape around the lettering. Or we can opt to, I'm going to clear this out, try a more oval shape, which is I think is what I'm going to do for this session. Really loosely draw an oval. It does not need to be pretty. All you're doing is creating a super rough guide for where you want your leaves to land and then we need to think about movement. Within that oval, how do we want the leaves to move? How do we want them to interact with the lettering? Because that's a big distinction between a really nice cohesive composition versus one that feels a little disjointed, is how are we going to interact with the lettering? You're going to want your leaves to curve around some letter forms, fill in some of the dead space that some of the letter forms create, like this little nook where the K is, right in here by the T, by the Y. You got to think about those things when we start figuring out where we're going to place our leaves. What I like to do is to map out the movement of the leaves and I'm just going to do that with some really simple curves and arrows basically. Because what you're going to want to think about here is varying the direction that your leaves are going because that's going to add again movement and a little bit more visual interest. By the way, I'm still on that really rough sketch layer where I made my oval. I'm just going to start to think about how I can position these leaves. I think I want to do one that curves around the YOU and goes up that way. Maybe something that will then come this way, can go down in this direction maybe. Again, it's all trial and error. You're just playing with it. It's super rough. This might change as we go along. We're just getting a general idea of some directional prompts, basically with these arrows, as well as staying within our overall oval shape. Maybe something going this way would be good. I want to fill this area here so there's not some dead space that way. It might take a few tries to get a feel for where you want to put things. Don't worry, it doesn't always come to you immediately. It takes a little bit of practice, but just give it a try. Now, I see I've got two arrows going that way so I want to create some movement going in the other direction to balance that out. All right, so I have a super rough idea of where my leaves could potentially land. Now with this map in mind, I'm going to reduce the opacity on this layer just to get it out of the way a little bit. I'm going to create a new layer and start to actually draw some leaves. 5. Sketching Your Design: Now we can start sketching our actual design. What I tend to do is to create the biggest leaves first and then fill in the gaps as I go along. I'm going to just start to create some structure here. Let's see. Let's do one this way. I'm going to put one of the broad leaves. Now, I'll turn my screen in every which direction when I'm sketching. I hope that's not going to make you guys dizzy. But I find it much easier to do than to contort myself. I'm going to put one of those broad leaves there. I've got three of these shapes. I need to switch it up a little bit. So that's a good variety going. Otherwise, it's going to get pretty boring. I want to do a stem here, and another broad leaf going this way. Again, like I mentioned, I'm just getting the big directional leaves down first, and then I'll go back in, fill in with some smaller leaves and details. I have a general idea of what I'm doing here. I'm going to start to fill in with a few smaller details. Here is an opportunity for me to do something to fill that space a little bit better. I'm going to add some acorns, I think, in these little areas where we have some space available. Again, this is not a point where you need to be precious or perfect by any means. We're really just getting our ideas down. When we get to the inking stage, we can be a little bit more precise. I'm going to create a leaf that'll just curve around this lettering a little bit. Although you don't want to cram something into every single nook and cranny, you do want to consider your little empty nooks and see if there is any way that you can create a little bit movement into those nooks to make use of the space. Almost there. Just got this little area to figure out. It's really a puzzle piece. So you're trying to fit things together. I think that's working so far. As you can see, there is a lot of movement. There is a lot of flow from one leaf to the next. Then flow, it helps your eye to move around the piece, and that's what you want to create. You don't want any areas that feel stagnant. I think that'll work. I'm going to turn off my oval layer to just get that out of the way. I feel pretty happy with where I am. 6. Doing a Color Test: Next, we're going to do a quick color text. We're going to plan which colors we're going to use and where, because we want to think about where our colors are going to fall and we want the colors to be evenly distributed across the piece. You don't want too many leaves of one color in one corner or the next. We're going to do a quick color test. Again, super rough stage. I'm going to add a new layer. By the way, if you haven't already, I'm just going to show you really quickly how to add the palette that I gave you to your color pallets. If you go to the layer where the color palette is that I provided for you, you can just go up here to your palette swatch, click the plus sign, create new palette, and then you can just tap and hold each of the color palettes until it changes the swatch, and then touch a square in your swatch. I'm just going to go ahead and add my palette so it's within easy reach. Back to my sketch. I've created a new layer and this is where I'm going to do a super rough color test. Like I mentioned before, I just want to see where the colors are going to land. Now, I'll save. This palette has a lot of flexibility. You can use the colors in many different ways. I'll actually show you a couple of examples so that you guys can think about how you might want to use your color. Here, in this example, the cream color is the background. The lettering is in the deep rust. I've created a drop shadow in white, and I've used the green and the light blue as the florals. It's really light and fresh, very fall-feeling. In this example, it's darker, it's richer. The deepest blue is the background color. I'm using the two greens for the leaves. That peachy color can work for some other elements. As you can see, you can really create a completely different look, depending on how you use the colors. For this piece that we're working on, I think I want the lettering in that deep blue. I'm going to go to the light blue for the background color. I'm going to make my background that light blue. Now that I have my background figured out, I can now better determine which colors I'm going to put where. First, I'm going to switch the color of my lettering, and the easiest way to do that is to tap on that layer, turn on Alpha Lock. I've already chosen the color, so it's showing up here in my swatch palette, and then just hit Fill Layer. I like to do it this way because it just makes it so much easier to play with the color, because you can go back to that layer and change the color in your palette, and just with one tap, you can switch it to any color you want. I know what my background color is, I know what my lettering is going to be like. I'm going to use the monoline brush. I'm going to make it pretty big because again, these is super rough stages. I'm just going to think about where I'm going to replace these colors. So I'll do a rust leaf here. I'm just going to start filling in. As I go along, it might switch, based on what I've put where. But the point here, again, is to just make sure you're spacing out the colors as evenly as possible. Let's stop there with the rust. I'm going to make some other leaves in a cream color and then I'll see if I need to fill in any other areas with the rust, as I go along. [inaudible] is there a shortcut way of being able to select multiple leaves and change them all at once or do you have to go through the motions of [inaudible] At this stage, you have to go through the motions. I'll show you when we start inking, I do it in such a way that we can select all the leaves and change a grouping of leaves. This is why I do this color test first, because when I get to inking, I like to link all the leaves of a same color on one layer. That way, I can swap out the color of all of those leaves at once, if I need to. That's why mapping it out this way is super helpful because it makes that process much easier later on. Here, there's no perfect answer. You just have to throw down some color here and there and see how it's working. Then you can make adjustments as you go along. I think that's probably good for the cream, and then I'm going to use the darkest green for the smaller leaves. [inaudible] , when you have a second, do you mind just going over how you changed the lettering color, again. Sure. Nice. You go to that layer and then you tap on it and you turn on Alpha Lock. I'll turn it off so you can see. When there is no Alpha Lock on, it's just a solid gray background. When you turn on Alpha Lock, if you look closely, it's a checkered background. It looks like it has a transparent background. Then you choose whatever color you want. You go to your swatches, choose whatever color you want, then come back to the layer and tap Fill Layer, and that will fill only the inked areas on that layer, it will fill those with color. I think this is working. Actually, you are going to make this little leaf rust. Got a lot of the rust going on already. I'm going to try the gray for the acorns. That's it mapped out. I feel like that's pretty good, in terms of spacing out the colors and getting enough balance with where they're positioned. 7. Inking Your Design: Now let's work on inking our illustration. What we're going to do now is use this rough color sketch as a reference. What I'm going to do is just take a screenshot. That's the power button and the home button. Press them at once, take your screenshot,. That should go to your camera roll. If you want to just double-check, go to your photos and it should pop up there. I'm going to bring that in as a reference. I'm going to go to the Actions menu and hit the toggle switch next to reference and actually, I have mine set to Canvas right now which means that whatever is here is what's going to show on your reference. Say if I remove that, it will show in the reference box. That's not what I want though. I want to reference the image that we just took. I'm going to go over here to image and it will ask me to import an image, and then I will just select what we just took a screengrab of. So I'm going to use this as a guide and this box you can change the size of, you can pinch and zoom inside the box. I'm going to use this color sketch as a guide so that I'll know what I need to ink on which layer. Let's turn off that quick color sketch and on the pencil sketch of my leaves, I'm just going to go in and reduce the opacity on that. To reduce the opacity on the layer, you just tap on the layer tab on the end and then use this slider to bring the opacity down. All right, now I'm going to create a new layer. Now, I love to ink in black first. It's just easier. You don't really have to think about color. It's easy to see and like I mentioned, we're going to use alpha lock to easily swap the color out anyway. I'm just going to ink with the monoline brush just to make it a little small enough to manage. To make this easier for myself, I'm going to label this layer, rust Leaves, and I'm going to ink all the rust-colored leaves on this layer. Jia, just very quickly when you have a second. Could you please show the reference? I have to get the reference image up again. Oh, sure. Yeah. You go to the Actions menu. Then right down here where it says reference, just turn that toggle switch on. Perfect. It might already be set to Canvas, which will show you what's on your Canvas, but you want to set it to image. Since I already pulled that image in from my camera roll it's already up. But if you don't have anything in the image section, just tap import to bring it in from your images on your iPad. I'm going to get the rust leaves inked. I'm just going to go in. Again, I'm using the monoline brush to do my inking. You're free to use whichever brush you feel more comfortable with. I'm not using a brush with any taper on it just because it's easier to control. During this process is where you can clean up your sketch a little bit, clean up your shapes that you've sketched. I usually just do the outline and then do the click fill with color. If you draw your curve and just hold, you see it says arc created, that'll help you get a really nice clean curve if your hand was a little wobbly, maybe. That only works with an arc. If you try to do it with a shape like this, if you hold, it will just snap to a straight line and that's not what you want. To fill that quickly, I just hold. You can't hold it for too long, it'll go back to the color you used last but tap on your swatch and drag. Whichever color of leaf you've decided to ink in the first layer, just go ahead using your referenced image and ink all of the leaves of that color on this layer. All right, let's see. One, two, three, four, trying to get them all, okay. I'm going to go ahead and turn on the alpha lock, switch to my rust color, hit fill layer. Create a new layer and I'm going to do the clean leaves. We're just going to follow this process until we've got all of our leaves of different colors inked on different layers. Jia, just remind us why you do the inking in the black first? For me, it's just a personal preference. I like it because it's very clear to see what I'm doing and I don't have to worry about the decision-making with color. If I haven't done this quick color test, I don't have to worry about the decision-making with color at the inking stage. Even with a light color like this cream, it's just a little bit more challenging to see exactly what you're doing if it's a lighter color. But it's a personal preference. You can absolutely go straight to the color of your choice. With your design, is it a style thing you never overlap your leaves, or is that to make it easier to change colors and violate that design style? It's just a style thing I think. I mean, feel free to overlap leaves. I mean, that can also add a lot of really beautiful interest. Yeah, it's just a style thing. I do sometimes overlap my leaves if I'm doing something a little bit more complex. Oh, by the way, I often use the eraser tool to clean up as I go along if I've done something that's wonky. Rather than redrawing it, sometimes I just chisel away at at the eraser tool. But if any of you want to overlap your leaves or you have a particular style that you like to use, absolutely. I encourage that. The point of this is to do something that's reflective of your creativity and that comes directly from you. You want your own style to come through. Now I will say in terms of overlapping the leaves, you will have to think about the colors and how they will work together. If they are overlapping, you just want to make sure that you're not creating an area with too much contrast, or an area where the colors just won't sit right together. That's just something to take into consideration. I think I've got all my cream leaves. Now on to the green. Now, what streamline percentage are you using? That is a good question. With the monoline brush, I don't think I've ever changed this. It's at 85 percent, on the monoline brush. Thank you. I would have been technically strained from the camera. [LAUGHTER] I've had a couple of questions on the lettering class about getting super clean lines. I've noticed that with a lot of students, the issue with their line work not being clean or not looking clean enough is more about the size of the file. It's not high enough resolution, more so than the brush itself. Jia someone's saying when they filled in the leaves, they have a hollow between the outlines and the filling. Okay. You just need to adjust. When you create your outline and you fill the leaf, just hold it, and you can adjust the color drop threshold. You can go to the left or you can go to the right. If you go too far to the right, it'll fill your whole page. If it's not quite filling the way you want it, just do the fill, keep your pencil down until you see that color threshold message come up, and drag to the left or to the right until it looks great. Great. Thank you. Sure. All right. I've got all my greens. Switch the color there. Last layer for me anyway, it will be my little acorns. If you guys are following along exactly what I'm drawing, it should be the last layer for you as well. I suppose you could tweak this design and make it more for the holidays, more festive? Absolutely. These could be holly leaves with little Christmas berries and you can do basically anything you want. But this is more so about thinking through how you combine your illustrative elements with your lettering, how you think through color placement, and bring everything together. Choose the gray. I've got all the color down. I can go ahead and turn off my sketch layer, and I can turn off my reference window as well. The next thing I want to do is just add a little bit of detail just to make this a little bit more interesting. 8. Adding Detail: Now, we're going to add a few details to really bring this to life. What I usually like to do, is do this with a clipping mask over each layer. I'm going to name this green leaves and acorns. What I'll do, is just add a line to the center of each of these leaves. It's amazing what one small line can do. I'm going to add a layer above the rest leaves and then I'm going to turn on Clipping Mask. I like to add a little texture here, so I'm going to use the dry ink brush which you can find in the Inking section. I have it saved in My Favorites, but if you go down to the Inking section, you'll find it there. I'm going to use the peach color for these lines. The reason why I like to use a clipping mask for this, is because I don't have to be too precise about where I put the leaf, because with the clipping mask, whatever you draw, is only going to be restricted to the layer below it. I can put these lines anywhere and they're not going to go outside the leaf. Now, the reason I like the dry ink brush, is not only because it has good texture, but it also has a little bit of a taper. I start off pretty light and then add a little bit of weight to the pencil as I get towards the base of the leaf. Again, because I have a clipping mask, I can let my stroke go beyond the shape of the leaf without having to worry about you actually seeing a line beyond the shape of the leaf. We can just pretty easily go to each of these leaves and add that one little bit of detail. Again, having these lines on a separate layer, gives you the flexibility to be able to change the color very easily without disrupting your leaf layer below it. I'm going to do the same for each of the layers of leaves. Add a layer above it, make a clipping mask out of that layer, and then add my lines. For these cream leaves, let me see, I think I might try the gray, see how that looks. If you've made a choice with the line color that you're not quite sure about, again, we've got a handy trick of you turning the Alpha lock on, and that way you can play around with different color options to see what will work best. I think that stands out a little too much. That's really subtle, but I like it. I'm going to add the lines to the green leaves now. Let's try the dark blue. You're just using the clipping mask for the detail? Yes. Gives me more flexibility to change my mind, to change the color, all without destroying the leaf layer that I just created. I'm just going to add a few quick details to the acorns. Again, I'm going to add a clipping mask above. I'm going to stick with this dark blue. Here, I'm just going to add a few little sketchy strokes to create the details. Because again, I have my clipping mask on, I can be really loose and free with where I start and end my line here. I'm just going to do a quick little curve for the cap of the acorn, and maybe just a few little lines for the details. A little curve and the little cross hatch or however you want to represent that texture on the top of the acorn, you're welcome to do it. Whichever way you like. That's pretty much it. You can add a few little effects and more line detail if you want. If you want to draw the veins of the lines, if that's more your style, you're more than welcome to do that. I am just going to add one more thing to the lettering. I want to add a drop shadow. I'm going to go to my Lettering layer and I'm going to swipe left to duplicate it. I'm going to make the drop shadow in gray. I already have Alpha lock on which you can see because of the low check to the background, and you can see it's checked here. I've chosen the gray, so I'm just going to hit fill layer. To create the drop shadow, that second layer I created, I'm just going to drag to the left and down a tiny bit. Hopefully, you can see it a little bit better there. You're not quite done with your drop shadow. If you do that, you want to make sure you go in and connect to the layer above it. So you see where there's a space here? You just want to fill that in. I'm still on the drop shadow layer. I first have to turn off Alpha lock because, let me show you, with Alpha lock on, it's not going to draw anything. Let's go ahead and turn off Alpha lock. Go back to the monoline brush. I'm going to make it fairly small. Then you just want to basically draw a line from the shadow layer up to the lettering above it, to connect the shadow. You want a brush that's small enough for this detail. I'm pretty much finished. 9. Sharing Your Card: Let's talk about how we can print and share this card, with someone you appreciate. Now this, you can export as a JPEG or a PNG file, if you want to send it digitally. Now if you want to print this out, like if you want to print it out at home, if you have a color printer at home, that's why I created the other template for you. I'm just going to go open that up. The file that I created for you will make a five by seven card, which will fit a standard A7 envelope. In order to print it, what you will want to do is print it on a 10 by 7 sheet of paper, so that will fit in a standard sheet size. I've indicated here where the fold will go and the artwork that you just created will go on this side, which is the front of the card. Once you fold it over, this will be the front of the card, and you can put whatever you want on the back of the card. My recommendation would be to take the artwork you just created, duplicate it, so hit Select and duplicate, and create a flat version. I would go and delete all the sketch layers that you don't need, all those tests layers. Then all of the layers that you do want, you can just go in and pinch together to create a flat version of the artwork. Now, your background colored layer never pinches to merge with the other layers. I would then create a new layer with the background color and add that to the flattened artwork, so that everything is on one layer. Then you can select three finger swipe, cap Copy. Then you go back to your template, three fingers swipe, Paste, and just position it. Make sure you got magnetics on so that it moves like along the right axis. Insert that there, just make sure to turn off your template layer. Then you can just send this to your computer and print from your home printer. That's awesome. Fold it, hide it in an envelope, and you're good to go. 10. Final Thoughts: That's it. I hope you enjoy the process. Feel free to personalize this, make it your own, and get creative. I hope you have fun and maybe found a different way to think through how you're composing your pieces, incorporating lettering and illustration and just a new way to think about layout in general. Most of all, I hope you had fun. Though we worked with the template today, but if you want to create lettering in a different style or a card with a different sentiment on it, but you're new to hand lettering, I encourage you to take my hand lettering and procreate class, which will take you from fundamentals to finishing touches. Be sure to share your card in the project gallery below and I can't wait to see what you create. Thanks so much for joining me today. If you'd like to see more of my classes or be alerted when I post a new class, feel free to check out my Skillshare profile.