Make it Fun, Make it Sell: Dive Into Commercial Illustration

1. Trailer : When I think of commercial illustration, I think of stuff. So basically, it's the art that goes on stuff; could be an oven mitt or it could be a print hanging in a home. This project, we will start there with a print. I'll show you a brief that I received. I will show you how to walk through that brief and create it to such detail where hopefully, it would sell really well. I love color, and I love trend, and I love doing fun art the people can use in their daily lives. Hey, I'm Amarilys Henderson, and I invite you to take a dive with me into commercial illustration. Make it fun, make it sell. 2. About Illustration: Commercial illustration is a huge market. It's basically anything that you see art on. So as opposed to children's book illustration or editorial illustration, when you see images in a newspaper or magazine, commercial illustration is the art that you see on stuff. The easiest go to, I can think of, is to point people to target or home decorating stores. A lot of the artwork that I create would be used in that type of setting. On greeting cards, on oven mitts, on mugs, on tote bags, that sort of thing. They would buy the art, put it on whatever they need to, whatever intent they have, and make money off of it. Your part is only creating the art. 3. Project Overview: We're going to work off a brief that I received as our class project. I was at an art show and I had a friend helping me out. So in my gaps I would paint and I had received this email from my agency that they were looking for family posters. So I started working right there at the show. I created these four posters that are meant to hang together, and that's what I'm using to spin off our class project. So we're going to call it our project brief. Here are the details. We're going to create one poster or one coaster. That was option that I was given, I'm giving it to you. We're not going to create the whole set of four. I think that would be a lot to ask, but do keep in mind that we will be wanting these to be incorporated in a set. It should include a quote pertaining the family, and it should be authored by you, whatever quote that is and we will incorporate a food motif and there's more on that later. The supplies you'll need are sketchbook paper or even just copy paper. Then you'll need the surface that you'll actually paint onto. Several of those, whether it be watercolor, as I'll show in demos or whatever medium you like, and a computer with Photoshop, and you'll be using a scanner. 4. Do Your Research *Project Post: So the first thing we're going to do, is to do our research. We're going to look at images that we can use as references, images that inspire us, color themes that we like, and compile those together. The temptation is to go to Google Images, but I'm going to challenge you to head to a store. The reason why I like to go to stores for inspiration is because I know that what I'm looking at looks good, is somehow profitable, or has shown promise to a manufacturer enough that they're creating it. So I take snapshots of things that I like, things that I think could help me out. I compile them and put them together in kind of amass an idea. You can do this with Pinterest. You can do this with a video with snapshots, but we want to see your mood board. As much as possible, stay away from Google Images, maybe just for reference shots and give us a pic. Put up your first post for your project. 5. Key Concept Trend: A huge key concept to an illustration is trend. When I first began illustrating I fought this idea because I wanted to do my own thing and create my own work. There is a very real tension between creating something trendy, something that will easily be picked up by the masses. Because after all we're creating artwork that will be used by the masses, and that middle person is the manufacturer who needs to look at your work and be able to buy in with assurance that this is going to sell well, that this is a good investment for them. There's that side and then there's the other side of the tension of creating artwork that is all your own. What we're going to do is we are going to copy. I know that that sounds icky to say. I remember when I was in art school and this professor, first-year art school, gave us these examples of these Renaissance charcoal drawings sketches. We were to copy one of them to the letter. It needed to be copied and replicated and I hated it. I felt like I had finally arrived to art school and here I am copying an artist when I was so eager to discover who I was as an artist. But as you might have guessed, I really learned a lot. Now I'm going to have you do it because there's nothing like seeing something by drawing it. To really pick up on the details of what is it that I like in this piece and how did they come to this point? You pick up on those nuances and that's what we're going to do. 6. Trend Exercise: So here's some examples of something that is super trendy, something that started from a sculpture by Robert Indiana. This "Love" sculpture has been replicated in about every way we could think of. But we're going to choose from one of those replicates and just quickly sketch what you see. If you don't like any of these examples, you're welcome to Google your own. We'll take this love letter structure and draw it. Take from some of the nuances, some of the things that we like that these folks have done with their pieces, and then add on our own interpretation. Take only about 10 minutes for this exercise, it's a quick sketch. We'll start asking ourselves questions like, what did I learn? What did I like from the way that they interpreted this "Love" word? What is it that made it appealing to me? You'll pick up on colors, and just all these subtle ideas that you'll then be able to apply to your sketch, that is all your own. 7. Selecting a Food: Something that's very trendy right now is food, especially the repetition of that imagery. So pick a food whether it's cupcake, sushi, pizza, fruit, ice cream, peanuts, sweet peas, any kind of food that is repetitive in a layout just looks very fun and it's very trendy. I'm going to tell you a story of this piece that I did for my dad. I've always been into drawing and I would draw him ice cream cones. To this day, when he introduces me to new people, he says, "You know, she can draw an ice cream cone really well, ever since she was little, she would draw me an ice cream cone however I would ask for it," and I think, "Yeah, dad, that's what I do for a living. I draw ice cream cones." So for his birthday, I made him that many ice cream cones for his card. So choose your food and draw it over and over again. 8. Thinking Through Layout: We've chosen our food, we have some images of some stuff that we like. Now we're going to think about how we're going to lay out our piece. The quickest way to do that is with thumbnail sketches. They're called thumbnail sketches because they're that small. I would like for you to do three, four, up to six, at the very least three thumbnail sketches. This would be what your poster or coaster is going to look like in the end. Doing them small forces you to work fast and just think of these pieces as chunks and where you're going to lay them out. As you think about where to lay out your food and your quote you'll come up with different ideas and it will evolve slowly, but you'll find that one will stick out for you and then we'll know for sure what this layout is going to look like for our final piece. 9. Sketching Your Background Art: Now that you've done your thumbnail sketches, hopefully one composition is really sticking out to you. Now you are going to transfer that composition into your final layout onto your paper. I use watercolor paper, this is the paper that I use. It is Canson brand, 140 pound cold press paper at 9 by 12. Whatever medium you're going to use, go ahead and transfer your drawing onto that, and we're going to get rolling after this and start to paint. 10. Painting Your Illustration Background: All right, now that we have our sketch all drawn in, it's time to paint. I do want to point out that at this point, we might not know what our quote is going to be yet, and that's okay because we're actually going to produce these separately. More on that later. But let's just get busy painting and not worry too much about the quote just yet. We want to keep it in mind, but we're not going to worry about it. We're just going to have fun and paint. If you're painting with me, I'm going to be doing first, some watercolor washes. A huge principle in watercolor painting is that you're whites are the paper, so you have to leave it untouched. When you start with your washes, right now is the time to look at the parts that you want to keep white. If necessary, go ahead and sketch very lightly circles, bubbles, shapes of whatever it is that you want to maintain as white. A trick that's often used in preserving that white detail is by using masking fluid. It's not at all something that you need need, but some people like to double with it, and it's a fun addition. It's basically a glue-like substance that you paint onto your page, let it dry and paint on top. Once you're done, you'll be able to peel off the masking fluid, and you'll have those white spaces kept white. I have a blog post on my preferred masking fluid, and if you want to look into that, I have the link right here. But for now, we're just going to keep it simple and avoid our white areas. With watercolor, we start from light to dark. It's virtually impossible and a little messy to start from dark to light. So we're just putting in the background washes and going with a lot of water and very little color. As we progress with our painting, we will put more pigment into our water-color combo, so more paint and less water, and we go on and on. A big misnomer with watercolor is that since it dries quickly, people tend to think that you can only do it in one sitting. That's something that I love about watercolor that I can work quickly in it, but it's not the only way to work, and it's actually not going to give you the brightest colors if that's what you're going for. There is a lot of layering that goes on with watercolor paint, but it has to go from light to dark. When I say light I mean white, untouched paper to dark, maybe three layers of dark pigment on top of each other, or just going into darker colors. Here is my first layer of candy corn for fun, and to add a pop of color, I'm going to use a contrasting color here. I've got a lot of oranges, so I'm going to use purple and create shadows underneath. You can do this with your food, or you can save this for your hand lettering, use it for both. Depending on what kind of food you have, it might not be useful to you. But like I said, I'm using that purple. It's really watery. Every so often I will go in and add a contrasting color, do something a little different, maybe not contrasting, but an analogous color like a blue, in this case, that's very close to the color that I'm already using just to add interest. For my particular subject matter with candy corn, I really wanted to do these shadows so that the white part of the candy corn would pop. I'm not going to be painting in a background in on this illustration, so these shadows are doing dual-purpose of making my colors pop, making my whites be outlined and stand out, as well as offering the opportunity to add in another color. My food choice is pretty simple and color nature, so it's fun to have one more color. Instead of rendering my candy corn per se, I went for a more fun approach where I have washes and then I did some colored outlines, and, of course, the shadows that I just mentioned. So these colored outlines, I'm going to show you with this particular one. I'm going with a lot of color on my brush, not a whole lot of paint. So very different from the wet technique I was using before. I'm just doing little design motifs. It is the simplest and most fun way, I think, to render something fun like candy. All right, let's do a quick review just to lay in those steps. I know that it sounds super simple, and then when you get to your paper, it's not quite that simple. So I'm going to do one big honking candy corn, which is okay because I will scan this and basically, remove it. But I'm just showing you now how I did this. So we first go in with light washes, go from lightest to dark. Lightest being the paper that we don't touch because that is our brightest bright. I went in with light washes, and now I'm dropping in more color to where I want it to be darker. Like I said before, I like to work wet on wet. I showed this in a class before this where we were doing letters, and I really didn't lift up my brush very much. I didn't render very much. I just let the colors bleed into each other. Sometimes it takes a little manicuring if it starts bleeding into areas that I don't want it to. In that case, I just take a dry brush and blot it out. Then I paint the shadow with water and drop in a little bit of color that's very much unlike my orange, to make that white and the whole candy corn pop. Again, I'm reviewing here Stage 2, where the paper is dry. I go in with bright colors. So this time, my brush has a lot more paint on it and a lot less water. I'm doing fine outlines in very bright colors, darker colors, doing some patterns, doing some details to make my candy corn fun. I hope you are happy with your illustration so far. I set mine aside while it dried. I felt like I needed to do something fun, and when I do these kind of things, sometimes I use them in the background. So it's always good to just play around when you're waiting for your paint to dry, and then add in those layers, you'll have that as a resource later. I'm making circles with just water, and then I'm dropping in colors. Again, since I thought I might be using this as my background, I chose colors that were very different from the orange and yellows in my candy corn. Even though I'm having fun, I'm always thinking what would be best for this illustration and just thinking through color and shapes, and I chose circles because essentially, my candy corn are triangles, and something that contrasts always sets the eye off a bit, and you want to pay attention just a little longer, linger a little longer. I drop in those blues and those purples and every once in a while, I'm putting in a bright pink just to make things pop for the unexpected surprise of something else. I know that when these dry, they're going to dry in their very own way. Sometimes those colors will bleed beautifully and sometimes they'll create these interesting creases that watercolor is known for. Here it is finished. Here are both of them. So you see how those blobs became these beautiful, little meshes. My candy corn is ready, and now I am going to work on the lettering next. 11. Marketability: I wanted to take a second to talk about another key concept, which is marketability. When I say that word I just basically mean, is your art able to go from your desk to a big box store? Some pointers for making your art more attracted to an art buyer who is looking for work that will sell well in the mainstream market, would be to work in a, sets. If you work in sets, people can gather this context, they walk through this idea with you, you help them linger there a little while. Think about posters or art prints that have like four trees and four different seasons or Christmas cards that come in sets. It helps us gain contexts and they may or may not be purchased altogether, but it helps become more marketable. I was advised by my agency I remember one time, to think of myself as a fashion designer, and that I come out with lines and sets every season. That really helped me wrap my mind around this idea because I feel like all my work has some continuity. To someone else's eye it needs to carry through so that we feel like you're selling a package of something. Another tip would be to make your work more mainstream, more highly accepted by mainstream, and that might mean making it more generic. For instance, I do a lot of Christmas cards and I do not mind listening to Christmas music all year long. I like to even incorporate those lyrics from what I think are really well-known Christmas songs. Yet, what would sell best would be a merry Christmas or a Noel. So what I do is a lot of times I create artwork that's for me, my personal work. I might throw it out there, put it in my portfolio if I get a bite, but doing my personal work energizes my commercial work. My commercial work is more focused on what would sell well. So working sets, work in the mainstream and when you're thinking of your quote now, think of quotes that would work well in a set. Food is a little easier, so I didn't have to worry about that before. When you're thinking of quotes, if you're going funny, if you're going very personal, think of something that would work well with three others. Think of things that are maybe more easily accepted by a lot of people. Something that we all share in common when it comes to family. If you want to do something very specific, that is totally okay. If you want to do Korean food that has some quote that has to do with an American born Korean and how life is, I wouldn't know, but it would be fun to see. I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about these tips of how to make your work more marketable in the commercial illustration world. 12. Quote Brainstorm: It's time to think about what we want to write on our poster. What's going to be our quote? You can have a lot of ideas, pour them all out, write them all out, and you'll solely find a thread coming together. Like I said, be thinking in serieses and when you're frustrated, I'm a firm believer in the Shower Theory that your ideas will come when you least expect it. 13. Exploring Type: Typography is such a huge subject. I remember going to a lecture by Ellen Lupton, who is actually also a Skillshare teacher, and I was blown away by the power of type and all the thought and precision that goes into it, and yet it's in art form. We're not going to explore all of it, but let's think about what pairs well with what you're trying to say. So one phrase in several different fonts is going to give a different feeling each time. We want to use the most effective font for what we're trying to say. When I taught my other class designing a water colorful alphabet, I got to see all kinds of fonts from different students. This one was one that was chosen by a student named Gail. When I saw her font choice, I was a little surprised just because it wouldn't be something I'd choose. But when I saw her quote, the font choice was perfect, I thought that it went so well with what she was trying to say. Contrasting that with another student named Jen who did this. So as you're thinking about your quote, also be thinking of what hand lettered font treatments would go well with what you're trying to say. 14. Sketch Some Type: This sounds totally trite, but the way that I've gotten good at doing hand lettering is by sketching. I take this little sketchbook in my purse. It's got a little bit of everything, so I didn't edit out what wasn't useful here. But you see that I draw my letters pretty often. So how do I do that? Here are a couple of tips that I've found useful. One is mimicking, and we talked about this earlier. But printing out a font or just using a pamphlet and looking at whatever type face is in front of me, especially ones that are digital, not hand lettering necessarily, helps me understand the design language of, say, the letter A, and how it consistently has these curves or the proportions that it usually has. My second tip would be, if you want to do something more loose, to just write out whatever you want to write, and then give it some muscle. In this example, I wrote scripture in a very thin pencil line, and then I added to it to make it more like a ribbon, made it thicker in areas that I thought needed it, and then embellished around it. Use whatever kind of typeface you feel most comfortable with. The most fun hand lettering type treatments are sometimes just the simplest done by hand. 15. Watercolor Handlettering: Wet on Wet: Let's get our paints out and start painting some letters. I'm going to first address this technique with watercolor. You don't have to do your piece in watercolor, but that is what I teach. That's what I'm reaching. I'm first painting with water, I'm using the wet on wet technique and I don't paint quite this fast. I'm just trying to show you exactly how the process goes. I painted my letters in water. You weren't able to see that really well, but I of course could, and then I wet my brush, I grab some paint, and I drop it in. I always like to use several colors, at least two, to make the type more interesting. With this, I'm using two blues and one green, and like you saw, I drop it in at the end. It's counter intuitive to work this way. A lot of people use what I'll show next, which is the wet and dry technique, which would be that your paper is dry and that's what you're writing on. But what I love about this technique is that the watercolor takes a life of its own, and even though you wouldn't think it would be easier to write this way, it actually is. It's almost like writing with a very light pencil. I wrote jokes in cursive. It's really easy to not really like what you do when you have it all and painted in watercolor. But when you start with water, then you're able to let it dry that didn't look good and then as you drop in the color, you can guide it around to how exactly you want it to look. Even though it sounds scarier to work wet on wet, it might be easier. I encourage you to try both ways. I always like to show you me doing it twice, just as a review. This time I'm going to water down the color so that you can see my watery first layer. I'm still doing the wet on wet technique. I'm just giving it a little paint so that you can see it from the camera. You can see my quote and how I'm thinking through how to change up the colors of the letters. I'm not in love with them, but I'll have a second chance to play with them again once we take them into Photoshop. Again, I'm dropping in those colors with cursive letters. You have the added advantage of having the colors really meld together that you wouldn't with other fonts. 16. Watercolor Handlettering: Wet on Dry: Now I'm showing you a completely different piece. You don't need to worry about the piece, I'm just using it as an example to show you the wet-on-dry technique in doing hand lettering. So wet-on-dry, meaning that I start with the traditional water pattern to paint and then paper, that's the traditional pattern, it's actually what I tell my kids all the time when they're using those cheap little watercolor paints to always get water than paint and then get on the paper. I'm doing a dark brown. I prefer it to black because you can always take out the saturation in Photoshop. You can always get back to black pretty easily, but it's not easy to bring in that color. Just as a side note, I always use a dark brown. There are very few true blacks in nature, so I like to use browns for those. As you can see, I can get a much thinner line. So if your font is a sans-serif font or something that's very thin, it's a lot better to do this wet-on-dry technique. If you're doing some more scripty fonts, it's more fun to do a flowing technique like wet-on-wet. 17. Key Concept Profitability: The last concept I want to talk about with you is profitability. I bring this up at the end for a reason, and I'll get back to that in just a minute. But I want to walk you through the process of actually selling your work commercially. Now, I worked through an agency and the blessing of being represented by an agent. But whether you do it yourself or not, if someone else brokers it for you, either way you receive a contract. Within the contract, there are certain things that you're agreeing on, and these different factors play a role in how profitable your art is going to be for you. One would be how you're getting paid. If it's a lump sum at the beginning, at just purchasing this license, or is it through royalties, you have to factor in how many of these pieces are probably going to sell. Is it worth the percentage in royalties? It's usually pretty low. The lowest I've seen is two percent. I've done 5-10 percent. The bigger the company, the lower the royalty simply because they're going to be selling more, and so you both stand to profit quite a bit. So consider that if it's a large company, if it's a large manufacturer that's going to distribute this work a million times over, then royalties would be a great way to go. Most of the time, manufacturers keep it simple, and they just want to do a lump sum. They know how much their investment is in it at the onset, they don't need to keep up with the bookkeeping for royalties, and they'll just pay you x amount of dollars for this license. Another factor is how far this piece is going. Is it going to be distributed within the US, or worldwide, or online, or in print. These things play a role in whether you'll be able to get the most bang for your time with your illustration. The third factor would be, how long is this license for? License could be for a very short amount of time, maybe just a season or year, but a lot of the time it is for ever. So if you have a contract, an agreement that says, "We want to pay you a lot of money to use this artwork for one year," that would be a great sell because then you could put the work back into your portfolio and sell another license for it. More often than not, they'll just want to keep it forever because they want to make sure, they want to see, "If it works out well for us, then, hey, we'll put it out again next year," and it's a lot simpler when it comes to keeping record of things like that. Another factor in keeping your work profitable is there's a tension in, so you want to create really great work and you want your portfolio to be strong, you want people to pick up things and say, like I do all the time, "Oh this is [inaudible] oh, this is [inaudible] work," and that's exciting and thrilling and your work needs to be awesome enough for people to want to pick up and things like that. So it's great to invest a lot of time into your work, but if I receive, say, $500 for an illustration that I spent an hour for versus five hours over, then obviously I'm going to be making more money if I am able to work quickly. Now, the trick to working quickly and creating quality work is an art form that you develop over time and it doesn't always happen, so you just take it for what it is. But learning how to work efficiently is something that you always want to keep in mind. I scan every single piece of anything that I ever do, even if it's just a little doodle, because I never know if it might be useful for something in the future. I'm always sketching and oftentimes those sketches will play a role in my commercial work when really it was just for fun. There are ways that you can turn down the amount of time that you spend on your art in order to be able to make more money off of it. That is why I'm talking about this at the end, when we are taking the different elements of our piece and putting them together. Part of the reason why we did that was for flexibility and being able to make adjustments and changes which our buyers love if they're able to receive a layered file that they can edit certain parts of or maybe remove text from, they love that. Another thing is that it does help the workflow go faster, and you may be able to use certain elements from one piece into another. Be thinking of ways where you can work more efficiently, enjoy what you do, start with what you know, grow from there, work on personal projects to develop things that you want to grow in as an artist, but when it comes to your commercial work, you are working efficiently, you are not doodling, worrying about, should I do it this way or should I do it that way? It's almost as if you use your personal energy on experimenting so that when you come to work, so to speak, you are ready to dive in and you have some ideas that you want to flash out. 18. Scanning Your Work: Here are my four pieces scanned. They're all on separate sheets of paper. I am not going to go into detail about how to scan your work and clean it up because I've already created a tutorial for that. There's a tutorial right here on Skillshare that I'd love for you to check out if this is something that you'd love to have help with. It details how I scan my artwork, that might look a little familiar to you, and then bring it into Photoshop, clean it up. Oftentimes I have to do it in several pieces and the paper isn't quite bright enough or the colors aren't right. I'll show you how to do all those things in Photoshop. I believe this tutorial is 14 minutes in video, and it also has a step-by-step in text form. So check it out. 19. Combining Digitally: Hopefully you took that tutorial and you saw how I clean up my files. If you have your own way, great. What we're going to do first is take all of those files and compile them onto one sheet of paper. Because I've got one with my quotes, one with the candy corn, and one with those dots that I used as a background image. The first thing I'm going to do is create a new document. I am going to do the 11 by 14 poster size. I'm going to take that window, drag it out, so that then I can easily drag the layers of the other pieces over. You can also just do "Select All", "Copy", and "Paste". Sometimes that works better. For whatever reason this actually does take a lot of RAM for the computer to process, so sometimes it's easier to just do a copy and paste. Right now, I'm just dragging them all into that one file. That one file, looking pretty messy, it's got four layers really of each one of the components in this piece. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure that my layers are, well, visible. My most important layer is going to be this candy corn. I'm starting there. Unlike working traditionally, I don't have to work from the back forward, which is fun. But first thing I want to do is just wrap my mind around how this is going to lay out. I am just playing with the text. I'm not worrying about color, I'm not worrying about what I think needs to be edited, what I think needs to be changed; I am just purely working on layout at this point. I did trim each word to be its own layer, so that I can move it around even more easily, and resize, like I'm doing now. I really want jokes to be really prominent. Pretty much all the words that are in cursive are cursive for a reason, so I want them to look really prominent. I want things to be centered. My but is right in the middle. A really easy way to do that is just to bring out a guide, and bring that into the middle of the page half of 11, five and a half. I'm just going to keep playing with this layout until it's something that I really like. I think my wording is okay, but now I got the feeling that some of these candy corn need to be adjusted. Using the Free Transform tool found in the Edit palette at the top, Photoshop, I'm able to rotate, I'm able to flip things around, and I'm making more space because, as you remember, I worked on a 9 by 12 and now this is 11 by 14, so it's actually a longer orientation. Something else I'm doing here is I'm not so crazy about that color. I'm grouping my text, I'm duplicating the group, so I always have a group of the original right there before me, and I desaturated it. The quick keystroke is Command Shift U to desaturate it. I'm basically removing all of the color. I want it to be just black and white, I think. But the only piece that I'm going to leave with color is the love part. Again, with these other words, I'm doing the same thing, I'm grouping them into a folder, I'm duplicating that group, and then I am desaturating that flattened group. So I have a folder with the color and a folder without. You might've also noticed that I played with the levels, which is something that I talk about in that tutorial for scanning. You almost forgot about these bobs. I am going to bring them in, but they are really looking way too strong for this piece, and drowning out my candy corn. I knocked it back with the opacity. I'm going to select the ones that are overlapping with the text, and just get rid of them. I also feel the color could be helped a bit. I'm going down in my "Adjustments" palette to "Hue and Saturation", and bringing up the saturation just a little bit. I'm finding too that my candy corn is drowning those white parts that I really worked on keeping white, are interfering with the background image. I selected the outside of that layer, selected anything but the candy corn. Select Inverse, which is Command Shift I, and then I filled those with white, so that I actually have some white behind the candy corn to make sure that it stays that way. Now this is looking okay, but I did some more work to it. I saved another image, I saved a copy, and I want to show you what I landed on, and how I got there. I spared you of the million decisions that I made throughout the way. I created a new layer underneath it all. I started with orange, then landed with that purple, a very light purple, and then I turned all the blobs, as I'm calling them, that were purple and blue, and I duplicated that layer. I played with the color a bit, but what I landed on was just to put them on the screen layer mode. I feel they just add a little something to the background to add interest. The but was very important to me, so I created a circle behind it. With that, I duplicated love, and tweaked the colors on half of one, and erased it a little bit; so there was a little push and pull in the color. I also created another layer of that, but as a shadow to go behind it. There's my finished family poster. 20. Now What?: This is supposed to look like confetti. You are done, so time to post your project. If you haven't already post your mood board, post whatever in progress shots, you want to show us. So that we can walk along your process with you. This Skillshare community is wonderful about providing feedback, and I am happy to do that too. I'm eager to see what you create. 21. Next Steps: Hi, I wanted to give some of you that are very interested in working towards the next step, some ideas. A lot of us know about putting our work out there and selling independently, be it through Etsy or now Amazon, eBay, Society6 where you can actually put your artwork on products and let them handle the manufacturing and you're getting your cut that way. But if you want to put up your portfolio, if you have some work, particularly in sets that you want to place on a website that is secure. I encourage you to check out ArtLicensingShow.com, and this website is very interested in promoting illustrator's work. You create your profile, you decide how much work or how much commitment financially you want to put into this, and it's a place where people who buy licenses to artwork go to to check out the art. So if you're interested in doubling with that, I encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity. In everything that you do, in your illustration work, always keep in mind those three concepts. I've enjoyed this class. I hope you have too. Keep in touch. I am on Instagram and I blog, and I have a website and I'm here. So keep in touch. Thanks.