Make Logo Stamps on Procreate iPad: Simplify Your Branding Routine

1. Class Trailer: Hi, my name is Esther Nariyoshi. I am a surface designer and Illustrator. In this class, I will walk you through steps for turning your logo into iPad stamps. So branding can be a much more natural part of your creative process. This class was created originally on Procreate 4. But also I've updated the content to show you how to achieve the same result in Procreate 5. As always, if you have any questions, I'm here on Skillshare as well as over Instagram. Without further ado, let's get to it. 2. On Branding: When we talk about social media branding, there are many factors to consider. One of them is how firm you want to claim your ownership to your creative work, and there is a wide spectrum that generally can be divided into three categories. On the very left, is basically not doing anything. Let's say that you have spent only 10 minutes on the piece of work and you want to take a picture to show your work in progress in Instagram story, it makes sense if you are okay with not attaching your name to it. But on the other hand, on the other side of the spectrum, you might have spent five months on a piece of work, and it carries your signature style and you intend to sell it eventually, commercially. Then you probably want to copyright your work for legal protection. This class is addressing the scenario in the middle, which I'm going to show you how to make art full branding stamps on your iPad. But first, let me give you a few examples so that you know what we're looking at. On my iPad corporate app here, I have a bunch of logo stamps that I saved as brushes, so that I can pull them out quickly before I have the artwork saved as an Instagram post. In terms of presentation, they can take a bold color from the illustration and sit next to the work, or he can quietly stay in the background like this one. You can also work it in as part of the illustration, for example, like this one, it becomes part of the packaging label, or they can go with the contour of your artwork. I have them all saved up here, so they can be applied whenever necessary. They're super easy to use, you can just pull it out and select a color and stump it wherever you want on Canvas. You can adjust the size like you would for any other brushes, and then change the opacity or blending mode, just like any other layers. It's super flexible and adaptive. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to make these brushes from scratch. 3. Make Basic Logo Stamps: Let's get started. If you have the program open, you want to create custom sized Canvas. For the brush making purpose, we want a really big giant square. The reason why we want square is because if it's a rectangle, automatically when we make a brush, Procreate will stretch it to a square. That will bring a lot of distortion to your logo, which you don't want. We want 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. That's big enough, say that if you are working on a pretty big canvas, your logo won't be puny. Well, of course unless you choose to. We're going to start with 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels and hit "Create." You want to start out by using a pretty dark color for the contrast and then use whatever brush you feel comfortable writing out your name or your brand name. I'm just going to write the word logo here, increase the size a bit, and write out the word logo. If you need more time, feel free to pause the video and come back later but the goal here is not to be perfect. Then you want to center this as much as you can, it doesn't have to be dead on, but it's nice if it's in the middle, it will just give you more control later. If you want to simplify the process and just type it out, you can do that as well. I'm just going to hide this layer for now and create a new layer to show you how it works. You can come over to Actions and then Add text. I'm going to write out the word logo again, you can edit the style by click on the "Edit Style" button and then change the font and the size. If you want to learn more about the topography tools in Procreate, feel free to check out my other class that is called text and animated GIF. That will bring you up to speed but as for now, I'm just going to give you a quick demo. You can do this as well if you want this to be your logo. I'm just going to delete this layer for now because I will go with this hand-drawn look. Next step we want to do is to color the logo white. To do that, you can lock the painted pixel by turning on the Alpha lock. If you click on the thumbnail and then click on the "Alpha Lock," you will see this checkerboard pattern appearing in the background that shows you all the painted pixels are locked. Then you can change the color to white and then click the "Thumbnail" again and click "Fill Color." It doesn't show you anything right now. That's because the background color is also white. You can turn it off and preview the logo right here. Then we want to save this image as a PNG to your local camera roll. The reason why we want it to be PNG is because we want the background to be transparent. We want the white logo on the transparent background. We're going to come to action and share and PNG and Save Image. Now you can turn the background color back on and turn off the alpha lock create a new layer and delete the old one. You can make your brush, first you want and click on the Brush icon, and then click on the "Plus" sign over here to create a new one. Immediately you need to make two decisions, one is your shape source, the other is the grain source. The shape source is basically your logo. You want to insert the photo, right now you don't really see what you saved. That's because your logo is white and the background is also white. It's tricky, you just have to trust that there is a picture there, and that's the last photo. If you click on that, you can preview over here, it's really nice because we have created a square canvas. If it was rectangle, it would be stretched at this point, which you don't want it to happen. As for grain source, we'll start with something really basic by choosing the swap from pro library here. You can scroll down until you see this little nice square called blank. Now you can see in the preview, it doesn't look anywhere close to a stamp that's because we need to do just a couple more things. First, you want to come over to stroke and you want to turn the spacing all the way up. The logos are not right next to each other and then you can come over to General and scroll down and see the sides limits. Under that you want to turn the max level all the way up and then scroll backup and turn on use stamp preview that will basically center your logo. You want to turn the preview up and down it's up to you. It doesn't really change how big your brush sides default is, it just give you a better view. You can change the brush name to whatever you want, I'm just going to name it as Logo test and click "Done." Now let's test it. We're just going to click on the Brush and give it a different color and then adjust the size. You can already preview the logo, which is pretty nice. Maybe at corner over here, that's really cool. You can change the size of the logo by changing the brush size it's pretty intuitive. If you want to change your stamp color, you can just change the brush color. That will give you a different appearance. Just like any other layer, you can turn the opacity up and down and change the Blending Mode. You can make your logo as subtle as you want or as obvious as you want, it's pretty flexible. You can also change the texture of the logo for example, here we just have a pretty plain crisp look. If you want to add a little paper texture, you can click on your logo brush and then click on "Source." Swap from pro library, scroll all the way down and select dirty paper. That will give it a little paperly texture. Let me just turn this up a little bit so you can see better. As you can see, there's transparency texture happening over here. It's a little bit hard to tell because our logo here is pretty thin. I'm going to show you what I have over here for my own stamp, this is a pretty classic in key stamp, that will show the texture a lot better. As you can see, here is what I have. I was trying to mimic the artists stamps from Chinese painting hundreds of years ago. I like how it looks and this one has a frame and this guy is all in one line just a different variation of my logo. This is just a plain logo without any framing. Sometimes I like to put my stamp against a contour of my art work, so I bent this a little bit in Illustrator using the warp tool. You can also do that here, but it doesn't go as elegantly as illustrator. That's just different variation and in the next video, I'm going to show you how to make in key frames like this one so that you can have a few variations that you can use and pull from your brush set. 4. UPDATE: Procreate 5 Workflow: In this lesson, we're going to walk through the same process, but in Procreate 5. The first step you need to do is to import your logo to your Canvas. The current Canvas is 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. To import an image, you can do setting or actions, and add, and insert a photo. Just a couple of things that you need to pay attention to. First is that your logo has to be on a transparent background. If it is a JPEG, it won't work because we need to isolate basically. Let me just turn off the background color. As you can see, we want to our logo to stand alone on its own layer. Once you're able to do that, we want to change the color to white. The easiest way to change the color to white is to click on the thumbnail here and click on "Alpha Lock". It will lock all the painted pixels and you click on the "Color" dot and a go back to white and then click on the thumbnail again and click on "Fill layer". Now we'll basically color all the painted pixel to the active color, which is white. Now we want to export this as a PING, which is PNG, so "Actions," "Share" in PNG and you can just save it to your iPad. Click on "Save Image" and that's done. We don't even need the layer anymore, I'm just going to delete it and turn the background color back on. I do want to turn off the "Alpha Lock," so just uncheck the check mark and now we want to create a new brush. Click on the "Brush" over here and in whatever folder you want, click on the "Plus Sign" over here. By default, it will look something like this. The first thing we want to do is to go to "Shape," which is the third option over here and click on "Edit" right on top of the shape source. This is pretty hidden in the Procreate 5, I don't know if there will be future improvement, so basically you click on "Import" and "Import a photo." That will pull up your, the latest photos should be the one you just saved, click on it. It just shows up as a white square. That's because it's a white on white. No big deal, just click on it and you will see your logo on a black background. That's what we want, click on "Done." There are a couple of things that we need to fix before we can call it a logo stamp. Click on the "Stroke path," the first option, and turn the spacing all the way up. Because ultimately, we just need one logo per artwork. We don't want a bunch of logos sitting right next to each other. That's why we want as much space as possible and then if you want some grain, you can change the grain source, but white is fine because it will give me a crisp look. You want to turn on the "Use stamp preview." Basically, this will allow you to preview your logo from the brush library and you want to turn the maximum size all the way up in case your Canvas is super-large and your logo needs to be relatively big. It doesn't have to have that size limitation. One more thing we want to change before we try it out is to come over to "Apple Pencil" setting, and the second option, which is called "Opacity," I think by default is turned all the way up. I don't want that. I want my logo to be constantly in full strength. If I turn on the opacity, sometimes if I'm not pressing it hard enough. In other words, if the pressure is too low, it will not appear in full opacity. As you can see, I'm varying my pressure a little bit as I'm drawing here. This is very light, medium, and hard. I don't want that kind of variation. I can fix that by turning my opacity all the way down. In that way, no matter how light I'm tapping on the screen, it will still show whatever brush I'm using for strength. You do have the option of naming your brush. You can come over to "About this brush" and tap on the "Made by" and put in your name, and your signature, and you can create a new reset point. Basically, it means that whenever you made certain changes and you want to revert it back, then you can reset from there. I'm just going to click on "Done" to test my brush. My first impression is that the preview is not very accurate. I'm going to go back and fix it under "Properties," and just turn the preview down. If I can offer a bit of feedback for Procreate, I would love to see the preview of my stamp life as I'm sliding down over here. I'm just going to leave it to maybe 19 percent and click on "Done." It's not too bad, it shows the gist of the stamp. All right, let's test it. The first thing I want to do is to give it a different color and adjust the size and just tap on my screen lightly. Awesome. Now we have a brush created in Procreate 5. 5. Add An Artistic Frame: If you're interested in making ink key-frames like over here, I'm going to show you how to do that in this lesson. First, say that you have your logo on its own layer and then you want to create a separate layer for the frame. I've created a bunch of guides for you to use. I'm just going to demonstrate how to use them with one of the examples. First I want to save it to my iPad and then import it by clicking actions. Add, insert a photo. It has already being important over here. I'm just going to click on it. It is a square, there's no stretching happening over here. I want to move it all the way down and then I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. Zoom out a tiny bit. Then keep repositioning. It's pretty simple. It's basically just a rectangle with a rounded corner. It serves as a guide when you do that ink key-frames. We want to create a new layer at the very top and choose the pen that is a bit dry. I want to turn the opacity down so that I can just barely see the guide. I want to use the same color as the logo and then just start drawing. As I draw, I want to vary the pressure of my pen so that it looks more realistic. As like ink key-frame. You can rotate it when it's needed and then just keep working at it. You see this little texture. I really love it. It just gives my stamp more character. [ MUSIC ]. Now I have ink key-frame traced. I don't need the guide layer anymore. I can just turn it off. Actually, I can just delete it and I can see the checkerboard pattern in the background. I'm just going to turn it off because I will match my layers into one by clicking the top one and click "Merge Down". Like how you made your brush from the previous lesson. I'm just going to do a quicker version of that. We want to turn on the [inaudible] and then choose a white color and fill the layer. Turn off the background color and save it as a PNG. When you make a new brush, you don't have to do all the steps all over again. You can just simply duplicate your previous brush and click on it and swap out the photo with the new one. In fact, I'm going to make this brush available for you so you can just import it to your appropriate and swap out the logo placeholder with your own logo. Again, because it's white on white, you just have to trust that there is a photo here. You can see the new logo stems being placed over here and you can also swap out the grain source as well if you want. You can choose any of those that is a square shape. I'm going to go with the pastel paper and see how it works. When I turn the background color back on. Create a new layer and delete this previous logo layer. Give it a different color. Make sure I have the right logo stamps selected and stamp it over here. This one is really quiet. As you can see, there is very light texture. When that happens, you can also invert the grain. The wider the source is, the darker your stamp won't be. I don't know the logic, but that's how it works. It's the same grain, but much darker and true to the color that we selected. On the knowledge doesn't come naturally to us. But the more you practice, the more you get to know the program and the easier it gets. Over here is a quick illustration sample that I created. Say that before I post it to Instagram, I want to add my logo somewhere and I can sample the color so that the logo doesn't look too out there and then select one of them. I like this ink key-frame. I'm just going to select this one and stamp at right there. Like any graphic object, you're able to resize it and reposition it. I'm just going to resize it over here. You want to turn on the magnetics that will keep your proportion. This is fine and you can also make it super quiet. By placing that on top, you don't see it completely because a has the same color as the drawer. I'm just going to change the blending mode to multiply. That is a quieter version of the logo. It's really up to you and you can even change the position or orientation. If you want to turn off the snapping, you can turn to magnetics off. Now we'll take care of this snapping. Whenever you want to color the logo, you can Alpha lock it first and then select your new color and then fill layer. There you go. I hope this can turn into a fun, natural part of your creative routine. Instead of taking your artwork somewhere else to add your logo, you can just do it right here on your iPad. 6. Thank You: That's all I have for you. I hope you have enjoyed the class. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I'm over here on Skillshare and also on Instagram. See you next time.