Transcripts
1. Project and Teacher Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm and I'm a graphic designer. Part of my passion for design
and art is that I loved create things that are unique and can be
shared with others. As part of my own
graphic design work, I have been using Photoshop
and other Adobe items like Illustrator to create
decorative and inviting images for digital
and printed formats. Here we can see a set of
gift wrap and stationary, which I designed in watercolors. And then uploaded
the separate images to Photoshop where I could manipulate them
and change the color slightly before I put them
into the printed format. I've also got some examples here of a poster that I've designed, some online items for the audible books and
a gardening website, which was a little project
that I had on one side. So in this class, I'll take you through
step-by-step how to create an image
using watercolors, upload the image to Photoshop, and then put together a greetings card that you'll
be able to personalize for any occasion and give it a really nice
professional finish using the Photoshop application. So the next step will be for me to take you through
the materials that you'll need to gather before
you can start this project. I'll list those out for you. But this is the thing
that you'll end up with at the end of the lesson. This is an image that I
created as a watercolor, uploaded it to Photoshop, added some texts in, added some interior text, and another little bit
of a, an image here. You can really do anything
you want with these. It can be a greetings
card or you could make a menu for a special meal
you might be having, or a song sheet if you're
holding a concept. If you come with me
to the next lesson, I'll list out all
the different items that you'll need to
create the card. Thank you. See you
in the next lesson.
2. Materials Needed: Hi, welcome back.
In this lesson, we're going to look at the different items
that you're going to need to create your gift card. So to start with, you're going to need
some nice thin card. This is 300s GSM, I think, in white, but you can choose a
colored one if you need to. You're also going
to need some paper to set out your
initial drawing on. Just any paper that
you can print a paper, any any nice clean
sheet of paper, it has to be clean because
when you scan it in, you're going to
need to make sure there's no there's nothing, there's no marks on the paper. The only marks you want
them to pay for them, hawks that you're gonna make. You also need a pencil
and a rubber so that, so that you can do
your initial sketches. Once you're happy
with the sketches, you're going to use
a fine tip pen. Mine is 0.8. I think it is. It's it's quite thin but you
can get thinner. It's up to you as long as it's a fine liner,
that's what you need. Then the next thing you need is your set of paints,
watercolor paints. I'm using pan watercolors, but you can use the watercolors
that come from tubes. But the panels are quite easy to use and quite
easy to get hold of. So if you're just
starting out in this, that's what I'd recommend
that you that you have. Then you just need a
couple of paint brushes. I use quite thick frames or
mid white paint brushes and 810 because the ends of the brush can taper to quite a nice thin point
for doing some detail. So you don't really
need a tiny brush. So just a couple of brushes is all
you're really going to need for this project. Then some water to
clean your brushes, somewhere to mix your paints. Sometimes the, the
the place where your paints are
actually stored has got some nice areas for
you to mix paints, but if not a nice ceramic, just a plain ceramic
plate or do I prefer a ceramic plate paint rather than something
that's plastic because the plastic can make the paint pool and it
can be quite annoying. Wet if you want to dry them off, take some, some water out there. And also obviously the water, then the items that you'll need once you finished
your painting. So you need to have a scanner, a color printer, your computer. And also they have
access to Photoshop. What we're actually
going to be doing is drawing a picture that
we like in pencil. Once we get that right,
we're going to do the outlines using the fine line and the black fine liner. Use the rubber to remove all of the pencil lines so
you're just left with the nice outline. Then we'll add color to that and some shading using
the watercolors. Then once that's dry, we'll scan that
into our computers. Use the Photoshop program to extract the image from the
scan that we've just created. And then we can position
that correctly. And that will be then
we're able to print it. So I'll let you gather
together those things. I just repeat them
again for you. So you're going to
need some thin card, about 300, GSM. Pencil, rather. Paper. Watercolors, somewhere
to mix your watercolors. A couple of nice brushes, water, a cloth to
wipe your brushes. And then you're going to
need to have the scanner, printer, computer, and
access to Photoshop. So once you've got
all those together, I will see you in
the next lesson.
3. Finding your Inspiration: So where do we get
our inspiration from to create our images? It's difficult
sometimes to find where to get it from can
be all around us. But I'm putting together
a Pinterest board to help me with my decisions. So I've created a
Pinterest board here with some different images
just to help with to inspire us as to what images we're going
to create for our cards. This first one here
that I've picked that has some black and yellow. And each area of the image has got a nice
black, clear black outline. So when you're choosing
images for your inspiration, I really recommend
that you look out for images that have got a
nice clear black outline. These plants on the
shelf that again, they're colored in
with watercolor. But the outline, as you can see, is a nice clean black outline using a fine liner to
create the outline. If we move back to
the Pinterest board. Here's another example. This one, I've got a
nice really rich colors, which also helps with
the scanning process. But again, the
outline is nice and dark so that you can define the
difference between the background and the image. This is what I would
advise against. This is all watercolor
and there is no clear outline for it. This can make it
really difficult once you've scanned in to extract the background of
the paper from the image. So that added black
outline really helps when you're extracting the image you've created
from the background. Here this image has got
a shadow underneath it, which I wouldn't
recommend doing because that can also make it
difficult to extract. I would say that this one here, the frog on the toad stool, is what you're aiming for. A nice, clean definition
between the image and the background paper with
all the color within the black outlines and making the colored
nice and bright. So to recap, we don't
want any images with a shadow or a
missing the outline. We want images with
nice dark outlines and bright colors so that we can extract from the
background easily. So that's dark outlines, color inside, and a
clean background. See you in the next lesson.
4. Creating your Watercolour Image: Right, So let's get started with some with our image for the card that
we're going to make. To begin with, I've got a
nice clean piece of paper, pencil, rubber, and
our fine liner. Now I'm using this line out
to 0 to this one I've used. And it doesn't need to be water resistant because we
don't want any of this ink from the pen bleeding when we start to add
the watercolors. That's really important for
this particular project. So we're going to start off, we've had a look at
our inspirations. We know what we need. We need to make sure that
all of the images I've got a nice clean black line and that the color stays
within those images. But we just want a simple image that we can add to our color. We're going to add texts later once we've got it
into Photoshop. So we just put a lid back on there just for
now in case it gets knocked. So I'm going to draw a snail with his shell, which is actually his
home on his back. So it will start, I'll
start off with the shell. So I'm going to scrub, scrub through this
quite quickly. We're just going
to trace the image here using our pencil. You could find an image that you really like
and you could trace it. Just add all the little
details that we want to hear. Don't worry about going over the lines because we're
going to put the, the permanent lines in, use an ink pen. But just, just get the gist of where everything
is going to be. With your pencil. I'm just
going to add a little chimney here just to make it look a bit more house like
a window and a door. So once we've got
the basic image set out, am I happy with that? The next thing we do
is to ink it all in. Now, just scrub through
this again. Fast-forward. I'm using the fine liner to
pick out all of the detail. Miss any overlaps. Make sure you only add a dark line that you
want to be there. So any pencil marks that
you're not happy with, just, just ignore these and just only add the lines using
the dark pen. Once you've added all
of the dark lines, rub out the pencil marks
using your rubber. I'm sorry, I've lost some
of the footage here, but as you can see,
we've moved on slightly. I've added a wash of
colors that I want for the different areas of the snail using my larger brush. And then I'm using the
smaller brush just to add some of the
details and the shading. I've used a dark gray to add shadows where I think
they might be on the snail. Each time you add more
paint you need to eat, let the paint layer before dry so that you don't
get any bleeding. Just to add some more shadow
here and a bit more details. So the eyes and the shell. You can really try
different techniques here with whether you're using wet on wet or wet on dry
with your watercolor. I've added some water here to let this pink
color bleed slightly, just to give a little
slightly different technique, technique, a bit more
texture to the shelf. But as I said, just make
sure it dries in-between. If you find that you've
put too much paint on or too much water on, then use your tissue
paper to gently blot the tissue paper that
the wet paint away. Just adding some more shadows and gently layering
up the shadows. Only needs to do now is
wait for the paint to dry. And once it's completely dry, you can scan it,
but I'll show you how to do that in
our next lesson. Join me there.
5. Scanning your Image to your Computer: In this lesson,
we're going to look at how we're going
to take the image that we've just
created on paper and bring it into our
computers using a scanner. And then upload it to
Photoshop so that we can make changes and
add it to our card. So to start this process, you'll need to open your
scanner and printer options and place your image
face down in your scanner. And then we can start. So we're going to scan
the document now. We open the scanner. It's going to look
at the document. Now I'm pushing down
really hard with my hands to try and make
sure there's no ripples. I've done the best I can here. But you can see there's some ripples around
the side here. We'll try and get rid of
that and the next scan. So we've got the flatbed scanner and it's going to scan in color. We're choosing 300 DPI for the resolution
because that's quite good enough for this type of project that
we're doing here. It's going to scan into this follow-up,
call it Skillshare, and we're going to call it
wherever you want to call it, but I call this snail too. Then I click on Scan
at the bottom here. And it's asking for
me to select an area. So I'm going to select within there to make it smaller area. They can scan again. And now it is looking
at the images, scanning that for me. Now the image has
been scanned in. We'll move on to Photoshop
to make our changes.
6. Manipulating your Card in Photoshop: In this lesson, we're going
to look at the imagery of just scanned into Photoshop, make some changes, and
upload it to our cards to create a PDF for our
front and back of our card. Let's go with that. If
we go to our Photoshop, we open the image. You can see that the image
is here in our layers panel. Down the right hand side. You've not used
Photoshop before. This is how an image would look when it first appears
it, when you first open it. You've got the layers of your images down here
on the right hand side, and your toolbar here
on the left-hand side. So we want to extract our image from the
background of white. So to do that, I'm going to unlock this layer. I'm going to go here
to the toolbar and I'm going to choose the
object selection tool, gives you the shortcut
of w. To do that, if you want to use shortcuts
which are very handy. We're going to scroll the
bounding box around there. Now it picks out and you
can see that you've got the little dotted line
all around the outside. If we Command or Control C to copy that and go Command
or Control V to paste that. You can see in the
layers panel here. It's taken it out of there. You can see we've just got
a nice clear image here. So this is the layer that we're
going to actually change. You could leave it as it is. This is the colors
that we chose. But if you want to make it
a bit more interesting, if we go up here to
Image adjustments, you can use Hue and Saturation. Now here, you can literally
change some of the colors. How about that with
the purple and green that look at that right there. The change that slightly. I quite like that with
the pink running. Actually I quite like the
green and the purple. I'm gonna say okay to that. So there is our image and we've changed that
to how we want it to be. So we can leave
that here on this, I'm going to open
up a new document. So go to File New, choose A4. And we're going to
choose landscape. It's 300 pixels per
inch, which is good. Now, RGB is fine for screens. But we're going to
be printing this. We want it to be
on the CMYK color. And then create and they go, that is effectively
your piece of paper. So we're going to
be folding this. So everything on the
right-hand side, it's gonna be the front cover
of our card that we create. To make sure that we make that we keep everything over that, over to that side. We're going to bring in. So I've dragged just out from
the ruler here at the side. I've dragged in a marker line. Now that is snapping. You can see that it's snapping
to the middle of the page. So now we know that that
is the direct middle. That's where our
phones going to be. All everything we want for our card is going to be
here on the front cover. We've made to put me to concentrate on this
side of the page. So if you go back to our snail
and we just grab that from the layers panel and drag
it our new document, and then just let go. There we go. We've put our snail image where we
can make that a little bit bigger by dragging the bounding box at lower
holding the Shift key, and that will make it bigger
without distorting it. We can move that up slightly. We can rotate that slightly with the rotation you see as I move into the corner, it turns to a curved arrow. Rotate that slightly to make that a little
bit smaller still, but otherwise that's
looking quite nice. So other things that we
can do to this is we can add some special effects
or go down here to the FX. And we're going to
add a drop shadow. Just gives you a bit of depth. With the drop shadow
highlighted here, all of these instructions
are going to affect it. I'm going to bring over here. You can see how it looks. This is the color
of the drop shadow. This is the direction
of the shadow. You can see as I move that
you can just see around the It's just slightly moving that I'm going to bring
the distance out slightly. I'm going to drop
that down so it's just sticking out the
side. There we go. You can change the
spread. Click on Okay. Now the only thing
we need to do for the front page is really
to add some text. I'm going to go back over
here to the toolbar. And if we click on T for text
or click on this icon here, we can add some text. So I'm going to just
going to draw out a bot bounding box
immediately wants to put in its own version of text. You'll see here that an
additional layer has been added on top, a text layer. And you'll also see
here that we've got the name of the font
that it wants to use. But you've got quite a
nice choice of different. I quite like this one here. Now while it's still
highlighted there, I'm going to add the text. Good luck. Now, most of that isn't visible. And that's because the
size of the text is too big and the spacing
between the text is too big. So we're going to highlight everything we've
just typed in there. We're going to go here and bring the size of the
font down slightly. Maybe that's a bit too small. Go back up to 60. There we go. Then we've got
the spacing between them, which is this here. If it says it on
auto, it will do. You can actually bring it down. You can type in the
number that you want. You can choose. So I'm
gonna bring it to 50. See how that looks. There we go. I want to actually space
that slightly differently. So I'm going to take away that
space and put that there. I'm also going to bring
the bounding box up here. You can see the pink lines that is making sure that
it's nicely centered. Now, I'm old, I also
would like to put a nice border around
the outside If this. So I'm going to go here, back here to the rectangle tool. I'm going to click on that. And we're going to swap. We don't want there to
be any fill in here. We want there to be. So we're gonna go see if we
go to the stroke, we choose a color,
nice pink color. But then on the fill, we're going to choose
not to be any fill. If we draw that out. You can see it very
faint line down, stroke to be slightly
thicker. There we go. There we go. Now thought to be
centered nicely. As you see if I could draw, drag it up slightly, the pink line
through the center. And that means that that's
centered correctly. Now, I think maybe I would like to change the
color of the font to match. So if I go back to the text, we choose the color. Go here. If we come off the the eyedropper
tool appears that so I can click on outside. That's better. I want it to be. That's quite nice. There we go. That's quite a nice
card we've got there. So that's the outside of
our card. Pretty much done. We've got our text, we've got a nice border
around the outside. And we've got our watercolor
image that we've added. So you can do the inside now. So if we open a new, a full screen, just
like we did before, choose A4 size,
choose Landscape, 300, DPI, or pixels
per inch, RGB. Actually, we need
to change that to CMYK because we're going
to be printing this. And create. Again, we've got another
blank A4 sheet for us to use. Using the move tool. Click on that. We're going to bring it into the center and it should
just click into place. This time. This is the
inside of the card. So here is going to be where
our message is going to be. We might want to
add some images. So if we add a new, new layer here by just clicking
this little square with a plus sign it at the
bottom of our layers panel. Again, new blank layer.
I'm gonna do it. I'm going to take the same
image that we had over here. There's still open in
the front of our card. I'm going to find
the layer that has got the snail image on, which we're going to click
down on that and drag it over into the interior. But this time I'm
going to hold down the Shift key and just the corner of the bounding
box with the move tool. And if I just move that in, it will shrink the image. And now I've released
the Shift key. I can use the arrow to just add some
movement to that image. As you can see here
in the layers, is exactly the same layer
with the same effects and same colors as the previous
one from the front. But we could change this again. So if we go back to
the Image adjustments, we can go to the color balance. We can change by
moving these sliders. The color of the
snail just slightly. There we go. I'm happy with that.
I'll click on. Okay. Now I'm going to add a new layer by clicking on the plus in the square at the bottom
of the Layers panel. Again, I'm going to go over
here to our tools panel. Click on T, which is our text. Drag out a box for text. I'm going to put in
an article message for the new homeowners. As you can see,
nothing is typing. And that is because if we look over in
the properties panel, you can see the color
of the text is white, so it's not going to
show up on there. So if we want to
change that color, this time, I'm going to pick, I'm just going to pick
a green at random. I'm going to type out. Okay, so I've typed that out
the peptide out the message. It's using the same font
that we used before. But as you can see, it
doesn't all fit in. And I wanted it to
stay within this. So I'm going to highlight this, highlight the whole thing. And we can change the
fonts always. Choose 18. Now, actually make it
a little bit bigger. Choose 30. There we go. It's still showing
on the pantograph on the paragraph panel that
is going to center it. And if we go back
to the move tool, we can see why move
it around the pink, I think, outlines automatically
and that shows that that is now nicely centered. If you're not happy with
this font, however, you can highlight it and go
back to the character here. You can choose a
different character or different font suits. I'm going to choose this
one just to make it a bit different. To 60. That's quite nice font. Now what I am going to add, I'm going to add some more. So instead of actually hand
typing, handwriting them, the two and the area, I'm going to add
another layer here. I'm going to choose the font. Drag that out. I'm going to choose a font that looks more like handwriting. Whenever you go to sarah, a fictional friend, I'm going to bring the size
of the font down slightly. We go back to the Move tool, put that where I'd like it. On another layer. Let me
choose the text tool. Click on here. I'm just right. Very good. Use the move tool just to
position this where I want it. There we go. So now we've got the
inside of our card. So I'm going to save this inside this on my computer. Save this in my Skillshare fall. Going to call it
snail card inside. Save that as a PDF. Okay. To that page. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Just wait for it to save. I'm gonna go back to this now college that we
originally started with. We're going to save this
as my computer Skillshare. This outside. Saved as a PDF. Save. Save that. Just to say yesterday. Wait for it to finish saving. Now I'm going to
close these items. Close down. Your Photoshop. With Photoshop closed,
we're now going to open up both of the
items is as Pdx, but we'll do that in the next
lesson and create our card. I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Printing your Card: Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll take
the two PDFs that we've created for the inside
and outside of the card. Fit them together to make one back and front print
to make our code. So you now need to open up as their PDF PDF builder. That comes automatically
with Photoshop. What we're going to do is
you're going to combine files. If we add the first one. Yeah, so and then add another file, bond two. So now if we look at these, we've got two of them. One by one. I'm going to
choose to print these. If you can load into your
front heel 200 DPI card, we should be able to print it. So I'm just going to
get more than 200 DPI that into my color printer. Print this. We ask it to print or get the choice of how
it's going to be printed. Don't want to change
the settings. We do want it to print on
both sides of the paper. We want it to flip
on the shortage, but we want it to
be in a landscape. So now you can see here, it's going to print this on one side and this on the other. So you just need to remember
that print on both sides. Flip on the short edge
and print as landscape. And then just tell it to print. The current should
now be printed. We move into the next lesson. I'll show you what
you should end up with and how we're going
to make it into a card. See you in the next lesson.
8. Finishing your Card & Final Thoughts: Hi, Welcome back to
this last lesson. So by now, I would
expect you to have created the PDFs and printed
those onto your card. Front and back will fold those now so that you
can see how that works out. So now that we've
printed our card, both the front, the back on our piece of
lightweight card. We're ready to just fold that into to make sure that
when you're folding that you match up the corners perfectly and press
down for the crease. There we have our finished card. I'll just run through
that again for you. So you've got the, the printout that we made
in PDF on both sides. We're going to fold
that carefully. So it meets the corners here. Press down, and then follow that crease all the
way to the other side. And then we have 22 lovely cards to send that we've
created ourselves. Now that you've
folded your card, this is what we're left with. I'm quite
pleased with these. Really nice to create
something that is unique, that is bespoke to your, um, to whoever
you're giving it to. You can add anything
you want to the front. You could. Once you've got the
hang of Photoshop, you can make any
sorts of images. But it's really nice
to create the image by hand yourself and then bring
that into the computer. Just adds that extra little
bit of personality to it. Once you've created
your own cards, if you could take a picture
of what you've created. I don't mind if it's if it's an upload of the
actual PDF itself or a photograph a few with
the card so that we can all take a look
at what you've achieved. And then I can give my, um, my comments on how
I think you've done. If you want any advice as well, I can I can pass that on to you. But I look forward
to a really look forward to seeing
what we've all done. I actually love
creating things and I'm using a mix of technology and physical painting
to make something that's truly unique and it's just lovely
to give to others. So I hope you enjoy putting
together your cards. It'd be great to see
what you come up with. Thank you for
joining my lessons, and I hope you've
enjoyed it and that you do get something out
of this. Thank you.
Ann Kent
