Matchbox Label Techniques: Illustration, Vintage Design & Print Textures

1. Welcome: Can you imagine yourself traveling back in time when digital design, as we know it today, was just a sci-fi dream. You're going to be employed by a printing company where your task is to come up with various match box labeled designs. The printing technology is limited, the printing area is small and the color palette is restrained. Nevertheless, some of the most beautiful and inspiring designs are made as proof that with all these constraints less is really more and art can thrive in all shapes and forms. Hi, I'm Nina, even though everyone knows me as Di Udji. I'm an illustrator and pattern designer based in Belgrade, Serbia and this is a class about creating match box labels. In this class, we'll dive together into the magnificent world in vintage design by looking closely at amazing matchbox labels throughout their history. We'll explore and discover some of the key concepts that designers use back then and learn from them. I'll take you through the whole process from inspiration and brainstorming to finding a way to express your complex ideas in a visually simple, yet effective way. Last but not the least, for a bit of nostalgic throwback, we'll be replicating the classical print effects in our match box and design. We're using Procreate and a bit of Photoshop at the end. This intermediate class is for illustrators, designers and all you vintage enthusiasts. I made this time traveling journey in a way that you end up with amazing design ideas for personal and professional projects. By the end of this class, not only will you have the knowledge to understand and replicate these vintage designs, but you'll also have a new visual ideas and principles that you can add to your professional repertoire when working on modern designs and illustrations. By the way, I'm so happy that you're here, so let's get started. 2. Project: Your project is to create a matchbox label design. As you'll see throughout this class, there are many styles and topics to choose from. The best way to approach this project is to pick a subject close to your heart. To make it easier for you, I created a project guide PDF document that you can download from the resources section of the class. There you'll find ideas from creating different types of matchbox labels, from starting and designing your own matchbox plan, to coming up with the advertisement ideas that will be placed on a matchbox label, to designing the label that will spread awareness or celebrate important events. Definitely check out that document, it will help you dive right into creating without wondering where to start. Also, another thing I'm leaving for you in the class resources section is a link to my Pinterest board, where you'll find a collection of matchbox labels I've gathered so far. It can be a great window in the world of vintage matchbox design and also good starting point resource for your inspiration and learning. There are many ways in which you can think about this project and many ways in which you can approach it. You can use it as a part of your work projects, for example, this is a great practice if you're creating a package design and you want to introduce a vintage twist, or you're designing postcards that need a bit of nostalgic throwback. On the other hand, you can use this practice as a personal project and create a matchbox label design that you can later use as a wonderful vintage style art print. All in all, one thing is for sure, you'll learn a lot by following this class. But once you have all the knowledge and ideas, the best way to use them is to put them into practice by starting your own project. We want to see your inspiration, drawings, and thought process that led to the final matchbox label design. Once you finish, make sure to share everything in the project section of this class. 3. A Brief Matchbox Art History: How did it all start? In 1826, a man by the name of John Walker, a British pharmacist, was working on an experimental explosive paste for guns. One day, he cleaned the wooden utensil used to mix that paste by scraping it, and it caught fire. By accident, friction matches were discovered, and they rapidly took off becoming an indispensable tool for more than 100 years after that. As matches gained in popularity, the market quickly became saturated, and art and design became key to creating the distinctive brand identity. If you were getting into match business, you need it to stand out amongst competitors to be visible, memorable, and definitely appealing to consumers. There was an extraordinary variety of designs, from the simple that included the manufacturer's name and location, to the elaborate, influenced by current trends and events. If you dive into all these incredible matchbox labels from that period, you'll see a range of topics, exotic places, technological inventions, and the ever popular animals and plants. The idea was to visually represent something interesting and appealing, and use it as your brand identity. At the beginning of the 20th century, the widespread use of matches made matchboxes a perfect canvas for efficient advertising. Instead of brand identity, matchboxes were now also adorned with advertisements for cigarettes, restaurants, airlines, or cleaning supplies, for example. As far as style goes, some countries kept the more traditional approach based on the Victorian aesthetic. While others, especially countries of Eastern Europe, took a more modern approach for matchbox designs. On these mid-century style labels, you'll find many examples of advertisement designs, as well as public health and safety messages, celebrations of national achievements, and events or technological advances. One thing that ties these designs together, independent of their country of origin or exact production period, is that they are defined by the limits of the printing technology of the time and the small canvas. They were made simple and with few colors, but were very effective in their visual language and design concepts. Before we move on to the next video, I want you to go to the class resources section, and find the link for the Pinterest board, where I've gathered a lot of different matchbox label designs. First of all, take a look at all these designs briefly to get familiar with the time periods, styles, and designs, subjects we talked about. Once you do that, pick 5-10 matchbox labels that caught your eye right away. You can print them out, or gather them in a digital mood board that you have in front of you. Because in the next video, we'll take a closer look at the matchbox labels we picked, and see what we can observe and discover when it comes to design ideas and concepts, and how we can apply that knowledge later in our own work. 4. Study The Old, Create The New: Let's start working on the first practical steps towards creating our design. As you can see, I printed a lot of different matchbox labels. They're all from the Pinterest board I told you about. Now I want to show you how I'm doing this visual detective work where I'm observing different types of matchbox labels to determine what makes them interesting. From overall design placements and concepts to styles and printing textures. The reason I'm doing this is to decipher my inspiration and learn from it so that I can apply some of these design concepts and principles in my work, as well as to be able to accurately replicate these vintage print textures. What I suggest is that you follow along with my examples because I'll try to cover many different variations. But at the same time place the matchbox labels you've chosen somewhere you can see them. As we go through each step, try to apply that knowledge to your examples and take notes. First of all, let's observe the overall placement of the design on these labels. Take a look at the background to see what you can distinguish. Here are a few things I'm noticing when it comes to background. The designs are in a simple rectangle that always has a paper or cardboard border. But the border can be just a plain background like in these examples or it can be filled with a slogan that goes around the edges or in these more traditional Indian designs, the borders are adorned with lines that frame the design. Now observe the matchbox labels you have and take notes about the overall design placement or make some quick sketches. The next thing we can observe is typography and how it's placed in these matchbox labels. Matchbox designs essentially combine illustrations and typography, on some of them illustrations are more prominent while on the others, it's typography. In this class, I'll focus more on the illustration aspects of matchbox labels while in the next class, I'll cover the whole topic of matchbox typography in depth from history to fonts that you can use and adapt. Of course, while working on your project now, feel free to include typography as well. All these examples here have prominent illustrations combined with typography that has secondary importance but still serves a purpose. In some cases, it's just one word, while in others, you have text or slogans. It's interesting to know that some of the designs use smaller rectangles at the bottom for the text placement like these three, for example. Others can be more experimental like these two. On this one, the text is placed on the edge and follows the border around. Here the text is placed in a similar way, but inside the background. Both of these examples are using the idea of a matchbox being something that you hold in your hands, and while holding it, you can rotate it to read the text. The text basically doesn't have to be positioned and structured in a usual way, and you can play with this idea while designing your label. These last two examples are a bit different when it comes to text placement. Unlike the previous ones that are related to the matchbox as a physical thing, these text placements are related to the design itself. They're incorporated in it and they feel unified with the illustrations. That's why they might seem more like miniature poster art rather than regular matchbox label. You might have similar examples in front of you or something different. Observe how the typography is placed and what you like about it. When it comes to illustrations, it's hard to talk about them just in terms of placement because this area is very broad and it depends on the subject you're depicting and how you're depicting it. That's why we can briefly observe them in terms of styles and interesting visual ideas. I don't want to focus on a strict period of matchbox art because I want you to find a period and style you like and feel inspired by. You might be more drawn to traditional styles from the 19th century or modern styles from the 20th century. In these two examples, you can really see the style difference. On one side, there are decorative elements, ornaments, and a lot of line work. On the other side, are simplified geometric forms, bold illustration, and no linework. By observing matchbox illustrations you selected, you can also go into details to see what kind of illustration approach you like. Is it the use of vibrant colors, details, and outlines like in this Indian design? Or would you go for a bold illustration style as in the Soviet label? Or do you like the simplicity of this Japanese design? See what you've chosen and take notes about ideas, styles, and techniques you like. You might find inspiration in one or you might naturally go for a variety of illustration ideas that will blend into something uniquely yours. The next thing I want to take a look at are colors and the creative use of positive and negative design space in some of these illustrations. As we know because of the printing techniques at a time, colors in these matchboxes are limited. You can mostly see color palettes varying from five colors max down to only two colors. If you use more colors, the production of your matchboxes will cost more. If you already have a limited color palette, you should definitely use the paper or matchbox cardboard as one of the colors. These cardboard papers are mostly white or creamy light brown, so they're also a great neutral color for any palette you choose. Since you're using the paper as the color and not printing it, you need to leave the white parts as cutouts in your design. There are various creative ways to do that. We have these three examples, the bird, the city label, and another similar city label that is from the same collection, I would guess. If you look at the last one, you can see that a tower and a bridge, are white cutouts and the other colors are printed on top. This is a typical example of white cutouts. In the other two, we have examples of more creative use of cutouts, as well as a play with positive and negative design space. In this example, the lower border is cut out and that's where the white building starts. The artist visually connects the building with the rest of the matchbox, and this makes the whole design more readable. By using paper, not only for the building but also for the ship, the blue sky becomes water as well. This is a great example of simplified design that tells a complex story. This one is also a nice example on how to play with positive and negative space. It has the silhouette of a bird, which I think is a peacock. The bird is not contained within the border. The feathers on its head cross the upper edge where they connect with the rest of the paper and the borders, and the same thing happens on the lower right. Now, take a look at the matchbox labels you have in front of you. Can you spot some interesting design concepts you want to explore? In my design, I want to experiment with positive and negative design space as well as cutouts. But you might be more interested in bold geometric compositions, for example. One thing that ties all these designs together, regardless of their period or style, is that they're constrained by the printing technology of the time. You can see that none of these prints are perfect. In my opinion, that is what makes them absolutely unique and perfect. In this part, I want to take a closer look at how these labels were printed in order to understand all the errors that occurred so that we can observe and replicate them later. If you look closely at these matchbox labels, you'll see that each color was printed separately. This means that you must put the cardboard into the printer and print one color, remove it, then put it back in and print another color on top, and so on. You can make this kind of print by carving wood, and creating stems, and then doing everything manually or you could use a fast offset printing method. When you're printing colors separately, there is a strong chance that something will move, especially if the printing process is fast. Then, in the end, the colors will not align perfectly with one another. Very often you'll see these nudged layers and color overlaps. Even though that's a mistake, it becomes something unique and inseparable from this vintage style. If you want to recreate this old vintage look in your modern digital design, you should make it imperfect by replicating these misprints. Something else interesting in the printing technology is the use of halftones. Halftones are series of tiny dots that can be used for shading in one color, as in these two examples, or it can be used evenly to fill the whole area as in this third example. Last but not least, we're going to take a look at how colors react with a cardboard surface. If you compare all the matchbox labels we've seen so far, you'll notice that some of them have better print quality than others. On some, like on these three, for example, there are a lot of imperfections. The printer has probably used more ink than necessary, and it soaked into the cardboard and made all these wobbly lines and ink smudges. You can also notice even on the ones with better quality, that it's not possible to get crisp and sharp edges, and you can see that here, for example, or on these letters. Another thing is that solid colors often are not solid at all. Most of the time there will be white dots peeking through because the color is soaked into the cardboard. We will keep all this in mind while recreating our own print textures. I analyzed these matchbox labels under three categories: overall placement, key design concepts, and print textures. Now is your turn. If you haven't already, check the matchbox labels you've chosen and take notes on what you're observing. You might have different examples than I do. If you find some additional features in your visual detective work, share them in your projects so that we can all learn more from each other. In the next video, we'll start brainstorming ideas for a label design and start sketching. 5. Label Design: Sometimes as artists, illustrators, or designers, we need a challenge. We need some limitations imposed on us so that we can get out of our comfort zone and scratch our heads a bit to see how we can get the most out of the situation or out of the design project. That's when our creativity can blossom and we can start bringing some amazing ideas to life. We'll start our design project keeping in mind that the design we're making is for a product that has various production constraints. It's small in size and has a restrained color palette. We're working with a limited printing technology. We'll be doing this, of course, using 21st century tools. But it's good to just imagine the scenario as a certain limitation you have while working on this project, especially if you want to recreate an authentic vintage look in the end. To easily pick a subject for your project, check out my PDF project guide, which you can download in the resources section of the class. I distinguished three example categories you can choose from, as well as some possible label names or slogan ideas. I think this will help you dive right into creating. Option 1 is to design a matchbox brand label. You can come up with an interesting name for your brand and create an illustration that goes with it. You can also use some of the names I've listed in the project guide. The second option is to create an advertisement design that is placed as a matchbox label. This design field is also very interesting and full of great examples. Pick a company you'd like to design an ad for or use some of the companies from my list. The third option is something I call a matchbox message. It includes labels that were used as a way to spread information or awareness. As examples, you'll see public health and safety messages or celebrations of technological achievements or events. I made a list of possible slogans and messages that you can use, but of course, create something close to your heart. For this project, I'm going to create a matchbox brand labeled by the name Horizon. It took me quite some time to settle on the name and that's why I decided to create a project guide for you with name lists so that you don't get stuck on these small and not that important details. Also, I chose five matchbox labels as my favorite and I'll use them for inspiration and as a reference to all the things I observed and talked about in the previous video. Now that we settled on the subject and the theme, we can start brainstorming ideas. What I suggest is to take a piece of paper and start listing things that are related to your design project. It doesn't matter if it's something very obvious or not. What mattered in my case was that I just let out all the information I had in my mind related to the word horizon. Here is what I did. First, I made a list of visual things that in my mind are related to the word horizon. I listed sunset, ocean, mountains, bridge, river. As you can see, my brain is not only creating a connection for the horizon, but it's creating a connection between those words as well. The next list is related to feelings I have when I think about the horizon. Those are the feelings I want to explore and express in my design. I wrote beautiful view, calm feelings, mindfulness, rest, deeper breath. You can make these lists as simple or as long as you want. You can develop these concepts further or you can keep them in mind while sketching. What I mean by that is that if calm is a feeling that defines this design, that means that I want to explore how to visualize something that is quiet and still. I might use straight horizontal lines, for example. If we compare this to something opposite, which would be, for example, an advertisement for commercial space travel, you might want to use diagonal lines, as they did with these airplanes here. You want to create a sense of movement and the sense of achievement. In that case, you definitely don't want stillness and calm. You want to make something striking, bold, and fast. These lists will give you an easy starting point. Use your feelings about a subject as a guide to how you will visualize things you noted in the first list of physical ideas. As a next step, start sketching by following your ideas. You don't have to focus right away on the final design. Instead, try to see where your sketches take you and focus on the list. From my examples, you can see that I wanted to play with shapes, with geometry, with lines. I also explored the idea of a half circle that could be used as a boat. Here I had an idea of playing with shapes and negative and positive design space. We talked about earlier. The idea was to merge a river and a sunset. Here I tried to see how mountains and sun would look in a composition. Once I explored that, I moved into creating sketches with the final design in mind. As you can see, these are more developed designs that are essentially based on the previous sketches from the list. At the beginning, I had a problem with my brand name because when I thought of the horizon, I had this visual cliche idea of a half circle on a horizontal line that had been used so many times before. I wanted to do something different. Instead, I was constantly going back to it. My advice is even if you have bad or cliche ideas, just let them all out so that you can move on to doing something better or more developed and that's what I did. I started from the basic idea and then I continued exploring it. These two are very similar and basic, even though the second one has a possibility of color overlaps. Here, I explored the idea of a boat being a sunset in reverse, but I wasn't sure how the potential consumer could relate to that as being a representation of a horizon. Then I went a bit abstract with geometry and lines as Sun rays. Now in these two you can see my final idea coming to life. I really liked the mountain silhouette and the idea of flipping the design horizontally, which fits nicely with the horizon representation. Yet I wasn't still satisfied with this idea. It was nice, but still a bit basic. I wanted to tell a story through this design. While looking at the mountain and thinking what I wrote, mindfulness, calm, deep breaths, it led me to think about a human face that is resting and taking deep breaths. In a nutshell, that's the process in which I ended up with this idea where I have a human face in the first plan and a mountain silhouette that resembles his face in a background. With this design, I can now visually tell a story of a human connection with nature that results in harmony and calmness. In this sketch, the face is a bit cartoonish and I'm still exploring the idea of half circles, which are too much for this design, especially if I want to keep it bold and simple. In the final sketch, I created a defined human face. I thought about color layers and how I could overlap them. I took out all those half circles. Instead of placing the font inside a rectangle, like I did here, I went with this idea, like on this matchbox. I placed the font on the outside edge of the border. Now I have a simple design sketch that is well-structured with a good idea and a story to tell. For this step, start developing and constructing your design sketches first in relation to your base list. Then let all those ideas merge and brew together until you find the one you've been looking for. Keep in mind all the things we talked about and things you've noted. Keep in mind those design ideas and principles you want to follow or try out. If you're not sure how to do something, go back to these matchbox labels and take a look at how they did it. You're now doing that in order to recreate what someone did, but in order to use all the available visual information as a reference and a learning tool so that you can solve your design obstacles along the way. I will now photograph this and add it in Procreate. In the next videos, we'll talk about layers, colors, and how to recreate the vintage print effects while finishing our design. 6. Print Colors: We're officially in Procreate now and we can start working on the final design, so far we've learned so much and we can incorporate that knowledge into making our matchbox label design. In this part, we'll mostly talk about colors and how we'll use layers to mimic the printing technology that was used on these vintage matchbox labels. As I mentioned before, on these labels, each color is printed separately. You add the stack of papers to the printer and one color is printed on each sheet. Then you feed the papers back in and you print another color on top. What happens with this printing is that you can use two colors, overlap them, and create a third color and this is something that makes this printing method very fun to explore and play with. Something very similar that is widely used today, especially in the art world and you've probably heard about it is risograph printing. Now, since we are working digitally and not printing this on a risograph machine, for example, we're just going to mimic the process and recreate it in Procreate. The first thing we need to know is that if we want the colors to overlap, we need to place each color in a separate layer just as we would if we were printing it. I will now open a new layer, select one color, and create just a simple shape. Now, in the blending mode here I will change normal to multiply. We want all the layers to have a multiply blending mode. In that way, the colors can overlap and blend with each other to produce new colors. I will now create a new layer, select another color, and again change the blending mode to be multiply and I will now create a new shape. If we're working only with two colors, we can use the overlap between these two to create a third color and that is something very fun to explore in our final design, I will now create a third shape and introduce another color. Again, I will put it to multiply and here it is. If you want to test colors to see how they look together in an overlap, you can also select a layer that you want to change. For example, this one and that you can go to adjustments, hue saturation brightness, layer and then you can play with hue for example, or saturation and brightness and have a live preview of how these colors interact with each other while you're changing these settings. Now, I want to show you a color chart I created for you. You can download it in the class resources section. It's a PNG file that you can add to your Procreate Canvas. That's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to add, "Insert a photo" and here is this color chart. To make this color chart, I've chosen seven different colors. I placed them horizontally and then again vertically and used multiply blending mode so that they can overlap. This gives me a nice overview of how these colors interact with each other and I can see which color overlap I potentially want to work with. Plus it serves as an imaginary color limit that I need to follow as if I was preparing my design for printing. You can use my color chart and pick these colors or you can create your own. I will leave a link in the class resources section for a website that has a list of available risograph print colors with their hex numbers. It's a very beautiful color selection that you can use as an inspiration or starting point for your color chart. I'm now going to pick these seven main colors and save them in a new color palette and then I can start working on my label to show you a few ways in which I can implement these colors into my design. What you can see here is my refined and finished sketch. The format I'm using is an A3 paper size because I want to be able to print this matchbox label design as a poster. Besides, it's always safer to work on a larger scale and downscale later if needed. I also added typography. I used a font, Rousseau 1. It's bold and strong, and it resembles those vintage fonts we observed. It's a Google font and has an open source license. Now, if I go to the Font and go to Edit, you can see in the settings that I adjusted the size of the font. I adjusted kerning and tracking and I also fit everything into this rectangle I made. The next thing I did with this font is I duplicated it. I tapped on it, and I just rasterized it. In that way I was able to use it as an object as a regular shape. By the way in the class resources you'll find links for all the things I'm using in this design from this font to different brush sets and textures. In my next step, I traced sketch lines with ink brush and created color blocks, each one in a separate layer and with a multiply blending mode. I'm leaving this part of the face as a cutout and I'm letting it breathe and connect to the borders but I want to have these three surfaces as three different colors. To show you how you can achieve those results in a few different ways, I created three possible variations for my design. The first one is using three color layers and has no overlaps. As you can see, each color shape has its own separate place and in this example, we're not exploring the possibility of mixing colors but if you draw each shape imperfectly, you can create interesting overlap errors on these connecting paths. The second example is also three colors, but it has an overlap. As you can see, it's made out of three color layers and if I take this one out, these are two base layers and this one goes on top and creates an overlap for this mountain silhouette. If we're thinking in terms of print efficiency, there is another way to do this with just two colors and that's something I've created for my last example where I used only two color layers. Let me show you the third example. Here we have just two layers and just two colors. We have this main one and then on top we have this light pink one. That is also creating an overlap for the mountain silhouette. If you look at that, you'll see that when it overlaps with this teal color, we get mountains and a darker teal color and we're keeping the original color on the place with no overlaps. Now we want to keep ourselves in this whole idea of mimicking the print process, instead of picking whatever color we want, we can limit ourselves to the color chart and use some of these seven colors we've saved. This also limitation you'd have if you are preparing this to be printed on a risograph machine, for example. Now if I want to make this teal color a bit different. I can place another color on top of it to change it and if I bring back my color chart and I look at it, I can see that by adding the pink color on top of a teal color, I'll get a more indigo blue color. What I'm going to do now to change the color on my layer instead of picking any color I want, as I said, I'm just going to duplicate this teal layer and I will color it in this pink color that I picked from my color chart. As you can see, we made indigo blue. The layer I duplicated is also in the multiply blending mode and now I can play with the opacity to make it less dark, so I'll put it maybe to 50 percent. Here we go, we now have a more subtle blue color. That's one way to do it and another fun way to do it is to use halftones. As we saw on the matchbox labels. You can use halftones to add shading and details, to cover whole surface and to change the color that is underneath, so the way I'm going to do this is first of all, I will delete the duplicated layer and I will select this base layer. I will tap on it and click "Select". Now, while all of this is selected, I will open a new layer, set the blending mode to multiply and I will grab a brush that is a halftone brush. I will use a brush set from true grid textures and it's called beat tones and I can use this shader dot 2. I will now just go over it with this halftone brush. Once that is done, I can press "Select" to de-select it and also this time I can play with the opacity and I can bring it to 50 percent like I did in the last example. If I zoom out, you can see the color change and for example, if I zoom in, you can see the nice halftone texture that I've created. The design looks very good even at this stage, but we're not done yet. In the next video, we'll add a few print imperfections to make it look vintage and authentic. 7. Print Style: I'm going to show you a few different ways in which you can recreate the classical print style. We're going to take this digital design and make it look more prone to errors, like it would be if we were actually printing it 70 years ago. If you remember, while observing matchbox labels, we took notes about misprints that were occurring from wobbly edges, ink smudges, to color layers being accidentally moved. Now let's see how we can recreate that. As you can see here, I deleted the halftone layer that I made before, and I'm only left with two main layers that I need to change a bit, and once I do that, I can reintroduce the halftone layer. The first thing I'm noticing are these letters. They're very crisp, and sharp, and have these sharp edges. While observing matchbox labels, I also noticed that by using the old print technology and printing on the cardboard, you could never have that sharp lines and corners. To change that, I'm going to grab the same brush I use to make color shapes, and I'm going to roughen these letters and make the corners round. As you can see, that's something I did while drawing the main color blocks. The brush that I'm going to use is a RetroSupply brush, and it's just an ink brush, it produces nice ink textures. I'm just going to select the layer and select the color, and I'm just going to roughen these letters. The letters look a lot better and more authentic now. The next thing I'm going to do is grab another ink brush. This one is from the Risograph set, and it's called squid ink. With this brush, I want to mimic an ink bleed that happens when you add too much color to the printer, which causes the color to soak into the cardboard and spread over the design edges, and create those wall bleed lines. Again, I will go into this layer that is already selected, and I will just add a beat of these ink bleeds on the edges. The layer is selected, and I have my brush, and I can just go a bit over here, and I can just create a bit of ink bleed that is basically just escaping the design edges. My biggest advice here is try to find a balance and don't overdo it. I will just add it in a few places, and that will be just enough. Now that I finished changing the layers, I can bring back the halftone layer. Again, I will go to Layers, I will tap on this one, and I will click, Select. Now, while I have this selected, I can create a new layer on top, and set to blending mode to multiply. Just as we did before, I will select the pink color, and go to brushes, and use this shader dot halftone brush. Again, I will just go over this, and add the halftone texture. To finish this, I can just press, Select to deselect it, and again, I will just turn down the opacity to 50 percent. So far, so good. At this point, you can really see that this design is coming together. Now, I want to add the last misprint by nudging the layers a bit as if we accidentally move the paper while printing different colors. You can now select the layer you want to move, for example, I can do this one. I will select it, and I will nudge it just a bit. Now I can do the same thing with the halftone layer. Basically, what you want to do here is to move these layers just a bit to create nice overlaps. Also, you can see the wonderful effects that it has. For example, this pink halftone misprint is creating a shading on the letters. Now that we have everything set, the only thing left to do is to add the paper overlay texture on top. I'm going to show you two ways in which you can do it. One way is by using Procreate, and another way is by using Adobe Photoshop. First of all, let's see how we can do it in Procreate. To create a paper overlay in Procreate, I will use texture brushes and filters. First of all, I will go to this Risograph set I have, and there, I will select this favorite paper overlay, it's a texture brush. To use it, I have to set the colors, one to be black and another one to be white. This way, once I start adding the texture on top, it will be in a medium gray, and I will be able to use it with a blending mode set to overlay, or some other blending modes. Now, I will just create another layer that is on top of everything, and with this brush selected, I can just go on top and create this paper texture. Now that this is created, I will just go to the blending modes, and as you can see, I can set it to overlay, you can see how it looks, or another option is to set it to linear light. With linear light, what I can do, I can turn down the opacity to 50 percent. I can have a paper texture that is visible not only on darker colors, but as well on light colors and especially the light, cream background. All in all, you can play with this and see what works best for your design. To finish this, I want to add a bit of green on top of everything. I'm going to do that by using the Procreate filter. First of all, I need to create a new layer on top of everything. I will color this layer with a medium gray. To get a perfect medium gray, I will go to Color Palette value and then R, G and B, I have to type 128. I will just go here and change this to 128. We have a medium gray and I just have to drop it in this new layer that is on top of everything. The reason I'm using a medium gray is very simple. Once I set the blending mode here to overlay, I'll just set it to overlay, you will see that there is no difference. If I turn it on and off, there is no difference. But once we start adding the texture and a filter, the change will be visible. Let's set this to overlay blending mode and go to Adjustments, go to noise layer, and now all I need to do is slide to adjust. You can see if I slide it like this, the noise is very visible and that's not what we want. Of course, I will just bring it down a bit to maybe 15 percent, and that's it. This looks nice and it's subtle. Now if I zoom in and I turn this off and turn it on, you can see the difference. The final results are really nice and realistic, both from risograph texture brush, and this noise filter on top. When it comes to Procreate, our work is done. In the next step, I want to show you how I'm going to use Adobe Photoshop to create similar results. As you'll see, we're not going to use brushes or filters, we're actually going to use some old paper. First of all, I will turn off the Procreate texture layers I've created, and I will save this design as a JPEG. You can also save it as a PSD file in case you want to edit it further in Photoshop. For this step, what we need is some old papers or books that have been really exposed to the passage of time. Like these ones, for example, you can use the covers, especially if they have discoloration and visible textures. Or you can use the first blank pages inside. I just scan these pages at 1,200 DPI, which is enough, but you can go even higher if you want to. In case you don't have a scanner or old books lying around, just go to the class resources and download mine to test out the whole process. Now once you're in Photoshop, open your design as a PSD or a JPEG file like I did. On top of it, add the scanned paper. What you want to do first of all, is to select this paper layer and change the blending mode to Linear Burn. Let's go to Blending Modes and select Linear Burn. Everything is too dark and undefined right now, and to make it better, we need to adjust the levels. Go to Adjustment, select Levels, and I'll do the right-click and select clipping mask. In the levels you can start playing with these settings to make the overlay more right and visible, so I will just drag this a bit and make it more light, and maybe this one just a bit over here. Try to make the paper look subtle and realistic, but still keep in mind that your design is the most important, and the texture is here to give a just a final touch. This looks very good. But the last thing, I want to adjust are the colors, you can see that this paper gave everything a different yellow, green tone, so I want to fix that as well. I'll go to Adjustments again and select Hue and Saturation. Now once more I'll do to right-click and create a clipping mask. In that way, by using clipping masks, what I'm doing is adding all these effects just on the paper layer. When it comes to hue and saturation, I will just play a bit with these settings so I can maybe turn down to hue to minus eight or something. This looks better, and I can bring down the saturation as well, a bit more, maybe to minus 20, and let's bring the lightness a bit up. That's it. I'm really happy about this result. The paper texture looks absolutely amazing and it gives such a perfect finish to this whole design. If you compare this one to the one I did in Procreate, you can notice that this one has more realistic stained paper look, while the other one is more subtle. One good reason to add this final finish in Photoshop is that you're in control of the textures you want to use. Besides, it's always fun to find different kinds of textures and old papers, scan them and test them out to see what you'll get. Now if you're wondering, if you could do something like this in Procreate, the answer is yes and no, because it is possible to add a paper scan in your Procreate file and use different blending modes, but you wouldn't be able to adjust the levels and fine tune your scan for perfect final look. 8. Thank You: Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for spending time with me and watching this class. I hope you enjoyed this whole learning process and discovered something new, something exciting, and something you want to dive right into. Once you start your project, document it and share with us your matchbox art observations, thought process, sketches, and ultimately your finished design. By the way, I would love to hear what you think about this class. Make sure to rate and review it. As always, if you have any questions or something I was showing wasn't clear, feel free to ask anything in the discussion section of this class and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. To get notified about my next classes, follow me here on Skillshare. You can also keep in touch with me on Instagram @diujdi. I'm sending you lots of love and good vibes. I'll see you in the next one.