Photoshop & Illustrator Techniques: Add Gold Foil Texture to Your Artwork

1. Welcome: Hi everyone. My name is Taylor Shannon, and I'm a surface pattern designer and illustrator. I really love using gold foil textures in my designs. It is a great way to add some extra fun to a piece of artwork. I often use foil textures on my designs to get a view of how actual gold foil will look once my design is on a real project. This can be a great skill to use when showing your artwork to potential clients. In this class, you'll learn how to apply a foil texture to part of your artwork in both Photoshop and Illustrator. You can use whichever program you're most comfortable with. Let's get started. 2. Your Project: Your project is to create a design featuring a foil texture and either Photoshop or Illustrator. Your project should show a before-and-after view of your design. For this class, you'll need access to Photoshop and or Illustrator, whichever program you're going to be working with. You'll need to have some artwork ready to go. It can be simple or complex as you want. I've provided three foil texture PNG files which can be found under the your project tab. You can use either of these textures in your design. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll start with Photoshop. 3. Photoshop 1: Clipping Masks: The first method we're going to use is to make a clipping mask with our foil over our design. I have my artwork open in Photoshop. My file is set to 18 inch by eight inch size just for reference. I have all my artwork elements broken up into different layers and folders. I have my flowers in this folder, my hand lettering, and then my background. Let's say I want to add a gold foil texture to my hand lettering. I'll simply go to where my PNG is and just drag it into Photoshop. Of course you want to adjust it towards covering up that entire layer. I'll hit Enter. Then I'll right-click on that layer to rasterize it. You want to make sure it's over the layer that you want to apply the clipping mask to. Now just hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard and hover in between the two layers until you see the black arrow and the white box pop up and then click. It's applied a clipping mask to this layer. If you click on the gold foil texture layer, you can drag it around and you can see how you can play with it and get it to where it looks the way you want it to. Let's say that we want to add a texture to these little dots and our image too. I'm going to go into my motifs folder, click on the dots folder and all of my dots layers are in this one folder. We can apply a texture to an entire folder too. I'll just do the same thing. I'm going to use this copper foil texture, drag it into my Photoshop document, and then make sure that it covers everything. Going to rasterize that layer. Then I'll just do the same thing, hold down Alt or Option and hover, and then click. It applied that texture to that entire folder. That's a really cool thing that you can do too. You can apply it to an entire group of objects and not just one specific layer. If I decided I don't want that texture on the dots, I can simply release the clipping mask by clicking on that layer and then right-clicking and going down to release clipping mask. Then I can just delete that layer. In the next class I'm going to show you how to use a Layer Mask to kind of paint on your gold foil texture. It's a really fun technique. I'll see you there. 4. Photoshop 2: Layer Masks: For this technic we are going to apply a Layer Mask and it'll allow us to paint on our texture. I'm going to go ahead and drag my gold foil texture on to my document, and I just have a black background. I'm going to go ahead and let that fill up the entire thing and then I'll rasterize it. Without layer selected, go down to the bottom of your Layers menu and click "Add Layer Mask." Right now the middle layer mask is white, so it's letting this whole layer shine through. If it was black, then it would be blocking out the gold foil. So we want it to be black, I want to invert this. I need to make sure that I have this white rectangle selected and I'll go to Image, Adjustments and Invert. Basically what we are going to be doing is knocking out part of this layer mask by using white and black. So we have to use white since it's black right now, and so you want your foreground color to be white and your background color to be black. If you have other colors over here, you can always click this little icon right here, or hit "D" on your keyboard, and it'll default to white with black. With white selected, I'm going to go to my Brushes and I'm just using the Kyle's paint box brushes. I have some saved over here. One of them that I like is a Natural Sponge brush. I can make the size bigger or smaller with a left and right bracket keys on my keyboard and I'll just start. Just go in and just showing you for an example. It's almost like you're painting on that texture. It's really cool. You can use different types of brushes, I really likes the Supreme Spatter brush. This one is almost like spray paint or something. It's really neat. You can see how you could add really cool effects to your designs. Now if you'll look over here at the layer mask is turned, those areas that we painted white. If you wanted to get rid of these and erase them, all you would do is toggle back and forth. You can hit X on your keyboard to go back and forth quickly and choose the block. Then you could choose a brush and gone here and essentially erase what you've already done and it's going to erase it over here. You can see it, turn it black again. You're really just painting with the black and white brushes, but it's knocking out that mask to make it appear as though you're painting with that gold foil texture. I'm going to show you a way that you can use the clipping mask technique with the layer mask technique to make some cool effects to your artwork. I'm going to bring in this gold foil texture again. In a rasterize it real quick and then I'm going to bring that in front of the hand lettering and make a clipping mask. On that same layer I'm actually going to make a layer mask too. I want to turn my hand lettering white so that it all blended with this background. I'm going to double-click on that layer, choose Color Overlay and then I already had white selected but if you didn't, you could click on the color and then choose "White", choose "Okay" and then I'm going to right-click so I can rasterize that layer so that there's not a layer style added to it. I'm going to go ahead and show that layer again and then I'm going to click on the "Layer Mask." I'll make sure I have black selected and I'll go over to my Brushes, I'm going to choose "Spatter" and I can paint on top of that. It's taking away or is actually adding to this mass. So it's taking away the gold foil. You can grunge it up a little bit. Then if you take away too much, you can always go back to white and then add that back in there. It's changing the mask over here on the side. I'm going to do the same thing with these little weaves around my hand lettering. I'll bring in the copper foil texture, rasterize it, and then create a clipping mask. Again, I want this to be white just so that I can take out part of it. So double-click Color Overlay, Okay and then I'll go ahead and rasterized this layer too. Then on the copper foil layer I'll do a Layer Mask and make sure I black selected and then same thing. I'll just go on here and start painting on top of that. You can get some really neat affects, it looks like you've actually used foil and in the process, some of it didn't get completely stuck to the paper. It's a really neat technique to fake in Photoshop. Then again, toggle back and forth between black and white, you can add more. I really like using these effects with my artwork and I really hope that you can find ways to implement them in your artwork too. There's so many different possibilities with this and it's just a really cool way to fake gold foil in Photoshop and it looks pretty realistic too. In the next lesson I'm going to go over how to create a clipping mask in Illustrator. So if you'd like to use Illustrator, then I hope you'll check that lesson out too. So I'll see you there. 5. Illustrator 1: Clipping Masks: The first technique in Illustrator, I've got this vectorized heart right here. I want to apply a clipping mask to this heart. I'm going to do the same thing I did before. Drag in, one of these PNG's, I'm going to scale it down. Then I need this heart to be in the front. I'm going to hit Command, Shift right bracket on my keyboard, or go to Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. Put that in front of the texture. Then I'll select both of them, and you can either go to Object, Clipping Mask, Make, or hit Command 7 on your keyboard. Now I have a clipping mask. If you wanted to move this texture around, you can simply, either click A, on your keyboard, or go over here, and click on the direct selection tool and you can move it around, You can even scale it, if you make sure that you have just the texture selected, you can go back to your block arrow tool, and then scale that down. Then make sure you click on the direct selection tool again, to drag it up, to scale it. If you want to release the clipping mask, you'll make sure you have your black selection tool selected. Select the whole thing, and go to Object, Clipping Mask, Release. It always does this, this top image. It'll apply a no stroke, no fill to it, and you would have to go, and add a stroke, or a fill. But that's the way I'll typically, apply a texture to a design, in Illustrator. When you're using a clipping mask in Illustrator, you have to make sure that each piece is one path. What I mean by that is, I'll go ahead and bring this gold foil texture into my document. Whatever you're going to make a clipping mask out of, you have to make sure that it's one path. If I wanted to make a clipping mask, with the texture on top of this hand lettering, I have to do each piece separately. Right here, the P, and the E don't cross each other, so I have to do two separate clipping mask for those. I'm going to bring the P to the front. I'm going to make a copy of this, and just drag it over. You can make a copy, and drag by holding down Alt or Option, and then dragging the object over, and then I'll select both. Hit Command 7, and make a clipping mask. If I had tried to do that with this whole word, since these two are connecting, it wouldn't work. You'll have to do the same thing with the rest of the word. Then Command 7, make a clipping mask. The word, on, is okay because it's all connected, and then earth is okay too, because it's all connected to each other. That's the only thing when you're doing a clipping mask in Illustrator, since these are vectors, they have to all be one path. Let's see. Select the texture, the word, and then Command 7. There we go. Again, if you want to move this around, you can use your direct selection tool. But I just wanted to throw that out there. If you are trying to make a clipping mask out of something that's not one full object, like these two that are separate, you have to make two separate clipping mask. You have to keep that in mind whenever using a clipping mask option in Illustrator. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to use one of these textures, as a pattern swatch. That's another great technique, that I use In illustrator a lot. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Illustrator 2: Pattern Swatches: For this next technique, we're going to bring our gold foil texture in again, and then we're going to drag it over into our swatches panel. You'll want to click on it, hit embed, and then drag it over, and it turns it into a pattern. I have all these vector images right here. I'll just select all of them and then choose that pattern, and now they're filled. The only problem is there's that line right there. That line is there because this is not an actual pattern, is just a square. If I try to turn it into a pattern, you can see there's a line there. That's not going to work. The best way to fix this is to go into each individual shape and move the pattern around so that you're not seeing that line. What I would do is click on this shape, go to object, transform and move. You want to make sure that transform objects is not selected. You want to select transform patterns and click preview. Then we'll go up to your horizontal and vertical little drop-down boxes and you can choose. I just play around with this and you want to keep inching it down until that line has gone. There you go. Now that looks good. You'd have to do that for each of these, you could actually select multiples and do the same thing, object, transform, move. It looks like it kept the same position, so it looks like that one's good. You can also change the scale of your texture too. If I want to select that and go to object transform and scale. Again, I want make sure that transform patterns is selected and now is set at a 100 percent, I could scale it down to 50 percent. Then of course I'll have to go back up and change. I'll have to move it. It looks like that's good. That's a great way to fill multiple shapes with that texture, using it as a pattern. I would use that same technique on this illustration right here. Like I was saying before, the hand lettering. This can be a little bit easier if you use the pattern fill selection. I'm going to select all of my hand lettering and then select my gold foil. You can see right now, there are a few issues. I want to scale this down because it's a little too big for me. I'm going to go ahead and go up to object transform, scale, and I like it at 50 percent, so I'll hit okay. Some of these have the line running through them, so I'm going to have to play around with those and fix those. We're going to go ahead and ungroup everything. I'll focus on the sun right now. I'll do the same thing, object, transform and move. It looks like I might have to play with the horizontal because this line, it needs to go either to the left or to the right to get rid of that line. I'm just going to start putting in different numbers. I still see it. Let's see. Five. Still showing up right there at the very tip. I'll do 5.5. Let's see. That looks good. I'll hit enter. Then you really have to check. It looks like right here there's that reset line and there may be a line right there too. Let's move that one around. It looks like what I already had for the position before is pretty good. I don't see any issues. That looks good. All of the other pieces seem to be pretty good. Like I was saying, this may be a better option and the clipping mask because you can do everything all at once and then just play around with the scale and just move the pattern around. That's one of my favorite ways to use gold foil in my designs. If I wanted to add it to other parts of this, I can just click on them and add it. Then play with the scale a little bit. To move that one. It looks like it kept the same position, so it looks pretty good. We'll move that one too. It looks good. There you go. That's another great way to add a texture to your design. You can do that with any texture that you bring in here, just to embed it and then drag it over to your swatches panel, and then just fill whatever vector shape that you want with it. 7. Thank You!: I really hope you enjoyed this class and learn some fun new tricks to add some character to your artwork. I hope you'll share your finished project in the project tab so we can see what awesome artwork you created. Remember, you can use these techniques with any images or textures you want to fill your designs with. If you'd like to connect on Instagram, you can find me at Taylor Shannon_. I love connecting with fellow creatives. Thank you so much for taking this skill share class, and I'll see you in the next one.