Postcard Studio: Monochromatic Stripes and Type

1. Introduction: Hello, everybody. This is Wiley. Okay. Yes, this is my assistant Wiley. Hi, everybody. This is Lucy. And I'm talking to you from my studio in Victoria, British Columbia. I'm a graphic designer, mixed media artist, and top teacher here on Skillshare, and I want to welcome you to my brand new My brand new class on Skillshare and it's called monochromatic stripes and Type, basically using strips of paper of the same color, but in different values and tone and adding type as a design element. So I think as a graphic designer, I've always been fascinated by typography as a design element. You look through magazines and old catalogs or children's book or calendars for big numbers, and you're going to find a whole bunch of material that you can use in your postcards. I'm also going to show you how to paint some book pages in different colors. You can use that too. Are you ready to create postcards in all the colors of the rainbow? What's your favorite color? I hope to see you in class. Bye. Look 2. Class Project: Your class project is to create a postcard in one color. You pick one color any color you want, and then collect some paper, collage paper in different values and tones and patterns and solids and then use typography as a design element in your postcard. In this one, I use pink tones. This one is in the teals and this one in the orange, yellow family, this one in the blues, and this one in the greens. The one we're going to do today is this one and I'm picking the color red. I'm going to show you how to do it. 3. Materials: So what we're going to do is make a monochromatic collage. I went through all my collage paper and separated by color, which is actually kind of fun thing to do. But I decided to I'm going to do a red one for this demo. But I have trays in different colors. This one is pink and teal and green. So as I, you know, work on other projects, I keep separating my collage paper in different colors and it's kind of really, I don't know, it's kind of a it's it feels a little nerdy thing to do, but it's actually really fun way to organize your collage papers. For the type part, what you want to look for is large headlines. I mean, you need all sizes, but it's really nice to have bigger type. Book covers are fun for that. And this is I think it's a flash cards can be cool book cloth. This is a spine of a book, and this is a front of a dictionary. But you can see where you can take a book apart and take some of the copy from there, the type. Also, if you use sheet music, you can find some really cool headlines. They always have headlines there and they're usually larger. This is from a from a book, from a kids book, I think that kids books are great because usually the type is larger, so this one is fun. I think I might want to use that or it's also by color, that would be a fun one to use. Packaging, old packaging.This is for soap, I I'm not sure. Cow milk, soap. Then you can use these big letters here. I mean, this is a brochure that I got for a festival. Again, this can look really good on a postcard. So yes, look at magazines, advertisement, anything, and then just cut out some headlines, some big type, small type maps. And then you need some numbers. You're going to need to get some big numbers somewhere. So bingo cards. If you have some, I don't know why I have those. I have no clue where I got them, but I collect all kinds of funny things. Again, bingo cards, wait. But calendars are great. Old calendars. This one is 1935, that's really old. Old advertisement like this in newspapers and stuff. They have big numbers there. This is a great one, this really old calendar. Collect some numbers and type. The other things we're going to use is a book page that we're going to paint in the color that we pick. So I am going to use a watercolor and a flat brush and then a container where you can actually mix it with water to paint our little book page. So you can have it in a book. I like to do it in a book like that so I can have access to all these great colors. But you're going to use the color that you going to use on your postcard to paint a page that you can use as collage paper. Then you'll need your postcard, which is the usual four and a quarter by six, and you can use recycle cardboard. You can use any kind of card stock that you want. Then we're going to need scissors, we need a pen, a ruler, and os stick, and we're ready to go. 4. Watercolour: We're going to grab our book and we're going to paint a page in watercolor to use on our postcard. I usually paint a full page in whatever color palette I decided to use on my postcard because it's really fun to use. So we're going to do red for this one, and I'm going to use this watercolor is called I think it's PyalRd I'm going to use a fair amount of water with it. But it's really up to you if you want to have it more dark, Um, there you go. It's a pretty color. You can put the water, right? On your page, doesn't really matter. So there you have it. It's that simple. We have one more piece of collage paper to use on our postcard and we can let it dry and go to the next step. 5. Guidelines: Before we start collaging our postcard, we're going to add some guidelines to help us out a little bit to get started. I'm going to split my postcard in two this is six by four and a quarter, so I'm going to do my first line for my guideline at 3 ". Then I'm going to do another line here and you can split it right in the middle if you want, but I'm just going to put it like this. Just in the middle, but not really. Then I'm going to do another line at the bottom here. And that's going to help us line up our paper stripes on our postcards. 6. Collage: Let's start with maybe the piece of paper that we use watercolor on. And the way that I The way that I do this, and you can do it another way if you want, you can put a glue on the back or you can just put it straight on your card. That's what I'm going to do for now. I'm just going to line it with the first line here like that. Then I'm going to cut it. Because I want to know what I'm doing here. So the first piece of paper. And I'm going to go and do this piece here. Again, you don't have to be so tied to this line here. You know, it's just a guideline. So it just helps to decide where you're going to put something, but you can cheat because I don't want to cut my type here. Now, let's see what else do you have? I usually mix patterns. I do a nice mix of different patterns and then solid color. Now I'm going to go to this line here. This middle line here. I just really helps to organize it somehow. But again, it's just a guideline. You don't have to follow any of it, and I'm going to cut it. What else? What else do you have? I want to put maybe a solid color here, may be some stripes here here. If I want to put something here, What you can do, you want to know how wide it's going to be, so you could mark it if you want. That's helpful. It's like a puzzle, really. You're going to go and see what works in what spot. Yeah, this is cool. I like that. Okay. All right. Yeah. And then I can take this piece and put it somewhere else. You know, I can bring it back here somewhere, you know. I'm going to keep that on the side, and then I'm going to keep going. And let's see what else do I have here? Oh, I can add more of this paper. I can put a big number somewhere. Where are my numbers? 15. Mm. Like this. No, it'd be like that. Right here. Yeah, that works pretty well. Let's do that. So when you think about the type part of it, it's really more like a design element that you're adding. But it's type. I probably use that somewhere. I do like this here. But I feel like I have too much too many patterns. Hm. It's cool. This one I made in my class on Skillshare, that's print stab and roll. This is pretty good. See, I want something that's going to go all the way down here. I'm going to look for something else. This one has a little gold on it. That's cool. I think this is a gel print. Pretty sure that's what it is. M. Okay, so if you want to have something in a specific place like I want this here. I want to know where this one stops, then I'm just going to fold it. Like this, and then either tear it or cut it. 7. Final Touches: So I'm almost done here. I think I'm just going to put this like that but I feel like I need some black. So let's see if I can add some black type. Maybe this here. Again, you can really if you want to go up here and do it like that, you can do that. But I'm going to stick to my grid here. Usually, I already don't follow the grid that closely, but this time, for some reason, it worked. I could totally stick to your grid if you want to. Now I want to put some black copy somewhere. Maybe I can put this here. That Niv let's see. Or I can put it here. I think I'm going to put it here and I'm just going to mark it so I can just cut it right here. That'll be that. I'm probably not going to go straight on my Postcard because I don't want to put glue everywhere. What do you think? I think we're done. I mean, the other thing you can add is if you want to add a little postage stamp. You really can. If you wanted to. That could be fun. You know, I don't know that it needs it on this particular postcard, but I might. What do you think? Yes. Yes. I hear a yes. When I teach a class on Zoom, I usually ask people what they think, so I can get an answer if it works or not, but I have to answer for you for this particular situation. But I think you would agree with me that it looks good. La you did it. I did it. Now it's your turn and once you're done, try a different color. Or try a multicolor one. I really like this concept of using typography as a design element, maybe because it's from my graphic design background, but I've been doing a lot of these postcards before. You can see where you can do it with multicolor and how much it adds to the graphic style of a postcard. The other thing that I think is fun is to use just strips. Stripes are really a great way to do a background or a postcard and these are honestly, it's just leftover pieces, but it looks really cool. Then you can also take all your strips and weave them together and stitch them together. Not a thing you can do. You can also, this is an exercise that I did in my book, collage joule, but it's basically using rectangles and you know, type and making a little library. And this is it. It's just rectangles. And you can create something more figurative if you want. There's so many things you can do. I hope that you have fun and that you do one in all the colors of the rainbow, and I will see you soon. Wow. 8. Thank You!: Thank you so much for taking my class. I can't wait to see your postcards and make sure you upload your postcards in the project section below and follow me here on Skillshare. You'll be the first one to find out about my next postcard class or audio class. So Avito.