Postcards in Procreate: Vintage-Inspired Text Effects

1. Introduction: If you love illustration, travel, vintage design and digital art, stick around because I'm gonna be teaching you how to make super cool vintage style postcards in procreate. In this class, we'll be starting with the destination of your choice and creating a one-of-a-kind illustrated postcard complete with both 3D lettering and as a deterrent effect. This is a great way to pay homage to your hometown or favorite travel destination or fictional location. You can use what you learn to create postcards. You can mail, self or sell to local shops and create travel posters to make announcements like a wedding, save the date, holiday card. So much more. The application for the skills that you learn here are near endless. Plus you can use the techniques from this class and so many other ways beyond postcards. I'm Lisa Bardot and illustration artist and teacher. I've taught millions of people around the world how to find their creativity. You're drawing on the iPad. I love teaching people about the physical things that you can make using digital art. I've taught people how to make stickers, greeting cards, coloring pages, repeating patterns you could print on fabric, goods, just to name a few. In this class, you'll learn a lot about manipulating text and drawing and illustration in Procreate. You'll learn how to find fonts and import them to procreate, how to warp and distort texts. And you'll also learn how to do several texts effects, including rounded corners, outlines, 3D block shadows, and inner strokes. I'll walk you through researching a location or topic. Ideation, sketching, layout, and entire illustration process from a rough sketch to a final rendered, will discuss how to print your artwork, including setting up Ready procreate file and printing at home versus their printer. You will also pick up a ton of new knowledge about using Procreate. As I walk you through my complete illustration process of creating this postcard design from start to finish in real-time with plenty of procreate tips and tricks along the way. For this class, we'll be using an iPad and the app Procreate. So it's great if you already have some knowledge about how to use Procreate. But I will be explaining every step along the way so that you can learn, no matter your skill level, whether you're a beginner or an advanced artist, you'll be able to create something that you're going to learn. As a student of this glass, you receive a resource pack full of goodies I made that will help you make postcards quickly and easily. This resource pack includes a customer procreate brush set with 12 lettering guides for postcard back designs you can use for your finished postcard and to procreate files containing print at home templates. So you can print your postcards on your home printer. Plus, I'll let you know how to get one of the premium procreate brushes that I'll be using this off for free. So if you're ready to explore some travel destinations while making a project, there'll be proud of your iPad and let's begin. Postcards. 2. Class Project: Your project for this class is going to be to create your own custom postcard design. You'll start by choosing a destination or location. And I will give you some ideas for what you can choose. And then you're going to do some research on that place and come up with some sketches and some ideas for some of the things that you can incorporate into the illustration. And then you're going to create what's going to be the star of your postcard design, which is going to be some bold lettering with lots of fun text effects. And I'll walk you through how to do all of that. And then you'll finish it all up by designing a background for the front of your postcard. So when you're all done making your postcard design, head to the Projects tab of the Skillshare page and create a project so we can see what you've made. Don't forget that or about your process as well. You can talk about the destination that you chose and why you selected. You can share about the research process. You could share your sketches and just anything else about your process that might help others learn and might help you reflect on the experience. I cannot wait to see your postcard design. 3. Giveaway!: To celebrate the launch of this class on Skillshare, I'm doing a big giveaway. I'm gonna be giving away my master bundle, which is my complete collection of Procreate brushes. It's 332 brushes, 15 sets, and it also includes my magic paper texture campuses. To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is posterior project that you've made in this class to the Projects tab. By June 24th, I'll pick one student at random and I will post you it is in the class discussion. Good luck and thanks for being here. I cannot wait to see your projects. 4. Tools & Materials: Before we get started, let's talk about some of the things that you'll need as a student of this class. I'll talk to you about the resource pack, how to get it, what's inside, and also talk to you about fonts, how to find them, how to download them, and how to install them into Procreate. Let's go for this class. We're going to be using an iPad and the app Procreate. I am currently using procreate 5.2.6. So if things look a little bit different for you, you might have a different version. And I'll also be using an Apple pencil. The other thing that you'll need is the resource pack for this class. You can find a link to download that on the project and resources tab. Once you download the resource pack file, you're going to find it in your downloads folder. So if you go into your files app and go to downloads, you'll find it here. It's called a postcard class resources, and it's a zip file, so you just have to tap it to decompress it. And then you can open it up. And inside we've got a brush set. We've got a folder with some postcard backs, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And then we have these print at home templates. So before we get started in this class, you want to install the brush set and all you have to do for that is to tap it and it's automatically going to import into procreate. So if you go to your brushes, you can see here on the list of brush sets, I've got one called lettering guides. And in here I have 12 different lettering guides with different kind of letter lettering shapes, lots of wavy and slant, D and arc and all that kinda stuff. And there's actually a double version for each of them. So there's one for one line of texts and then there's another 14 or two lines of text. So we'll get into how to use those in a little bit. The other thing you'll probably want is some fonts that are going to work well with these designs. So there's places to get fonts, all of the Internet, lots of really great free options. One resource that I like to use is Google Fonts. And I'm actually going to be using a couple of Google fonts in the designs that I'm going to show you. So let me show you how to import fonts into procreate. So here we got fonts.google.com. These are all free to use fonts that you can download and pop into Procreate real quick. So one of the fonts that I know is going to work really well is called Erica. I'm just going to search for that and it's called actually Erica one. So there is the font that I want. I'm gonna go ahead and tap on it. And then I'm going to tap here where it says download family and then choose download. And as you can see, this is where my downloads are going to be. I'm going to open that up and I'm going to tap on Eric one. It's gonna go to my downloads folder. I will tap it to open it up, open that new folder. And then here is the file. So you can try tapping the font file and it might automatically import into procreate. But if that doesn't work, there's another way that you can do it. You're going to drag out the font file and then go here where it says on my iPad, you're going to find the procreate folder and you're going to drop it into the folder called Fonts. So if you have a lot of fonts to import, That's a great way to kinda just drag them and install them all at once. So here's how to find a few more fonts that will work really well for this type of project, we are looking for fonts that are really big and bold and thick. So you can go here where it says font properties. And you can check the box for thickness and then you can pull the slider all the way over and you can sort by thickness. So there's Erik one. I can go down a little bit to get some other options. Another font is the limb web. I think I also downloaded candidate, but a lot of these fonts that are big and thick will work really, really well. Paschen one is another one that you can download, and then other types of fonts that we might need for the greetings from part or any other texts that you might want are some like retro style kind of script fonts. One font that works really well is called Damien, and here's a preview of that. And another font is called yesteryear in here, a preview of that. Okay, if you have everything you need, let's go ahead and get started. 5. Inspiration & Examples: The design style we're trying to create in this class is inspired by vintage travel postcards from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. One of the main characteristics of this style is big, bold letters that are filled with illustrations, graphics, or photography. The name of the destination was usually done in a 3D block letter style. And it usually says something like greetings from, or it had a state motto or something about that location. And often the backgrounds were filled with more illustration. To get you inspired, I've created a Pinterest board full of examples of this type of vintage style postcard design. You can find a link to the Pinterest board on the Projects and Resources page, you'll find lots of examples of this style of postcard that were popular in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as well as some contemporary versions of this design. So take some time now to look through the board and get inspired. And if you're ever feeling stuck during this process, refer back to it to get some ideas. 6. Choosing your Destination: So before you can get to drawing anything, you'll first need to decide what destination or location you'd like to use for your postcard. Now, there are a lot of different approaches that you can take when it comes to choosing a destination. So of course, you could go with the obvious and choose a travel destination. And some ideas for that. Our cities, states, countries, national parks, amusement parks, landmarks and other tourist attractions, natural wonders, specific regions, bodies of water. The possibilities are endless. There are so many different location-based options that you could choose. In fact, if you're going on a trip, you can make sketches of all the things that you see along the way. And then use those sketches to create a wonderful piece of artwork to commemorate your trip. Another option is to create a postcard that's dedicated to your hometown or the city that you're living in currently, I think it would be such a cool way to pay tribute to a place that you're very familiar with and maybe share some of the lesser known features of that place by creating a postcard of it. The destination you choose for your postcard doesn't have to be one that exists in real life. You could choose a fantasy or a fictional location. So some ideas for that are the Emerald City, Never Land, Hogwarts, Jurassic Park, Springfield from The Simpsons, monstrous Dulles Hill Valley. You could literally just pick your favorite movie, show or video game and it create a postcard from that. And that'll be a great way to create some fan art of something you love. What have you created a postcard that wasn't about a location at all? You could create one that's about a state of mind or an emotional state. Artist, Lisa Angler has a really great series of postcards that she made. And they're all about being an introvert and imposter syndrome and they're really, really awesome. You can also use this project to create sort of a self portrait. You could let her your name and then incorporate into the illustration some of your favorite things or stuff from your life or family members, or picture of yourself. And I think that'll be really fun to. Another idea is to use this technique to create sort of a family card or something that could be a holiday card. And I actually have a lesson at the end of the course where I'll walk you through doing something like that with photography. And then one more idea, kinda going back to the locations is what if it wasn't like a far-off destination, but it was something really personal. Like it could be your living room or your couch, or your backyard, or just something, something on a much smaller scale that's important to you. I think that would be such a fun concept to explore with this idea. If you're having trouble deciding what to do, choose a place that you love or something that you're really familiar with. As the example that I'm gonna be teaching you in this class. I chose to do my home state of California. It's a place that I absolutely love. I still live here. And that's going to make it a lot easier for me to decide what illustrations to do. So definitely choose a place that is really interesting to you or you think that you know a lot about it, where it's just a place that you love. 7. Research & Sketching: So now that you've selected your destination, it's time to start doing a little bit of research and thinking about what types of things you're going to be illustrating within the letters of your location. So I'll give you a few ideas based on what type of destination you chose. If you're doing a city or a state, you can think of landmarks, buildings, food items at that place is known for mascots, insignia. So that would be like your state bird, state flowers, date tree, that kind of stuff. You can also think about other attractions, things that the location is famous for. If you're doing a fictional location. The things that you can research, our characters, settings, or locations within that world or that location, fictional location. You can think of props and objects or other things that are found within the movie, game or TV show. If you're doing something personal or you're doing something about your family, you can think of sentimental objects. You could do portraits of your family members. You could do other things that have happened in your life together or family symbols and things like that. So be sure to spend enough time doing research and creating sketches so that when we get to that part of the illustration, you'll have a lot of things to choose from when you're laying out what you want to put within your letters. Now, I'll get started with my California's postcard and I'll walk you through the process of researching that. Now that I know what location I would like to do for my postcard, I'm gonna go out and do a little research of some landmarks and other geographical things or images that I can include in my postcard. So I'm gonna go ahead and just open up a procreate canvas so I can do a little bit of sketching. I'm gonna go ahead and tap the plus sign here. And for now, I'll just choose screen size since this is just gonna be some sketches. The other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring up the split screen view so that I can have some google images on one side and some sketching on the other. So here I've got a Safari window open. I'm gonna go ahead and tap these three little dots up at the top, and then choose the one with the two columns here. And then for the second app, I'm going to choose Procreate. And now I have a split screen view. I like to make this a little smaller and that side, just by dragging that little gray handle over. Another way that you can bring up split-screen views just to drag this dock up from the bottom and then find the app would be Safari in my case, and just drag it over to the side and then you can resize it. Over here. I'm going to research some California's things that I might include in my postcard illustration. I'm literally just going to type in california things. I kinda have some ideas in mind already because I'm really familiar with California where I live. There's a lot of really famous stuff in California, but this also is a good way to get some ideas. So one of the things I knew I wanted to include was the Golden Gate Bridge. So I'm just gonna do some little very simple sketches. This is just kinda get a brainstorm of stuff that I might include. So I'm gonna go up to my brushes and you can use any brush you want to sketch with. I'm using my sketching pencil from my pencil box set. This is the brush set that I created. And I'm just going to choose a dark color. And now I'm just kinda just sketch just a really basic representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. So kinda has these cables suspension. It's got these little things across there. And as I, you know, when I go and I do my final illustration, I'll research and I'll pull it more photos. But this is just to give me an idea of something that I could draw. I've got the Hollywood sign, which I think would be a really cool addition to have. So I'm just going to write that in there. So again, super-duper, basic palm trees, absolutely. I think I'll just sketch a little palm trees here. Just like that. Again, these are just super simple. You, in the end, these drawings aren't going to be super, super detailed because they're on, they're very small on a postcard there within the shapes of letters, so they don't have to be very detailed in the end anyways, let's see what else we got. Something that comes to mind for me because I just spent a lot of time in the mountains, is a redwood trees, so I'm just going to draw some trees like that. You can also search for other things like California Redwoods, I'll type that in. So of course you want to be searching for the things that have to do with the destination that you have chosen. So let's say it's hard to get a picture of the entire Redwoods. So we're just going to draw some kind of little stylized redwood trees and then we can research that more later. I really want to include the ocean as well. So I might include like a wave. So I can just search for wave here. No, thank you. So again, I'm just going to do something super basic. Maybe there's a lot of foam. There's our wave. We don't need to do a lot right now. Let's see. Oh, I know I want to include some California poppies and I've drawn a lot of puppies before. So I'm just gonna do a really basic sketch of those with some leaves. I know I'm going to want to include some poppies for sure. Little bud. Let's think what other california things can I include? I'm gonna go back to my original search. I definitely want to include some mountains. We have a lot of great mountains here. There's Yosemite. I think I'm just gonna do some like maybe just some general, basic looking mountains. I could do like a half dome or something like that, but I think I might just keep it simple. And let me think if there's anything else I might want to include. I like the plants at Joshua Tree National Park so I can't spell it, Joshua Tree. It go to images and maybe I'll include some of these crazy looking tree things, like spiky things at the end. I think it helps to not get caught up in the details in these sketches. Like I said, because you want to keep these, these drawings pretty simple when it comes to the final art anyways, so already in this mindset of not getting too complicated with your sketches, I think is going to help you out a lot. Plant is down there. And all of these elements are gonna be like overlapping each other as well. I definitely want to include a sudden because California is known for being very sunny. In Sacramento where I live, It definitely is, especially in summer, gets really, really hot. So of course you can keep going, keep researching, drawing lots of little sketches of things that you might include. So go ahead and spend some time researching, sketching out some landmarks and other little illustration ideas. And then we will jump into creating our lettering. Once you've finished with all your sketches, we're gonna go ahead and export this out into our camera roll so that we can use it as a reference. Later on. I'm gonna go ahead and close my script split screen view by just dragging this little handle off to the side like that. And then I'm gonna go here to the little wrench icon and I'm going to choose Share. And then I'm just going to share it as a PNG. And I'm just going to tap Save Image. And that will save it to my camera roll. Now that we've done that, we're ready to start getting into our lettering. 8. Creating a Canvas: Next we're going to talk about creating a procreate canvas and what size you should use to create your postcard design. So now that we've done a little bit of research and sketching, it's time to create a canvas so that we can create our final design. So we're gonna go up to the little plus sign here in the upper right. And we're going to create a new canvas template by tapping the plus sign right here. There's a few things you'll want to keep in mind as you're setting up your canvas. The postcard that I'm going to be designing is a four by six postcard. It's one of the standard US postcard size is. So that's what I'm gonna be using. So when you're getting ready to set up a canvas and you intend to print it. I usually stick to setting up in inches here instead of pixels. So let's say we wanted to set up a six inch by four inch canvas. And at 300 DPI, that will print great at that size. That being said, I recommend using a much higher resolution Canvas. And one of the main reasons for that is as you're transforming things under Canvas, moving them around, manipulating them. The lower resolution cameras that you have, the more obvious you're going to see degradation and like it might get pixelated and start looking bad. So I tried to work as high resolution as I can. So four by six at 300 DPI is roughly like 1800 by 1200 pixels, and that's pretty small. If I bumped the DPI up to 600. Now, if you do the math 600 times six, we've got 3600 by 2400 pixel canvas, which is bigger. What you really want to pay attention to is your maximum layers. And the maximum layers is going to depend on a couple of different things. One is, of course, how big your canvas is, how large resolution it is. The second thing is actually your hardware, your iPad. The more RAM your iPad has, the moral layers you're gonna get. I'm gonna be setting my postcard up at pretty much 6 thousand by 4 thousand pixels is very large, but that's what I wanna do, which would roughly equate to a thousand dpi. And as you can see, I have 74 layers, but you might not have that many of you have. I've got an iPad Pro, it's maxed out for hardware pretty much. You might want to do less, but I could print this as poster if I wanted to. So that's another thing to think about is, is if you plan on creating something and printing it larger than a postcard, you might want to work with a larger size. And then one more consideration to make is bleed. If you're creating a design that's gonna go all the way to the edge of the piece of paper. It's gonna be printed on. It actually gets printed larger and then trimmed down and some of the design is going to get trimmed off. So standard practice for bleed is 1.25 inches all the way round. So if you add a quarter-inch to each of these dimensions, then you'll have extra room for bleed. You just need to make sure not to put anything too, the edge of your Canvas because it will get cut off. So that's another thing to keep in mind. I'm gonna go ahead and just use this size again, adjusted DPI to be less if you need more layers. I'm just going to call this postcard and DPI. It's big. And then I'll click Create. 9. Placing a Lettering Guide: So I've just created a procreate canvas. Now I'm going to teach you about how to use the lettering guides that came in your resource pack. If you miss how to get that, go back to the tools and materials video, and that'll tell you how to get it and how to install that. So as I'm thinking about this piece and I've looked at a lot of examples of this type of postcard. I know I want to have my text here really big in the center and I'll probably do like greetings from over here and then maybe a little slogan or an illustration of down here in the lower right corner. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use my lettering guides to place my text. So I'm gonna go up to my brushes and I'm going to go to my lettering guides brush set. So this is a part of the class resources. I showed you how to install this in an earlier video. We've got 12 different brushes or 12 different guides in here. There's six designs, and each design has a single and a double line options. So there's the single upswing and then this has two lines of texts and the same for all the rest. So I think for this piece, I'm going to choose the upswing. I really liked that kinda, kinda wavy, kind of slanted design. So I'll choose that brush and then I'm going to choose black for my color. And I'm going to make sure that my brush size is all the way up. Then I'm just going to tap on my screen and stamp the lettering guide. Now that I've done that, I mean it's transformed, kinda move this around. So I'm gonna go over to the arrow and choose Transform. And then I'm just going to make it bigger and kind of move it around like that. And if I know my word is California, which is a lot of letters, so probably won't stretch it this big. So I can always go here to the freeform transform if I want to make it a little bit shorter, like that. But then I kinda lose some of my wave. So I can go over here to distort and grab the edge. I can go up a little bit more like that. So you can kinda play around and get it to be the size and the shape that you want it to be before you add your text. 10. Distorting Text: Now that you've got your lettering guide setup, let's go ahead and start adding some text to our design. And then I'll show you how to manipulate it into our different shapes. That so it's not just like a flat straight line of text. So we've got our lettering guide here. We're gonna go ahead and add our text now. So to do that, I'm gonna go over to the Actions menu, which is the little wrench icon. And then I'm gonna go to Add. And then I'm going to choose Add Text. And you'll see some text will appear before we start typing anything in, we're going to set the font. So to do that, we're gonna go here to the lethal to little a's over on the right-hand side. Then we've got a list of fonts that we can choose from here. And again, we want to choose a font that is nice and thick, not with a little thin parts, like lots of lots thick and bold so that we have lots of room to put our illustrations. And one of the fonts I mentioned in an earlier video is Erica, one. That's really great font. It's nice and bold and thick, and it works really well for this. So I showed you how to find that and download it in an earlier video. And then you can adjust things like the size, which we don't need to do right now, but like Kerning and tracking, spacing of letters, all that stuff. But for now we're just going to keep it simple as it is. And we go back to the keyboard and go ahead and start typing. So I'll just tap here with this little keyboard icon. And I'm going to put it in caps lock because I want it to be in all caps. And I'm going to type California. Just like that. The next part is going to be to distort and transform this texts so that we can fit within our lettering guide here. So I'm gonna go to the Transform tool here, move this here. And I'm just going to start by making it as big as lettering guide. So now as long as that, and then I know I do want the text to be a little bit stretched so that it can fit in here. So I'm gonna go over to free form. I'm just going to drag it down and make it a little bit taller like that. And now I need to slant the text. So we're gonna sort of shear it and we're gonna do that with the distort transform. So right here we're going to tap distort. And then to do that, you're actually going to grab one of the edges. So one of the sides, I'll just grab that and move it straight up. And then I'll grab this side and move it straight down. So now our text has that slanted effect. And then the final transformation is we're going to use warp to create that wave. So I'm going to tap right here where it says warp and a grid will appear and you can actually tap and drag anywhere within these grids, like literally any point within this grid, and kind of move things to where you want them to go. So for example, I'm going to tap right here and just drag this side up to meet up with that line. I'm going to drag right here to make it meet down there. I'll grab the a, kind of bring it down there. And I can kinda shows this up a little bit. Same thing here. I'll move that up a little bit that down so you kinda just keep working with it until you get it to be the size and shape that you want it to be. One thing to know is when you're dragging, you want to mostly keep dragging straight up and down. If you drag to the side, your text is gonna get a little distorted that way. So maybe you want that, maybe you don't. But in my case, I want everything to still have those nice verticals like that. So I'm making sure to drag just straight up or down. Okay. And you're gonna get a pretty close. It doesn't have to be exact, but pretty close to what you've gotten, the lettering guide. Alright, so I think that looks pretty good. So I'm gonna go ahead and basically commit all of those transformations by tapping the little arrow icon again. So I'm going to tap that. And when I do that, you'll see this red bar disappear really quickly. And that says text layers rasterize. And all that means is that now this text is not editable anymore. So you want to make sure before you go through all those transformations that you've spelled everything correctly because at this point we can't change what the text says. And then finally I'm going to go up to the layers and I am going to turn off the layer with the lettering guide. And there's my text. 11. Text Effects: Overview: Alright, we're about to get into creating some really cool texts effects in Procreate. Over the next few videos, I'm gonna be showing you how to add rounded corners to letters, how to create an outline or an outer stroke around letters. We're also going to be creating a drop shadow like a block shadow effect with shading. And then finally we're going to be doing an inner stroke or an inline felt like it outlined within the letters. So let's continue on and we'll learn how to do all those fun texts effects. So now it's time to add some text effects to our lettering. We're gonna be doing a few different things here. We're going to be rounding out these letters, making them a little less angular. We're going to be adding an outline around all the letters. We are going to be creating lists like block, drop shadow effect. And we're going to also be creating an inline, so kind of like an outline within all the letters. And we're gonna be doing all of that using a technique that involves blur and color fill. Unfortunately, Procreate doesn't have the ability to add a stroke around text or around an object. So we're kind of using a little bit of a hack to do that today. 12. Text Effects: Rounded Corners: The first thing I wanna do is round these letters a little bit. They're very angular, which maybe you like that, maybe you don't, but I kinda liked them a little more rounded, like, especially in the corners and stuff like that. So I'll show you a technique for doing that first. I'm gonna go up to the Adjustments menu, which is a little wrench here. And we're going to choose Gaussian blur. So I'm going to tap that and I'm going to blur it just a little bit, maybe like 5% or so. I've kind of already, you can see that those corners are a little bit more round, but everything is soft, so we need to sharpen that up as well. So let's get out of the blur tool and now we're going to use the selection tool to create a more kind of sharpened version of that. So I'm gonna go over here to my selection tool, and I'm gonna make sure I'm choosing Automatic here. And I also want to make sure you do not have color fill selected because you'll have some unexpected results. We will use color fill a little bit later, just not right now. I'm going to just tap anywhere outside of the letters and then I can slide my pencil back and forth to adjust my selection. So I'll show you that all actually zoom in so you can see a little bit better. So I'm going to tap and I can kind of adjust how much I have it selected. So that's a little hard to visualize, but I'm gonna do about that much. And then I also need to make sure to tap in these little spaces here. They're called counters, the little spaces in-between letters. So this is essentially what my letters are going to look like, but I need to I'm basically going to fill this but on a new layer. So the first thing I need to do is choose Invert. I'm going to tap invert. So now instead of the background selected, I have the letters selected. And then I'm going to go up to my layers, tap the plus sign, and I'm going to choose Fill layer, tap that and then choose Fill layer. And that's going to fill that layer with black. But it was like a rounded selection. So I can actually turn off the previous layer. And now I have these cool like rounded letters instead of those angular letters. So if you ever wanted to make your letters more bubbly, this is the way that you can do that. Then I'm going to go into my layers and I can just delete that blurred layer. I don't need it and just to keep things clean, I'm just going to go ahead and delete it. 13. Text Effects: Outlines: Now so far we've just been using black, but now we're going to start to have outlines and we need to see what everything looks like. So I'm just going to introduce a color. At this point. We haven't done any color planning or anything like that. So I'm just going to choose any color and then we're going to adjust it later. So I'm gonna go to my colors and I'm already in this realm of blue-green, so I'm just going to choose a very light version of that color. And one of my favorite ways to change the color of an entire layer is to use Alpha Lock and then fill it with color. So to do that, I swipe to the right with two fingers on the layer. Or you can choose Alpha Lock from the menu here, and you'll see there's checkerboard pattern, so that means it's on. And then, then I would tap on the layer and choose Fill layer. And that's going to fill every pixel on that layer regardless of how transparent is or whatever with that color. So this is a useful way to just make sure you change the entire layer, sometimes color dropped to fill in all the areas. So that's the way that I like to do that. The next effect we're gonna do is we're going to add an outline around the outside of all the letters. So we're gonna go back to our layers. We're going to duplicate this layer. And then on the bottom of those two layers, we're going to turn off alpha lock so you can swipe to the right with two fingers or you can tap it and uncheck alpha lock. Then we're going to use that same technique of blurring to create this outline effect. So let's go over to our adjustments menu and we're going to choose Gaussian Blur again. And I'm going to blur that to about 10%. You don't need to blur it a lot. Then I'll go over to my selection tool just like before. Make sure I'm on automatic selection and slide back and forth to adjust how big I want the outline to be. I think I'll just do it like that much. And we're going to fill this with color on a new layer. But first, we're going to choose Invert, just like we did before. It's going to invert our selection. So it's just the letters, not the background. And then we're gonna go to our layers and then tap the plus sign. And we're going to fill it with color, but I want a little bit darker of a color. So I'm gonna go over to my colors. And I'm just going to get a little bit darker version of that same color. These aren't my final colors for the piece, but we're just going to work with we have for now. Don't worry about color later. Now I'll go back to my layers. I'm going to tap the layer, this new layer created and choose Fill layer. So in my layers, I can delete this blurry layer that was just to kinda temporarily get us there. So I'll delete that. And as you can see, we have a nice outline around our letters. 14. Text Effects: Block Shadow: Now we're ready to create the block shadow effect. So we're going to basically kinda make this into a 3D object. So let's do that now. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this new outline layer. So I'm going to swipe left and choose Duplicate. And then I'm going to use the bottom layer. And I'm actually going to make this an even darker color. So I'll just go to my colors. Let's get a little bit darker version and then I can just fill it with color. You can't really see. But if I turn that one off, you can see it's darker. So essentially what we're gonna be doing is we're going to drag this new layer out a little bit like this. Oops. Make sure I'm in free form. We're going to drag it out like this and then we're going to connect this so it looks like a block. But I'm going to show you a little trick to just make it a little bit easier. If you're having a hard time like lining up in drawing and connecting everything. So let me undo that. So to do that, we're gonna go over to our Actions menu. We're gonna go to Canvas and we're going to turn on Drawing Guide. This is going to help guide us as we're doing this. So turn on drawing guide and then we're gonna go to Edit Drawing Guide. Then what I wanna do is I want to grab this little green node and I'm going to rotate it so that the lines are at the angle that I'm gonna be dragging my shadow up to the side. So that's step one. And then I'll zoom in a little bit because I also want to make sure one of these lines, like this line here is like right on the edge of this kind of curve of this letter. I have to grab this little blue node to move it around. I'm just going to line that up with the edge. It's close enough. You'll see why we do that in a minute. The other thing you wanna do is turn on Drawing, Assist, assisted drawing. So go ahead and toggle that on. Okay. We're all set up. We're gonna go ahead and tap Done. So now we're going to make sure we have that bottom layer selected the darker color. Go to the Transform tool. And it's easier if I zoom in, you can zoom in as long as you don't do it on the layer within the bounding box, you can zoom in or out here. Man, do that. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so it's easier to see. And essentially I'm going to do, I'm going to move the layer down this way. I want it to line up with this line here. You see that? So here's the little curve, and then here's the same little curves. So I want it to line up on this drawing guideline. Okay, so now it's looking like that. Now all we have to do is connect these two edges on some of these shapes. So that's what we'll do next. And the drawing assist that we turned on, it's going to help us with that. So firstly, I need a brush. So I'm gonna go to my brushes and we'll use one of the built-in brushes in the calligraphy set. Calligraphy. It's called mono line. It's great for doing stuff like this. So mono line, brush I'm using, I still have that same. It's this dark, darker blue color. And I'm going to go right here. And because I have Drawing Assist on, I can only draw lines at this angle, which is great for connecting these and making sure that it's at the right angle. So I'll just zoom in and kinda connect it like that. And it's the perfect angle. I don't know. Maybe we need to connect it here a little bit. You just want to make sure that the edge of your brush at the edge of these shapes. And I have a little, it's probably hard to see, but I have the brush cursor turned on and you can turn that on. But going to the Actions menu, preference, brush cursor, and then you get like a little outline of the shape of your brush. So that's a little tip you can use. So I'm just making sure I'm right there on the edge and then carry it all the way down like that and then fill in the rest here to make sure it's right on that edge. There we go. So anywhere that kinda like sticks out like that. Maybe this one. No, I can't really see that one at all. We know that if I didn't have the Drawing Assist, I might try to go that way and then it would look weird. It wouldn't be at the right angle. I think this one probably doesn't need it either. This one, yeah, that one does. So anywhere that kinda like sticks out right here, specialty. And I think this is the last one. Okay. Alright, so I've gone through and kind of connected. This shape to the other shape and it creates this block effect. So I'm gonna go and turn off my drawing guides. I don't need them anymore, so I'm gonna go over to the Actions menu, Canvas and turn off drawing guides. And now I'm going to add some shadow to the underside of all these letters. So to do that, we're going to use a blend mode and a clipping mask. I'm gonna go to my layers. I'm going to create a layer right above the layer with the block shadow. I'm going to tap that layer and I'm going to choose clipping mask. And what that does is anything that I draw in this layer will only appear within this shape. The shape of the layer that it's kinda like there's a little arrow pointing down to it. So I can only, whatever I draw here will only appear within that shape, which is great for what we wanna do. The other thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change my blend mode to multiply. And the reason I'm doing this is because I'll probably come back and change the color of this later. But if I'm using a blend mode to do my shadows, it's going to stay consistent. It'll make more sense. We get to that stage. And I'm just going to choose a gray for now. And any brush that's kinda soft and has some texture will be good for adding shadows. So I'm gonna go to the charcoal set and choose six be compressed. This is another built-in brush, Six be compressed. And the other thing I want to do is I'm going to turn on Drawing Assist on this because as you can see, like if I draw, I can try and get the right angles, but I might get it wrong. So if you want to be sure you're getting your shadows at the right angle, you can turn on Drawing Assist. So just tap it and she's drawing assist. And just like we did on this layer, now I can only draw at that angle. So it's really helpful for doing these shadows. So all I'm gonna do is kinda like on the bottom of the lid letters. I'm just going to add a little bit of shading. I like that. I'm just kinda softly coming in and laying on a few strokes just kinda like at the bottom. So there's kind of this like little curve out and that's kinda where I'm focusing my shadows on. I keep my shadow nice and soft along this little corner here. And in this little area as well. I don't want it to be here, so I'm actually gonna go ahead and erase some of it. So I just tap and hold the eraser to choose that same six be compressed as my eraser, and then I can erase some of that away. There we go. As you imagine, the OH is in front of that. F will look like that. Okay, So let's add some more on these curved shapes like the O's. I'm gonna do it darker in the center and then do light strokes to make it like kinda like a gradient effect. So like the shadows falling off. Then here, I forgot. I looks like I didn't connect these and I should have. So let me actually go back and do that. I'll go back to my calligraphy monoline. I'll go back to this layer, select this color. And then I'll just connect that. Go. Okay, that's better. Go back to my previous layer. And I can actually tap and hold the color picker circle and that's going to choose my previous color. So that's helpful. And then I'll go back to charcoals, get my six be compressed and I can shade in this letter now. So just like a lot of strokes layering on to get it as dark as I want it to be. And also make the edges a little soft. Okay, cool, That's looking really awesome. Maybe I want to add a little bit of shadow or shading in this little nook. Might be dark in there. If there was light coming this way, you would imagine it was dark in there. But overall, I think this is looking pretty good. We don't really need to add a ton more shadows. If your shadows you feel like they're looking a little bit dark, you can go to your layer and tap those little m, where that's where we chose our blend mode, but you can reduce the opacity a little bit. So maybe I'll turn it down to like 70%. And that's looking pretty good. Just as a side note, I noticed as I was editing this video that I could have placed these shadows a little bit better. So here is what I did in the video that you just saw. And here is a little bit better placement, as you can see. Instead of placing the shadows on the bottom of the letters, I placed them in the little grooves inside and also on the right-hand side of the letters. Of course, all this will change depending on where your imaginary light source is coming from. But let's see the before and the after, so that you can get an idea of where you might place the shadows instead of what I did in the video. 15. Text Effects: Inner Stroke: So the last text effect that we're going to add is an inline, basically an outline within each letter. So we're going to add just like a white inline. So to do that, we're going to use a similar technique to what we've been using, but a little bit different. So I'm gonna go up to the layers. I'm going to find the layer with this one, the one that just has the letters. I'm going to tap it and choose, Select. And as you can see, I have a selection here. We're going to actually use this feather tool to create this inline. So I actually need to invert my selection right now to get it so we can make, I make it an inline and not outline. So I'm gonna go ahead and tap Invert. Now I've got the background selected. And then I'm gonna go right here to choose feather. And as you can see, you can feather your selection and you get this nice little line, which is sort of like a preview for what you are. Inline is going to look like. I'll do that again. I'll zoom in so you can really see it. Zoom in feather. And I don't need a lot. I just need like a little outline like that. So now I'm at like 8%. And now we're gonna go up to our layers. I'm going to tap the plus sign to create a new layer. And I'm going to fill this layer with white. So I'm gonna go to my colors, double-tap close to white, and that's going to snap to a pure white value. So double-tap. And then I'll go back to my layers, tap it and choose Fill layer. And this obviously this doesn't look like much yet, but we're going to make it into a sharper outline as we've done before. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to end up using a clipping mask to make this outline. So if I tap this new layer I made and I tap Clipping Mask. Now, It's very hard to see, but the white is only within the letters. Now that I have this layer, I'm gonna go ahead and make a selection within all those letters. So bear with me, this is what we're gonna do next. We're gonna go over to our selection tool. I'm going to make sure we're on automatic and makes your color fill. Phil's off. And I'm going to select inside this little letter and I can adjust how thick I want the outline to be. The outline is basically what's not blue right now. So the lighter blue that's around it. So I'm going to do probably something like that. That's my outline. And then I can just go through and tap all the other letters. Once I adjust to the exact thickness I want it to be. I'll go through and adjust or go through and select. Okay. Now, we have the letter selected and we knew on the outside of the letters to be selected. So we're going to be inverting it again, a lot of inverting for this one. Then we're gonna go ahead and go to the layers, create a new layer, and then tap it and choose Fill. And we can turn off or we can delete our blurry later, we don't need that. And then finally, here's the big reveal. We're going to tap the layer that we just made and we're going to choose clipping mask. And now those lines only appear within the shape of these letters. So there is our final text effect. We have an outline, we have a drop shadow or block shadow, and we have an inline and all we also don't forget we made all of our letters a little round. And one of the nice things about starting off by making the letters round is like this, creating outlines using the blur effect. They tend to get a little soft. They're not like sharp outlines. So starting out by creating your letters, a little rounded helps blend of those effects together. Now there's a couple of things that look a little weird like right here on this end, the outline kinda does that. So we can just use the liquefy tool to make it look a little bit better. So I'm gonna go over to the adjustments menu, liquefied and make sure you're on push. And you might need to play around with the brush size, but you can just kinda drag that down a little bit. And go look at your letters and see if there's anywhere else where you might want to adjust. I think maybe this right here on this l, I can make the size a little smaller. Kinda pull that out a little bit right here. Now that we're really zoomed in, one side effect of doing outlines this way is your lines. Do you get a little bit jagged? That's expected because it's not like a true stroke tool. It's not like the vector perfect, but we're going to add some vintage effects to this later and that really kind of eliminates that. So don't worry about that for now. So here's our complete lettering. Now it's time to start working on doing the illustrations inside of all the letters. But before we do that, I'm just going to kind of adjust the placement on my Canvas. There's a couple of ways that you could do that. I could select all these layers, then move it. Or I can go over to the Actions menu here, Crop and Resize, and then just kinda move the cropping a little bit to center it. 16. Sketching the Layout: You've just learned how to do bunch of fun text effects. Now it's time to get into the illustration portion of our postcard design. So I'll be walking you through in real time my process of creating my California postcard. In this video, you'll see me lay out all the different elements that I researched earlier into a rough layout sketch. And then I'm going to create a refined sketch that I will use to create the final art. So I actually have two videos of this for you. The first one is just the real-time I real-time process of me doing all of that. And then if you wanted to kinda go through a little bit more quickly, I've got a sped-up version of it on the next lesson, let's go ahead and start sketching our illustrations. Now that our lettering is all done and looking awesome, it's time to focus on the illustrations that are gonna be going inside of all these letters. And if you remember back to our previous lesson at the beginning, we spent some time researching our location and drawing some really rough sketches of some of the stuff that we want to put in there. So let's go ahead and pull up those sketches and we can start figuring out what we want to do here. So we're going to use the procreate reference companion feature, which is really awesome way to have just a little image that you can reference as you're working. To do that, you go to the Actions menu and Canvas. And then here it says reference, you go and just toggle, toggle that on. And it will show, basically, I'll start by showing you exactly what's on your canvas. Or you can load up an image, which is what we did. We exported our sketches out to our camera roll earlier. So we're gonna go here, it says image and then I'm going to tap Import Image. And then we're going to choose the sketch from our camera roll. So we have that to look at as we're working on. I'm laying everything out within our letters. Okay, So I've got a few elements to work with. I've got a bridge, mountains and hills, ocean. I think the thing that I want to start with is this Golden Gate Bridge. So I'm going to place it. So my illustration is going to be all melded together within these letters. So some stuff is going to show within two letters and that's kinda my plan. You could also draw something individual within each letter. So you could make each letter a different picture, you could do it that way. But I'm gonna kinda like meld everything together so you'll see what that looks like. Okay, so we're gonna be sketching within these letters. So I'm gonna go ahead and switch to a sketching brush. Now, you can use any brush that you like to sketch. I'm going to use one from my pencil box set called Sketching Pencil. I designed it just for sketching. And then when I go to my colors and I'm going to choose just kind of a dark gray. And then in the layers, we're gonna be using clipping masks, like everything that we're gonna be illustrating is gonna be only, it's only going to appear within these letters because we're going to use a clipping mask. So I'm going to tap on the letter with the layer with the letters, like tongue twisters in this class, the layer with the letters. And then I'm going to tap the plus sign to create a layer right above that. As you can see, it automatically becomes a clipping mask because it's underneath another clipping mask. So now any layers that we put in between the outline and the letters is going to be a clipping mask. So it's nice that we don't have to worry about setting it to clipping mask every time. So we created a new layer so we can start working on the sketch. Alright, so the first thing I want to lay out is this bridge. I think that I am going to have the tall parts of this bridge on letters that are really visible. So maybe I'll start here. I'll do one side there and then maybe one side there. Then have the leg that part of the bridge going across like that. Something like that. So this is just like really, really rough. This is just for placement so far. I'm not going to add any details or anything like that. Let's maybe add this Hollywood sign. I can kind of overlap. Maybe have a hill kinda going over there and I can have, well, maybe a little taller than that, something like that. And I can have Hollywood right there. Again, it's just placement, so that's where Hollywood is gonna be. So I also think that I have this wave and I think it would be cool to do it here in the C since they have a similar shape. So I'm going to, well, you know, since I have the bridge, maybe I can just draw the ocean kinda coming all the way across. And then I can make a wave like that. So I'll just kinda, again, this is just for placement. So now I've got the ocean there. This will be in front of that. I can add these mountains, maybe on this side so I can draw some overlapping I don't know, tall mountains like one there, then maybe one behind it. I like that. I'll probably not have this continue this Hollywood Hills. There we go. Then some snow again, just placing everything. Let's see what we've got. We've got a palm tree, you've got some redwoods. I've got these puppies. So let's put some poppies and I love them. So maybe we can have the poppy is kinda over here and we put the palm tree kinda the wave. So I'm going to draw some big puppies. Maybe one, they're just doing some basic shapes. Maybe one there. We can have a little bud, so something like that. And then some leaves. So he had her puppies. Palm tree right here. Very rough. And let's see, we've got some trees there. Maybe we can put those here. A tree there. Maybe a little one there. I don't know if that'll be too crowded, but I'll try it. And let's see. Oh, I drew these like Joshua Tree type things from Joshua Tree. So let me put that here. Kinda make sense to be in Southern California where the Hollywood sign is going to. And maybe I'll do a different kind of cactus here. I can do some of those long skinny ones that are very long skinny cactus. And we also have this sun, which I think would be great right here. So I'll draw the sun. Okay? So here's our very rough sketch and layout of where everything could be. So I think that's overall looking pretty good. It's a good layout again, and as you can see, I have things like kind of overlapping the different letters. And I think it looks pretty cool, but you could draw one thing in each letter if you wanted. 17. Refined Sketch: So I'm going to now make a refined sketch. So I'm gonna go over to my layers. I'm going to tap this n and reduce the opacity of this sketch I just made and create a new layer right above that. And this is where I'm gonna do my refined sketch. So now I can kind of draw these things in more detail. I can look up some reference photos to kinda help me with that. So I'll go ahead and close this for now. So I'll just tap it, close it like that. And I'm going to bring up Safari so that I can look up some photos of what the Golden Gate Bridge actually looks like and stuff. So I'm going to drag the dock up from the bottom and I'm going to grab Safari and I'm just going to drag it over like that, then resize it. And let's start with the Golden Gate Bridge. Course. Yours will be different, whatever you're deciding to put in your, your design. So a lot of the bridges are from this kind of angled view. And I kinda want like a straight on view. So I'll look at this Golden Gate Bridge. That's exactly what I want. I'm going to tap that. And I want something kinda like this. This is another illustration where you can see the, the like, you know what the parts of the bridge looks like. It's not like flat like that. So I'm going to do that. So I'll just draw like to go all the way up. And then there's kinda like for these, I'll do this one over here. So I'll just draw two lines and it kinda making these lines parallel. This doesn't have to be perfect. It can be pretty rough still, but we just want to add a little bit more details. We can figure out what we're gonna do. 12341234, okay, then we have like this part of the bridge across this one should go to that one. This one should go to that one. I like that. Okay. Then underneath this one doesn't show, but they have these little like X things, so I'll add those. Then. There's the little cement bottoms. Okay. So there's my bridge. Let's draw the mountain and maybe a little bit more detail. Do my mountains. I do like a ridge down the middle. And then I'm just going to add some texture. I'm not going to add a lot of detail to this sketch. There's this now is the same one. Snow or sun? Hollywood sign. Let me look that up. Alright, Hollywood sign. This is a good This is a good one. And it kind of like this color too. So let me draw like that. And then the Hollywood, I get it. It does like a little bit of a wave. So I'm going to draw a bit of a guide to help me do that, just like we did with our texts earlier. The lower Hollywood. Let's draw in the ocean. And I'll probably when I color the wave, I'll come back to a reference photo of that. For now. I'll just kinda keep it pretty rough. Let's do a palm tree here. Then our flowers. And to draw those with a little bit more detail. Dr. John, California poppies, lots of time. So I can have my little way of doing it. They're very simplified. Leaves. Maybe another leaf over there. Okay, that's looking good. We need some trees. I'm just going to draw like the overall shape of the tree. And I'll come in and add more detail. You know, when I'm doing my coloring because I kind of have an idea of what I'm gonna do there. I'm Joshua Tree, I want to look that up again. Okay, So they're so unique looking like this picture, which all something like that. So why is out like that? Then? Has these branches coming off? Lots of branches and things like spiky things. Probably need to look at that again when I go to color it. Thicken that up a little bit. And then I can, I just have an idea of what I wanna do for this cactus? I'll just draw a bunch of these small things. And I think that's pretty much it for this refined sketch. One more thing I might add is some clouds. So maybe I'll draw some clouds in here, maybe one behind the bridge. Maybe over on this side to just kinda blogging them in. There we go. Cool. I like the way that looks. Alright, so I think that looks pretty good for my refined sketch. I'm going to go over to my layers. I can turn off or even delete that rough sketch. So I'll just turn it off for now or you can delete it if you want. 18. Speed Sketch!: The following video is just a sped-up version of my sketching process. If you wanted to see it a little bit faster, you can go ahead and watch that next. 19. Make a Color Plan: Alright, so you've just finished laying out all of the elements in your illustration. You've created a refined sketch and you're ready to start your final artwork. Well, before we do that, we're actually going to take some time to create a color plan. This is a stage in the process where we can experiment with colors and just kinda figure out how we want everything to look before we do our final illustration. Now it's time to start thinking about colors. So before we jump into like drawing, all these illustrations are rendering them, we want to start thinking about colors, but remember this blue we kinda just used as temporary. So let's, let's start by changing the colors of our lettering. And then we're gonna work on making a color plan for our illustrations. So I'll just close this for now so that we can get nice big view. I think I want to do sort of like maybe orange, red, orange, yellow color scheme for my letters. Like they reminds me of yellow, the Golden State, orange poppies, the red Golden Gate Bridge. So let's experiment color a little bit. I'm gonna go over to my layers and I'm going to start with the letters. So this layer here. And actually the color it is now isn't too bad. It's kind of a sky blue. And I can imagine like most of this is gonna be sky up here. I just might want to change the hue a little bit. So one way to adjust colors is by going up to the Adjustments menu, hue, saturation, brightness. And then you can adjust the hue I make make it a little more cooler. I don't know if I want it more saturated or darker. A little bit darker. I can always adjust that color a little bit later, but I'll do that kinda nice sky blue for now. And now I'm going to change the color of the outline. So I kinda wanna do like orange, orange, red. So I'm gonna go to my layers. I'm going to select this layer, which is the outline layer. Let's choose, I don't know, like a really, an orangey color. Not super saturated. Maybe like orange red. I could just color drop that in since it's one pretty solid shape. Maybe a little, maybe a little darker, a little more red, kind of play around with colors. And now I want to change the color of this block shadow layer. And I can show you, not everything is connected like some of these shapes. Don't touch other shapes. So color drop might not be the best solution to do that. Instead, we're going to use color fill. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn on Alpha lock on that layer just to two fingers swipe to the right. And I'm going to get a darker, maybe more saturated version of this orange. And then I'm just going to tap the layer and choose Fill layer. And that's going to fill everything on that layer that was already there with this color. So it's a little bit easier than color drop. And now that I've got those colors, you can kinda go in and start adjusting. If you want to make things lighter and more or less saturated, I'm gonna make that a little lighter, will make my letters a little darker. It's totally up to you what colors you want to use. So I think that's good for now. I can always come back and adjust them more. And I didn't mention this, but we didn't have to change the color of our shadows here because we used a blend mode. It automatically just kind of darkens whatever color you have underneath it. So that's pretty cool. You can of course, come in and adjust and make it darker if you want. But I think that looks pretty good. Alright, so now it is time to make a color plan for the inner illustrations. I'm going to go up to my layers. I'm going to find my refined sketch. I'm just going to tap the N and reduce the opacity. Then I'm going to create a layer right below that, and this is open. This is going to be for our color plan. You can use literally any brush you want to do this. I'm going to use one for my basic toolkit. It's just a thick, smooth brush and it's great for just plopping down some colors. But again, you can use any brush you want for this. This is gonna be really quick. Note not a lot of detail, just kinda like figuring out what colors we want to use. So maybe I'll, I'll start with some of the stuff that's more in the background, like the ocean. So I'm going to go ahead and choose a blue like that. See how that looks. Kind of like that. So I'm just going to just kinda lay that in really rough. And I'll do the Hollywood hill here, which I remember was kinda like a yellowy yellowy brown. Maybe a little play around with it. It's kinda lay that in like that. I'll do my mountains and sort of a dark desaturated brown. Probably a little bit too dark. I'm just kinda like, like, like experiments with color, just layering on more color. I'll do my son like a bright yellow. Let's do the bridge. The bridge is kind of like an orangey red. So I'll choose a nice color for that. I've got our palm tree and our puppies. So maybe I'll do the puppies and x, I'll do like a kind of yellowy green. Might be, I might need a little bit darker than that. So I'm just kind of experimenting. Seeing what colors it might work. Well, maybe we can use the same green and this palm tree and get a brown for the tree trunk. Do an orangey yellow. These poppies. We have our trees over here, so I'm going to choose a brown for the trunks. And then instead of like a yellow green, I'm going to go more down here until like blue-green. For that can have a different color tone. Let's see. We're going to have some white snow up on. These are an Alpha Hollywood right there. Then for these Joshua trees, I believe they were kind of a brown color. Then. I don't know, like a greenish. These sets are not dark enough. There we go. For these ones, I think I'm just gonna do more blue-green. Yeah. Like Oh, that looks and of course, look up your reference photos if you're not sure what colors to do things, you don't have to do things and they're realistic color. That's just kinda what comes natural to me. And all these colors of California and make me feel like make you think of California. So I'm doing more of kind of like natural colors. We're going to have our clouds here, turn it off their white. Necessarily plan for those. But we're gonna have like the foam on our wave. And I think that's pretty much it. So this is a very rough color plan, but I was able to do the experimentation now so that I can just focus on drawing and rendering when it comes down to doing the final artwork. So just like we did with our sketches, we're going to export this image out to her camera roll so that we can use it as a reference as we're working on our final illustrations. So I'm gonna go up to the Actions menu, Share. I'm going to share it as a PNG and then just save the image to my camera roll. And now we're gonna go over to Canvas and we're going to choose a reference. And then I'm going to choose, we're already on image because we had this up earlier. But I'm gonna go to Import and I'm going to choose my color plan that I just made. So now I can actually zoom in on this. I can sample colors from it. I can just look at it to see how I decided I wanted to do everything. So it's nice to have it there. 20. Final Illustrations: Part 1: Alright, we are at the main event. It is time to start creating our final artwork. We're going to be drawing all the elements. We're going to be rendering them and adding detail and texture and all of that. So in this video, I will walk you through that entire process in real time. It's a bit long because it does take a long time to go through everything and draw. But I also have a sped-up version of this. If you wanted to watch that, you can find that on the next lesson. One more thing, I just wanted to let you know how you can get one of my procreate brushes for free. This is a brush that I'll be using to do the majority of the illustration in my California postcard. And it is called painting round from my gouache paint box. It's one of my most popular sets and it is actually included in the Procreate all stars brush pack is a collection of brushes by some of the top brush bankers put out by Procreate. And you can find a link to download that on the projects and resources tab. Alright, let's get to it. Alright, so let me go up to our layers and I am going to turn off the color plan. So that's why it's nice to have it there because I need it off now so that I can work. I'm going to create a new layer right above that. And this is where I'm going to start drawing all the different elements in my scene here. So I'm gonna be working with a lot of layers as I'm doing this illustration, basically like any elements in my design that are on top of each other but are different colors. I'll put on separate layers. I like to use. I like to reuse layers when I can. So if there's elements that aren't touching, I'll put those on the same layer and you'll kinda get a feel for this as I work. So again, I had just created a new layer. There's nothing on it yet. And I'm going to decide what brushes I want to use. For this. I am going to use brushes that I made myself. This is my gouache paint box. It's one of my brush set size style. It's one of my favorite brush sets to use and I really love it. But of course, use any brushes that you feel comfortable using. You can illustrate literally in any style that you want with any brushes that you wanted, any colors that you want. Make it personal, make it you do it your way. I'll walk you through my decision-making process as I'm working on this illustration. Okay, so I'm going to start by illustrating all the background elements first. So one of the biggest elements in my scene is the ocean. So I'm just going to start by selecting this blue color from my reference. And the brush I'm gonna be using is painting a round. And I'm just going to go ahead and just start drawing that in like that. One of the things I like about this brush is you can see the brush strokes of the edges of the brush stroke. So it looks really cool and water, especially when you like layer a lot of brush strokes like that. So that's kinda what I'm doing here. I remember from when I was looking at the wave pictures online that there's a lot of different shades of blue. So I'm gonna come back and do that later. But for now I'm just kinda laying down the base color. And it's going to end here. So I'm actually going to erase this a little bit. Alright, so we've got some water. I'm can do the Hollywood hill on this same layer. So I'll just select that color and it will zoom in, select that color from my color plan and just kinda draw the mountain or hill like that. I'm doing this on the same layer as the water because they don't touch each other. There's a space right there. The mountains gonna be on another layer in front of the hills, but this mountain is behind this bigger mountain. So I can actually put that on the same layer. So I'll just grab this brown and I'll drew this mountain. There we go. And what else? I could probably put the sun on this layer. So I'll just go ahead and get that color from a colored plan. And I'll draw the sun in. And I can even add some sun rays. Little thinner, smaller brush size. Okay. They've got the sun. I think. Anything else is going to overlap something that I've already drawn, so it's time to move to another layer. The reason why I put things on different layers is because I'm going to come back and add texture and details to all these things. So if I were to put something on top of it and be really hard for me to add texture to stuff. So I'm creating a new layer and I can start working on some of the elements that overlap some of what I've already drawn. So like for example, this mountain, select that color to use. I'm just kinda trying to make it more detailed, hard to see right there, but I'll color that in. Let's see. I'm going to try and do most of the bigger elements if I can. So I think I'll do the bridge now. Let's get the color I chose. Go if you need to adjust it, you can. But I think that color is pretty good. So I'm going to make my brush size smaller. And I'm doing like a very simplified, you know, Bridge. I'm just going to draw like this two sides of that. If you find that you're not able to keep drawing that line over and over again and it's not exactly where you want it to be. Another little tip that I use for adjusting. So I don't have to keep redrawing it and hoping it worked that time is a liquefied tool. So you can go up to the Adjustments menu, liquefy, and then you can kinda just like adjust your brush size and then just push it to where you want it to be. If you need to. Straighten it out a little bit. That's a little tip that I use a lot. There we go. So now it's just a little bit more straight. I don't mind that it's imperfect. I kinda like that. Let's draw this part of the bridge and try and make it pretty straight. I think I did pretty good. Now, I will draw the connector pieces. Space those out a little bit more. As you can tell, I've kind of angled my bridge. I'm trying to keep it parallel to my letters so that this line is parallel to this line and these lines are parallel to that line because I think it just kinda makes it feel a little bit more cohesive. So that's what I'm doing. And now I can draw the kind of the cables, the suspension cables. So I'm going to connect that one to that one. I'm going to kick the same ones, that one to that one. Then this one. That one. This one's going to come down that way. There we go. Oh, I forgot the little cross beams here. So I'll draw those in. And then there's the, well, actually before I do that, I'm going to add some lines like the cables that are coming down the vertical ones. But I'm actually going to do those on a separate layer and I'll show you why. So let me just create a new layer really quick. I'll reduce my brush size a bit. And I'm just going to draw them bigger than I need them to be with really fast strokes like this. And the reason why I'm doing it this way is because it's when I do fast strokes, it's easier to get them straighter. They have a little bit more texture there, thinner. If I were to try and draw them in carefully trained to get this to that, it might be a little less expressive, I guess, to me. So that's why I'm doing it this way. Oops. That one in there. The reason why I put them on another layer is which I'll show you just a second so that I can come back and actually just erase what I don't need. So I've got my eraser. I'm just erasing away what I don't need. So that's why I did it on a separate layer. Then I can merge the two layers together. So that's a little trick that you can do if you need to do something similar to that. Okay? Alright, so that looks pretty good. In fact, I might actually liquefy that just a little bit because it looks a little crooked, because it's on another layer. I can just adjust these cables without messing up the whole bridge. So that's kinda cool to you. Okay, so now that I've done that, I can go and just merge those two layers together so I can tap it and then choose Merge Down. And there's my bridge. I do also need those little cement things at the bottom, so I'll grab a gray and kinda do it like that. Maybe actually it should probably be behind this. So I'm going to erase some of this away just a little bit to make the bottom of it. And then I can go to this other layer, the one that's right below that. And I can just kinda, There we go. That looks a little bit more realistic. A little bit darker color for the edge here. I'm not getting super detailed. I'm just like adding a little bit and I haven't even gotten to the detailed part yet, so I'm just just kinda laying down all the basic forms. Alright, so the bridge is looking good. I'm gonna go back to that layer that I had, the bridge on this layer. And I can add a lot of things. I can add this palm tree or actually I'll add the water. I'm gonna do the water so I'm going to grab white. I'm going to make my brush size really big. And then I'm in a very softly add some strokes and that's going to, I'm really show the texture of the brush. You know, if you have a textured brush like this one and have these kind of soft foamy shapes. So a lot of foam there. And I'll come back and probably adjust that more, but I just want to lay down the color. So I'll probably I can do the, um, the tree trunk of the palm tree. There. I'll go ahead and select that. And I'll reduce my brush size again and just draw, whoops, too big or too small. There you go. So I got my palm tree trunk. I could probably do now I can't do the flowers because they overlap. I can do these elements here. So I'll do like the cactus and the Joshua trees. I'll just kinda nice and thick but those in and I will do the spiky parts on another layer. But I can put these cacti on the same layer. I'll just kinda Yeah. I can also do the Hollywood sign, so let me get white and I will do a small brush size. And the Hollywood sign is kinda, he's like blocky letters. I'm not gonna do it exactly like that, but get it close. Okay. That's pretty good. Let me see. There's anything else that can go on this layer. I think that might be it already to probably start another layer to add some of these other elements. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a new layer now. And let's just start with this palm tree here. My little color plan, that green. And then for the palm tree, I'm just gonna kinda make the brush do the work and like it looks a little bigger. Just use some like flicking motions to make these tapered shapes like that. And a few more in than my sketch. It looks pretty good. Let's hold to spiky. Alright, If it looks pretty good. So I can also do the stems of my puppies. So draw those n goes off that way we've got some leaves. Again, you'd want to look at your reference if you are not sure exactly how to draw some of these things, but I kind of had my way of doing poppies, so okay. Got my stems. What else can I put on this layer? I can do the redwood tree trunks. So I think color do I have for that? Darker brown. They'll make an even logo reader has read would. Supposedly, that's a little too dark. So I'm doing really light pressure at the top and then doing heavy pressure at the bottom. So I get this nice tapered shape. A little thinner. Okay. What's a little crooked? That's okay. Okay. I can do the rest of the Joshua trees. So let me go over there. Pull that green for this one. Um, let me look at my picture real quick. Okay. So they're like bushy and spiky even though like trunks are spiky but like but she's spiky shapes. So I'm going to try and draw that. I'm just going to use kinda lots of little motions like that. Little smaller brush size. That's gonna make my little spikes. I'm trying to make them as philosophy as possible. Just lots of little strokes there. And we got one right here. Then while there, while I'm at it, I'm just going to choose a little bit lighter version and a light or lighter version of that color. And just add a few more strokes just to give it a little bit of definition. These are kinda like highlights. This is kinda getting into some of the details that, and we'll just do it right now. Okay. So let's see what else. We can probably put the snow on this layer. So I'm going to choose a white, but I'm actually going to choose just a little bit, little bit gray. And then in this purple tone for the snow, because I'm going to draw, I'm going to use a darker color and then I'm going to add some white on top so that way I have some highlights. So don't start with the brightest color because then you can't have highlights. Look like snow. Maybe, probably not. Okay. It's cartoons, no. Stylized. So then we can do this one as well. And I will be coming back and adding shading to the mountain and stuff in this as well. But then now I can get white and just add, actually really, really working with the light source here, but we have our Sun, so we might as well say that's our light source and kind of put some highlights on that side a little bit. I don't know. It's just kinda like add a little bit of texture so it doesn't look so flat. And we'll come back to the mountains and do that. Let's see me every time. I might be all we can put on this layer so far. We still have to do the poppies, the trees, and clouds, which will be on a layer under everything out. So I guess we'll do one last layer for the puppies and the trees. And I will choose my poppy color over here. Or you could just choose a color from the color picker if you know what color you want to use. Alright, so I'll do my puppies. Like my little way of doing poppies. So very simplified. Doing one over here, overlapping the bridge. Then I just realized that the backs of the puppies will need to be on a layer underneath this so that I can have them behind this part of the petal. That's fine. I'll just reuse one of my layers, a little bud. While I'm here, I'm just going to add a little detail. The fill of redder, red, orange. I like where the poppy petals overlap. Then I'll go to the layer below that, which I think is one of the stems to add. The inside at the backside of the poppy. I'm just using a lighter yellow for that. All right, go, go. Here's my poppies, and let's do this tree. So I'm going back to this layer. And I remember I had like a blue-green color for those, so I'll just select that. Then for the trees, I'm going to start off by making some really small flicking motions are like the top of the tree, using this shape as a guide. So kinda bring it down and then the brushes get bigger or the branches get bigger and more textured. So as we go down, I'm just going to add some like branches that kinda do that. And then some that go right over the middle because those represent the branches that are facing you because they don't all just go out to the side. So I'm just gonna kinda keep adding all of those three different strokes to fill this in and make it look more full. Cool. I really liked the way that one looks. I don't know if I want this one to be slanted. It looks like it's dying or something, so I'm going to change it. I'll choose my freehand selection, deselect that. And that makes me feel happier. Then I'm gonna do the same thing. So some little branches up at the top, then some like one's going out to the side and over the middle. Again. We're working at such a small size postcard that it doesn't have to be super detailed. It's gonna be really small like when you print it out. So don't worry about getting caught up in too much detail. Okay, so the last thing I want to add is my little clouds. So let me go back, see what layer I can use. I can use the layer with the ocean, that one to do my clouds. So for my clouds, I'm going to not choose a super bright white because I want to have two tones in it. So I'm going to choose a little bit in on my color wheel and I'm gonna go to my purples, can look at purple undertones for my clouds. I'm gonna go ahead and just create those shapes. Yes, they look very dark right now, but that's okay. Too dark. So I'm making a big brush size and using small or soft kind of circular motions to get. It's a little hard to see, but these will give me like textured edges on my clouds. So kinda just paint those in here. One more. Right there. Cool. I think that's all the clouds. Floyd, they've got a little slanted, didn't they? Not that big of a deal, but now I'm gonna go ahead and get a pure white. And I'm going to just add some little bright highlights to the edges of these imaginary puffy shapes that are in my cloud. So I'm just like adding more white on top. And that will get my clouds a little bit of dimension like that. Since my son is over there, I'm adding all the highlights on this side. Not super worried about my light source, but might as well, since we know that there is something of it there, the sun. Okay, couple more here. Now my clouds have just a little bit of interests. They're not just completely flat. Shapes. Cool. I think that looks good. Okay, so I have kinda laid the groundwork for all the elements of the scene here. So at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and turn off this little reference companions to have all the colors that I need. And I'm gonna go ahead into my layers and I'm going to turn off my sketch. Now I can go in and start adding some final texture and details. 21. Final Illustrations: Part 2: All right, so I'm going to zoom in over here. I'm going to start with these mountains. So I'm going to find out what layer there on, I believe, this Mountains on this layer. So I'll just start with that color, get a darker version of it. And I'm going to do a line down the middle, that's the ridge of the mountain. Get a little bit darker. Just add some, I don't know, just some texture to that. Mountains are kind of organic shapes, so I need too much detail. I go and I'm going to do this mountain now which is on this layer. So just to get a darker version and Joel are ridge, make this side dark. Didn't even darker color and just kinda that's more a little ridges. Then on this side I'll get this color and add some little ridges there. I don't need a lot of detail again, I'm just kinda think that looks pretty good. Maybe I'll even add a little bit of a lighter color and add some little highlights. Just to add a bit more texture and make it look more rocky. Okay, Alright, So I think that looks pretty good for the mountains. I'm gonna do my Hollywood Hills. So I'll go to that layer. For that, I'm going to turn on Alpha Lock and add some texture that way. I have this really great brushes in this set called Daddy gouache green. And it has a grainy brush and it has all kinds of really great texture, which I think will look a lot like the hills. So I'll start by sampling, does color. I'll get a little bit darker, just a tiny bit, and I'm just gonna kinda go over it. You can already see a little bit of that texture. Maybe I'll do a little bit darker just over some parts of it. And I might actually add some green because I remember in that reference image I looked up, there's some bushes and things like that. So I'm just kind of trying to make it look sort of like that. The impression of that. I think that looks pretty good. So a few more there. Okay. So let's see what else. Oh, the ocean, I definitely want to work on that. I'm going to work on this wave over here. So I'm gonna pull up a reference for that. I'm gonna go back to Safari, pull this over, and then go back to that wave image that I looked up earlier. I think it was this one. So I can kind of get an idea of the colors that I might want to use. Because it kinda gets lighter here and then it's got darker on the edge. So let's start with the color that I have. A little bit darker. Make sure I'm on the right layer. So I'm on the layer with the ocean. And I'm gonna go back to my painting, a round brush. I'm going to start by making a bigger brush. And I'm doing this side that it's happening there. Have Alpha lock turned on and turn off the lock off. There we go. Soldiers, you like what's happening? And then while I have this color, I'm actually going to go ahead and draw some other strokes like in the water just to give it a little bit more texture. I'm just adding few horizontal strokes just to give the water a little bit more texture. Okay. And I'll probably come in with some lighter colors and do the same. And now I'm kind of blending that. I'm gonna get a lighter, maybe a greener, blue. So I'm gonna go lighter, a little greener. And I'm gonna do this part of the wave, maybe a little too saturated, so I'm going to blend in some of this lighter color as well. Just like little strokes. A few of those into my water. Waves starting to look really good. I like it. I'm gonna get white and just add in some little lines. So you're kinda like highlights on the water. Sparkling and the sunshine. Cool. Okay, So the wave looking pretty good. I think I need to put a little bit more of the frothy *****, like the white. So I'm going to find that layer. One, white. I'm going to make my brush really big and just kinda paint in some more of these blend the top, the wave splashed down here. Although I don't want it too much because now I'm losing the side of my outline. So it may be all blend in a darker color into my wave. There. There we go. I have a little bit more contrast to an outline. Cool. Looks pretty good. I might blend in one darker color to my water. Just don't need it. Okay. So I think that's looking pretty good. The wave looks like a wave and that's what I'm going for. So let's see what else. How about this palm tree will then work on the palm tree. I'm just going to add a little bit of detail to that. Maybe some little highlights. Puppies. I could add a little bit of highlights to those. Like you could just add a little bit. Just helps to make it look just a little less flat. And I definitely want to add some highlights to the bridge. So I'm gonna go to the layer with the bridge. I'm going to select that color and I'm gonna choose a lighter, warmer version of that color. Really tried to make my highlights warmer. There we go. Little. Okay, that looks good. So I'm going to just kinda go along this edge just to kinda give this a little bit of definition. So it doesn't blend into the rest of the bridge. I'll do the same. This one. I'm just going to add a little highlight to this side. Make sure I'm doing the right one. On that side too. You know, I could also add a little bit there too. I want to sum really like subtle definition across the top of the bridge would be good. Okay, So that looks pretty good. It's very subtle, but it kinda helps define what's on top of other things. So that's good. Let's see what else we might need. So far, so good. Then we actually might be done with everything that we wanted to add. I think I'm going to beef up these trees a little bit out, a little bit more color to that. Since they're so small, you know, having them a little bit more full makes them a bit more visible. So just going to kind of add a little bit more strokes to those little cacti right here are think this layer. So I'm just going to add some lines to that. A little definition. I think I might need a little bit more definition between these two mountains. So lightened up one of them. Dark and the other one. Cool. Alright, let me go ahead and close my little safari reference over here. And overall, I think I'm pretty much done with all of my rendering. So I've got my final illustrations. Of course, you can keep going. You can add as much detail as you would like to your piece. I'm trying to keep things a little bit simple, but overall, I like the way this turned out. 22. Speed Paint!: This video is just a sped-up version of my drawing process. If you wanted to see the whole thing happen all at once, you could check out that video next. Yes. 23. Illustrating the Background: So the next step is going to be to add some additional text as well as an illustrated background if you prefer. Because it looks awesome. But we want to make an entire postcard and then also show you how to make a really cool vintage effect. So I'll show you that as well. Alright, so now that we have finished our lettering effects, we've finished the inner illustrations of the letters. It's time to start working on our background. I know I want to add my greetings from, and then maybe I'll add a little slogan down here. So let me go up to my layers and I'm just going to group all of these together, everything that's in this, this element. So I'm just going to select all these layers by swiping to the right on all of them. Then I'm going to choose group. Then I'll just close that. So now those are all together as one thing. And if I need to move it around, I can, it's a little bit easier. So I'm gonna go and add some more texts now. So I'll go up here to the Actions menu, add, then add text before I type anything. And I'm going to set my font. And the font that I think I'm gonna try. Let's see. I downloaded one called Damien, which is kinda like this cool, retro looking script font. So let's go ahead and try that and go back to my keyboard. And I'm gonna type greetings from I think I want the Fromm to be on a separate lines, so I'll just do greetings for now. I can make that bigger. We talked a little bit about this before, but as long as I don't do these kind of these transform tools that distorted my text is still going to remain editable. But if I were to do this or this or anything like that, it's going to rasterize it and I can't edit it anymore. So keep that in mind. You might want to do distortion. I think actually that's too bad. But if you're not quite committed to what you're reading in there, you might want to wait. Okay, I'm going to add some more texts. I'm gonna do from and I'm gonna put that down there. But you can do like a uniform resized and it's fine. Alright, and we're going to add a little bit text here. So I'm gonna go to Actions text. Then I'm gonna do like quotes, the Golden State and whips. And then I can just drag this little note out to make it all on one line like that. Then I can move it down here. I don't know how big all want it to be in the end. Obviously this is very plain. So let me start thinking about what kind of elements I might have in the background. You can add additional illustrations. You could add a cool pattern you could do with just a solid color if you want. You can do anything you want. So I think I might wanna do another son because I always think of the sun in California. So maybe I'll do like a sun here and we'll have some rays coming up and maybe some wavy lines or something. So let's go ahead and we'll just change the background color. We'll just start there and kinda see what kind of colors go well with it. Maybe like a bright yellow. It's too bright. I don't know. You can kind of play around and see what looks good to you. Owe me. I'll just start there for now. Let me do that. I'm actually going to create a new layer because I think I want to add some illustrated elements. So this new layer, I'm going to move below all my text and I'm going to draw a sun. So I'm gonna get a bright yellow. And I'm still using my paint round brush. I'll go ahead and just kinda oh, you can't see that at all. That's okay. I'm going to draw a circle there. I might not be the right shade of yellow anyways. Okay. Let me change my background color. Okay, that's a little bit better. And then I'm going to add some light rays coming out of it. So I'll do that color and maybe like a little brighter. I'm going to put a layer below that and we'll see how this looks. So I'm going to do like arrays coming out. Its color is not working, but that's okay. We can always adjust. Okay. I'm gonna go ahead and fill these in a bigger brush size. Alright, I know I realized this is all really hard to see, but I'll adjust the colors in a moment. I'm just filling in, in-between the two rays or two lines to make the solid re. Remember you can do your background however, you want. Lots of great examples of these venture style postcards and penicillin, the different things that they put on. I already put on the state flower in the illustrations, but I could do like the state bird or the other state things or other California's things. I just kinda wanted to keep the background a little bit simple for this one. Alright, so let's move this down below. And I'm gonna change my background color again. There we go. So now we can see that a little bit better. And let's see, maybe it can play around with that color a little bit. I can go to hue saturation, brightness and just make it a little brighter, a little less green. Maybe. Here we go. That looks pretty good. So now that I've done that, I can kinda change my lettering a little bit on that little spot. So maybe I'll try doing wait for the text. So if I want to just change the color of the text, I can tap it at it, choose edit text from this menu. And then I can go to my colors, and I can choose white. And I'll do the same for all these. Okay, I'm changed those all to wait. Okay. This getting so messy over here. You got to fill this in. And then maybe add a little bit of a not like a not like a block shadow but something similar. Let me see. I'll duplicate that and I will change the color to Lego, reddish orange, something like that. And then if I move it below the other layer, I can just kinda skewed it out a little bit. So that way, it kinda like pops out, Whoops. Kinda pops out a little bit without you could go in and connect all these lines together, but that's too much work, so I'm not gonna do that. I'll probably do it for this one to the Golden State, so I'll duplicate that. On the bottom one. I'll do edit text and choose wonder if I can just sample this color. Totally that worked. Okay. Sometimes working with text is really annoying in Procreate. It's not my favorite for laying out tech see like I didn't even change the color. I'll just do choose it. Okay. That's good. Stop it. Okay. So far that's looking pretty good. I don't know if I want to add any other elements like I could, I don't know, create a new layer. I could add some just like literally designing decorative elements. Like I could add a wavy line across here. I might need to move my text over, rearrange stuff. But it's totally up to you. You could do something like that or not. Let me just move my text, resize that. And I probably need to move the whole California up, so I'll grab that group. Kind of move it up a little bit. Alright, so you can keep moving things around until you get a design that you are happy with. But I think that looks pretty cool. We've got, we've got a nice background. You've got some little design elements, and that's looking pretty good. 24. Vintage Print Effect: Now that you've completed your entire postcard design, I want to show you a really cool vintage print effects that you can create in Procreate. Now I want to show you how to create sort of a vintage print effect. And this is really fun thing to play around with, and you can apply this to other illustrations. I've used this a lot and in other illustrations that I've done, but works really well for this. So what we're gonna do is we're basically, we need a flattened version of all of these layers. There's a really fast way to do this. So all you're gonna do is you're going to take three fingers, swipe down on your screen to pull up the Copy Paste menu and you're going to choose Copy All, Copy All. And that selects it copies all visible layers. So anything that's visible, it's going to copy. And then I just wanted to make sure that I go to the very top here, select the top layer. And then I'm in a Chou, I'm going to do the three-finger swipe again and choose Paste. So basically it copied everything and then it pasted it all onto a single layer. So now I have a flattened version of everything that I've done so far. Because you need to have it on one layer in order to do this effect. So to do the cool vintage effect, we're gonna go over to the adjustments menu. And we're going to choose halftone. And all you do to adjust the half tone to add it is slide your pencil across the screen. So if you went really big, you would get this really crazy halftone effect, which is way too big for what we need. You can't read anything anymore. So I'm gonna go down so that it's kind of just like barely visible. Like that. I'm at 6%, I probably get a little bit more. It's up to you how much you wanna do this. And if I zoom in, you can now see that it's got this cool halftone effect. So it's up to you how much detail you want to lose to add this effect. So I'm at like 8%. And then there's a second part to this effect. So after you're done doing that, you're going to go back to the Adjustments menu and you're gonna go into chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration. And then you're going to choose displace. And now we're basically just going to like this. This kind of separates the colors into three separations. And we're going to just offset that a little bit. So it's easier to see if you zoom in. See, I'm kinda, I'm sliding it and they're getting it's getting all wonky exceeded like three color separations. We just want to offset it just a little bit super subtle, but this kinda gives the effect that the machine that printed this out was a little off register and didn't get all the, it didn't quite print all the three colors of ink properly. So it has this really very subtle, but like awesome vintage effect. So then you can go up to your layers and you can turn it on and off and you kinda see the before and after, like with and without that effect. I think it looks pretty cool. So you can kind of play around with that and how much of the effect you want to add. But I think it really adds to the whole like vintage postcard thing that we're going for here. 25. Printing your Postcard: So now that we've got our design all finished, let's start thinking about how we might want to print this out. I have included in your resources folder a couple of print at home templates, so I'll show you how to use one of them right now. If you want to print this at home, we're gonna go ahead and open up one of those templates. So I'm going to go into my file's app. And I'm going to go into my Downloads Folder, and I'm in the postcard Class Resources folder. And then I'm gonna go into print at home templates. And I have one for A4 paper and one for us letter paper. So these are procreate file. So if we tap them, it should just open up Brian into procreate. So I'm going to open up the US letter file. And if I go back to my gallery view, now you'll see that that imported. So I'm just gonna go ahead and open that up. And there's a couple of things to note. We've got a few layers here. We've got these red lines that are going to help you put your design onto the card, which you'll see in a second. And then we've got our cut guides which are going to show you where to cut that. And then this layer is where we're going to place the artwork. So I'm gonna go back to my design and I'm actually going to export that to my camera roll. I'm going to the Actions menu share. And I'm going to share it as a PNG file. And then I'm going to save it to my camera roll. Great. Now I'm gonna go back to my template. I'm gonna go to the Actions menu, Add and insert a photo. And there's my design. And as you can see, it's taking up the whole Canvas. So what we need to do is resize it down to fit within these guides. So make sure you're in uniform transform. And I'm just going to make it just a little bit bigger than these red lines. The red lines are essentially where it's going to get cut off when you trim it. You want it to be just a little bit bigger than that line just so you have a little leeway as you're cutting, you can probably go a little bit smaller if you want. This is, this is one of the reasons why I recommend not putting anything too close to the edge when you're designing so you don't chop anything off. So once you've got it placed, now I'm gonna go over to my layers. I'm going to turn off the red guidelines. So that's the one that says Turn off to print. And now I've got a template that I can print out. When I cut it, I just need a cut along these little crop lines here. And I kind of wrote that cut along these lines. So I can share this as a PDF. So I can go to the Actions menu share. I would share it as a PDF just because I think it's the most printer friendly file format. And then you can choose the best quality. Then I can AirDrop it to my computer so I can print it out. Alright, so let's say we didn't want to print it at home. We actually want to send it off to get printed from a print house or print vendor. So in that case, you're just going to want to export it just as a PNG or whatever file format they accept. Png should be pretty widely accepted. Pdfs also a good option. So you just basically share that to your camera roll and then you can transfer it to your computer. Do you upload to website or something like that? And you also want to think about what's gonna go on the back of your postcard design. And I actually have included in your resource pack a few different back postcard back designs that you can use. So I'll kind of show you what those look like. So there's four different designs. And these are all set up for us postcard. They, they're all, everything's in the right spot. So there's four different designs you can choose from. And of course, you can also design your own postcard back if you wanted to add some little design elements and other fun stuff, just make sure you check with us or wherever you live. Postcard and mailing regulations so you don't put stuff in the wrong spot. And if you are going to do the print at home method, you could import that here, but sometimes it's hard to print double-sided and get everything to line up on an at-home printer. So I don't know if I'd recommend that, but you can always experiment and play around with it if you want to try printing on the back of a postcard at home. 26. Photo Card: Part 1 - Text Effects: All right, So I actually have a bonus lesson for you. I mentioned a little bit earlier, but this technique is also a great way to incorporate photography. It doesn't have to be illustrations in your letter. You can also use photos. So I'm going to show you how I created a holiday card for my family using the same technique and some photos. So I'm gonna do it from start to finish this first video. I'm going to take you through the process of creating the texts, but I'm gonna do it very quickly so that you kind of see how fast it might take in real time when I'm not explaining every step. Then in the next video, we're going to add photos to it. So let's go ahead and get into it. So I'm gonna do postcard with my family. I'm going to put our last name on there. So let's go ahead and get into it. I'm going to switch my color to black. And then I'm gonna go ahead and choose a lettering guide. I think this time I'm gonna do the double wave. I'm gonna do two lines of texts, the bar dose, that's our last name. So I'm gonna go ahead and select that. And then I'm just going to tap on the screen and re-size it. Can also share this if I want to make it go up a little bit. Okay, I'm gonna go to the Actions menu and add some text. I will change the font. I'll just use Erica won, like I was using before. And I'll type in. And that's gonna go here. Go ahead and do my manipulations. Just kinda work this. Now I can add some more text. This is going to say our dose. So I'm just going to work this into place now. Okay, so I've got my texts warped and it's all rasterize. I turn off my layer lettering guides and I'm just going to merge these two together. So I'm going to merge down. Then I'm going to move this a little bit. That way. I'm going to round out my letters. I'm gonna go to Gaussian Blur, blur it a little bit. Go to my selection tool that automatic select it. And then also select these. Invert, create a new layer and fill it, and then delete the other one. Now I'm going to add my outline. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just change the color of this to something else. I'll do like a green this time. Color doesn't matter at this point. Okay, I'm gonna duplicate that. I'm going to turn off alpha lock on the bottom layer, go to Gaussian blur and blur that about 10%. And then we're going to use our selection tool again and make a selection and make a big outline like that. Then I'm going to invert that, create a new layer and fill it with a little bit darker green. Now I'll delete the blurred layer. So I'm going to duplicate this layer. I'm gonna choose the bottom one. I'm actually going to choose a darker color and just fill that. Can't really tell what happens, but it is darker. Then I'm going to move it over. I'm just gonna do it really quickly. So I'm not going to use the drawing guide method this time. I'm just going to try and do it really fast. So I'm going to calligraphy and selecting my monoline brush and then just connecting these little areas here. My angles might not be perfect because I'm doing it this way, but it's okay. Okay, and I'll do on the top here. Alright, and I think I've done all of the edges, so everything is connected. Now, I'm going to add a little bit of shading using clipping mask. I'll use the charcoal brush six be compressed. I'll turn on multiply in my blend mode and choose like a gray. Then I'm just going to add some shading on the bottom of these letters. I like that. I'm doing this really quickly. Definitely adhere to. End up here on the top of these letters. Maybe like right there. A little bit in there. Okay, that looks pretty good for shading. Finally, I'm going to add my inline, so I'm going to select this top layer, the one that's just the letters. I'm going to invert it and then I'm going to feather the selection a little bit that. And then I'm going to create a new layer and fill it. Let's color gray right now. I'll change it to white and a little bit. And then I'm gonna go in and select the individual letter. Kind of adjust how big I want the outline to be, and then select all of my letters. And now I'm gonna invert it again, create a new layer. This time, I'm going to fill it with white, so double-tap close to white and fill. Okay, and then I can delete that blurry layer and create this in our set. This to be a clipping mask. Now we have all the components all finished. 27. Photo Card: Part 2 - Adding Photos: That was a very quick run-through of creating all those texts effects. Now I'm going to show you how to add photos to your letters. So it's pretty easy to do. I'm gonna go ahead and go up to my Actions menu and insert a photo. And I have a photo here of my family from one of our family photo sessions. I'm going to enlarge it a little bit. I go. Okay. So there's my photo. I'm just going to turn it off and it's kinda evaluate what I wanna do here. I have like four individuals that I can stick into the letters and 1234567 letters. So I'll probably going to use that. And then I have a few individual pictures of my kids. I'll put in there as well. So let's go to the photo, going to select it. I'm gonna go over to the selection tool, make sure I've free hand selected. And I'm going to start with my son here and just draw a selection around him. Then choose copy and paste from down here. I'll turn off that photo layer and see now I have just him. Then I'm going to drag this down in-between my outline layer and my letter layer. So it automatically becomes a clipping mask. And now I can resize it. I think I'll put him here and the letter B, the name is bear, So that's appropriate. Then I'll erase the stuff I don't need. There's one. And let me go back to the layer with my photo, turn it on. And now I'm going to select the next person which is me. So then draw selection there, choose copy and paste. And I'll drag that down here. Turn off this layer with the photo. I'm just like copying each time so I can keep reusing that same photo. And then I'll place me, move me one letter over. So there I am with my little son here. And then I can erase this stuff I don't need. There we go. Alright, now let's get the next person. I'll go back to my layer with the photo, get my husband little bit more and copy and paste. Turn off that layer and drag this one down. I think I'm going to put him I'm like doing every other letter for now. So I'll put him right there. Then erase what I don't need. Okay. Alright. And my daughter is less, so I'll grab her and I'll choose copy and paste. And move her down here into my clipping mask stack. And she's gonna be right there at all. Erase what I don't need. Okay. Now I'm going to import a few other photos to kind of fill in these other I have three spots and I have three kids, so I'm going to fill those in with them. So I'll go up to the Actions menu, insert a photo, and I'll do the first one, a little Ralphie. And this time I'll just where's he going? We'll put them in there. That's really cute. So instead of erasing what I don't need, I'll just draw a selection around what I want to keep. Tap that, then choose Invert. And then I can do a three-finger scrubbing motion to clear out everything else. So that'll clear out your selection. So I just select the inverted and then clear. Let's add another photo to my son beer. Making a funny face. Cute. I'll do the same thing. I'll just select around their invert it and then clear the rest. Whoops. Here we go. One more photo. Old daughter. I mean, it would be cool to have a photo that goes across the whole thing like that if you have the right photo. But I like doing these little individual letters. Her right there. Then again, I'm just going to select Around there, tap that little gray circle, and then choose Invert. And then I can clear. Here we go. Alright, so we've got all the letters filled up with pictures of my family members. I also have the which I could choose a color to use for that or I could just use the photo. So I have this photo still, maybe I'll drop that in and just kinda fill it with some of the nature and then it'll look like it fits with the rest. So I'll just erase everything that I don't need here, which is all this. I think that looks good. Alright. So there is all my letters all filled up with pictures of my family members. So now you can take it and create this into whatever you want. I could create like a little holiday cards. So maybe I'll add a background color of green and red situation since it's the holidays. Then I could also add some text. Change my font. I can place that over there. Right there. I can add some more texts and maybe put the year. There we go. You can keep going with it. You can add some elements to the backgrounds and little designing things. Maybe some, I don't know, holiday design elements and things like that. I can show you a version of this that I created before. So this is kind of that version. And I also added the vintage effect that I showed you. So I did that on this one, which looks pretty cool. So this is a different version of that. 28. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing the course. I hope you had a lot of fun designing your postcard and you're excited to create some more postcards in this way, I think it's such a fun way to explore favorite locations, favorite destinations, places you want to go, places you've been other things that are important to you or things you're a fan of. There's just a lot of possibilities here and a lot of ways that you can also use these same the text effects in other ways too. So I can't wait to see what other stuff you create using what you've learned here, but please do share your finished postcard in the project section so that I can see it and just hit tell us about your process. I'm really excited to see what you've created. Up next, I have a couple more postcard designs that I've put together. So if you want to watch the time-lapse of me illustrating those, you can check that out next. Otherwise, I hope that you have a lot of fun and thank you so much for joining me in this class. And I wish you happy art-making. Buh-bye. 29. More Examples!: Good. Hello.